10 Tips For Making Email A Strategic Channel

Lots of recent studies have shown that brands intend to invest more money in the digital channels this year with a recent CMO Council study showing that more than 44% intend to deploy new email automation systems in 2009 – this makes email the biggest new investment for CMOs this year, beating Social Networking into second place. 

Making email a strategic channel is a real headache for the marketer, coping with the issues of relevance and maintaining a relationship through a channel that can easily make the brand communications appear to be noise or even worse: spam.

Email isn’t a cheap channel either – it may be cheap to send when there is no stamp involved, it may be easy to customize when there is no costly paper and printing involved, but that’s not the whole story.  Each creative still costs money to build and that’s nothing compared to the cost associated with having a customer or prospect unsubscribe from the mailing list because your communications are not relevant; even worse, you could be flagged as a spammer.

So here are my top tips for compelling, engaging email.

It is vital to understand whether the recipient of an email will find your message relevant.  The obvious part about relevance is audience selection; you need to make sure that the recipient is the kind of person to whom your brand or product applies. However, relevance may also be affected by where the recipient is in the purchase cycle for a product, how recently they purchased from you, what other products they hold or have bought - maybe just what they have clicked on or opened in the recent past.

Some individuals will react well to being sent messages on the same subject, others will not.  If you are going to be relevant you need to capture all of the responsive data and combine that with your knowledge of the recipient from your customer or prospect database. This will enable you to select an audience that are most likely to be interested in your message right now.

Email is a highly dynamic medium in which you can cheaply and easily send different messages and offers to different groups of recipients.  It is a total waste to send one generic email to every recipient when we know that different identifiable groups will be more engaged by targeted messaging and content.

Don’t treat email as a silo channel, use data and knowledge from off line systems to target your email  communications as well as information on how a recipient reacted to a previous message.

Where possible make it personal, address the communication by name. Use the segmentation described above so that you can use imagery and copy that fit with the person you are speaking to.  You might choose to split out your creatives by life-stage using a subtly different message for young singles, families and empty nesters.

If you are going to make an promotional offer consider splitting this out by different groups – saving £10 on a £150 transaction might appeal more to a younger cash strapped individual – whereas an older, affluent person might react well to a larger discount on condition of a much bigger order.

There is nothing worse than sending out a personalized communication when you don’t have the data to support it in some cases.  If some of your database doesn’t have forename make sure that your email template will cope and not leave embarrassing blanks!

Also, don’t make your copy or creatives too explicit and ensure that you have up to date product information – we all hate receiving communications offering us a product we actually bought the month before.  These blundering messages damage the brand more than anything else because we are promoting a relationship and clearly have no idea about the recipient.

Communications are better received when there is some interesting content, be that endorsement, gossip or some exciting piece of creative that engages the recipient.  Recent viral campaigns like the T Mobile dance are exciting and engaging and a recipient that finds a communication engaging is far more likely to absorb other sales messages alongside the interesting content.

Recipients are more likely to consider a communication relevant if they find any part of it interesting.  It therefore suggests that a “newsletter” format communication, with multiple offers is far more likely to be engaging than a message conveying only a single offer.

You are lucky if a recipient opens one of your communications, if they do then having more than one opportunity to be relevant is a big bonus.

Newsletter format also enables us to choose a series of best next offers for an individual and push them out around a central piece of relevant or interesting content, that is the main focus of the communication.

It is vital to test out strategies on small groups and measure what works and what doesn’t.  It’s also very useful to look for unexpected groups and segments who are interested or disinterested in an offer and use that to refine the targeting and segmentation strategy for the whole campaign.  Sometimes we find niche groups that react particularly well or poorly to an offer or a treatment – email gives us the ability to exploit these groups rather than designing the perfect “camel” that has generic, but lower level appeal.

The email channel is a fantastic source of data – we can see when people open emails, when they click through to a landing page, then even measure the amount of revenue generated from the on line channel or impute revenue generated by offline sources.  All of this adds up to create the best possible measurement of campaign ROI.

Email lets us see how a prospect reacts to our message in a way impossible with traditional direct marketing approaches – this gives us an unprecedented ability to tailor our communications and promote the brand in the best possible light.

Feed the email response data back into the Marketing Database so that off line campaigns, customer segments and models can be built using the responsive data. 

Appearing joined up is one of the most important things a brand can do to appear relevant and aware of its customers and prospects, the email response data is a vital part of the picture of a customer and should be used across all channels of communication to inform offers and target communications.

Email provides a very quick way to build and send communications that are relevant to current events – perhaps world events, perhaps competitor actions. 

This velocity is made possible when email sending is combined with easy to customise templates; now marketers can get relevant offers out into the market very quickly while maintaining the brand image and values.  By being able to react quickly and push messages into the base there is a natural increase in the general sense of relevance surrounding the brand.

Australian and American DM Trends

I'm just back from an extended trip that took me to America and Australia to meet with clients and partners involved in the direct marketing business: this yielded a couple of insights.

America is definitely fully aware of the depths of the financial crisis and budgets for both above and below the line marketing are being cut.  The biggest cuts are certainly above the line, but it's interesting to see that there is huge margin pressure being exerted on data suppliers and on hygiene processes. Such pressure clearly has to have a floor and if reductions continue I have to say that makes me worry - as a statistician and data junky I know the danger of garbage in - what comes out? Unhappy customers and damaged brand integrity.  Smart brands are concentrating on better data and less communication to well targeted audiences, increasing response rates and reducing volume costs.  The only people reporting increased or maintained spend are the email and web site vendors - brands are concentrating on the cheapest methods of communicating and ensuring that their online identity is up to scratch. However, it doesn't seem that many are really taking advantage of the enhanced response tracking features of these channels though - it looks like brand marketers are looking to repeat tried and tested advertising strategies in the e-channels, a big missed opportunity in my humble opinion.

Social is in the news all the time and viral campaigns like the excellent T Mobile Dance are still proving that innovative advertising is far from dead.  I've blogged enough about social recently, but there's a daily stream of interest stories - today it's damaging the fabric of Facebook with a story of the other kind of "viral" attacks, this time on users' personal data.

Australia is not quite so mired in the throes of the financial crisis.  Certainly the banks and automotive manufacturers are under pressure but the mood is considerably more upbeat in all of the other sectors when compared to the UK and US.  My contacts in the direct marketing world are happy as the budgets they are interested in are being maintained if not raised with most companies aiming for saving on expensive above the line campaigns.  With a reasonably small population direct marketing is far less costly in Australia than it is in the US with hardware and software requirements being considerably lower. Exchange rate fluctuations are probably helping the Aussie economy which is fairly reliant on the import market for luxury items produced in territories suffering greater hardships.