7 steps-email-marketing-guide-smart-insights

Email MarketingSeven Steps to Success Guide

Dr Dave Chaffey and Tim Watson

Published: April 2013

Plan > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage

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© Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

7 Steps Guide to Successful Email Marketing

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Email marketingSeven Steps to Success Guide

Contents13 Step 1 Prioritise your email marketing efforts with CRITICAL20 Step 2 Set your goals and build a quality list

31 Step 3 Defining your email marketing proposition

38 Step 4 Segmentation and targeting techniques

58 Step 5 Integrated email communications strategy 61 Step 6 Creating effective email templates and creative 71 Step 7 Test, learn and refine to increase email efficiency

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Introduction Your options for using email marketing to grow your businessEmail marketing is far from dead as some have suggested in this age of social networking!1

As we’ll see in this section, you can use email marketing both for gaining new customers and selling more to existing customers. In this guide we’ll look at the options for each, but we’ll focus on using email as a customer communication tool, which is where it works best and can integrate well with your social media marketing efforts.

Strategy Recommendation 1 Focus your email marketing efforts on customer retentionEmail marketing tends to work best as a tool to improve customer retention and growth. This is because your emails are received by a warm contact that is already aware of you. Email doesn’t work well when it’s with a cold contact.

That said, there are a range of options to use email for customer acquisition and it’s worth considering them. We will start here.

About this guideWe have written this guide for marketers with some experience of email marketing who want to take their email marketing to the next level of sophistication.

The workbook format is designed to make it quick to review and decide on the changes you need to make to your email marketing to get better results. It covers both email strategy topics like segmentation options and communications strategy, but also practical advice on how to improve your creative and subject lines.

How is this guide structured?In this section we have introduced the concept of permission marketing and shown how it can be applied to using email for gaining new customers and communicating with existing customers. In Step 1 we will show how to prioritise your email activities using the CRITICAL factors. We then cover each of these in more detail in the next steps of the guide.

About the authorsDr Dave Chaffey is a consultant, author and trainer specialising in digital marketing. He started giving courses on email marketing in 2001 and still advises on email marketing as part of training and consulting. He wrote Total Email Marketing in 2003. This book was updated to a second edition, but this guide is effectively the modern version.

Tim Watson, is a specialist, independent email marketing consultant Tim Watson, from consultancy Zettasphere. He actively promotes email marketing and frequently speaks on the subject and how to improve use of the channel. A member of the DMA Email Council and chair of the DMA Email Best Practice hub. He writes regularly for Smart Insights as an Expert

1 Facebook’s view on email marketing.

http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/email-marketing/is-email-dead-dying-or-just-changing-facebook-says-yes-consumers-no/

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commentator on Email marketing.

Related guides

Recommended resource? Email marketing primer We have grouped our Expert member resources on our Email marketing hub page. These guides are related to this one

þ Email marketing effectiveness audit spreadsheet þ Email campaign calculator spreadsheet þ Email contact strategy template.

Using email for customer acquisitionCustomer acquisition by email generally refers to emailing where first-party permission does not exist. That is, the recipient has not given permission directly to the sender and is not in their in-house list. Permission has either been given to a third party using an opt-in to partner mailings or the law allows emailing on an opt-out basis such as under CAN-SPAM and B2B in the UK.

When first-party permission does not exist effective email is difficult as it requires much tighter targeting than first-party permission email and needs a message that has spot on relevancy. This demands rich and accurate data that is typically not available with third-party data sources.

The lack of effectiveness is as a result of the cost of data, such as rented data, versus the level of response. The difficulties that arise are as a result of poor data leading to deliverability issues that compound ability to gain response.

r Q. Have we reviewed our options for customer acquisition through email?

Although many just think of email as a customer retention tool there are still some great options to use email marketing for acquiring new customers through reaching new prospects.

Checklist – email acquisition optionsThese are the main options to review:

r 1. Rented list email. Rental typically doesn’t give direct access to data or unlimited use, however is higher quality data than a purchase list.

r 2. Co-branded email (and/or co-registration).

r 3. Competition sites.

r 4. Third-party email newsletter.

r 5. Viral email.

r 6. Event-triggered email.

r 7. House e-newsletter.

Best Practice Tip 1 Don’t miss the opportunities of advertising in others’ e-newslettersWe highlight the fourth option as particularly worth considering, especially for business-to-business marketing since the ‘banner blindness’ that we see with display ads doesn’t occur to the same degree with e-newsletters as visitors scan them.

To help you quickly review the options for acquisition using email marketing, this table shows

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/

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their benefits, disadvantages and issues to consider to help manage.

Table. Summary of methods of using email marketing for customer acquisition and their advantages and disadvantages

Option What is it? Benefits Issues1. Rented list. Text is: This is as opposed to list purchase.

Renting access to contacts from a list owner who broadcasts on your behalf.

Reach into new contacts

§ List source. High typical cost of acquisition (CPA)

§ Low responsiveness

§ Perception of spam – rent from a reputable list owner

2. Co-branded list

Email sent from list owner but with your brand, message and offer

Leverage partner brand. Can also co-register – sign up on their site

§ Exclusivity

4. Third-party e-newsletter ad/sponsorship

Placing an ad, sponsorship, editorial in a publisher’s e-newsletter

Responsiveness compared to other options

Reach

§ Prime position

§ Clutter

§ Cost

5. Viral email An email is designed to be shared and seeded to a house list or a rented list in combination with social media

Potentially low-cost and high reach

§ Achieving cut-through

§ Negative brand impact

6. Event-trig-gered email

Conversion of leads

Automated – just sit back and relax

§ Optimising creative, offer and frequency

7. House e-newsletter

E-newsletters are mainly aimed at customers and most sales will come from this source, but they can work well for prospects who haven’t bought from you yet

Helps build a relationship with recipient over time

§ Achieving balance between informing the list member and selling to them

Using email for customer retention and growth r Q. Have we reviewed our options for customer retention and growth through email?

Most marketers agree that email marketing works best as a relationship-building tool. Review

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the options in the next table.

Checklist – email retention optionsThese are the main email acquisition options to review:

r 1. House e-newsletter.

r 2. House campaign.

r 3. Triggered email.

r 4. Research email.

r 5. Service email.

r 6. Sales force email.

The table below summarises your options for communicating with existing customers via email. You will see that some of these options such as event-triggered email and social messaging are in common with acquisition.

Retention option What is it? Benefits Issues1. House e-newsletter

Still one of the best digital marketing tools to build a brand and develop relationships

Add value, gain response

Defining the best sell/inform/entertain balance

Integration with social media

Resourcing2. House campaign

A focused send with a single offer or objective often has better response than an e-newsletter because of its clarity

Permission-based

Responsive

Managing contact strategies of frequency so that the impact is not reduced

Targeting

Testing the best template layouts and offers

3. Triggered emails Behavioural emails following up on abandoned shopping basket, search or category browses on site, post purchase ratings or review requests, response to webform completion or interest expressed through a click on an email can be a cost-effective way to increase conversion to sale

Very effective There is growing customer distrust of tracking so transparency on this is required and opt-in is essential

Requires technical integration of behavioural data with email solution for triggers

4. Research email Research + Responsiveness Selection of sample

Managing frequency5. Service email Service + Responsiveness Cross-selling

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Retention option What is it? Benefits Issues6. Sales force email

Relationship build

Sell

Relationship Control

Integration

Permission-based email marketing r Q. Is our email marketing permission-based?

Permission marketing, or gaining consent for marketing communications to be received, is fundamental to successful email marketing. If you don’t practise permission marketing, customers will see you as a spammer and you may lose them forever. Then there are the legal requirements in many countries which make permission marketing a must.

Strategy Recommendation 2 Ensure your email marketing is permission-basedAudit your email marketing to ensure that your email marketing is permission-based. All emails sent must be agreed to received by customers and you should have traceability of how, where and when they opted-in.

Since email marketing underpins much of digital marketing, but especially email marketing, let’s take a look at what’s involved. You will know most of this, but it’s worth checking.

Permission marketingPermission marketing is an established approach that still gives a practical foundation for customer relationship management (CRM) and online customer engagement. ‘Permission marketing’ is a term coined by Seth Godin way back in 1999, but it’s still valid and we think that many still don’t work hard enough to get permission.

What is it? Permission marketingCustomers agree (opt in) to be involved in an organisation’s marketing activities by email, social networks or traditional channels in return for the value offered.

The classic exchange is based on information or entertainment – a B2B site can offer a free report in exchange for a customer sharing their email address and details, while a B2C site can offer a newsletter or company Facebook page with valuable content and offers. This is stage 2 in the classic permission marketing process shown in the next diagram.

In the section “Double or single opt-in?” on page 26 we discuss whether it’s necessary to send an email after a form is filled in to complete opt-in (we don’t recommend this for most businesses).

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It’s worthwhile reviewing and optimising this process to ensure you’re using the best engagement devices, messaging and placement to maximise lead generation.

What is it? Engagement devicesA call to action that encourages visitors to the site to interact. If these also enable capture of leads, these are lead-generation devices.

To improve the effectiveness of your permission marketing, ask these questions:

E-permission marketing checklist – how effective are our engagement devices? r Appeal and range of devices? How effective compared with competitors?

r Balance of lead-generation and non-lead generation devices?

r Placement and call to action?

r Ability to track (see our article on campaign tracking,2 in the section ‘Assess engagement “beyond the click” through web analytics’ on page 73 or the guidance on event tracking in our Google Analytics guide)?

r Type of engagement device?

r Videos

r Content download

r Poll, survey or interactive quiz

r Social recommendation (share through social networks or email).

Strategy Recommendation 3 Review engagement and lead-generation devicesCheck that you have the best methods of generating leads within your budget. Review the range of engagement devices you have against competitors. Use testing to review the messaging and placement of offers to maximise conversion. It’s best to use a mix of engagement devices that include both those that include lead generation and those that do not require registration to maximise reach.

2 Campaign tracking for email guide.

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing-ecrm-alerts/email-campaign-tracking-with-google-analytics/

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Use a common customer profileYour options to target your email list will be based on your customer knowledge. Since we are looking to learn more through time, we need a structured approach to customer data capture. This can be achieved through a common customer profile which you can use to review data quality of your list.

What is it? Common customer profileA definition of all the database fields that are relevant to the marketer to understand and target the customer with a relevant offering. It is best if different levels,1–3 of profile can be defined to encourage more customers to sign up.

Once defined, the common customer profile can then be used as a means of structuring e-permission marketing and refining understanding about the customer. A plan with targets for each level can be created about how to learn more about the customer.

Best Practice Tip 2 Identify key subscriber profile fieldsIdentify the profile fields you really need to be able to understand your audience and target them with future messages. These are level 1 or 2 of the common customer profile.

To identify the key profile fields first needs customer insight to understand how customers segment themselves and the fewest data points needed that provide the highest value for segmentation and targeting. When possible, analysis of transactional data delivers good insight, alternatively surveys and feedback data may be used.

A structured approach to customer data capture is needed otherwise the wrong data may be collected or some data will be missed, as is the case with the utility company that collected 80,000 email addresses, but forgot to ask for the postcode for geo-targeting!

The customer profile can have different levels to set targets for data quality:

þ Level 1 is contact details and key profile fields only. þ Level 2 includes preferences. þ Level 3 includes full purchase and response behaviour.

E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed? r Q. Has our e-CRM and data profiling approach been reviewed?

We can refine Seth Godin’s permission marketing ideas, which have been described in the previous steps, to make them more practical to apply to retention marketing.

Permission marketing E-permission marketing

Opt-in Selective opt-in

Opt-out Selective opt-out

Initial profiling Communications preferences

Continued profiling SenseTargeted communications & Respond

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These are some of the key features of E-CRM implementation we suggest you work through for your organisation.

þ 1. ‘Offer selective opt-in to communications.’ Selective opt-in may be on the basis of a subscription centre or a preference centre. A subscription centre provides choice of different newsletters you may have, such as ‘family’, ‘home’, ‘garden’, ‘sport’ and so on, whereas a preference centre collects interests and choices for content segmentation and targeting. Either way, providing customer choice enables more relevant communications. Some customers may not want a weekly e-newsletter, rather they may only want to hear about new product releases. Remember opt-in and providing opt-out is a legal requirement in most countries.As customers do not frequently complete or update preferences then it is best that any information gathered is of an evergreen nature.

Four key opt-in options, selected by tick-box are:

r Content – News, products, offers, events.

r Frequency – weekly, monthly, quarterly or alerts.

r Channel – email, direct mail, phone or SMS.

The needs of the marketer and the customer need to be balanced. Providing a lot of choice can make the E-CRM programme difficult to deliver, adding more complexity than the additional value it delivers to the brand, whereas insufficient choice could mean poor relevance and unhappy customers.

Giving the customers frequency control may make sense for your brand. However, offering a lower frequency as an antidote to poor value and targeting is not a solution. It just means you are sending irrelevant content less frequently. Whereas the aim should be to provide value and targeting that permits you to provide maximum marketing pressure. When moving into targeted ‘sense & respond’ programmes the frequency is best the responsibility of the marketer.

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This is an example of a preference centre or customer profile.

What is it? Customer preference or communications centreA page or area on a site where customers can edit their profile or communications options such as types and frequency of email they will receive.

Although many large brands use these, they are now within the reach of smaller companies through low-cost e-CRM tools, IF they have a strategy that acknowledges their importance.

Best Practice Tip 3 Create a customer communications preferences centreA preference centre enables customers to adjust the frequency and type of communications so increasing the likelihood of engagement.

þ 2. Create a ‘common customer profile’. Following on from the idea of a preferences centre. A structured approach to customer data capture is needed otherwise key data needed for delivering targeted emails will be missed. You don’t want to ask for lots of details straightaway, so a preference centre enables you to gradually add data. Today, big brands such as Sears3 are using social sign to integrate customer profile information with email and CRM database information.

What is it? Social sign-onSite visitors log in to site services through their preferred social network account such as Facebook or Twitter. Optionally this process can be integrated with additional profile fields which are stored in a customer database.

