Email Marketing Strategy
A practical guide to improving email communications
Authors: Dr Dave Chaffey, Jordie van Rijn
Part of the Email marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit
Seven Steps to Success Guide
Define current value of your email marketing to customers.................................................26
Define value of email marketing activity to your company...................................................27
Growing your list..................................................................................................................29
Define objectives for email list building and list quality........................................................30
Review touchpoints to improve email marketing..................................................................31
Techniques for list maintenance...........................................................................................38
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Test, learn and refine
Step 2: Set your goals and build a quality list for email marketing.. 26
6
Creating
Conversation........................................................................................................................ 17
Incentive (or offer)................................................................................................................20
Timing..................................................................................................................................21
Integration............................................................................................................................22
Creative and copy................................................................................................................22
Attributes (of the email)........................................................................................................24
Landing page (or microsite)..................................................................................................25
5
Defining strategy
Step 1: Prioritise your email marketing efforts with the
CRITICAL factors................................................................................... 17
4
Segmentation
About this guide.....................................................................................................................5
Using email for customer acquisition.....................................................................................6
Permission-based email marketing........................................................................................9
E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed?................................................................... 12
3
Defining proposition
Introduction: Your options for using email marketing to
grow your business................................................................................ 4
2
Set your goals
Contents
1
Prioritise
Email marketing
Step 3: Defining your email marketing proposition........................... 40
Integrating value into social media marketing communications...........................................44
Step 4: Segmentation and targeting techniques................................ 49
RFM analysis.......................................................................................................................67
Set best email frequency.....................................................................................................73
Assess headlines.................................................................................................................80
Crafting effective copy.........................................................................................................82
Making copy engaging.........................................................................................................86
Landing page.......................................................................................................................88
5
Defining strategy
Improving email delivery......................................................................................................90
Assess engagement ‘beyond the click’ through web analytics............................................93
Improving email marketing for mobile devices.....................................................................94
Mobile landing pages.........................................................................................................100
4
Segmentation
Step 7: Test, learn and refine to increase email effectiveness.......... 90
3
Defining proposition
Step 6: Creating effective email templates and creative................... 77
2
Set your goals
Step 5: Defining an integrated view on RFM and email frequency........67
1
Prioritise
Targeting option 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics) .................................52
Targeting option 2. Current and predicted value..................................................................54
Targeting option 3. Customer lifecycle groups ....................................................................55
Targeting option 4. Current and predicted behaviour in response and purchase ................59
Targeting option 5. Multi-channel behaviour (channel preference) .....................................63
Targeting option 6. Customer personas including psychographics......................................64
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Creating
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Test, learn and refine
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Introduction
Your options for using email marketing to grow your
business
6
Creating
Start by reviewing your existing capability using our visual benchmarking template to score
your approach2. Alternatively use our interactive capability tool to score your email marketing
in our benchmarking toolkit here. As you work through this guide, make a plan for which level
you need to be at for each part of email marketing and when you think that is achievable.
5
Defining strategy
Key Strategy Recommendation 2 Create an integrated email communications strategy
To make the most of the many options available in email marketing and marketing
automation we recommend a strategic approach to define your goals and how you will
achieve them through improved value to your audience, targeting, frequency, creative and
tracking of effectiveness. Ideally, it shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, but should be integrated
with related tactics including your content and social media as the examples in this guide
show.
4
Segmentation
We believe that businesses that succeed with email treat it seriously by developing an email
communications strategy with the resources to match, rather than simply as a low-level tactic
focused on an e-newsletter. This guide is structured to help you review your overall strategy
to create an email or customer communications plan, but you can dip into individual sections
like those on targeting or creative as required.
3
Defining proposition
Given the importance of email marketing as one of the top channels for driving sales1 it’s
worth treating seriously with a strategic approach needed to take advantage of the many
features of email marketing available today.
2
Set your goals
Key Strategy Recommendation 1 Focus your email marketing efforts on current contacts
Email marketing tends to work best as a tool to improve contact conversion, customer
retention and growth. This is because emails to warm contacts who already know you work
best. Email doesn’t work as well when it’s with colder, or less interested contacts.
1
Prioritise
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful communications channels since it can
be used for gaining new customers and for building out relationships and selling more to
existing customers. In this guide we’ll look at both. The focus will be on using email as a
customer communications tool. This is where email marketing gives the biggest commercial
contribution and can integrate well with all your marketing efforts.
