By Chris Lee

The UK’s top retailers are not capitalising on the full potential of email marketing, according to the annual ‘Hitting the Mark’ email marketing report from dotMailer, an email marketing provider.

dotMailer rated the UK’s top 36 retailers out of 100 against various email marketing criteria, including the exploitation of social media and mobile channels. The report’s key findings demonstrate that average email effectiveness has slipped and that three quarters (73 per cent) of retailers studied in 2009 achieved lower scores in 2010. Also, dotMailer claims that only 17 per cent of email campaigns studied included any ‘share on social network’ links.

Brand awareness

According to the report’s criteria, Marks & Spencer were deposed after two years at the top of the email marketing tree by entertainment outlet HMV and clothing store Republic. Clothing retailers New Look and Figleaves came joint second. The Early Learning Centre and Harrods, conversely, slipping down the rankings.

Social scene

Retailers on the whole did not score highly when it came to integrating email marketing with social media, with an average score of just 5.7 out of 15. Only four retailers linked to their blog in email content and half (50 per cent) did not include a ‘forward to a friend’ viral option.

dotMailer also criticised retailers for not personalising emails, claiming that that just three of the 36 email campaigns it surveyed contained any kind of personal salutation. Only a third (33 per cent) of retailers collected extra data – such as gender or personal interests – during the sign-up process, potentially missing out on upselling opportunities.

“For two years in a row, there has been no obvious improvement made by the retailers we have assessed, which is disappointing given some of the simple steps that can be taken to boost the effectiveness of email marketing,” said Tink Taylor, managing director at dotMailer. “Email offers a highly cost-effective, trackable and accountable way of communicating with prospects and customers, but this latest study shows that too many companies are still getting it wrong.”

Practical advice

Taylor has outlined five top email marketing tips for retailers striving to ride out the recession:

1. Include forward to a friend and ‘add to social networks’ links – only 17 per cent of the retailers assessed included ‘add to social networks’ links in their email messages. Viral and word-of-mouth marketing can provide lucrative opportunities to spread marketing messages, drive traffic, collect contact data and increase revenue – at little or no cost to the marketer

2. Add links from your email campaigns to your social media pages and blog – Email can be a powerful and highly effective tool for driving traffic and signups to your organisations social media sites, helping to build further engagement and sales opportunity

3. Personalise your greeting - Opening an email with a personalised greeting can significantly improve both open and click-through rates by engaging the recipient and helping to establish one-to-one communication. 92 per cent of the emails we looked at failed to do this, a big increase on the 70 per cent in 2009

4. Check renderability before sending – 19 per cent of recipients will delete an email unread if it fails to render (display) correctly. There is still more work to be done in this crucial area with only eight per cent of emails we studied rendering correctly in every type of email account

5. Make sure your template has a good balance of text to images - as well as helping your campaign to pass spam filters, this ensures an email is readable when images are switched off by the email client – a simple step that can increase open rates by up to 40 per cent

6. Initiate some action – the key to the success of an email campaign is to help recipients answer these three questions: Who is it from? What’s in it for me? and What shall I do next? Make sure you provide clear guidance on what you expect a recipient to do once they have read your email, for example click through to a product page, forward it to a friend, or contact your team. A third of retailers failed to provide a clear call to action