þ 3. ‘Don’t make opt-out too easy’ (selective opt-out). A bit radical, but my view is that we often make it too easy to unsubscribe. Yes, providing a straightforward opt-out is part of permission marketing and in many countries, a legal requirement. Although offering some form of opt-out is now a legal requirement in many countries due to privacy laws, a single click to unsubscribe is arguably making it too easy. Instead, wise e-permission marketers use the concept of ‘My Profile’. Instead of unsubscribe, they offer a link to a web form to update a profile, which includes the option to unsubscribe or opt-down to some or potentially all communications. Opt-down allows customers to temporarily suspend themselves from marketing or otherwise slow down communication to them. Amazon’s communications preferences page is a good example of this approach. Remember, though, that offering opt-out that works is a legal requirement. Many opt-out processes still don’t work so instead subscribers may report as spam which can hit your overall deliverability. Still, we still think there’s some merit in what we said way back: The use of ‘My Profile’ can be tied to the principle of ‘selective opt-in’ – you could call it selective opt-out. Put the ‘My profile’ option in the email to prompt the user to keep their contact details up-to-date.

þ 4. ‘Watch don’t ask’ – use ‘Sense and Respond’. The need to ask interruptive questions to better profile customers can be reduced through the use of monitoring of clicks and behaviour to better understand customer needs and to trigger follow-up communications or ‘Sense and Respond’. This type of behavioural targeting is more effective due to the difference between what customers say and what they do. Some examples of personalisation through this technique include:

3 An example of how Sears use Social sign-on.

http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing-alerts/why-social-sign-on-matters/

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þ Monitoring click-through to different types of content or offers. The interests of individual list members can be assessed through monitoring which landing pages they arrive onto and which further pages, products or categories they go on to browse. Lastminute.com reputedly tailor their newsletters to many different template types according to content click-through. For example, if you click through to theatres or city-breaks, then you will receive more of this type of content in future.

þ Monitoring the engagement of individual customers with email communications. This is achieved by monitoring trends of opening and click-through by individual customer. These metrics indicate the level of interest of individual customers and we can monitor how these vary through time and use follow-up communications. For example, perhaps a buying signal is suggested by a customer who has not previously responded to emails who starts clicking through to the website more frequently. This could be followed up by a tailored email communication or a phone call.

þ Follow-up of response to a specific email. If a B2B vendor offers information about a new product launch which encourages click through to a landing page then they have two main choices of follow-up. First, the form could contain a question asking about the future buying intentions or whether contact from a sales rep is required. Alternatively, if there is a capability to monitor an individual who has clicked through to a page, then it may be best to use this to prompt a call from an account manager or sales person. This approach can be further enhanced to provide more complex nurturing process and lead scoring, commonly called email automation. Multiple signals of engagement are used: open, click, web visit, whitepaper download, information request form completion and so on. Further emails are sent determined by previous behaviour, or lack of interaction. A score is calculated to enable sales teams to focus on the customers who are most engaged. This makes sense due to the high cost of a sales team where the complexity of nurturing and scoring is more than offset by the increase in sales efficiency

In this section we have introduced good practices for permission email marketing. In the first step we will add to this by reviewing the CRITICAL factors you control that will affect your success in email marketing.

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Step 1 Prioritise your email marketing efforts with the CRITICAL factorsA review of the CRITICAL success factors for email marketing is a useful place to start your journey to improved email marketing. CRITICAL summarises the main factors which will determine whether you’re successful with your email marketing.

Let’s now briefly review each of the eight CRITICAL success factors. We’ll look at some examples of good practice to learn from along the way and cover them in more detail later in this guide.

Conversation r Q. Is our email marketing two-way – are we engaging visitors in a dialogue or just

pushing content?

Email works best when it’s part of a wider dialogue encouraging user participation and interaction with a brand. It’s easy to just treat email marketing as a substitute for direct marketing. But it works best when it encourages interactions, for example through:

þ Polls or surveys (for an e-newsletter). þ Reviews and ratings on products (for an e-retailer). þ Competitions which are announced in several emails. þ Sharing of what’s hot in the social channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s an example from the CIPD B2B e-newsletter showing how a poll is integrated (see full example creative):

Relevance r Q. Is our email marketing targeted? Are we segmenting sufficiently?

It will be no surprise to direct marketers that response rates for emails will be higher if they are targeted to the interests of individual recipients.

In the section on targeting (Step 4) we’ll review six options to targeting which cover both traditional targeting options and methods to deliver contextual emails through what our US

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/enewsletter-marketing/24-point-creative-checklist-for-b2c-and-b2b-enewsletters/

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/enewsletter-marketing/24-point-creative-checklist-for-b2c-and-b2b-enewsletters/

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marketing colleagues call ‘Sense and Respond communications’.

þ 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics and customer set preferences). þ 2. Customer lifecycle groups. Most commonly groups for new subscribers or prospects,

active customers and lapsed or no longer engaging in email. þ 3. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted). This is the

most powerful method, though also requires more technology to deliver it. þ 4. Customer multi-channel behaviour (channel preference). þ 5. Customer value (current and future). þ 6. Customer personas. Personas provide a helpful way to target best on multiple

dimensions. More complex methods in this area such as psychographics were created to control channel costs in direct mail and aren’t used in email marketing.

What is it? Sense and respond communications Delivering timely, relevant communications to customers as part of a contact strategy based on assessment of their position in the customer lifecycle, and monitoring and following up automatically based on specific interactions with a company’s website, emails and staff.

The next diagram gives an example of how ‘Sense and Respond’ email marketing can work. It may not be necessary to follow up on all. Which do you think is most valuable here? We suggest Option C : ‘Click Don’t Respond’ because these respondents may just need a little push to convert, either through a follow-up email or phone call if they are a high value customer.

E-maildatabase

Initial e-mailPromotion(s)

Landing pageresponse

E-mailLanding pageor microsite

Responsemonitoring

tool

Rules-based

responseengine

Phase 1Campaign

Clickthroughs

Opens

Responses

Phase 2Campaign

New subject

Line,New time

New Creative

NewOffer

New Offer

TimelyFollow-up

A.Don’tOpen

B.OpenDon’tClick

C.ClickDon’t

Respond

D.Respond

Key

E-maildatabase

Initial e-mailPromotion(s)

Landing pageresponse

E-mailLanding pageor microsite

Responsemonitoring

tool

Rules-based

responseengine

Phase 1Campaign

Clickthroughs

Opens

Responses

Phase 2Campaign

New subject

Line,New time

New Creative

NewOffer

New Offer

TimelyFollow-up

A.Don’tOpen

B.OpenDon’tClick

C.ClickDon’t

Respond

D.Respond

Key

Relevance also relates to the email list quality – you can only target if you have collected sufficient information to profile the individual and really understand their characteristics and interests. This becomes a catch 22 situation. Asking for information up front reduces the number of customers who will sign up and best practice advice is to ask for the minimum and then learn over time. In the critical early stages there is little data for targeting and behaviour-based data becomes easier to collect than getting further data from customers.

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Incentive (or offer) r Q. Are our incentives or content offers effective? Is our email engaging?

This is the WIIFM factor or ‘What’s In It For Me’ for the recipient. What benefit does the recipient gain from reading the email or clicking on the links within? For promotional emails or e-blasts, there is a range of product or launch offers we can use in emails which are often in the ’Free’, ‘Win’, ‘Save’ category. For an e-newsletter, this is the content which we’ll review in the section on developing your email proposition. Is the quality of content or offer consistent through time?

Best Practice Tip 4 Highlight your incentives through formattingHighlight your incentives in headlines, image text and call to action.

This example shows how the WIIFM is included within the call-to-action buttons.

Timing r Q. Are we sending our emails at the right time?

Timing refers to when the email is sent or received; the time of day, day of the week, point in the month and even time of year. It is usually thought that B2B emails are best sent so that the recipient receives them during the working day or midweek. All of us have a full inbox to work through first thing in the morning, often containing SPAM and newsletters.

The theoretical best time to send is when the recipient is active in their inbox and your email pops in at the top. The massive move to reading emails on mobile devices has changed habits and timing. Increasing numbers of subscribers check their emails somewhere between

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waking up, having breakfast and arriving at work and later into the evening. Your message determines whether that makes it a good time to send. Whilst your new shoe styles may get attention before breakfast it’s not the right context for further action and purchasing.

However, only testing can show this for sure – some email marketers get good results on Friday, when office workers are winding down for the weekend. The truth of the matter is there are no generic perfect times to send. What works for one brand may not work for another. It’s also a fallacy to think that timing is always critical, within a few hours of a particular time may make no difference. This situation is likely to be driven further by the use of email on mobile devices. With email an always on 24/7 channel for many, the number of times per day the inbox is checked is on the increase.

Test the timing that works best for your audience by assessing success against your marketing objective for your emails at different times of the day and week. At a minimum assess success against click rates. Read our posts on timing for more ideas.4

Timing also means more than the best time to get seen in the inbox, such as:

r Timing to external factors. Some brands notice increased offer take-up just after pay day.

r Timing in the context of user interactions – the sense and response approach mentioned already.

r Timing according to product need and lifecyle, for replenishment-based products around the point when the product or service is needed again

Integration r Q. Are our emails integrated with other channels?

This is looking at email as part of your integrated marketing communications rather than just the aspect of technical integration of systems. As always clarity in cross-channel marketing communication strategy should proceed consideration of technical integration. How does email integrate with social media, websites, direct mail, telesales, offline adverts and so on are all important to getting your message across.

Questions to ask include:

þ Are the creative and copy consistent with my brand? þ Does the message reinforce other communications? þ Does the timing of the email campaign fit with offline communications? þ Do we encourage social interactions?

For example, following up telesales with emailed information or if sending direct mail, combining with an email pre and or post direct mail send. Tests have shown increasing the number of touchpoints increases conversion.

Remember, too, that email channel integration means considering use of all other channels and touchpoints for gaining new permission subscribers.

Creative and copy r Q. Are our creative and copy engaging enough?

Creative refers to the overall design of the email including layout, use of colour, images and copy.

4 Best time of week to send an email. Best time of day to send an email.

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing-ecrm-alerts/which-day-of-the-week-is-best-for-sending-email/

http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/email-marketing/best-time-of-day-to-send-email/

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Best Practice Tip 5 Make your offer clear up-frontAvoid the direct mail approach of ‘saving the best to last’. Email is an impulsive medium where visitors will scan it quickly, so if the recipient likes your offer from the subject line and the opening paragraph, then they should be able to click through straightaway. So in general, emails should always have a call to action and link in the first three or four lines and then repeat the call to action throughout the message three or four times, such as in the middle of the message and at the close.

Here’s an example of an up-front offer repeated in the subject line, images and editorial text – which almost always receives a good click-through rate.

Key issues creative issues to consider which we will explore later in this guide are:

þ How is the email structured? Are layouts commonly used in direct mail appropriate for email?

þ Where are the calls to action? What are the best positions for calls to action and how can click-throughs be encouraged? Up-front is best.

þ How is the email branded? How should email campaigns and newsletters support the established brand and when should brand variants be used?

þ Is the tone of voice right for the email? Tone of voice and message should be in the context of the subscriber and their current relationship. A highly engaged subscriber who doesn’t need much encouragement will be fine with a strong and simple buy message, whereas a new subscriber or lapsing subscriber needs more trust and relationship building before going with a hard sell.

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Attributes (of the email) r Q. Are our creative and copy engaging enough?

The attributes of the email header which can all determine campaign success include the subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt and format. Of these, subject line, from address and format are most important in influencing response.

þ From name and address – most email clients show the friendly display from name rather than from email address, so readers see ‘Fred Blogs’ rather than [email protected]. Readers start evaluating an email based on from name. Email from the boss or spouse? It’s going to be read regardless of subject line.

þ Subject line – if the email has passed the test of being someone the reader is happy to hear from then the subject is used to evaluate the next action.

þ Format – technically emails should contain HTML and plain text versions, known as MIME encoded. When both versions are sent less than one percent of people will see the plain text version. There is no advantage with sending only a plain text version. Plain text is not the same as an HTML format that contains just formatted text (i.e. no heavy graphics). Formatted HTML text can work well is a creative design choice.

þ Renderability – your creative and email won’t be effective if it isn’t easy to read in the inbox. This needs to take into account making an email easy to read and action on different devices: desktop, smartphone and tablet devices.

We’ll look at more tips on subject lines later, but for now, here’s one – shorter can often work best. The lesson from this research from Mailer-Mailer5 is clear.

Deliverability may be impacted by copy and creative, though in the first instance sender reputation is more critical than content. See the section on deliverability for more on this topic.

Landing page (or microsite) r Q. Do we send readers to the right pages to engage them?

There may be a temptation when experimenting with email to encourage click-through to a web page that is already part of the site, such as the home page or a product page.

5 Mailer Mailer Metrics

http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/index.rwp

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However you will get a much better result from a landing page focused on achieving action. ‘Landing page’ is the term given for the page(s) reached after the recipient clicks on a link in the email.

Typically, with a B2B email, on click-through, the recipient will be presented with an online form to profile or learn more about them. Designing the page so that the form is easy to complete and reassuring about how their personal data will be used can affect the overall success of the campaign.

The conversion rate on the landing page can make a dramatic difference to the success of an email campaign, yet this is often overlooked in favour of the email creative. Testing and improving landing pages can pay dividends.

This is the landing page for the Euroffice email earlier in this section. You can see the customer journey is nicely integrated, encouraging fulfilment of the offer.

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Step 2 Set your goals and build a quality list for email marketingYou probably know that interaction with email campaigns is measured through open and click-through rates. While it’s great to review email response in this way, if this is all you measure, you’re missing the bigger picture of how valuable email is to your company and its customers.

The rich metrics in email are great. However, there is a distinction to be made between business metrics and email marketing performance and diagnostic metrics. Click rates may help you to understand how well you are doing with offer, content and targeting and complaint rates are important to deliverability management, but neither is a business metric. Just numbers useful to gain insight and manage activity.

Define current value of your email marketing to customersTo assess how valuable email is to customers it’s best to measure the quality of their engagement – how engaged are they? How engaged do they need to be?

r Q. How well do we measure engagement of our subscribers?

A review of campaign open, click-through and conversion rates is a natural place to start to improve engagement. Trends in overall response rates are a good starting point, but a capable email marketing system will give you more insight. For a more detailed analysis, you should review:

Checklist – measuring engagement with email marketing r Click to open rates (CTOR) – these will enable you to see how engaging your creative

and offer is.

r Open and click-through rates by segment – engagement will vary by segment depending upon the targeting and relevance of your content or offers, so be sure to assess this.

r Open and click-through rates based on delivery time – time of day and day of the week or time in month may make a difference so review to gain insight as to when to send.

r Unsubscribe rate – check that particular messages or offers aren’t causing peaks in un-subscribe rates.

r Complaint rate – as with unsubscribe, do particular messages cause high complaints?

r Engagement at different points in the customer lifecycle – it is natural that engagement will decline through time and some subscribers will become inactive. So you need to work to engage visitors through time, for example through a welcome strategy or, if necessary, reactivate them. Reviewing hurdle rates at different lengths of time from original subscrip-tion can help assess the success of these strategies.

r Engagement with different types of offer and message – different types of promotion or message will also vary in popularity, so you need a way of tagging offer-type to analyse what is effective. Some email marketers tag specific types of links in different positions in the template to know which part of their template is most effective, for example, there could be a standard link for hero product or featured category in an email.

r Hurdle rates of engagement over a longer period – this assesses engagement over a six-

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or nine-month period to set goals to review how active your subscribers are measured through open, click or purchase rates.