7
Test, learn and refine
1
2
4
Custora Pulse Sales referrers for major US retailer
Smart Insights capability benchmarking templates
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1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
We have written this guide for marketers with some experience in email marketing who want
to take their email marketing to the next level of sophistication.
How is this guide structured?
About the authors
You can find him at www.emailmonday.com and www.emailvendorselection.com
Dr Dave Chaffey is a consultant, author and trainer specialising in digital
marketing. He started giving courses on email marketing in 2001, still advises
on email marketing as part of training and consulting and wrote the first edition
of the book Total Email Marketing in 2003.
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Jordie van Rijn is an independent Email and Marketing Automation consultant.
Founder of the software and vendor knowledge platform www.emailvendorselection.com and author of the book E-mailmarketing in 60 minutes. Jordie is
much sought after trainer and speaker on digital marketing topics.
6
Creating
In this section we will introduce 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.
5
Defining strategy
The guide is designed in workbook format to make it quick to review and decide on changes
you need to make to get better results. It covers email strategy topics like segmentation
options and communications strategy as well as practical advice on how to improve your
creative and subject lines
4
Segmentation
About this guide
Related guides
Recommended resource? Email marketing resources
We have grouped our Expert member resources for Email marketing on our Email
marketing and marketing automation toolkit page. These guides and templates are
recommended:
þþ Email marketing campaign broadcast checklist
1
Prioritise
þþ Email marketing effectiveness audit spreadsheet
þþ Email campaign calculator spreadsheet
þþ Email contact strategy template.
Remember that there is also the option for first-party email acquisition where you attract
people to your website using inbound marketing and encourage opt-in through an offer to
receive content like in a newsletter or via a whitepaper, or a deal; a discount on first purchase
is often used by retailers since it’s effective.
rr Q. Have we reviewed our options for customer acquisition through email?
Although many just think of email as a customer retention channel there are still some solid
options to use email marketing for reaching new prospects and acquiring new customers.
5
Defining strategy
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 as a result of poor data can lead to deliverability
issues that compound the ability to gain response.
4
Segmentation
When first-party permission hasn’t been given effective email marketing is difficult. It requires
much tighter targeting than first-party permission email and needs a message that is very
relevant. This demands rich and accurate data that is typically not available with third-party
data sources.
3
Defining proposition
Customer acquisition by email generally refers to a third-party 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.
2
Set your goals
Using email for customer acquisition
Checklist – email acquisition options
rr 1. Rented list email. Rental typically doesn’t give direct access to data or unlimited use;
however is higher quality data than a purchased list.
6
Creating
These are the main options to review:
rr 2. Co-branded email (and/or co-registration).
rr 4. Third-party email newsletter.
rr 5. Viral email.
rr 6. Triggered, retargeted email.
rr 7. First party house e-newsletter or acquisition deal.
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rr 3. Competition sites.
Best Practice Tip 1 Don’t miss the opportunities of advertising in others’ e-newsletters
We highlight the fourth option as particularly worth considering, especially for business-tobusiness marketing. The ‘banner blindness’ that we see with display ads doesn’t occur to
the same degree with e-newsletters as visitors scan them and see relevant content.
A summary of 7 methods of using email marketing for customer acquisition and their
advantages and disadvantages
Leverage partner
brand. Can also
co-register – sign
up on their site
Issues
§
List source. High typical cost of
acquisition (CPA)
§
Low responsiveness
§
Perception of spam – rent from
a reputable list owner
§
Exclusivity
§
Brand mismatch
Responsiveness
§
compared to other
§
options
§
Reach
Need prime position
Potentially
low-cost and high
reach
§
Not achieving the viral effect
§
Negative brand impact
Automated – just
sit back and relax
§
Optimising creative, offer and
frequency
Can handle
conversion of
leads
§
Might have high start-up costs
§
Availability of enough data to
target/segment
Clutter
Cost
5
Defining strategy
Reach second
degree contacts
6
Creating
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7 Steps Guide to Successful Email Marketing
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4
Segmentation
7
Benefits
Reach into new
contacts
3
Defining proposition
What is it?
Renting
access to
contacts
from a list
owner who
broadcasts on
your behalf.
