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Successful Email Marketing

Planning, creating, delivering and measuring the effectiveness of a direct email marketing campaign.

Mike Teasdale (Harvest Digital), Rory Teeling (Harvest Digital), David Hughes (E-mail Vision) and Sam Michel (Chinwag) presented a practical guide to email marketing at this NMK seminar in February 2002.

The evening’s chair, Sam Michel of Chinwag, introduced the seminar with a picture of Claire Squires, the unfortunate legal firm employee whose ‘intimate’ email to a boyfriend was forwarded to thousands of bored office workers around the world within days of it dropping into the wrong inbox. Despite the negative publicity generated for her firm, the incident served as an illustration of the massive potential for the right email message to reach a vast audience within a very short space of time. This has not been lost on marketers, many of whom now see email as their preferred method for reaching customers. Email certainly has many advantages as a marketing channel: it is quick and relatively cheap to implement, provides a means of reaching potential customers at work, boasts a dream demographic (69% of Yahoo users are ABC1s), and - as Claire Squires found to her cost – has the capacity to spread virally.

Sam outlined what he sees as the seven advantages of email marketing, relative to other forms of marketing such as direct mail:

• Cheaper
• Quicker
• Effective
• Flexible
• Spread (viral)
• Relationship
• Measurable

Unfortunately, the rising popularity of email marketing is creating its own problems. With some email users now receiving tens of thousands of marketing messages over the course of a year, how can you ensure that your communications are opened, read and acted upon – and not relegated to the wastebasket with the rest of the spam?

Rory Teeling, Managing Partner, Harvest Digital

The first thing to remember is that email marketing doesn’t have to be radically different to conventional marketing. In many cases, you will be selling the same products to much the same customers, and planning discreet promotions targeted at discreet, segmentable audiences. You will invite feedback, aim to enter into and maintain loyalty dialogues, and persuade customers to buy. Unsurprisingly, direct email is in many ways similar to direct mail, but as Rory pointed out, there are some notable differences.

Direct Mail	Direct Email
• Segmentable (to gross clusters) • Two-way	• Segmentable • Interactive • Fast • Scalable and cost-effective • Flexible • Responsive

Speed and Flexibility
Among the differences, speed and flexibility are two of the most significant. While an average DM campaign cycle is around 3 months, an email campaign can be completed in just 3 weeks, and the material can be optimised during the course of the campaign. Unlike with printed material, which for reasons of cost must be prepared in advance in bulk, copy can be tweaked as you go along. Responses are quicker too: most action taken as a result of an email happens within 48 hours.

Gather Customer Data and Encourage Viral Activity
Email can be an extremely effective means of finding out more about your customers – if you know what you’re doing. When inviting customers to complete online questionnaires, Rory advised that you should ask only two to five questions at a time, and these should all be visible on one screen (without scrolling). Customers should also be given an incentive to provide their details. In a job which Harvest Digital carried out for Birmingham Midshires, they incentivised customers to complete a questionnaire by giving them the chance to win £500. In order to encourage viral activity, customers were offered the chance of further prizes if they forwarded the email to their friends. The campaign achieved a 50% open rate, a 20% click-through rate, and succeeded in doubling the size of the original database through viral marketing.

Relation to Traditional Media
It is important that your email campaign complements traditional media campaigns. Consumers don’t distinguish between different marketing channels, so ensure that your email campaign integrates with your overall strategy. Remember, too, that it is still more appropriate to use traditional media for many aspects of marketing. Email is unlikely ever to challenge TV as a tool for building brand awareness, but it is brilliant and cost-effective way of profiling existing customers.

A Tip When Buying Lists
If you buy a list of potential customers to contact, make sure you get permission to re-contact those individuals. Data houses won’t permit you to re-use their data without paying for it again, so it is vital to invite a response allowing you to harvest the customer information for your own database. Data protection laws can be implemented retrospectively, which could mean that you lose any information that you did not have permission to collect.

Checklist For Planning Your Campaign
Rory ended his presentation with ten recommendations for marketers developing a direct email campaign.