This is the big one! If you have to choose just one measure to assess customer engagement, let this be it! Hurdle rates measure customers not campaigns and do so across your contactable customer base. Thus they provide a vital view.

Strategy Recommendation 4 Measure longer-term engagement through hurdle ratesTo analyse longer-term engagement, you can use the type of analysis shown in the table below, which shows a diagnostic for longer-term engagement with email marketing.

This analysis often shows that over half of your audience is not engaged, so this gives you a hurdle rate to benchmark your engagement efforts against.

These types of hurdle rates should be used to set goals for list quality and engagement, and can also be broken down by subscriber segment or offer type.

Define value of email marketing activity to your company r Q. How well do we measure value generated from our email marketing?

In the previous section on customer value we looked at value to the customer. But what about company value? To assess this we need to know about the marketing outcomes generated that lead to sales.

So we suggest you set these as primary goals for your email marketing and how to track them. You can look at the efficiency from the point of view of emails sent which shows you overall campaign effectiveness or visits to the site from email that helps you assess the efficiency of your web conversion.

Checklist – measuring value generated from email marketing r Size of contactable email database.

r Size of contactable database as percentage of total customer database.

r Growth of contactable database each month.

r Outcomes (goals) per 1000 (or per 100) emails sent.

r Revenue (profit) per 1000 (or per 100) emails sent.

r You divide by 1000 to normalise value to make it easier to interpret, but it’s not essential.

r Total revenue from the email channel per month.

r Revenue per email contactable customer per month.

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r Outcomes (goals) from email marketing per website visit from email.

r Revenue (profit) from email marketing per website visit from email.

This will be tracked through your analytics package. To implement your tracking to check whether you have achieved these goals you will need to tag your emails as described in Step 7.

Best Practice Tip 6 Use a conversion funnel model to set goals for your email marketingThrough creating a simple conversion model for your email campaign you can set realistic goals for your email marketing with an agency. You can also set expectations among colleagues since the multi-step response means that response may not be as much as they expect.

A conversion model to edit is available for members.6

Success refers to achieving the objectives set for the campaign – does the campaign deliver the required outcomes? The success of direct response campaigns is often talked about in terms of click-throughs – the number of recipients who follow a link from the email through to the organisation’s website. But what really matters are results in terms of your original objectives – how many recipients click through and then take the follow-up action on the site such as purchasing a product, agreeing to attend an event, receiving a visit from a sales rep or entering a competition.

Where you have very specific marketing objectives consider how you can measure against these too. For example, increase the number of subscribers who have provided preference information, or the average number of different product categories each customer buys.

Growing your list r Q. Do we have a structured process for growing our email list?

If you don’t have a plan to grow your email list then it will still grow, but not as fast as you would like since you will be missing opportunities from different touchpoints.

Lucky Voice set out to dramatically increase the size of their database and almost doubled it in 12 months. They did this by planning and using many different growth strategies across a variety of channels.

This pie chart shows the percentage of new addresses acquired by a variety of sources used.

6 Download Email campaign calculator.

http://v2.smartinsights.com/guides/email-marketing/email-marketing-campaign-calculator/

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2A simple baseline to establish how well your list growth is working is to assess your current figure for the proportion of current customers for which you have email addresses. You can then set targets for this metric and devise techniques to increase this figure. When devising these techniques don’t only think quantity, but also think quality. What procedures can you use to maximise the number of valid email addresses? Email addresses which have just one character wrong are no good to anyone since you won’t usually know what the miscreant character is. A further aspect of quality is opt-in. Just because you have obtained an email address from the customer doesn’t necessarily mean it is opt-in and you have permission to use it.

It is only opt-in if the customer has proactively agreed, and expects to receive email communications. Perhaps there are a range of email communications available to the customer such as different e-newsletters or email alerts. Which have they agreed to receive or is there the expectation that they will receive all of them?

Control your email list acquisition costs r Q. Do we have an allowable cost of email address acquisition (for non-customers) to help

control the costs of list-building?

If you are using different channels and acquisition strategies for list growth then ensure you track the source of where permission was given. Use this to calculate the cost of acquiring an email address and to check the performance of the email addresses. Whilst one source might deliver email addresses at half the cost, if the performance of those addresses is only a third as good it’s actually a more expensive acquisition source. Tracking source is also useful should you ever be challenged by someone as to why you are emailing them.

Strategy Recommendation 5 Set an allowable cost of email acquisitionIt is useful to have an allowable cost of email address acquisition which is a target figure for addresses from new prospects since it can help control spend on media such as paid search. Examples include a B2B software company who places an allowable cost of email acquisition of £0.40 per email and a recruitment company who placed an allowable cost of email address (as part of a job application) at £0.70.

Define objectives for email list building and list qualitySetting specific SMART objectives for your list can help grow the list faster, giving more opportunities to generate sales.

r Q. Have SMART objectives for our email list been set?

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Checklist – email list size and quality

Here are some examples of objectives for list-building for you to review including: r List size. Aim to increase the size of your list over a particular time period, e.g. add 5,000

subscribers to an e-newsletter in a year.

r Email address coverage. Aim to increase coverage of email addresses in your customer base – you may have 15 percent of customers opted into an e-newsletter, but you want to increase this to 35 percent over the next year.

r Email address quality – proportion of valid or active email addresses on your list (i.e. those that don’t bounce back or the percentage of customers who are ‘email active’ i.e. they open or click through on emails within a defined period).

r Email permission quality. Although you may have collected email addresses, you may not have explicit permission to use them, which is required by law in many countries. Also, have you got permission to send the full range of e-communications, or just some, e.g. alerts and e-newsletters?

r List value – value generated per 1000 or list members in terms of sales/leads in a time period.

r Targeting quality – increase proportion of subscribers qualified for your products who you have collected profiling information about.

r Data quality – proportion of specific profile fields held about individuals. This section describes a range of offline and online techniques to increase email address capture and make sure that the accuracy is a high as possible.

Review touchpoints to improve email marketing r Q. Have all touchpoints for collecting and updating email addresses been reviewed?

It is important to have a structured approach to collecting and maintaining customer data. A good way to review all the possible methods of capturing email addresses is for marketers to brainstorm alternative methods for capturing email addresses by thinking about opportunities for capture which are:

þ Digital channels, websites, social channels, mobile apps, blogs, SMS. þ Offline. þ Existing customers. þ New customers.

Best Practice Tip 7 Grow your list with online and offline contactsUse all customer touchpoints as an opportunity for gaining email addresses.

Besides looking at new touchpoints and strategies, also review existing data collection processes. Very often the processes in place were created some time back and have not been optimised. Lucky Voice improved their online collection process and provided an incentive, this doubled the number of addresses acquired.

The chart below gives a good way for a company to review all the possible methods of capturing email addresses and other profile information. Some examples are shown.

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Here, we will consider online and offline opportunities for email capture separately. Many of these apply equally to potential and existing customers.

Checklist – online methods to build your house listHere are nine online methods to help build a house list:

r 1. Direct from website – permanent incentives to capture leads should be one of the main aims of a web presence, particularly for a B2B organisation. Design, structure and content should be devised to maximise conversion to sign-up. Be clear on benefits and where possible, give instant tangible benefits of subscribing. Keep the amount of data required to sign up low. Place the sign-up call to action across every page of the site in prominent locations. If very strong incentives to sign up use real-time verification of email addresses and/or use verified opt-in to gain the incentive.

r 2. Web response from offline communications. Here an offer is publicised offline and respondents are referred to a website to sign up (e.g. Dell offered a monthly notebook prize draw or offline ads (such as the now discontinued Chocollect promotion from Mars which was featured in TV ads).

r 3. Social networks. Social media can be a good place to start a conversation or relation-ship but email can help monetise it. Make an objective of social media strategy to get email subscribers.

r 4. Renting an email list from a third party – recipients who click through to a landing page are encouraged to opt-in to your house-list.

r 5. Placing an ad in a third-party e-newsletter. This has the same aims as 3, but may be more cost effective and can often be tightly targeted.

r 6. Using a third-party site, sometimes referred to as an ‘acquisition’ centre to provide offers with a view to sign-up (for example MyOffers).

r 7. Campaigns with social sharing or viral elements where a friend or colleague is referred can also increase the size of the house list. Here permission marketing and data

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protection law require you to send an email offering the referred person the option to opt-in before further communications are sent.

r 8. Any other forms of online traffic-building not mentioned above. Examples include graphical online ads or Pay Per Click text search engine ads.

r 9. Email appending services. Companies such as Freshaddress (www.freshaddess.com) StrikeIron, Mintigo or Email Movers (www.emailmovers.com) can be used to identify likely email addresses from existing customers who have not yet supplied their address, e.g. John Smith at IBM is [email protected] (perhaps not the best example). Similar services can also attempt to correct email addresses with typos.

Checklist – offline methods to build your house listOffline opportunities are the full range of customer touchpoints. Here are eight more:

r 1. Any form of paper registration or order form. But be sure to check the form of word-ing such that an opt-in to all forms of future communications is achieved.

r 2. Visit from sales representatives. Can be used for opt-in either on paper or through subscribing online.

r 3. A phone contact at a call centre. For example a bank could ask customers whether they have an email address during a routine phone enquiry.

r 4. Telemarketing. This can be specifically to capture email addresses, but is more cost-effective if it is part of a telemarketing campaign.

r 5. Point-of-sale. For a retail context.

r 6. Trade show or conference. For example from a prize draw collecting business cards (but care with the opt-in).

r 7. Paper response to a direct mail offer. Traditional direct response.

r 8. Phone response to direct mail or ad. Again traditional direct response.

When email addresses are captured offline, a common problem is the level of errors in the address – this can often reach a double figure percentage. So plan to control this also – staff should be trained in the importance of getting the email address correct and how to check for an invalid address format. Some call centres have even incentivised staff according to the number of valid email addresses they collect. When collecting addresses on paper, some practical steps can help such as allowing sufficient space for the email address and asking for it to be written in CAPS.

Double or single opt-in?This is not a requirement by law in the US or most of the European countries. Double opt-in addresses are of higher quality but there is leakage in the double opt-in process so you will get fewer subscribers on your list if you use this method. We advise using it for publishers who may will use their lists for rental, but it is not general practice in the UK for companies - single agreement to sign-up on a form is taken as consent.

What is it? Double-opt-inDouble opt-in requires new subscribers to confirm their email address by clicking a link within an email sent to the address they provided.

http://www.freshaddess.com

http://www.freshaddess.com

http://www.emailmovers.com

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Examples of opt-in techniquesLet’s return to the Lucky Voice example which Tim Watson has written up in more detail7.

The nine list growth methods that worked well were:

þ Incentivising the home page sign-up, increased sign-ups by 92% þ Adding Facebook Social Connect sign in, increased sign-ups 40% þ Using online competitions, prized appropriate to target audience þ Incentivise customers who booked to recommend to friends þ Promotion through X-Factor partnership þ Adding incentivised email sign-up to Facebook presence þ Facebook App to vote for best customer Karaoke pic, with integrated email collection þ Quiz events at Lucky Voice venues with raffle entry in exchange for email address þ Cross-selling between venue and online databases

You can see the home page social sign-in and incentivsation here:

Here is a collection of examples of offline paper opt-in subscription forms.

This is a small card in a restaurant, with one on every table positioned with the menu to ensure that all customers see it at time of making their selection.

7 Smart Insights: Email list growth example

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-list-management-ecrm/list-growth/

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The next example is a postcard placed at the checkout of the Marko trade retail stores.

Park Resort formed a partnership and ran a promotion to the benefit of both companies in Shoe Zone stores. This was incentivised with a competition which required online entry and

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giving of permission.

Finally a simple low-tech call to action in a pub/restaurant, to chalk up some new subscribers!

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Techniques for list maintenance r Q. Options for list maintenance reviewed?

As with maintaining any customer database, maintaining a list can be a major headache. For email or mobile-related lists the headache can be more intense since:

1. With permission-based email, the customer can opt-out or unsubscribe at any time.

2. Email addresses tend to change more frequently than postal addresses.

3. Multiple email addresses are held, often to counter spam.

If your e-newsletter or email campaigns are good quality, then the unsubscribe rate shouldn’t be too much of a problem. A good rate for unsubscribes is under 0.5% or below per broadcast for a house list.

All the forms of collecting email addresses online and offline that were mentioned in the previous section can also be used to keep email addresses fresh since the most recent email address can be collected. This particularly applies to the offline methods where employees talk directly to customers and prospects. Since it is annoying to be constantly asked ‘is your email contact address still correct?’ it is best if this is only asked when an address becomes inactive as described in the section below.

Encouraging self-service through an online profile or permission centre should also be used.

Direct mail promotions also give opportunities for gaining email addresses. In fact, whenever a prospect or customer has to fill in a form this is an opportunity. Collecting the email address should be an in-built part of the sales process.

Another approach to find out more about customers where you haven’t collected their data directly is to use information available from registration on other sites like social networks. This approach is a service available from companies like Rapleaf.com, FlipTop, Mintigo.

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Step 3 Defining your email marketing proposition

r Q. Have we defined how our email communications offer differential value?

Discussions of how to engage email audiences often start with reviewing creative or the offers presented to subscribers, but in our view, a better starting point is the customer’s needs. Email is like any other digital channel, whether it’s a social media presence like Twitter or Facebook, AdWords in Google or mobile marketing. Consider the customer’s emotional needs.

þ Be admired by friends. þ Impress a boss. þ Increase ego. þ Save money. þ Get something exclusive. þ Have fun and be entertained. þ Save time and be efficient. þ Maintain good health. þ Care for family and friends.

To be successful in comparison with the other channels each channel like email marketing must offer its own unique form of value that is distinct from other channels. Every channel needs a distinctive online value proposition (OVP) to succeed. This defines how the digital channel supports the core brand values but adds its own unique value.

Within email marketing, this is particularly important for an e-newsletter. This doesn’t preclude content re-use from other channels in emails. The unique value of email could be adding additional commentary or simply a round-up of social content that was most popular.