2. Co-branded
Email sent
mail
from list
owner but with
your brand,
message and
offer
4. Third-party
Placing an ad,
e-newsletter ad/ sponsorship,
sponsorship
editorial in a
publisher’s
e-newsletter
5. Viral email
An email is
designed to
be shared
and seeded
to a house or
rented list in
combination
with social
media
promotion
6. Triggered
Email that is
email
automatically
sent after
a trigger
event like a
download or
cart abandon
2
Set your goals
Option
1. Rented list.
Text is: This is
as opposed to
list purchase.
1
Prioritise
To help you quickly review the options for acquisition using email marketing, this table shows
their benefits, disadvantages and issues to consider.
7. House
e-newsletter
Helps build a
§
relationship with
recipient over time
Achieving balance between
informing the list member and
selling to them
Broad testing
and optimisation
options
Creating relevant and
interesting content
§
1
Prioritise
E-newsletters
keep your
contacts
informed, they
can work well
for prospects
who haven’t
bought from
you yet
rr 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
the options in the next table.
3
Defining proposition
Using email for customer retention and growth
2
Set your goals
Best Practice Tip 2 Don’t miss the opportunities of email retargeting
Research studies show that many companies aren’t taking advantage of automated,
triggered emails for acquisition. These are a form of behavioural retargeting where a
prospect has registered buy hasn’t bought. Events such as registering for a whitepaper or
webinar in B2B, signing up for a newsletter or partial completion of checkout are all great
reasons to send a follow-up email to a prospect.
4
Segmentation
Checklist – email retention options
These are the main email retention options to review:
rr 1. House e-newsletter.
rr 2. House campaign.
5
Defining strategy
rr 3. Triggered email.
rr 4. Research email.
rr 5. Service email.
rr 6. Sales force email.
What is it?
Periodic email to your
Still one of the best digital
marketing tools to build
a brand and develop
relationships
Benefits
Stay top-of-mind
Helps build a
relationship with
recipient over
time
Gain repeated
response
Broad testing
and optimisation
options
8
Issues
Defining the best
sell/inform/entertain
balance
Creating relevant and
interesting content
Integration with other
channels like social
media
Resourcing
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Retention option
1. House
e-newsletter
6
Creating
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
2. House
campaign
Requires technical
integration of
behavioural data with
email solution for
triggers
Responsiveness
Selection of sample
Relationship
Managing frequency
Relevance to the
subscriber
Often requires technical
integration
Service mail can be
governed by other
departments than
marketing
Control
Permission-based email marketing
6
Creating
Integration
5
Defining strategy
Sell
There is growing
customer distrust of
tracking, transparency
on this is required and
opt-in is essential
Per definition,
excellent timing
Cheap
alternative to
other research
methods
An email that is deployed High open and
to guide a transaction
response rates
or deliver a service
Possible
message
cross-selling
Relationship build
Testing the best
template layouts and
offers
4
Segmentation
6. Sales force
email
Targeting
3
Defining proposition
5. Service email
Quickly
deployed, hook
on to current
news or stock
levels
Can be a
cost-effective
way to increase
conversion to
sale
Issues
Managing contact
frequency so that the
impact is not reduced
2
Set your goals
4. Research email
Behavioural emails
following up on a trigger
event like 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
E-mail send to your
current subscribers
to research, learn or
complete profiles.
Benefits
Often has better
response than
an e-newsletter
because of its
clarity and focus
1
Prioritise
3. Triggered email
What is it?
A focused email send
with a single offer or
objective
rr Q. Is our email marketing permission-based?
Key Strategy Recommendation 3 Ensure your email marketing is permission-based
Audit your subscription sources and email marketing messages to ensure that your email
marketing is fully permission-based. The recipients must have opted-in to all your emails
customers and you should have traceability of how, where and when they opted-in.
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Permission marketing, or gaining consent for marketing communications to be received,
is fundamental to successful email marketing. If you don’t have permission marketing,
customers will label you as a spammer and you may lose them forever. Then there are the
legal requirements in many countries which make permission for email marketing a must.
Since permission marketing underpins much of digital marketing, but especially email
marketing, let’s take a look at the basics and what’s involved. Worth checking again even if
you already know the foundations.