1. Clarify objectives
2. Define target markets
3. Integrate campaign with other media
4. Ensure you have a clean list from the outset
5. Obtain permission to re-contact respondents
6. Consider technical realities
7. Copy and design should follow clear response rules
8. Collect data whenever you can
9. Make sure you can measure everything
10. Ensure that you can judge ROI

Creative Tips for Email Marketing

Mike Teasdale, Creative Director, Harvest Digital
How important is the creative element of your campaign? Not as important as the quality of your list, the nature of your offer or timing, reckons Mike Teasdale of Harvest Digital, but creativity comes a pretty close fourth. Mike went on to outline his Rules for Creative Email Marketing.

Rule 1: Keep it Simple
The single most important thing to bear in mind. What’s the call to action? How can you incorporate it into the subject line?

Rule 2: Explain the Deal
Ensure that customers are tempted by your offer before they even open the email.

• Don’t overlook the ‘From’ field – establish the brand here.
• Incorporate the main hook into your proposition in the ‘Subject’ field (45 characters or less)
• Start to build your argument in the first three lines of the email – these will be displayed in the Autopreview in Microsoft Outlok.

Rule 3: What’s a Good Offer?
In email marketing, subject lines which are concise, honest and unambiguous work best. Mike suggested studying the headlines on MSN for an idea of the kinds of phrases that will encourage readers to click-through to find out more.

Rule 4: Give Clear Directions - The Call to Action

• Don’t leave the call to action until the end (as in direct mail).
• Primary link should be within the first three or four paragraphs.
• Give hyperlinks prominence – don’t hide them in the copy.
• Explain clearly what will happen next. Don’t leave people guessing.
• Don’t say “Click here for…”. Use action verbs in hyperlinks (‘Buy the AS34 widget’, ‘Discover beautiful Cyprus’, ‘Subscribe’)
• You do not always have to drive customers to the web.

Rule 5: Get Personal
The capacity for personalisation is one of the most valuable aspects of email and the web for marketers. The explicit data you gather about your customers will be of most value to you in this respect, whether previously held information such as addresses and sales histories, or information obtained through an email marketing campaign that drives customers to online questionnaires, registration forms or e-commerce transactions. The data you obtain through these activities will help you to target customers with relevant offers and identify appropriate opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.

In addition, don’t underestimate the importance of the implicit data that you will also be able to gather. These include measurements such as open rates, click-through rates, number of clicks, and unsubscibe responses in email; and page views, session duration and number of visits on the web. Analysis of this information will help you to fine-tune your campaign, and to judge correctly the tone of your copy and the frequency of contact.

Rule 6: What to Do When Things Go Wrong
One of the advantages of direct email is that you can test the campaign on your first batch of customers, and adjust what you’re doing according to the responses you get. Mike offered the following tips for salvaging disappointing campaigns:

Low Open Rate

• Change the frequency
• Change the subject heading
• Shorten length (reduce file size)
• Change the time of day sent
• Is the ‘from’ field meaningful?

Low Click-Through Rate

• More prominent call to action
• Incentivized call to action
• Change length
• Change time of day sent
• Change product types offered
• Improve the offer — cross-sell promotions with partners, offer discounts on products previously abandoned, hold a competition etc.

Technology

On the technical side of email marketing, one of the main decisions you'll have to make will be whether to use text or html emails. As David Hughes, Group Account Director of E-mail Vision UK Ltd, explained, users' different combinations of hardware, software and ISPs make it impossible to optimise your campaign for everyone – unless you stick to plain text. Some email client software, such as Pegasus or Eudora 3 to 5, can only handle text, while others, such as AOL 4 and 5, have limited HTML capability.

Even when your clients' hardware and software is technically capable of reading HTML emails (true in 86% of cases, according to one recent survey), they still may not be able to receive your message. Reasons for this include: emails being read off-line; emails being accessed on a phone, PDA or other device; corporate firewalls blocking attachments and scripting; and ISP security settings.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Text
HTML emails may seem more glamorous, but there are advantages to sticking to text. Text is almost 100% consistent, gets through firewalls, and customers will see what you think they’re going to see. By contrast, HTML emails may be rejected by ISPs or firewalls, displayed differently depending on the mail software used, or disliked by home users because of slow download times.