One of email’s distinctive values is the ability to be timely and relevant. Blog posts, website offers, Tweets and other social media are more broadcast in nature and timing isn’t tied to individual customer activity, behaviour, demographic or lifecycle stage.

If your brand offering is wide then this may include different email streams each with their own value proposition. Such at the big grocers that offer newsletters specifically for mums with babies and toddlers as well as their mainstream newsletters.

Review these examples of the types of value that will engage subscribers and improve perception about a brand and see which is most relevant for you:

r Engaging text content that makes the subscriber feel happy, angry or as if they are learning.

r Engaging non-text or rich media content such as videos, podcasts, presentations, blog posts, photos, etc.

r More in-depth content or alternately a summary of content.

r Sharing of other subscriber views and opinions through votes, product ratings and polls.

r Exclusive discounts or coupons only available through the channel.

The email value proposition is tightly connected to the sign-up. The expectation is set at time of sign-up and in your welcome emails. The emails should deliver the email value proposition that has been positioned to the customer.

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The success of daily deal email illustrates this. The customer expectation is for a daily email that carries content which they believe are really good deals. In this case the customer has not signed up for in-depth product reviews, household tips, travel advice and so on.

Contrast this with a newsletter that sets the expectation of weekly tips and advice. It would not be appropriate to send a daily email with product deals.

What is the focus of each campaign? In many cases the direct focus is revenue. Can this be more specific? Reduce old stock, cross sell into new categories, up sell to more expensive products, increase basket size.

Does brand awareness and trust need to be built? In a complex sale, typical for many B2B companies but also in B2C high ticket items such as cars, the immediate message isn’t buy now.

If your offer is a service with regular payments then is the focus on ensuring customers get the most value from the service so that they are retained?

Write down different types of value that you do offer or could offer:

Do offer? Competitors’ offer? Should offer?1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Define the value offered through email marketing communications r Q. Do we get the sell-inform-entertain-share balance right?

Achieving the correct balance between using your newsletters or other email communications as a sales tool and adding other types of value is key to their success.

You will definitely have seen examples of overselling, but maybe also underselling where the call to action or connections to products is too limited.

Remember that this relates to the structure also – the most enticing content needs to be ‘above the fold’ when the email is opened. Start with what you feel are the strongest articles for your audience. Have regular features plus new, topical, articles separate in each issue.

Use the inform and entertain content to bring subscribers through your mail and mix in the sell content so they see that as a result.

As well as different types of feature, think about how you can use your e-newsletter to give a sense of community and engage the audience.

The balance might need to change for different customers. Highly engaged, active customers who buy a lot don’t need the same amount of engaging content. They trust you and are

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happy to buy already. New subscribers or lapsing subscribers might respond better to a higher ratio of inform and entertain content.

The only way to get the balance right is to test different ratios of content over a period of time.

Write down your assessment of the types of value you offer through your e-communications:

Sell (___/10)

__________________________________________________________________________

Inform (___/10)

__________________________________________________________________________

Entertain (___/10)

__________________________________________________________________________

Share (___/10)

__________________________________________________________________________

Define email value proposition r Q. Do we communicate our email value proposition effectively?

Having clear goals around the value you want to offer will help internal copywriters focus and can also be defined on the website to encourage sign-up.

For business-to-business e-newsletters, think about how you can add value by acting as a filter for information about your market sectors.

Your e-newsletters can potentially Alert, Aggregate and Distil information through market alerts, industry trends and in-depth best practice case studies. But to deliver this information-based value will not be cheap as the content will have to be up-to-date, relevant, accurate, concise and clearly presented.

Best Practice Tip 8 Define and communicate value of your e-newsletter or email programmeYou should explain your newsletter proposition, i.e. how it will deliver value to subscribers, for example, through:

þ Saving time. By providing a single, up-to-date source. þ Learning. Increasing knowledge and solving day-to-day problems. þ Saving money. For instance through exclusive offers or offering new ways of working

through a company’s products. þ Entertaining. All newsletters can and should be fun for their audiences – this is not

only the preserve of consumer newsletters. þ Sharing. Sharing information about your organisation or facilitating sharing of content

from customers.

To achieve engagement, you should review how the newsletter delivers value and try to incorporate these into the e-newsletter.

You should answer these questions and emphasise them through the design of the e-newsletter.

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B2B Proposition B2C PropositionMake my work easier Make my life easierHelp me develop Help me learn/have funMake me look good Make me look goodGive me a great deal Give me a great deal

The example below gives a great business-to-business example of the value an email can offer:

And here is an example for an engaging newsletter for a consumer brand focus not around product or offer but customer need and interest. Sales offers are below the fold:

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Integrating value into social media marketing communications r Q. Do we show the value we offer from our email marketing in our social media

communications?

With the rise in popularity of social media, email faces competitors for customer attention, like Twitter and Facebook which are increasingly offering similar types of value. So the email channel needs to compete with or complement these to stay relevant. Think how email marketing can be more valuable compared with these other media.

Alternatively, it can be argued that a company simply needs to offer choice and many customers will prefer email for its lower frequency and richer media. Email can help the time-poor audience by filtering or summarising the high frequency messages from blogs and social networks.

In the example below, the retailer is using email to promote an exclusive campaign offer available through Twitter but, equally, the campaign could work in reverse.

Best Practice Tip 9 Enable ‘share to social’ optionsA ‘share to social’ feature allows email marketers to include links from the email so recipients can easily post emails to their social network profile page, where friends can see the message, make comments and even post the email on their own profile pages.

Speaking about the ‘share to social’ concept, Matt Lindenberg, assistant director of marketing for Diapers.com, explained the benefits thus:

‘Social networks are all about communication. This feature empowers our customers to communicate with each other, and therefore allows our messages to move beyond our email list. One of our emails was posted on 50 different social network profile pages. That kind of customer endorsement turns our email “push” marketing into a powerful “pull” campaign.’

Getting a share to social click is no different to succeeding in getting the reader to take any other action. Simply putting in social icons with little reason to explain what they are for or the benefit in clicking will result in little social sharing.

For example, just a Facebook logo on its own doesn’t explain whether clicking will like the brand or share the content.

This example of icons in the footer from Screwfix does a better job of explaining what customers can expect from the social presence.

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If getting social engagement is important to campaign objectives then doing all the same things as for any other call to action will increase sharing or social media interaction.

r Dedicate more space to the social share.

r Use headlines, copy and images to highlight the call to action.

r Explain the benefit of clicking.

r Use an incentive.

Here is an example from Pizza Express with a call to action to join a debate on Facebook:

A simple, but effective approach is to include more reference to customer ratings within email as this example campaign encouraging purchase based on customer-picks shows. The Macys example uses this approach.

\

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Best Practice Tip 10 Using social media channels to encourage email opt-inA like or a follow is essentially a low commitment action. Whereas providing an email address and marketing permission is a higher commitment which should be encouraged for the more personal, targeted communication it offers.

Now that many brands have grown fan bases and have ongoing social media activity, the social media and email integration opportunity is the reverse. To bring socially engaged customers into the email channel. Social media is a great conversation medium and email is a great conversion medium. Reaching out through social media to gain new email subscribers should be a key objective of the social media marketing plan.

You can even get the best of both worlds by encouraging email sign-up and liking simultaneously. Smart Insights Expert Scribblers use as described in this post8 and the more detailed case study.

Scribblers grew their email list when they integrated their Facebook page with Constant Contact’s Social Campaigns system as a way of ‘Likegating’, i.e. a customised version of Constant Contacts Social Campaigns app was created to give people access to the PDF in exchange for a like.

8 Smart Insights: Facebook Email opt-in example

http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/facebook-marketing/an-example-of-how-facebook-can-grow-online-retail-sales/

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Step 4 Segmentation and targeting techniques

r Q. Have our strategic approaches to segmentation and targeting been reviewed and selected?

There are many different levels in sophistication of targeting, some of which may or may not be worthwhile according to the size of your list. But it’s still useful to review the segmentation and targeting approach used by the top e-retailers to deliver relevance. Typically, these are based upon five layered segmentation options used to develop a more effective targeting.

Best Practice Tip 11 Different targeting options can be combined through layering the segmentation approachesA layered segmentation approach summarising the segmentation approach used by eBay UK is shown below.

Here, I’ll outline the six segmentation approaches that you could use.

Checklist – six email targeting approaches r 1. Customer profile characteristics. Demographics , geographics and customer set

preferences.

r 2. Customer lifecycle groups. Most commonly groups for new subscribers or prospects, active customers and lapsed or no longer engaging in email.

r 3. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted). This is the most powerful method, though also requires more technology to deliver it.

r 4. Customer multi-channel behaviour. Targeting based on channel preference.

r 5. Customer value. Current and future.

r 6. Customer personas. Personas provide a helpful way to target based on multiple dimensions. More complex methods in this area such as psychographics were created to control channel costs in direct mail and aren’t used in email marketing.

The wider the audience and the product or service offering the more segmentation layers and sophistication within each that are needed. This is how eBay manages this:

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eBay has a huge number of different products and a diverse set of members, calling for several segmentation layers to maximise response.

This example email from eBay shows how some of the content has been targeted based on behaviour, in particular purchases and items on the watch list. The watch list has the auctions a particular eBay user has selected to bookmark or watch. The closest equivalent for a brand is a wish list.

A company with just a handful of related products will need relatively little segmentation, since by definition anyone who subscribes is already targeted to a limited degree. Simply being on the list is by definition enough.

There is also the possibility of wrong segmentation or more likely over-segmentation, in which case business performance may be reduced. Take, for example, a very tightly defined segment. An offer may have a high take-up rate within that segment, but that is not to say that the offer would not have been taken up by a larger segment, albeit at a lower rate.

Best Practice Tip 12 Using event-triggered emails and dynamic content insertion to deliver really relevant emailsTo implement this level of email marketing needs a capable email marketing system that supports event-triggered marketing and dynamic content insertion where rules are used to drop different offers and email messages into a container as described in this post and our event-triggered email template.

Again, using eBay as an example of triggered emails, this shows an example when someone bids but does not win the auction. eBay send a triggered email showing ‘Buy It Now’ options

http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/how-to-plan-event-triggered-email-campaigns/

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and more current auctions for the same item.

Let’s now review the six core targeting options available through email. Review which you use now and which could be relevant in the future?

Targeting option 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics) r Q. Options for profile-based targeting used?

This is where most will start; based on their traditional strategic customer segmentation based on the type of customer recorded in the fields of their profile.

For B2C e-retailers this will include age, sex and geography. For B2B companies, this will include size of company, job role and the industry sector or application they operate in. This example shows a female and male creative with the tone and style varying in line with their preferences. Gender can very often be a good segmentation criteria, not only in the very obvious cases such as shoes, but also less obvious, such as pizza. Spicy and hot for males

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vs. healthy eating for females.

Best Practice Tip 13 Test different targeting optionsUse the lower cost of email creative and broadcast to test different targeting to create more relevant emails for your audience.

Many B2B companies target according to industry sector, but do not also look at job role. Different messages can be developed for people with more strategic interest (e.g. for a senior manager the benefits of a new printer may be reduced costs, while for an IT manager it may be ease of administration or throughput). Similarly, many B2C companies may conduct national campaigns, but with email can add a regional element – perhaps using the postcode to determine different parts of the country and then give different messages according to region or airport they will fly from (for a travel company).

The data acquisition source may also convey information for targeting. Here are a couple of examples when this is the case

r Offline data collection. A paper form based collection gives likely geography for future targeting.

r Online subscribe forms. Where a sign-up form appears on multiple webpages or even on different websites, then the content of the page or site of sign-up provides initial product or service interest.

Best Practice Tip 14 Consider tone and style preferenceSome demographics will naturally respond differently to different types of message. Some customers may like a more rational appeal in which case a detailed email explaining the benefits of the offer may work best. Others will prefer an emotional appeal based on images and with warmer, less formal copy.

Sophisticated companies will test for this in customers or infer it using profile characteris-tics and response behaviour and then develop different creative treatments accordingly. Companies that use polls can potentially use this to infer style preferences.

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The most traditional way of gaining customer demographic and profile information for targeting is by means of a preference centre.

Since customer interests are not always so black and white, rather than tick boxes for choices Amazon use Like, Neutral and Dislike in the example. Note, too, how the user interface has been improved by use of pictures and headings. Providing an easy to use preference centre can do a lot to improve the accuracy of completion and number of subscribers who complete it.

Where demographic information is missing one approach is to run campaigns to ask for the information. In the next example the incentive of a birthday gift is used by Norm Thompson to get age information.

Targeting option 2. Current and predicted value r Q. Options for targeting based on customer value review?

Retailers work hard to understand their most valuable customers so that they can develop loyalty in this group. A useful way of thinking about customer value is these three groups, originally identified by Peppers and Rogers:

1. Most-valuable customers (MVCs)These are the customers who contribute the most profit and are typically a small proportion of the total customer base as suggested by their position in the pyramid. These customers will likely have purchased more or higher-value products.

The strategy for these customers focuses on retention rather than extension. In the case of a bank, personal relationship managers would be appointed for customers in this category to provide them with guidance and advice and to make sure they remain loyal.

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Often this strategy will work best using direct personal contact as the primary communication channel, but using online marketing for support where the customer has a propensity to use online channels.

2. Most-growable customers (MGCs)Customers who show potential to become more valuable customers. They are profitable when assessed in terms of lifetime value, but the number of product holdings or lifetime value is relatively low compared with the MVCs.

Strategies for these customers centre on extension, through making recommendations about relevant products based on previous purchases. Encouraging similar re-purchases could also be part of this.

Online marketing offers great opportunities to make personalised recommendations through the web site and email.

3. Below-zero customers (BZCs)Below zero customers are simply unprofitable customers. The strategy for these customers may vary – they can be encouraged to develop towards MGCs, but more typically expenditure will be minimised if it is felt that it will be difficult to change their loyalty behaviour or the source of their being unprofitable. Again, digital media can be used as a lower-cost form of marketing expenditure to encourage these customers to make repeat purchases or to allow them to self-serve online.

When considering loyalty-based segmentation, it’s useful to compare current against future value, and it’s best to visualise this within a matrix. Here’s an example presented by Chris Poad of retail group Otto to an E-consultancy Masterclass.

Here’s a creative for a VIP mailing sent to highest value segment. ESP eCircle shared that the average performance was five times higher than the regular newsletter:

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Targeting option 3. Customer lifecycle groups r Q. Options for targeting based on customer lifecycle or relationship used?

As visitors use online services they can potentially pass through several stages, often known as the online loyalty ladder.