Permission marketing
3
Defining proposition
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. While email
permission also includes current customers, it is similar in concept to the first stages of ‘inbound
marketing’,. Instead of only focussing on direct conversion, getting permission first will allow you
to develop a relationship. More about this on the section on list growth. The permission marketing
process is shown in the next diagram for the complete customer lifecycle3
2
Set your goals
What is it? Permission marketing
Customers agree (opt in) to be involved in an organisation’s marketing activities by email,
social networks or traditional channels, often in return for the value offered.
1
Prioritise
Permission marketing is an established approach, it’s the foundation for customer
relationship management (CRM) and online customer engagement. ‘Permission marketing’
is a term coined by Seth Godin in 1999, it is still valid and we think that many still don’t work
hard enough to get permission.
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
It’s worthwhile reviewing and optimising the process of gaining permission to ensure you’re
using the best engagement devices, messaging and placement to maximise generation of
opt-ins and leads.
3
10
Source: Responsys
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In the later section “Double or single opt-in?” we discuss whether it’s necessary to send an
email to complete opt-in after a subscription form is filled in. (We don’t recommend this for
most businesses).
What is it? Engagement devices
A 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:
rr How effective are we compared with competitors?
1
Prioritise
E-permission marketing checklist – how effective are our engagement devices?
rr What is the appeal and range of our engagement devices?
rr Is the placement optimal and our call to actions effective?
rr What type of engagement device can we use?
rr Content download
rr Poll, survey or interactive quiz
rr Social recommendation (share through social networks or email).
Your 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. Through the use of a common customer profile you can review the data quality of
your list.
We recommend using these levels of common customer profile grading:
4
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Campaign tracking for email guide.
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Once defined, the common customer profile can be used as a means of structuring
E-permission marketing and refining data for customer insights.. For the purpose of learning
more about the customer and collecting more customer data, a plan can be created with
targets for each level.
6
Creating
What is it? Common customer profile
A definition of all the database fields that is relevant to the marketer to understand and
target the customer with a relevant offering. It is best if different levels (for instance 1
through 3) of profile completeness can be defined. This allows opt-in mechanisms with less
information asked up front, encouraging more customers to sign up.
5
Defining strategy
Use a common customer profile
4
Segmentation
Key Strategy Recommendation 4 Review engagement and lead-generation devices
Check that you have the best methods of generating leads and opt-ins 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.
3
Defining proposition
rr Videos
2
Set your goals
rr What is our ability to track (see our article on campaign tracking,4 in the section ‘“Assess
engagement ‘beyond the click’ through web analytics” on page 93 or the guidance on
event tracking in our Google Analytics guide)?
þþ Level 1 includes the contact details and key profile fields only.
þþ Level 2 includes preferences.
þþ Level 3 includes full purchase and response behaviour.
E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed?
rr Q. Has our e-CRM and data profiling approach been reviewed?
We can refine the mentioned permission marketing ideas of Seth Godin to make them more
practical to apply.
Opt-in
Selective opt-in
Opt-out
Selective opt-out
Initial profiling
Communications preferences
Continued profiling
Targeted communications
Sense
& Respond
As customers do not frequently update preferences it is recommended that information
gathered is largely of an evergreen nature.
Three key customer subscription categories are:
rr Content – e.g. News, products, offers, events.
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þþ 1. ‘Offer selective opt-in to communications.’ A selective opt-in lets the subscriber
indicate which part of your e-mails and content he would like to receive. A selective opt-in
can be based on the based on the choice between different newsletters you may have,
such as ‘family’, ‘home’, ‘garden’, ‘sport’ and so on. This is offered via what is known as
a subscription centre. 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
an opt-out option in each communication is a legal requirement in most countries.
6
Creating
These are some of the key features of E-CRM implementation we suggest you work through
for your organisation.
5
Defining strategy
E-permission marketing
4
Segmentation
Permission marketing
3
Defining proposition
A structured approach to customer data capture is needed, otherwise wrong or overlapping
data may be collected. Or essential data will be missed, as was the case with a utility
company that collected 80,000 email addresses, but forgot to ask for the postcode for geotargeting.
2
Set your goals
To identify the key profile fields, you first need to understand how customers segment
themselves. What is the smallest set of data points that provide the highest value for
segmentation and targeting? When possible, analysis of transactional data delivers good
insight, alternatively surveys and feedback can also be used.