Multi-Part – Problem Solved?
If you can’t decide whether to use text or html emails, the other option is to use both. Multi-Part emails are sent in text and html versions, and the client’s email browser selects the version it is best able to read. This certainly increases the number of customers you will reach, although firewalls can still cause problems, and some email browsers will display both versions of the message (with HTML code appearing below the text version).

For the reasons outlined above, it is crucial to build up an understanding of how and where the majority of your clients will receive your emails. If in doubt, ask them.

Security
It is both unethical and illegal to make your customer data available to other parties without permission – whether you do so intentionally or otherwise. It is therefore essential to convince consumers that their data is safe, and to comply with data protection legislation (see below). If you are using another party to send your emails, David recommended password-protecting all data before sending them to your broadcaster. He also suggested that data is stored offline except at the time of mailing, and that all links are encrypted to prevent hackers gaining access to your database.

Measurement
While it is possible to measure responses to your campaign in extremely complex detail, the key information that you need to record is as follows:

• Messages sent
• Bounces (hard and soft)
• Messages delivered
• Opened
• Click-through
• Multiple click-through
• Unsubscribe

Campaign Management Options

In-house, ASP or Outsourced?
David outlined the three main broadcast options available to marketers considering a direct email campaign. These are:

1. Buy and build your own system in-house.
2. ASP – use a third party’s software and broadcast platform, but manage the process yourself.
3. Outsource – hand everything over to an external supplier.

If you were to develop an in-house system for managing your database, sending mailouts, and analysing the results, you would be responsible not only for the strategic and creative thinking behind your campaign, but also for implementing the necessary hardware and software infrastructure. This might be desirable if, for example, you want to integrate your email marketing activities with a CRM system, such as Broadvision or Epiphany. Taking the entire process in-house gives you increased control, a low unit cost per email sent, and allows you to create a bespoke solution for your precise requirements. Disadvantages include high set-up and fixed costs (who’s going to operate this stuff?), potential limits to scalability, slower speed to market and the possibility of expensive technology upgrades.

ASP (application service provider) solutions are a sort of half-way house between in-house and outsourced options. In this case, the mailing software and servers are provided remotely by another company, but accessed through a web interface by in-house staff, who remain responsible for creative, strategic, and some of the data management and analytical elements of the campaign. Set-up costs start at around £1500, with an additional cost of 1 to 5 pence per email sent (depending on total volume).

Alternatively, you could outsource your email marketing activities completely. In this scenario, you would brief an external supplier, who would then create your campaign, project manage it, send the emails, track the results and send you a final report with your bill. Both ASP and outsourced solutions offer low start-up costs, fast speed to market, scalability, access to the latest technology, and the services of expert practitioners. On the downside, unit costs are higher, you are reliant on third parties, and you may have data transfer issues to deal with.

ASP & Outsource Partners
Companies providing ASP and outsourcing services include: E-Mail Vision, Harvest Digital, DoubleClick, Digital Impact, Responsys, E2 Communications, Expedite, Mailtrack, E-Mailcom, Claritas, Agency Republic and iTraffic.

Data Protection

Sam Michel of Chinwag finished up by saying a few words about data protection. He explained that you must observe the following rules when using customers’ personal data:

• Offer a privacy option.
• All subjects have the right to request the data you hold on them (although you may charge a fee for this service).
• You are responsible for all data you hold, and this data must be secure.
• You must process data fairly and lawfully.
• Data should be used for limited purposes.
• Don’t keep data for longer than necessary (e.g., delete unsubscribes).
• Proceed in accordance with subjects’ rights.
• Do not transfer data to other countries which do not have reciprocal data protection regulations.
• For more detailed information on this subject, visit www.dataprotection.gov.uk.

Email Marketing Association Guide to Best Practice:
www.emmacharter.org