Once you have defined these groups and set up the customer relationship management infrastructure to categorise customers in this way, you can then deliver targeted messages, either by personalised on-site messaging or through emails that are triggered automatically due to different rules.

Once visitors are then registered or identified by means of an email link click and resultant cookie, they can be tracked through the remaining stages. Two particularly important groups are customers who have purchased one or more times. Although a customer is sometimes not considered to be a loyal or repeat customer until they have purchased two to five times, in which case a single purchase segment is more akin to a warm prospect than a loyal customer.

For many e-retailers, encouraging customers to move from the first purchase to the second purchase and then onto the third purchase is a key challenge. Specific promotions can be used to encourage further purchases. Similarly, once customers become inactive, i.e. they have not purchased for a defined period such as three months, further follow-ups are required.

The actual period of inactivity should reflect the product or service. Holidays are purchased

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less frequently than shoes. Analysis of customer transactions should be used to determine the average and variation in re-purchase frequencies.

Here’s an example of the lifecycle segmentation approach used by e-retailer Tesco.com which they call a ‘commitment-based segmentation’ based on recency of purchase, frequency of purchase and value. It’s used to identify six lifecycle categories which are then further divided to target communications:

r ‘Logged-on’

r ‘Cautionary’

r ‘Developing’

r ‘Established’

r ‘Dedicated’

r ‘Logged-off’ (the aim here is to win back).

This is an example of what we think is an excellent branded welcome email from Clinique:

As emails should be typically kept short there may be too much to say in a single welcome and the welcome email should be made into a welcome series, providing a mix of offers, brand offer education, information about other channels, service channels, mobile apps and so forth. The most sophisticated brands make these welcome series behavioural based. So what comes next in the series depends on what engagement, if any, occurred in the previous welcome emails. Here’s a nice low-tech, but often more effective email activation creative where the attempt is to win-back a lapsed customer.

A more polished win-back example here from Audible, a subscription service targeting

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previous service subscribers with a coupon to get them to subscribe to the service again:

Best Practice Tip 15 Use behavioural email marketingRather than manually planning email campaigns, use automated event-triggered messaging to encourage continued purchase.

For example, Tesco.com have a touch strategy that includes a sequence of follow-up communications triggered after different events in the customer lifecycle.

In the example given below, communications after event 1 are intended to achieve the objective of converting a website visitor to action; communications after event 2 are intended to move the customer from a first time purchaser to a regular purchaser and for event 3 to reactivate lapsed purchasers.

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Trigger event 1: Customer first registers on site (but does not buy)

þ Auto-response (AR) 1: Two days after registration email sent offering phone assistance and £5 discount off first purchase to encourage trial.

Trigger event 2: Customer first purchases online

þ AR1: Immediate order confirmation. þ AR2: Five days after purchase email sent with link to online customer satisfaction survey

asking about quality of service from driver and picker (e.g. item quality and substitutions). þ AR3: Two weeks after first purchase – direct mail offering tips on how to use service and

£5 discount on next purchases intended to encourage re-use of online services. þ AR4: Generic monthly e-newsletter with online exclusive offers encouraging cross-selling þ AR5: Bi-weekly alert with personalised offers for customer. þ AR6: After 2 months – £5 discount for next shop. þ AR7: Quarterly mailing of coupons encouraging repeat sales and cross-sales.

Trigger event 3: Customer does not purchase for an extended period

þ AR1: Dormancy detected – reactivation email with survey of how the customer is finding the service (to identify any problems) and a £5 incentive.

þ AR2: A further discount incentive is used in order to encourage continued usage to shop after the first shop after a break.

Here is another example and excellent option for visualising these types of campaigns.

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Targeting option 4. Current and predicted behaviour in response and purchase

r Q. Options for targeting based on response behaviour used?

As customers progress through the lifecycle, if all interactions with different communications such as email clicks and pages visited on site are captured, we’ll be able to build up a detailed response and purchase history.

Best Practice Tip 16 Develop an activity score to show levels of customer activityHere each customer is scored according to their response whether it is the number of opens, clicks, leads or purchases. Different communications can then be sent to list members depending on their historical level of activity. Customers who don’t seem to be responsive to online messages can be targeted through other approaches such as direct mail and phone.

A more sophisticated method of understanding behaviour is to categorise customers according to the details of their recency, frequency, monetary value and category of products purchased (RFM analysis). The RFM technique is quite involved, so we will cover that in more detail in a moment.

Using these RFM techniques in combination with the other targeting techniques it becomes possible to use predictive modelling to identify the ‘Next Best Product’ for particular customer types. With the right system of tracking and web analytics, it should be possible to see not only which types of links in an email a customer has clicked upon, but also which types of web pages they have visited recently. For example, a select on the database for a wine promotion could be used to target customers who have been to the wine section of the website in the last three months, but have not purchased wine.

Targeting option 5. Multi-channel behaviour (channel preference) No matter how enthusiastic you are about online channels, some customers will prefer using online communications channels and many others will prefer traditional channels.

We call this ‘Right Touching’9 – this is the holy grail of digital marketing – delivering the perfect message for each customer. Just one aspect of this is determining which customers prefer email and then upweighting email activity more for them, while reducing frequency and using more traditional communications for those who prefer these. These days we will also need to consider social media response.

Best Practice Tip 17 ??TIP 16??Use a right touching approach to channel preferenceIt is useful to have a flag within the database which indicates customers’ channel preference and by implications, the best channel to target them by.

Rather than asking explicitly for channel preference Orange tested the same message sent in different channels, including email, MMS (mobile messaging service), DM to test cells to determine the best channel to use based on return on investment (ROI). The situation was found to be complex and that whilst email was generally the better performer the type of message made a difference. Messages that need online action work better in email than MMS or DM, whereas calls to action to text to a short code or download a mobile app work fine within MMS or DM.9 Dave’s definition of Right Touching.

http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/email-marketing/what-is-right-touching-for-customer-communications/

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Channel preference will be indicated by RFM and response analysis since customers with a preference for online channels will be more responsive and will make more purchases online. Customers can also be asked direct through surveys.

Customers that prefer online channels can be targeted mainly by online communications such as email, while customers who prefer traditional channels can be targeted by traditional communications such as direct mail or phone. Though in reality the high cost of DM and phone channels changes the business equation. The high cost channels being used only after lower cost channels have not engaged customers and the customers are considered to be of sufficiently high value to warrant the use of a higher cost channel.

To deliver relevance also requires a plan specifying the number, frequency and type of online and offline communications and offers. This is a contact or touch strategy which is described in a later section.

Targeting option 6. Customer personas including psychographics r Q. Options for targeting based on customer personas reviewed?

Once we have reviewed and selected from the five targeting approaches above, a final step to think about is using design personas for typical customer types.

Best Practice Tip 18 Use digital customer personasWeb design personas are a powerful web design technique increasingly used to improve the usability and customer centricity of a web site.

What is it? Digital customer personasDigital customer personas are a summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and access platform preferences of different groups of users.

These have the benefit that they characterise segment types in the context of the targeting options mentioned above such as stage in lifecycle, demographics and style preferences.

We can also include psychographics which summarise the mental attitudes, motivations and opinions of customers, for example:

þ Impulsive or rational decision maker

þ Price-conscious

þ Risk-taker or conservative

þ Willingness to share information or participate socially

þ View they want to project of themselves.

The design persona concept can also potentially be used for e-newsletters, but isn’t used so often.

Personas are essentially a ‘thumbnail’ description of a type of person. They have been used for a long time in research for segmentation and advertising, but in recent years have also proved effective for improving website design by companies who have applied the technique.

I have not heard about personas being used that much in an email context, but I think they could be usefully applied, particularly for e-newsletters. One example where they were used is where the American National Football League (NFL) identified three types of scenarios – one following a particular team who wanted to check upcoming games, another who was

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very interested in the statistics associated with the fantasy league and another who tended to be more interested in the position in the league.

These are some guidelines and ideas on what can be included when developing a persona. The start or end point is to give each persona a name. The detailed stages are:

1. Build personal attributes into personas:

þ Demographic: age, gender, education, occupation and for B2B, company size, position in buying unit.

þ Pyschographic: goals, tasks, motivation. þ Webographics: web experience (months), usage location (home or work), usage platform

(dial-up, broadband), usage frequency, favourite sites.2. Remember that personas are only models of characteristics and environment:

þ Design targets. þ Stereotypes. þ Three or four usually suffice to improve general usability, but more needed for specific

behaviours. þ Choose one primary persona whom, if satisfied, means others are likely to be satisfied.

What is it? Primary personaDigital customer personas are a summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and access platform preferences of different groups of users.

Once different personas have been developed who are representative of key site visitor types or customer types, a primary persona is sometimes identified. Wodtke (2002) says:

‘Your primary persona needs to be a common user type who is both important to the business success of the product and needy from a design point of view – in other words, a beginner user or a technologically challenged one.’

She also says that secondary personas can also be developed such as super-users or complete novices. Complementary personas are those that don’t fit into the main categories, which display unusual behaviour. Such complementary personas help ‘out-of-box thinking’ and offer choices or content that may appeal to all users.

Recommended resource? Personas toolkit See our Personas toolkit showing key issues to consider when creating personas and with examples of different styles of personas.

To summarise the approaches described in this section, the example of Euroffice is a good one.

Euroffice targeted email marketing case studyEuroffice (www.euroffice.co.uk) is a large online office supplies company which targets small and mid-sized companies. This description is adapted from the company website press releases and Revolution (2005). According to George Karibian, Euroffice CEO, ‘getting the message across effectively required segmentation’ to engage different people in different ways. The office sector is fiercely competitive, with relatively little loyalty since company purchasers will often simply buy on price. However, targeted incentives can be used to reward or encourage buyers’ loyalty.

http://www.euroffice.co.uk

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Rather than manually developing campaigns for each segment, which is time consuming, Euroffice mainly use an automated event-based targeting approach based on the system identifying the stage at which a consumer is in the lifecycle, i.e. how many products they have purchased and the types of product within their purchase history. Karibian calls this a ‘touch marketing funnel approach’, i.e. the touch strategy is determined by customer segmentation and response. Three main groups of customers are identified in the lifecycle and these are broken down further according to purchase category. Also layered on this segmentation is breakdown into buyer type – are they a small home-user, an operations manager at a mid-size company or a purchasing manager at a larger company? Each will respond to different promotions.

The first group, at the top of the funnel and the largest are ‘Group 1 Trial customers’ who have made one or two purchases. For the first group, Euroffice believe that creating impulse-buying through price-promotions is most important. These will be based on categories purchased in the past. The second group, ‘Group 2 The nursery’ have made three to eight purchases. A particular issue, as with many e-retailers is encouraging customers from the third to fourth purchase, there is a more significant drop-out at this point which the company uses marketing to control. Karibian says: ‘When they get to Group 2, it’s about creating frequency of purchase to ensure they don’t forget you.’ Euroffice sends a printed catalogue to Group 2 separately from their merchandise as a reminder about the company.

The final group, ‘Group 3 Key accounts’ or ‘Crown Jewels’ have made nine or more orders. They also tend to have a higher basket value. ‘These people are the Crown Jewels and will spend an average of £135 per order compared with an average of £55 for trial customers.’ They have a 90 per cent probability of re-ordering within a six-month period. For this group, tools have been developed on the site to make it easier for them to shop. The intention is that these customers find these tools helps them in making their orders and they become reliant on, so achieving ‘soft lock-in’.

We can then target these segments through using fields within the database to identify which segment customers belong to and then using mass customisation and personalisation to tailor offers to these customers as described in the following section.

RFM analysisAs is well known by catalogue retailers, knowledge about customer purchase behaviour typically falls into three key areas:

þ Recency of last purchase, e.g. three months ago. þ Frequency of purchase, e.g. twice per quarter or twice per year. þ Monetary value of purchase(s), e.g. average order value of £50, total annual purchase

value of £5,000.Assessing these behavioural characteristics is known as RFM or a similar equivalent FRAC, which stands for:

þ Frequency. þ Recency. þ Amount (obviously equivalent to monetary value). þ Category (types of product purchased – not included within RFM).

These approaches have not been limited to retailers though, they have been a staple approach for many years for some marketing applications such as: catalogue and mail-order companies; grocers and other retailers with loyalty schemes; charities who can track donations; and car manufacturers who can track car purchases or services through time.

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However, for many other organisations, they have proved less relevant. With the advent of web and email marketing, there are many more opportunities for applying this behavioural customer information to use RFM in virtually every market. This is possible since recency and frequency of purchase can be used to understand and respond to other types of digitally recorded transactions and interactions, for example visits or log-ins to a website or interaction with emails such as opens or clicks. These types of interactions apply not only to e-retail sites, but also relationship-building websites, brand-building sites and portals.

Traditional channels such as catalogue and mail-order have particularly high channel costs which drove those companies not to develop models which are customer centric per se but in which they deliver sustainable ROI. Catalogue companies simply can’t afford to send to customers with lower propensity to buy. Whilst the RFM model does have value in email marketing, the business purpose involved is entirely different. It’s not to control use of expensive channels but rather to avoid customer marketing fatigue.

We will now give an overview of how RFM approaches can be applied in online marketing, with special reference to email marketing.

Recency:Recency shows the number of days since a customer completed an action.

Jim Novo stresses the importance of recency when he says:

‘Recency, or the number of days that have gone by since a customer completed an action (purchase, log-in, download, etc.) is the most powerful predictor of the customer repeating an action…Recency is why you receive another catalogue from the company shortly after you make your first purchase from them.’

(Of course, this applies in particular to catalogue-style purchases.)

Online we can measure a lot more than days elapsed since last purchase. We can assess:

þ Purchase. þ Visit to site or particular type of content (using cookies). þ Log-on to a site (more accurate than cookies provided user ID is not shared). þ Opening or clicking through on an email or e-newsletter.

Online applications of analysis of recency include:

þ Monitoring through time to identify vulnerable customers. þ Scoring customers to preferentially target more responsive customers for cost savings. þ Out of R, F and M recency is arguably the most important of the three in email marketing.

It’s not uncommon for 50 per cent of the customer database to have not recently engaged in email, so it’s important to identify different levels of engagement and treat the inactive members differently.

Frequency:Frequency refers to the number of times an action is completed in a period.

Examples are similar to those for recency, for example, but with reference to a time period:

þ Five purchases per year. þ Five visits per month. þ Five log-ins per week. þ Five email opens per month, five email clicks per year.

Online applications of analysis of include: combine with recency for RF targeting.

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Monetary:Monetary value is the amount spent in the period. The amount could be per month, per quarter, per year depending on the type of application. For an e-retailer, average order value would be appropriate also.