1
Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 3 Identify key subscriber profile fields
Identify the profile fields you really need to effectively reach them and be able to
understand and properly target your audience with future messages. These are level 1 and
2 of the common customer profile.
rr Frequency – e.g. weekly, monthly, quarterly or alerts.
rr Channel – e.g. email, direct mail, phone or SMS.
2
Set your goals
Giving the customers control of email frequency 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 seen as the
responsibility of the marketer.
1
Prioritise
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.
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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This is an example of a preference centre. In the case of King Arthur Flour they go into
product, product use, geographical information (for events) and types of content.
Best Practice Tip 4 Create a customer communications preferences centre
By using the data gathered via a preference centre, a company can adjust the frequency
and type of communications to better fit the recipients profile and wishes. In doing so it is
increasing the likelihood of engagement.
14
An example of how Sears use Social sign-on.
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5
6
Creating
þþ 4. ‘Watch don’t ask’ – use ‘Sense and Respond’. The need to ask (interruptive)
questions to improve customers’ profiling can be reduced by employing ‘Sense and
Respond’ email to better understand customer needs. Monitoring the clicks and behaviour
5
Defining strategy
þþ 3. ‘Don’t make opt-out too easy’ (selective opt-out). It might sound of a radical idea,
but marketers 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 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 (pause) 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. If the opt-out
process doesn’t work or is too confusing subscribers may report your email as spam
which can hit your overall deliverability. Still, we still think there’s merit in what we said
before: 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.
4
Segmentation
What is it? Social sign-on
Site 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.
3
Defining proposition
þþ 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 Sears5 are using social sign-on to integrate customer profile information
with email and CRM database information.
2
Set your goals
Although many large brands use a preference centre, they are also within the reach of
smaller companies because of the low-costs of current day E-CRM systems provided
they have a strategy that acknowledges the importance of gathering the profile and
preference data.
1
Prioritise
What is it? Customer preference or communications centre
A page or area on a site where a subscriber can edit his profile or communications options
such as the frequency and the types of email he wants to receive.
of your customers; these can then trigger follow-up communications. 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:
1
Prioritise
yy 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. This
example6 shows how a retailer uses click behaviour to gauge interest in Kitchens and
sends follow-up emailings to those how have clicked on the Kitchen links.
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
6
15
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yy Leading scoring and nurturing. This approach can be further enhanced to provide
more complex nurturing process and lead scoring, commonly called (email) marketing
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
6
Creating
yy 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.
5
Defining strategy
yy Monitoring the engagement of individual customers with email communications.
This is achieved by monitoring trends of opening and click-through per subscriber.
These metrics indicate the level of interest and interaction of individual customers and
we can monitor how these vary through time. Based on engagement levels we use
follow-up communications. For example, perhaps a customer who has not previously
responded to emails and who starts clicking through to the website more frequently is a
buying signal. This behaviour could be followed up by a tailored email communication
or via other channels like giving a phone call.
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
Related guides
The Smart Insights Marketing Automation Best Practices Guide includes:
2
Set your goals
Recommended Resource: Marketing automation Best Practices Guide
Marketing Automation is a relatively new category of marketing technology combining CRM,
Email marketing, lead scoring and analytics. It gives exciting opportunities to deliver more
relevant and timely communications to prospects and customers which boost response and
nurture leads.
1
Prioritise
In this section we have introduced good practices for permission email marketing. In the first
step we will review the CRITICAL factors you control that will affect your success in email
marketing.
þþ Explanations of Marketing Automation concepts
þþ Best practice tips for Marketing Automation covering lead scoring and targeting
þþ B2B and B2C examples
3
Defining proposition
þþ Selection criteria for email marketing versus marketing automation software
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Step 1
Prioritise your email marketing efforts with the
CRITICAL factors
Conversation
rr Q. Is our email marketing two-way – are we engaging visitors in a dialogue or just
pushing content?
þþ Polls or surveys (for an e-newsletter).
þþ Reviews and ratings on products (for an e-retailer).
þþ Sharing of what’s hot on (your) social channels like Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s an example from the Crate & Barrel asking for reviews after product purchase.
4
Segmentation
þþ Competitions which are announced in several emails.
3
Defining proposition
Email works well when it’s part of a wider dialogue encouraging user participation and
engaging them with a brand. It’s easy to treat email marketing as a substitute for direct
marketing. But it works best when it encourages interactions, for example through:
2
Set your goals
Let’s first review the eight CRITICAL success factors. Along the way, we’ll look at some
examples of good practice to learn from. Each of the factors will be covered in more detail
later in this guide.