Generally, customers with higher monetary values tend to have a higher loyalty and potential future value since they have purchased more items.

One example would be to exclude these customers from special promotions if their RF scores suggested they were actively purchasing.

Assessing the characteristics of these customers on the database to understand factors which may make them more valuable is often insightful. These customers could also be surveyed to find out these factors also.

Frequency is often a proxy for monetary value per year since the more products purchased, the higher the overall monetary value. It is possible, then, to simplify analysis by just using recency and frequency. Monetary value can also skew the analysis for high value initial purchases.

Values could be assigned to each customer as follows:

Dividing customers into different RFM groups The rigorous approach to RFM analysis is to use an approach which places an equal number of customers in each quintile of 20 percent (10 deciles can also be used for larger databases). This approach is shown below.

The diagram also shows one application of RFM with a view to using communications channels more effectively. Lower cost e-communications are used for the most loyal customers and more expensive communications are used for the less loyal customers.

It is also possible to place each division for Recency, Frequency and Monetary value in an arbitrary position. This approach is also useful since the marketer can set thresholds of value relevant to their understanding of their customers’ behaviour. For example:

Recency: þ 0 – Not known. þ 1 – Within last 12 months. þ 2 – Within last six months. þ 3 – Within last three months. þ 4 – Within last one month.

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This could be purchase frequency or, as here, recency of a visit to the website.

Frequency: þ 0 – Not known. þ 1 – Every six months. þ 2 – Every three months. þ 3 – Every two months. þ 4 – Monthly.

This could be purchase frequency or, as here, visits to the website.

Monetary value: þ 0 – Less than £10. þ 1 – £10–50. þ 2 – £50–£100. þ 3 – £100–£200. þ 4 – More than £200.

This could be total purchase value through the year or, as here, average order value.

Another example, with real world data as is shown in the next diagram.

You can see that plotting customer numbers against recency and frequency in this way for an online company gives a great visual indication of the health of the business and groups that can be targeted to encourage greater repeat purchases.

Source: Interactive Marketing Journal – January to March 04 – SilverMinds music catalogue

Another example, which shows how RFM can be applied in non-retail settings shows how a theatre group uses these nine categories for its direct marketing:

Oncers (attended theatre once): þ Recent oncers attended <12 months. þ Rusty oncers attended >12 <36 months. þ Very rusty oncers attended 36+ months.

Twicers: þ Recent twicer attended <12 months. þ Rusty twicer attended >12 <36 months. þ Very rusty twicer attended in 36+ months.

2+ subscribers:

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þ Current subscribers Booked 2+ events in current season. þ Recent Booked 2+ last season. þ Very rusty Booked 2+ more than a season ago.

This approach shows how the full RFM analysis approach doesn’t have to be applied. Three or four RF groups can be sufficient to greatly improving targeting.

A final example, most relevant to publishers and communities, is shown in the next figure where online community provider Magicalia has categorised its audience to assess the volume of members in different categories (denoted by the size of the circles). Triggered email communications and on-site personalised messages are then developed for each group to encourage customers to migrate to higher recency/frequency categories.

Additional methods of reviewing online customer behaviourJim Novo also recommends two additional measures of customer behaviour in his DrillingDown blog that can be used to understand behaviour and also to set targets for retention marketing. These are latency and hurdle rate.

LatencyLatency is the average time between customer events in the customer lifecycle.

Latency can be applied to these events:

r Website visits.

r Second and third purchase.

r Email click-throughs.

Online applications of latency analysis include:

r Put in place triggers that alert you to behaviour outside norm – increased interest or disinterest, then…

r Manage behaviour using e-communications or traditional communications.

For example, a B2B or B2C organisation with a long interval between purchases would find that the average latency increased for a particular customer, then they may be investigating an additional purchase (their recency and frequency would likely increase also). Emails, phone calls or direct mail could then be used to target this person with relevant offers according to what they were searching for.

Hurdle rate

http://www.drillingdown.com

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According to Jim Novo a hurdle rate refers to the percentage of customers in a group (such as in a segment or on a list) who have completed an action. It is a very useful concept, although the terminology doesn’t really describe its application. Its value is that it can be used to compare groups or to set targets to increase engagement with online channels as the examples shown below.

Online marketing examples of hurdle rates

þ 20 percent of customers have visited in past six months. þ Five percent of customers have made three or more purchases in year. þ 60 percent of registrants have logged on to the system in year. þ 30 percent have clicked through on email in year.10

Online applications of analysis of include:

þ Use for objectives to deepen relationship. þ Use for targeting communications on particular groups, e.g. reactivate those who are less

engaged. þ Use for monitoring impact of communications, i.e. how many change hurdle rates as a

result of tactics.

A related approach to RFM analysis is propensity modelling which is one name given to the approach of evaluating customer characteristics and behaviour, in particular previous products or services purchased, and then making recommendations for the next suitable product. However, it is best known as recommending the ‘Next Best Product’ to existing customers. A related acquisition approach is to target potential customers with similar charac-teristics through renting direct mail or email lists or advertising online in similar locations.

Lifetime value calculationsAn appreciation of lifetime value (LTV) is key to the theory and practice of marketing and customer relationship management. However, while the term is often used loosely, calculation of LTV is not straightforward, so many organisations do not calculate it. Lifetime value is defined as the total net benefit that a customer, or group of customers, will provide a company over their total relationship with a company. Modelling is based on estimating the income and costs associated with each customer over a period of time and then calculating the net present value in current monetary terms using a discount rate value applied over the period.

There are different degrees of sophistication in calculating LTV.

Lifetime value modelling is vital within marketing since it answers the question:

‘How much can I afford to invest in acquiring a new customer?’

If online marketers try to answer this from a short-term perspective as is often the case, i.e. by judging it based on the profit from a single sale on an e-commerce site, there are two problems:

1. We become very focused on short-term ROI and so may not invest sufficiently to grow our business.

2. We assume that each new customer is worth precisely the same to us and we ignore differentials in loyalty and profitability between differing types of customer.

10 See these ideas on how to treat inactive email subscribers.

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing-ecrm-alerts/inactive-email-subscribers/

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Lifetime value analysis enables email marketers to:

þ Plan and measure investment in customer acquisition programmes. þ Identify and compare critical target segments – strategies usually involve preferentially

targeting the most profitable customers and minimising communications with the least profitable customers. In email marketing the need to reduce communication to un-engaged customers is often driven by concerns of deliverability rather than channel costs.

þ Measure the effectiveness of alternative customer retention strategies. þ Establish the true value of a company’s customer base. þ Make decisions about products and offers.

Make decisions about the value of introducing new E-CRM technologies.

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Step 5 Defining your integrated email communications strategyThere is a fine line between being seen as a spammer who sends too much email and selecting a frequency which maximises returns. The next step involves selecting the best frequency for you.

Set best email frequency r Q. Has email frequency been reviewed?

Is there an optimal email frequency? Is it one email a quarter, week, month or day even? Is less more or is more more?!

This is a basic question every digital marketer has to try to answer to maximise profit of email activity.

We are looking to achieve the right balance between email overexposure and underexposure. With overexposure, the recipient receives email from the same company so frequently that they don’t have the time to read it or feel they are being spammed. They become ‘emotionally unsubscribed’. Worse than this is if they hit the report as spam or junk button, as this has deliverability implications.

On the other hand with underexposure, opportunities and sales are lost since the customer does not receive emails sufficiently frequently.

Evaluating current email frequency and customer response behaviourThe first step to help decide is to assess the impact of your email marketing frequency on customer activity and perceptions. If frequency is too high, subscribers will tune out. Though this is not a one dimensional question. Value and relevance play their part, sending irrelevant email less frequently doesn’t make them relevant – they are just less frequent irrelevant emails. Providing value and relevance is a way to gain acceptance and emotional permission to send frequently. The obvious thing to measure is aggregate open and click rates and most email broadcast systems are good at this. However, in a heavily segmented environment with multiple emails and customers getting different quantities of email a hurdle rate provides a better way to evaluate engagement. Answer the question of how many customers across the entire customer base have opened, clicked or purchased in the last period.

Best Practice Tip 19 Review your frequency and email types against competitorsA good starting point is to look at the average number of emails you and your competitors send to subscribers per week, month or year.

Econsultancy reported11 that the average in 2009 for US e-retailers was 2.5 emails per week and 11 emails per month giving an average of 132 emails per year.

The growth of the deal sector has demonstrated that even a daily email may not be too much. If the customer expectation at sign-up is a daily email and those deals are truly deals which are relevant enough then daily is acceptable. It doesn’t need to be that every email is perfectly relevant, just that on balance sufficient interest and value is delivered in the month that the customer is happy to delete and ignore those that aren’t relevant. 11 Econsultancy article.

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/5259-are-retailers-sending-too-many-emails

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But you need to go beyond this and use these measures that most systems can’t measure readily, so you need to do some more analysis to identify:

r Average frequency of email received and plot profile by frequency for different list mem-bers – to see the proportion of the list who are receiving too many or two few emails – see chart.

r List activity – the percentage of your list that open, click and buy within a period, e.g. quarterly or annual.

r Recency of response – what is the average for the last open, click or purchase – a good tip is to store recency in your email database as a field for analysis. Alternatively score list members by activity and store this in the database also.

r Break down list activity and recency measures by different type of list members – it may be that the frequency is working for some segments but not others.

r Break down list activity by time on list – common sense suggests that the longer they are on your list the less responsive your emails will become.

Best Practice Tip 20 Review unsubscribe and email activity levels through timeGraph the response rate and unsubscribe rate of your e-marketing campaigns weekly or monthly independent of campaigns. Try to maximise the number of clicks and minimise unsubscribe rates.

Testing options to decide on the best email frequencyIt’s not an easy question to answer by gut instinct, so maybe testing is better. So how do you decide on frequency? Here are some ideas and examples showing how you can approach frequency testing. First, you need to think about defining a random control group to test frequency changes against. Here you continue with current mailing frequency for the control group and then vary the frequency for other groups and review changes in response and in particular revenue per 1000 subscribers. In one case a bank tried frequencies of 1,2,3,4 times per month and found the right frequency this way.

Example 1Sean Duffy of EmailCenter described how TopTable measured the long-term impact of increased frequency by creating a control group with half the new customers that joined in a month held back from the second send.

After three months this control group was measured against those who had joined the site at the same time yet received the default setting of two emails a week. Open rates were 86 percent higher, unsubscribe rates 57 percent lower.

But the main figures that proved why sending too many emails leads to long-term damage – those receiving only one email a week had made 14% more bookings than those receiving two emails over that three-month test period!

Example 2In this case fashion e-retailer Net-a-Porter.com reduced the number of emails it sent to customers from up to 10 per week to two according to Brand Republic.12

It had been emailing some customers up to 10 times a week with information including generic updates, highlights from specific designers and details of new products.

After the experiment Net-a-Porter.com now sends each user two automatically generated

12 Brand Republic: Email response

http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/630617/netaporter-ups-conversion-rate-cutting-email-activity/

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emails a week that take into account their specific interests and preferences. Conversion rate increased; product update emails get a conversion rate of more than 10 percent and newsletter emails are opened by nearly half of recipients.

This report also shows the importance of getting email marketing frequency right. The company sends out around 300,000 emails a week. Email drives 32 percent of Net-a-Porter’s sales and generates more than £1m in revenue each month.

If you have a single email newsletter as in the Toptable example, testing is relatively straightforward. It’s more complex if you have a range of different types of emails such as e-newsletters, promotional offer emails and also individually tailored event-triggered emails. Different offers or creative to each segment will also have to be overlaid upon this.

Other options to solve the frequency dilemma include:

þ A. Reduce email frequencies automatically for lower responding customers. Set a database field for activity or engagement level for each customer to help implement this. Amazon is good at implementing this and increases frequency through event-triggered emails sent in response to someone browsing, searching or buying – that’s the smartest approach.

þ B. Change frequency for different segments. One frequency size is never going to fit all. So if you find that open or click response is lower for certain segments, then decrease the frequency when they are inactive and look to understand why the response rate is lower in that segment to correct the fundamental cause.

þ C. Give customers a choice on frequency. You do this through their profile or ‘communications preference centre’. An alternative option is to provide opt-down as well as unsubscribe choice. Opt-down offers a temporary holiday from emails. Teletext Holidays found they recovered five percent of customers by offering opt-down in the unsubscribe process.

þ D. Increase direct mail for customers with a lower email response. This is sometimes called ‘right channelling’. To test the value of this use a holdout group. This small group, perhaps five percent of your list or a specific segment doesn’t receive the catalogue (or email if you’re testing this) at all.

þ E. Re-engagement campaigns. Re-activation campaigns use content or discounts to encourage email subscribers to become active again.

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Step 6 Creating effective email templates and creative

r Q. Have our email templates been reviewed for effectiveness?

Effective email templates should balance the need for visual prominence of:

þ A main text headline. þ Copy to engage (where relevant, like an editorial on an e-newsletter). þ Sub-headings. þ Different blocks of content and offers. þ The call(s) to action.

Email marketing template examplesTo guide good practice we have created these outlines which you should reference against the information in this section. We’re not saying you should include all these features, but they give options of template sections to discuss with your designers.

Model solus email template

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Model enewsletter template layout

From: <Display address – newsletter name> [Physical address]Subject: Focused subject line (Newsletter issue, featured offers/articles)

“Header”

Left Sidebar

(optional)

Right sidebar

(optional)

BrandIdent

<Visual engagement><Main message>

<Offer description or additional offer, e.g. Catalogue>

Banner“Header”

<Salutation: Dear>

Lead copy <Personalised>

<Initial call-to-action>Call-

to-action

Clickable text headline (+sub-head?)Lead

paragraphLead

image(optional)

Call-to-action

Repeating feature offer sub-headlines

<Summary of offers><Compelling reason to act now>

Closingparagraph

Call-to-actions

<Sign-off text> <Person or company>Optional P.S.

Sign-off

<Company <Privacy statement><Unsubscribe><Terms and Conditions>

Footer

Options:<Detailed offer description><Features list><Benefits list><Range of producs – images and text>

Note: Asymmetric layouts more visually appealing

Main block“Body”

Call-to-actions

Main or category navigation

Product categories or site main navigation

<Text: Offer / message summary : call-to-action><View in browser text hyperlink><Whitelist – “add to address book” / <Verification ID – Postcode/Member><My Profile / <Comms Preferences or occasionally unsubscribe>

“Pre-header”

Note:

Table of contentsabove foldessential for informationor feature-ledEnewsletters

Can be left,centre or right

You may also be interested in these compilations of templates to inform updates to your templates or to use as a starting point:

þ Campaign Monitor Email Gallery þ Mailchimp Templates

Assess headlines r Q. Have headlines been reviewed for effectiveness?

Since most of the readers of your email will only scan them, it’s important to offer clear messages in the header and within the sub-headlines or section.

Best Practice Tip 21 Ensure the email is scannable even when images are blocked

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/

http://mailchimp.com/features/email-templates/

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Since images are still blocked by many as a spam prevention measure, so you will get a better response where the main headlines and headlines of sub-sections or containers are clear. This is particularly important for e-newsletters and business messages, but including some text or at least alternative text for images will give you a better response for consumer messages also.

r Q. Are headings and text clear when images are blocked?

This is an example from our e-newsletter with images blocked, you can see how we make use of tinted background colours to give focus to the different areas of the email.

This is an example of how not to do it. There are plenty we could have chosen, even in this time when mobile marketing is more important.

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Visual focus or priority on a limited number of areas r Q. Does the email have a clear visual focus?

Although we can scan quickly, a page will still be more effective if there are clear visual priorities on a limited number of areas on screen. Our e-newsletter offers these opportunities.

Use pyramid style copywriting r Q. Email effective if only first part of email “above-the-fold” displayed?

Sometimes we will only browse the first part of the email above the fold, so you need to make sure the first part of your email engages and a call to action is visible above the fold.

What is it? Above-the-foldA term derived from direct mail where this is the first part of a letter when it is opened. The equivalent in email is what appears in the preview pane before the user scrolls down.

Clear calls to action r Q. Are our calls to action clear?

Calls to action are often embedded as images, but text call(s) to action can add to the response, so need to be clear.

Ensure images are effective r Q. Has effective imagery been used and is it consistent with the email?

Some of the image issues to consider are:

þ Relevant to product or offer. þ Quality effective to support message and offer. þ Images linked rather than embedded to reduce weight of email. þ Alt-text tag used to explain message when images are blocked in email reader.

Crafting effective copyTo write successful email copy, you need to start by thinking about how readers interact with email. If you are familiar with writing copy for print, consider these three important questions you should ask. When running win-back and welcome campaigns consider also the stage of the relationship. For example a more conciliatory tone with softer sell may work better in win-back.

Effective subject lines r Q. Are the subject lines effective?

The reality of email subject lines is that your readers aren’t waiting to lavish their eyes on your email, rather their fingers are hovering over the delete button waiting to assign it to trash.

Readers use the subject line to self-qualify the email to themselves. The subject line is not just about getting the email opened by the maximum number of people, it’s about getting the people most fitted to the offer or message to open the email.

Whilst intrigue and ambiguity may increase open rates it may not always translate to click rate increase. Clarity and specificity in the subject line can often be the most powerful approach to getting good click rates.

We all know that subject lines are important, but do you know the part which is most

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important? For us it’s the first two words. Let’s now look at some questions related to subject lines.

Make copy scannable r Q. Is the copy scannable?

Jakob Nielsen reported on research that shows that in a test 79 percent of test web users scanned, while just 16 percent read word-by-word. Since we tend to read 25 percent more slowly from a computer screen, this behaviour is likely to be exhibited in all on-screen copy, whether web or email.

One implication of this is that we should write less copy when writing for the web or email. Nielsen suggests 50 percent of the original for web copy. We can suggest that for email, which tends to be read in a smaller window, and in a different context, this should be even shorter.

To achieve brevity, Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think! suggests we should:

þ 1. Omit needless words! He says we should remove half our original words and then strive to remove half again.

þ 2. Marketing happy talk must die! Avoid that introductory text intended to make the customer feel comfortable or extol the virtues of a company. Rather than rest on ‘best ever’, ‘market leader’ and other such unsubstantiated claims look to provide evidence. Such as a deal company might talk about

þ How many new deals they have per week. þ The average saving. þ How many customers buy more than once. þ Customer feedback and ratings on deals and service.

þ 3. Instructions must die! This refers to online forms rather than emails where it is achieved through making the options clear without extensive text. For email we can argue that instructions are often useful to explain to the reader what they need to do to redeem the offer and to convert them to action. But we can certainly keep instructions succinct.

Of course the other implication of scanning behaviour is that we should make our emails scannable! Nielsen suggests these as approaches to this:

þ Highlighted keywords (we will look at different forms of highlighting for text and HTML emails later in this guide).

þ Meaningful not ‘clever’ sub-headings. þ Bulleted lists. þ One idea per paragraph. þ The inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion. þ Half the word count (or less) than conventional writing.

Make email style conversational r Q. Has a conversational style of email marketing been used?

Although we receive many unsolicited communications, many of the emails we receive are from work and friends.

So we are used to using email in a conversational, informal way with friends, family and colleagues. It follows that copywriters can be more conversational with email than other media, and this can help us get closer to our prospects and customers.

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Some have said we should ‘Write like you talk’ – a good test is to ask whether you would say it to someone face-to-face. If not it is probably the ‘marketing happy talk’ we referred to above.

Other ways to make email conversational is to use simple words and use colloquial expressions.

Pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘they’ are also effective. Some talk about the ‘we-we test’ – reviewing the email to see whether the emphasis is on the sender ‘we’ or the recipient ‘you’. The example below shows an email that passes this test:

‘You already know how easy it is to get instant online insurance cover from Norwich Union. But did you know that Norwich Union can also offer you online access to low-cost life-cover. For example, £ would cost you as little as £Y per day.’

Connecting copy with readers r Q. Does our email language connect with our readers?

With so much spam, every email reader is going to be super-cynical about what you are offering. So, professional email marketers have to work extra hard to establish credibility and prove their benefits. So, as you write, put yourself in the position of a cynical customer who is fed up with insincere and bogus offers – how are you going to prove that you are a credible supplier?

These are some approaches to overcome cynicism and build credibility through email:

þ Try to achieve ‘connection’ with the reader to show that you understand them by using customer language and buzzwords.

þ Spell out the benefit the feature gives. For example a bulleted list could use different fonts or formats to emphasise benefits.

þ Backup with facts and numbers. þ Build testimonial elements into your emails such as customer quotes, number of

customers, client names and independent reviews and awards. þ Customer-centric copy r Q. Is the copy customer-centric?

It is often said that to write good direct mail copy, you need to write for your reader. In other words, to imagine the person who is reading your carefully crafted words. But to do this, we need to remember the different types of position that our readers are in. Write down how their backgrounds vary. These are some of the different aspects you should consider:

þ How well do the recipients know your company? Are they prospects, customers or first-time customers?

þ How well do they know your products? Have they bought single products or a range of products?

þ What style of communications will appeal? What will they expect from previous interactions with your brand? Do they like a direct approach or do they prefer a more involved dialogue? What is their age – they may prefer more or less formal communications accordingly.

þ How technologically literate are they? Some may have been using email and websites for five years, others for only five weeks. Make it obvious for the newbies, while avoiding patronising the old hands.

þ Do they scan or do they read? Depending on time available, and their character, some recipients will just scan the email body, others prefer to read more carefully. You need to

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provide copy and design that works for both.Through using customer personas and asking these types of questions you will build a picture of the range of people you are writing for. If it is not practical to write for such a wide range consider separating your mailing, for example into recently acquired customers and established customers.

Does your email have CRABS? r Q. CRABS email copy?

In Emarketing Excellence, PR Smith recommends using the acronym CRABS to summarise effective web page copy. This is even more appropriate to email copy, since we typically have even less space to communicate. CRABS stands for:

þ Chunking – Chunking means that paragraphs must be shorter than in paper copy. Think one or two sentences. Three or four maximum. This helps scannability.

þ Relevance – With limited space, we have no room for fillers. Stick with what matters – the details of the offer and how to receive it. Personalise the email where possible.

þ Accuracy – Don’t get carried away with your copy; don’t set expectations so high that you overpromise and can’t deliver something you offer.

þ Brevity – Brevity goes with chunking and scannability. Write your copy, reduce the word count and then reduce it again. Give yourself targets and beat them without sacrificing good English and understanding.

þ Scannability – This is reading without reading every word, just picking up the sense of each paragraph from the keywords. The eye will pick out words at the start of paragraphs and those emphasised in bold.

The title of Steve Krug’s book on web usability gives a useful guideline for copywriting for email – ‘Don’t make me think’. He also suggests that you should consider the amount of copy you have, halve it and halve it again.

If you have produced copy that follows the CRABS guidelines, you are only a small way there, since there are many issues of style to make successful copy.

As with any direct mail piece, the first paragraph of an email must:

r Engage – when reading this, perhaps in the auto-preview window, recipients are deciding whether to delete or read further. So as for any creative, the opening needs to be power-ful.

r Add detail to the subject line or the headline – the recipient will remember the gist of the subject line, and it is always there at the head of the email, so reinforcement is the main objective of the message here.

r Summarise the whole – the opening of an email is often compared to the opening of a press release which typically uses an ‘inverse pyramid’ structure to summarise the main points of the email message in decreasing order of importance, as briefly as possible.

r Include a call to action – if the reader likes the offer or wants to know more, we shouldn’t make them scroll down to find an elusive hyperlink – it should be there in the first para-graph. This is a mistake often made by email ‘newbies’ – leaving the best until last. As different people will be ready to leap off the email at different points through the copy or offers, then repeating the call to action in different ways throughout the email is advisable. Make the call to action about the value and purpose of clicking rather than emphasising the actual action of clicking. For example ‘start free trial’ rather than ‘click now’.

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Making copy engaging r Q. Have we developed engaging copy?

To complete Step 6 here are some other ideas to help your copy connect to the max.

Email campaign checklist – Eight key copy questions r Question 1. Does your copy excite?

You have a great offer, but have you supported the offer by writing enthusiastically to appeal to the reader’s emotions?

For the consumer you are offering riches, dreams and experiences – does the copy effectively communicate how your offer will improve their life?

For the business person you are offering time, knowledge and control – does the copy effectively communicate how your offer can help them ‘work smarter’?

The copy also needs to excite from the outset – see Question 7 for tips on headlines.

r Question 2. Does your copy convince?

You may believe that your service or your offer sells itself on its features because you believe in it. But the recipient is less likely to be a believer – they don’t have the interest or knowledge you have. Have you backed up your promise with enough detail to convince the reader that the offer is worthwhile? Is the unique selling point clear?

The style of writing also needs to enthuse about these benefits. This may be difficult if you cannot personally relate to the customer’s needs – sometimes difficult for technology markets. The only way to succeed is to develop empathy with your reader by researching, and maybe even living the role as actors do.

r Question 3. Is your copy natural?

We have said that email is a social, conversational medium – we mainly use it to chat to friends or communicate to colleagues. So we want to avoid our email reading as if it was written by a machine.

If you can make copy conversational, write at the same level of your audience and make it flow naturally then you will get closer to the reader and predispose them to what you are offering. However don’t overdo the informality – some emails seem as if they are written by someone you have known from ‘back at school’.

r Question 4. Is the copy length right?

Let’s look at the extremes. Which is best – short copy or long copy?

There can be no right answer because it depends on purpose. Most people answer that short is best since the reader doesn’t want to read your carefully crafted words, just WIIFM – ‘What’s in it for me’?

My view is that you can combine short and long copy in one email. For those who are more likely to respond to short copy you use the introduction and the start of the main copy which is above the fold.

For ‘the scanners’ who scan through the whole email you may impress with detail, provided that detail stands out.

For ‘the readers’ who read every word and want the details you need the long copy.

I would argue that the email cannot be too long provided it is relevant and entertaining and another call to action and summary of the total copy are included at the start.

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Some argue that the detail can always be put into a link to a more detailed web page, but I think that this can cause loss of focus – once the reader clicks through to their web browser you have lost control.

r Question 5. Did you repeat yourself?

This is a difficult one.

Direct mail wisdom says repeat to reinforce.

Email wisdom says the reader doesn’t have the time to see information repeated. However, I think some repetition is desirable. Reinforcement of messages is effective in any media.

We need to repeat and build on what is available in the subject line in the headline. Then, because the reader has scrolled, repeating the offer in the final call to action makes sense.

r Question 6. Which copy stands out?

You have satisfied yourself that you can answer the other questions, but now, looking at the big picture, what will the scanner notice – what techniques have you used to emphasise the key points in your email?

In text emails you have these options to make copy stand out:

þ CAPITALISATION, particularly in text emails, but don’t overuse it. þ The SPACE before and after words and between lines is powerful in

highlighting offers or calls to action. þ Bulleted lists using asterisks or dots.

You can see that text emails are limited. But in HTML emails, we have much more scope for emphasis – perhaps one of the reasons why in many markets, HTML emails receive higher response rates. With HTML we can use the options for text emails listed above, but also:

r Text formatting – bold and italics. But take care since italics may be difficult to read in small point sizes. Never use an underline which looks like a hyperlink – readers will try to click on it.

r Font sizes – large font size as headings or separate messages work well for scanners.

r Font colour – using a different copy from body copy using vibrant colours such as red and orange.

r Graphical animations of copy – but make sure your animation doesn’t prevent the mes-sage being viewed by scanners

r Hyperlinks – blue underlined hyperlinks attract the eye online.

r Whilst HTML does allow rich formatting, colours and images this does not preclude the use of HTML to produce a very simple plain text type of email, with the HTML just used to add simple text format and emphasis. Whilst this approach is more common in B2B it can also work in B2C communication.

r Question 7. Do we have a powerful headline?

Many emails do not have a title at all – online copywriters seem to think they aren’t necessary because that’s what the subject line is for. Not so! Headlines do help engagement if they build on the subject line to engage the reader.

In his excellent book on Online Copywriting, Bob Bly recommends the following approaches that can be used for email titles:

1. Get a terrific benefit up-front.

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2. Appeal to personal self-interest.

3. Get right sort of attention.

4. Add news.

5. Offer to teach.

6. Ask a provocative question.

7. Use ‘Quotes’.

r Question 8. Will our copy achieve action?

We finish our eight questions with the most important question – whether our email will achieve action. Arguably, this should be the first question, since then the whole copy can be structured around the outcomes we want to achieve!

Approaches that can help achieve action are:

þ A text-based call to action in first screen (for the impulsive) and last screen (for those with the time to read).

þ A time-limited offer which uses copy to encourage the reader to Click NOW! þ Instructions such as ‘forward to a friend’ or ‘print this email as a reminder’ can be other

useful outcomes. þ Using hyperlinks to highlight the offer at the right position in the paragraph.