1
1
Prioritise
A review of the CRITICAL success factors for email marketing is a useful starting point in
your journey to improved email marketing. CRITICAL summarises the main determining
factors to your email marketing success.
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
17
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In this next example7 from Starbucks subscribers get a notice that they have been given a
free reward added to their loyalty card. This shows that engagement with the brand can be
across channels and email be used to streamline the engagement!
1
Prioritise
1
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
rr 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 for targeting which cover both
traditional targeting options and methods to deliver contextual emails through what your
marketing colleagues are calling ‘Sense and Respond communications’.
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Test, learn and refine
Relevance
þþ 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics and customer set preferences).
þþ 2. Customer lifecycle groups. Most commonly grouped in categories like new subscribers
or prospects, active customers and lapsed or no longer engaging in email.
þþ 3. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted). This is the
most powerful method, though also requires more technology to deliver it.
1
þþ 5. Customer value (current and future).
þþ 6. Customer personas. Personas provide a helpful way to simultaneously target 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.
Initial e-mail
Promotion(s)
Opens
Response
Clickthroughs monitoring
tool
Phase 2
Campaign
A.
Don’t
Open
B.
Open
Don’t
Click
New
subject
Line,
New time
C.
Click
Don’t
Respond
D.
Respond
New
Offer
New
Creative
New
Offer
Timely
Follow-up
Landing page
response
Responses
E-mail
Landing page
or microsite
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7
Test, learn and refine
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. In many cases it is best practice to ask for limited
profile information 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.
6
Creating
Key
5
Defining strategy
Phase 1
Campaign
4
Segmentation
E-mail
database
Rulesbased
response
engine
3
Defining proposition
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 (series) or phone call if they are a high
value customer.
2
Set your goals
What is it? Sense and respond communications
Delivering timely, relevant communications to customers as part of a contact strategy
through monitoring and following up automatically based on specific interactions with a
company’s website, emails and staff.
1
Prioritise
þþ 4. Customer multi-channel behaviour (channel preference).
Incentive (or offer)
rr 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 staying subscribed, reading the email, participating or clicking on the
links?
1
1
Prioritise
Although the offer can be entirely based on the product features or other (emotional) benefits
for promotional emails, there is a range of product or launch offers we can use in emails
which are often in the ’Free’, ‘Win’, ‘Save’ or ‘New’ category. In this example personalisation
is used to highlight the deals with the most relevant shown at the top in ‘Hero’ position.
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
This next example8 from Boden shows how a discount offer , included in their welcome series
and is supported with a clear Call to Action, popular product categories and social proof.
8
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7
Test, learn and refine
Best Practice Tip 5 Highlight your incentives through formatting
Highlight your incentives in headlines, image text and call to action to make the benefit for
the recipient as clear as possible.
6
Creating
For an e-newsletter, content is a big part of the subscriber benefit which we’ll review in the
section on developing your email proposition. Is the quality of content or offer consistent
through time?
1
Prioritise
1
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
Timing
Timing refers to when the email is sent and 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 working days.
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
immediate purchasing.
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 being an always on, 24/7 channel, the inbox is checked more often.
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.
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Some email marketers get good results on Friday, when office workers are winding down for
the weekend. The truth is, there are no generic perfect times to send. Only testing can show
the right times. What works for one brand may not work for another.
6
Creating
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
email consumption habits. Increasing numbers of subscribers check their emails somewhere
between waking up, having breakfast and arriving at work and later into the evening.
5
Defining strategy
rr Q. Are we sending our emails at the right time?
Some email service providers now also offer a feature that lets you adjust send time per
recipient on the basis of their previous open times. At a minimum assess success against
click rates. Read our posts on timing for more ideas.
Timing also means more than the best time to get seen in the inbox, such as:
þþ Timing to external factors. Some brands notice increased offer take-up just after pay day.
þþ Timing according to product need and lifecycle, for replenishment-based products around
the point when the product or service is needed again.
rr Q. Are our emails integrated with other channels?
Questions to ask include:
þþ Are the creative and copy consistent with my brand?
þþ Does the message reinforce other communications?
3
Defining proposition
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 precede 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.