As an example of highlighting the offer through a hyperlink, think of marketing to an IT manager to download a best practice guide. Which of these approaches do you think would be best?

A. Click below to receive your complimentary guide to reducing Total Cost of Ownership:

FREE guide to reducing TCO.

Sign Off

B. Click here to receive your complimentary guide to reducing Total Cost of Ownership.

or

C. To receive your complimentary guide to reducing Total Cost of Ownership, click here.

or

D. To help you lower the costs of running your IT infrastructure we have prepared a complimentary guide to reducing Total Cost of Ownership.

In A separating out the hyperlink on to a separate line does increase its prominence, but spoils the flow of the copy.

I prefer B rather than C since it is more direct and the eye will be more naturally drawn towards the underlined hyperlink at the start of the sentence within the copy as a whole. However, approach C can encourage the scanner to read the copy before the end of the sentence.

Design practice for web pages would favour approach D, which makes the call to action part of the copy. While this may work best for web pages where we are perhaps not seeking the hard-sell. For simplicity and encouraging action approach B is best.

Think carefully about the colour of the hyperlink. On the majority of web pages, Yahoo! And Amazon, for example, users are used to seeing a blue hyperlink on a white background. You will get a higher response with this combination because of familiarity. If other colours are used, high contrast is essential.

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Step 7 Test, learn and refine to increase email efficiencyIn this section, we look at some of the more advanced techniques to get more from your email marketing. We will cover:

þ Improving email delivery. þ Tracking email campaigns. þ Improving email marketing for mobile devices.

Improving email delivery r Q. Have our email delivery techniques been reviewed?

Email delivery arguably isn’t the most interesting part of email marketing for marketers. But since it can directly affect your results it’s worthwhile knowing the right questions to ask. Since this is a specialist area I turned to my friend Tim Watson,13 who has spent many years optimising delivery for clients through his work at email services providers.

How do ISPs identify spam?Spam is defined in the eye of the beholder and not by law. In the case of the ISPs and webmail services, they define spam as emails that users don’t want. ISPs filter email based on sender IP address reputation and increasingly domain reputation. ISPs determine reputation score from a variety of factors, including:

ý High bounce rates. This results from poor list hygiene. Often with limited ability or inter-est to receive and process bounces from botnets, bouncing addresses stay on spam lists.

ý High spam complaints. Users clicking the junk and report as spam button in their email client.

ý Spam traps. These email addresses that should not be on your list. The ISPs create these and watch for unsolicited email to the addresses. They most often get onto your list if you purchase data. As old email addresses may be converted by ISPs into traps poor hygiene and data management can also result in spam traps.

ý Very low engagement. Low open rates and a high number of deletes without reading. No user reply emails in response to a spam email.

ý Campaigns sent across hundreds if not thousands of IP addresses. The IP address-es rapidly change and come and go as spammers use a botnet of ‘zombie computers’. The email volume from each zombie IP address does not have smooth flow. It shows high peaks of activity.

ý Incomplete setup of technical criteria. The include DNS, reverse DNS, SPF and DKIM. (See Deliverability.com) for discussion of these.

ý Sending from a dynamic IP address. For example, those allocated to home ADSL con-nections.

So, to not be treated as spam means to not look like spam with the above characteristics!

In the early days ISPs used content to filter spam, words such as Viagra were obvious choices. These techniques were crude and easily circumvented. The ISPs are clever people with large resources and have been moving closer and closer to measuring the metrics that are fundamental characteristics of the spammers’ business model. This is shrewd as it is 13 Follow Tim’s advice at: http://www.twitter.com/tawatson.

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something that spammers can’t fake.

So, what can we do to avoid being identified as a spammer? The factors today that are important to inbox placement are low bounce rates, low complaint rates, high engagement, correct technical setup, content validity and consistent email volume flow.

Assessing your current delivery r Q. Has our email delivery optimisation been reviewed?

The delivery rate as provided by email marketing tools is the percentage of emails that didn’t bounce. If you are emailing at least weekly to each email address on your customer base and you have good list hygiene practices in place then your delivery rate should be over 98 percent, that is less than two percent of emails sent are bounced.

But delivery rate isn’t the same as inbox placement, ReturnPath have recently reported an average inbox placement as low 88 percent, even when the mailer has a good IP reputation as measured by a SenderScore14 of over 91!

By the way, if you haven’t encountered ‘bounce rate’ applied to email marketing, bounces are commonly categorised into hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are bounces due to a permanent error; whereas soft bounces mean a temporary error. As an example, a hard bounce will occur if someone terminated their email account, whereas a soft bounce example could be if the person’s inbox is full. ISPs may also send a soft bounce as an initial warning that an email is seen as spam.

If your delivered rate is lower than 90 percent, then your next step is to review and change list hygiene best practice and reduce your bounce rate before moving on to the guidance in this post.

Deliverability, as opposed to delivery, is about more than just removing the bounces. It’s about arriving to the inbox. Before the rise of spam and aggressive spam filters to counter it, just knowing an email had not bounced was sufficient to be confident it was delivered to the inbox. Spam forced ISPs into additional filtering and the difference between deliverability and delivery arose.

An ISP will do one of three things for emails not bounced:

ý Place in the inbox.

ý Place in the junk folder.

ý Throw the email away.

Unlike bounces issues, whereby the ISP tells you that you’ve not reached the inbox, there is not such notification to senders by ISPs if you are put in junk or deleted.

The challenge then, is given the ISPs won’t tell you, how do you monitor if your emails are placed in the inbox?

There are two main methods:

þ 1. Delivery confirmation seed addresses. Delivery confirmation seed addresses are simply email accounts you create with the ISPs and include on your mailing list. Once the campaign has been sent, log into each of the seed accounts you created and check if the email arrived to the inbox. The inference is that if the seed address email got to the inbox you can expect the rest of the campaigns emails for that ISP to have reached the inbox. This is generally a sound assumption. Thankfully, as creating seed email accounts and manually checking inboxes is rather time consuming(!) this capability is automated and built into some ESP solutions or offered

14 You can review your Senderscore at https://www.senderscore.org/.

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as a service by companies like ReturnPath. Using an automated service means you just need to read the reports as part of your campaign metrics review process.

þ 2. Campaign metric changes. Your open, click, bounce and complaint rates also provide insight to inbox deliverability and alert you to a potential change in deliverability.

It’s not as simple as just looking at your average open or click rate and if it drops concluding there is a deliverability problem. There are so many other factors that could cause this such a conclusion is nonsensical.

To use these campaign metrics you need to look at how these vary and trend across ISPs.

The key is knowing what is normal for your campaigns and looking at trends. Here the ratio from Hotmail to Yahoo is 1.82 (4.04/2.21). If this ratio changes significantly it implies the deliverability has changed between Hotmail and Yahoo. So ask your email service provider to do an analysis of this ratio.

Best Practice Tip 22 Review delivery variation by email platformEmail delivery will vary by platform such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc. If you see a much lower delivery rate, then it may indicate a problem with delivery.

Tim Watson recommends keeping spam complaint rates below 0.2 percent to ensure a good reputation and the lower the better. However, dropping spam complaint rates can be a sign of trouble too. If your open, click and spam rates all drop together it indicates you are not reaching the inbox. The spam complaint rates are dropping simply because noo ne is seeing your email and thus will no longer complain about it!

Two more tools to consider are blocklists and Hotmail SNDS. All ISP filtering includes use of block lists. These are lists of IP addresses which are considered to be sending spam. ISPs hold their own private lists as well as using the public lists. Use a service that will alert you if your IP address appears on a public block list. If you are using a good ESP they should be doing this for you.

Finally, Hotmail provide a service called SNDS.15 This shows you how Hotmail rate your IP addresses and is one of the few ways to find out if you are hitting spam traps.

Assess engagement ‘beyond the click’ through web analytics r Q. Has the effectiveness of email ‘beyond the click’ been reviewed?

For many years, it was difficult to track engagement of your visitors after they click through on your email through to the site. In more advanced email systems you could, and still can, tag the conversion page such as a sales or subscription thank you page, but this was time-consuming and now there’s a better way.

Best Practice Tip 23 Integrate web analytics campaign trackingYou should define standard campaign tracking codes for different email campaigns to enable you to review engagement against conversion to sale or other goals, otherwise emails will be recorded within your analytics system as direct visits. If your site is a transactional site with a clear sales conversion goal then success in conversion will be shown by e-commerce tracking.

With the widespread adoption of web analytics and in particular Google Analytics for tracking

15 https://postmaster.live.com/snds/.

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pay per click AdWords campaigns, many email marketing vendors have made it easier for you to track after the click by automatically integrating Google Analytics campaign tracking into the hyperlink in your email templates. Integration with other advanced web analytics systems such as Omniture and Coremetrics is also possible. To find more about campaign tracking in Google Analytics see our 7 Step Guide to using Google Analytics or try using the Google Analytics URL builder16 that shows how the Google Analytics tracking tag is introduced.

Here is an example tagged URL (split across several lines):

http://www.domain.com/landing_page.htm?

utm_campaign=EnewsNov

&utm_medium=email

&utm_source=HouseList

&utm_term=editorial-link

&utm_content=header

For Email marketing the parameters (* are optional) I recommend are:

þ utm_medium – medium used for marketing, i.e. email. þ utm_campaign – campaign name, e.g. EnewsNovember. þ utm_source – this is usually the media owner, but for email marketing can be used to

specify the source of email list, e.g. HouseList or the name of external list providers/newsletter ads.

þ * utm_term – in AdWords used to identify the keyword used to trigger the ad, can be used in email marketing to identify individual links (optional), e.g. Offer1, can be based on click text summary.

þ * utm_content – used to track an individual or segments response (optional), this could be based on any field in database, e.g. user-id, user email, etc.

If your site is not transactional, then you should define other conversion goals for engagement with the site. In both cases you can define an actual or nominal monetary value for conversion. In Google Analytics this will enable you to compare campaign effectiveness according to $Index value or total value.

Best Practice Tip 24 Review web analytics bounce ratesCompare landing page bounce rates (for the site not hard bounces for the email campaign) for evaluating the relevance of the landing page content. If you find the bounce rate for the landing page is relatively high, you can be sure you are directing your visitor to a less relevant page from your email. You can also compare landing pages on duration, number of pages subsequently viewed and conversion to goals pre-defined in the analytics system.

Improving email marketing for mobile devices r Q. Has our use of email on mobile devices been reviewed?

The reading of emails on mobile devices and particularly on smartphones and tablets is an important part of email marketing with the concept of design first for mobile now a trend. This data shows the huge growth of email being read on mobile devices

16 Google URL Builder

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py%3Fanswer%3D55578%26cbid%3Dt375m2oo67as%26src%3Dcb%26lev%3Dtopic

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This chart is from Campaign Monitor and they provide the following breakdown of email clients being used:

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Android stats are likely understated with respect to iOS devices, due to iOS loading images by default and the Android blocking by default, leading to blocking of open tracking. Even when taking this into account the biggest device for mobile opens is the iPhone

So, we’ve seen the industry trends, but you still need to check to see how important mobile email marketing is for you. Whilst the majority of brands now have mobile opens making up between 25 percent and 75 percent of their total opens there are still a few that may have below 10 percent, particularly for some B2B sectors.

Best Practice Tip 25 Define the target platforms for mobile email marketingYou should decide which platforms your emails should work on and then take steps to evaluate how effectively these work.

To find your mobile usage levels take a look in your Google Analytics at Audience, Mobile Devices. You’ll be able to see the main types of devices you need to support. This B2B example shows that although iOS devices are dominant, some Android devices are increasingly important.

I

Best Practice Tip 26 Apply Advanced Segments for Email in Google AnalyticsTo better understand the behaviour of visitors on your site referred from email marketing you can create an advanced segment for email visitors once you have setting up tracking - the Advanced segment should be based on a medium of ‘email’. This can help you see the devices people who clickthrough to your site from email are using.

Target mobile email devices selected targeted and reviewed r Q. Has the effectiveness of email marketing on target mobile devices been reviewed?

The most common approaches are now to design a compromise skinny email that gives good user experience on desktop and mobile or to use full responsive design so that the email adapts to the device used at the time of viewing.

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Fortunately Internet-enabled phones now include browsers and email clients that are based on the WebKit rendering engine, which has fantastic HTML and CSS support. This includes the iPhone, Android devices, webOS and the most recent versions of RIM’s browser for Blackberry. You can read more about how this is achieved through media queries.17

So design and code an email that works on the desktop, and you can be fairly certain that it will render faithfully on all these devices.

With the increase in smartphone screen sizes the challenge of reading emails on mobile devices has reduced. The iPhone 5 has almost five times more pixels than the original iPhone.

The think mobile first approach is to design for the mobile consumer and display initially and then consider desktop afterwards, rather than taking a desktop design and just simplifying it.

The device trend goes further than desktop or smartphone with the increasing size of the tablet market. Tablets have large screen sizes akin to desktop. The difference is the user context and use of touch rather than mouse.

Using responsive design allows the best user experience to be presented for any device. Using responsive design allows an email to automatically adapt the device being used to view the email, allowing changes such as:

r Hide content.

r Change font sizes.

r Change the email width.

r Resize images.

r Re-stack rows into columns

These examples from Amazon US shows a good example of using responsive design to give a much narrower mobile vs desktop email design.

17 Overview of media queries.

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing-ecrm-alerts/design-email-mobiles/

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However, responsive design also increases the cost of the template and ongoing campaigning. So it may not be for everyone and an alternative approach is to provide a skinny compromise design.

Some guidelines to consider when creating mobile first thinking emails:

r Use pre-header text. This is shown in the iPhone inbox view.

r Reduce the use of large branding headers and banner images in the above the fold area.

r Use larger fonts, 12pt for the body and 24pt for headings.

r Use even shorter and chunked content. Already good advice for email in general and even more important for mobile.

r Only include images that add to the message, drop anything purely artistic.

r Space out links so they are easy to touch without getting the wrong link.

r Use buttons for calls to action, 22 x 44 pixels as a minimum.

r Favour single column design.

r Keep the HTML size and image sizes down, readers may be on a slow 3G connection.

r Place calls to actions on images – there is no equivalent of the hand icon when ‘hovering over’ on a touch interface.

r Drop content, calls to action and design elements that aren’t central to the email objective.

Modern smartphones do a good job of making the largely passive reading experience of an email work well. The bigger challenge becomes the landing page. What happens when someone clicks through and gets to your website? If the website works badly then any email improvement has little benefit!

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We hope you have found our Email guide helpful to improving your email marketing. Please let us know any feedback you have. Thanks!

http://www.smartinsights.com/contact-us/

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