2
Set your goals
Integration
1
1
Prioritise
þþ Timing in the context of user interactions – the sense and response approach mentioned
already.
þþ Does the timing of the email campaign fit with offline communications?
For example, you can follow up telesales with emailed information. Or if sending direct
mail, you can combine it with an email pre and or post direct mail send. Tests have shown
increasing the number of touchpoints increases conversion.
Creative and copy
rr 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.
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Here’s an example of an offer by Kohl. It is repeated in the subject line, Take 25% off Nike
gear & start the new year in style. Headline and imagery and has a logical call to action –
which stimulate a clear offer and a good click-through rate.
6
Creating
Best Practice Tip 6 Make your offer clear up-front
Avoid 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.
5
Defining strategy
Remember, too, that email channel integration means considering use of all other channels
and touchpoints for gaining new permission subscribers.
4
Segmentation
þþ Do we encourage interactions in other channels, such as social?
1
Prioritise
1
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
Key creative issues to consider which we will explore later in this guide are:
6
Creating
þþ How is the email structured? Is the layout commonly used appropriate and effective for
this type of email?
þþ Where are the calls to action? What are the best positions for calls to action and how can
click-throughs be encouraged?
þþ 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 now
message, whereas a new subscriber might need more trust and relationship building
before going with a hard sell.
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Test, learn and refine
þþ How is the email branded? How should email campaigns and newsletters support the
established brand and when should brand variants be used?
Attributes (of the email)
rr Q. Is the header content engaging?
The attributes of the email header which can all determine campaign success include the
subject line, name and address, timing and format. Of these, subject line, from address and
format are most important in influencing response.
2
Set your goals
þþ Subject line – if the email has passed the test of being someone the reader wants to
hear from then the subject is used to evaluate the next action. We’ll look at more tips on
subject lines later, but for now, here’s one – don’t be afraid to test longer subject lines.
Although shorter will often display the whole subject without risk of it being cut off, recent
research9 suggests that there is no correlation between length and read rate.
1
1
Prioritise
þþ From name and address – most email clients display the friendly display from name
rather than from email address, so readers see ‘Your Company News’ rather than news@
yourcompany.com. 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.
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
9
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Return Path: “The Art and Science of Effective Subject Lines” report
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7
Test, learn and refine
þþ Accessibility & Usability goes even one layer deeper, making sure that the email is
formatted in a way that screen readers and other smart devices are able to present
the email and its content in a correct and actionable way. You can test your email for
accessibility and get tips for improvement on www.accessible-email.org.
6
Creating
þþ 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, render well and
action on different devices like desktop, smartphone and tablet.
5
Defining strategy
þþ Format – technically emails should contain HTML and plain text versions, known as
MIME encoded. When both versions are sent in a multi-part format 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, while still being able to add some mark-up like highlighting hyperlinks and calls to
action.
Deliverability may be impacted by copy and creative, for example through the use of words
that encourage more people to see and mark as spam, or certain spam filters being triggered
by (combinations of ) words. Though sender reputation is way more critical than content.
So normal email marketers can use the word ‘Free’ without delivery being affected. See the
section on deliverability for more on this topic.
rr Q. Do we send readers to the right pages after the click?
1
1
Prioritise
Landing page (or microsite)
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.
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.
Best Practice Tip 7 Integrate copy, creative and offer in email and landing page
If the offer or creative on the landing page isn’t consistent with the email then this can
negatively impact conversion.
4
Segmentation
Landing page conversion rates can have a dramatic influence on the success of an email
campaign. Testing and improving
landing pages therefore pays dividends, yet this is often
Typically, with a B2B email aimed at registration, or downloads, the recipient will be
presented with an online form after click-through, so to recognise the subscriber and
overlooked in favour of testing
the
email creative.
asking for information to add to their profile.
3
Defining proposition
Typically, with a B2B email aimed at registration, or downloads, the recipient will be
presented with an online form after click-through, so to recognise the subscriber and asking
for information to add to their profile.
2
Set your goals
However you can get a much better result from a landing pages focused on achieving action
and tailored to continue a consistent experience that started in the email. ‘Landing page’ is
the term given for the page(s) reached after the recipient clicks on a link in the email.
Designing the page so that the form is easy to complete and reassuring about how
The transition from offer to website
guided
men
(top-right) through
Landing page is
conversion
rates canin
havecase
a dramaticof
influence
on thecategory
success of an
email campaign. Testing and improving landing pages therefore pays dividends, yet
recognisable red imagery right
and
repeating
the theoffer
theme on the landing page. Guidance
this is
often overlooked
in favour of testing
email creative.
In the example below you see a mail (left) and landing page offer by Macy's. The
is given by showing sub categories
(bottom
right)
in
case
ofcategory
women’s
customer buying journey is integrated, encouraging clicking by
in the email, coats product category
and further browsing and search / selection options on the landing page.
click through.
The transition from offer to website is guided in case of men category (top-right)
6
Creating
through recognisable red imagery right and repeating the offer theme on the landing
page. Guidance is given by showing sub categories (bottom right) in case of
women’s coats product category click through.
5
Defining strategy
will be used can affect the overall success of the campaign.
In the example below you seetheirapersonal
maildata(left)
and landing page offer by Macy’s. The customer
Integrate copy, creative and offer in email and landing page
buying journey is integrated, encouraging clicking by category in the email, and further
If the offer or creative on the landing page isn’t consistent with the email then this can
browsing and search / selection
options
on the landing page.
negatively
impact conversion.
7
Test, learn and refine
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Step 2
Set your goals and build a quality list for email
marketing
1
Prioritise
You probably know that interaction with email campaigns is measured through open and
click-through rates. While it’s meaningful to review email response in this way, if this is all
you measure, you’re missing the bigger picture of the value of email to your company and its
customers.
1. Business metrics
These could also be called output metrics. They measure the contribution the channel has to
the business goals. Think about the conversions and revenues for example.
2
2
Set your goals
These rich metrics in email are great. However, there is a distinction must be made between:
2. Process metrics
To 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?
rr Q. How well do we measure engagement of our subscribers?
Checklist – measuring engagement with email marketing
rr Click to open rates (CTOR) – these will enable you to see how engaging your creative
and offer is.
rr 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.
rr Complaint rate – as with unsubscribe, do particular messages cause a high number of
complaints?
rr 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 starting with a welcome series or, when
necessary, emails geared towards reactivation. Reviewing hurdle rates at different lengths
of time from original subscription can help assess the success of these strategies.
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Test, learn and refine
rr Unsubscribe rate – check that particular messages or offers aren’t causing peaks in
unsubscribe rates.
6
Creating
rr 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.
5
Defining strategy
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:
4
Segmentation
Define current value of your email marketing to customers
3
Defining proposition
These are the metrics you use for email marketing performance and diagnostic
purposes. Click rates for instance may help you to understand how well you are doing with
offer, content and targeting. Complaint rates can be important to deliverability management,
for instance, but will never be a business metric. They are numbers useful to gain insight and
manage activity.
rr 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 big difference between the link for hero product or featured category in an
email.
1
Prioritise
Key Strategy Recommendation 5 Measure longer-term engagement through hurdle rates
To 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.
2
2
Set your goals
rr Hurdle rates of engagement over a longer period – this assesses engagement over
a six- or nine-month period to set goals to review how active your subscribers are measured through open, click or purchase. 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.
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
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.
5
Defining strategy
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.
Define value of email marketing activity to your company
In the previous section we looked at value to the customer. But what about company value?
To assess this we need to know about the marketing outcomes generated and the influence
on sales. These are the business metrics.
Checklist – measuring value generated from email marketing
rr Size of contactable email database.
rr Size of contactable database as percentage of total customer database.
rr Growth of contactable database per month.
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We suggest you set these as primary goals for your email marketing. You can look at the
efficiency starting at emails sent, which shows you overall campaign effectiveness. And can
focus on activity after the click to help you assess the efficiency of your web conversion.
6
Creating
rr Q. How well do we measure value generated from our email marketing?
rr Outcomes (goals) per 1000 emails sent.
rr Revenue (profit) per 1000 emails sent.
rr When looking at outcomes and revenue per email sent, dividing by 1000 (or per 100) will
normalize value and make it easier to interpret, but it’s not essential.
1
Prioritise
rr Total revenue from the email channel per month.
rr Revenue per email contactable customer per month.
rr Outcomes (goals) from email marketing per website visit from email.
rr Revenue (profit) from email marketing per website visit from email.
3
Defining proposition
Best Practice Tip 8 Use a conversion funnel model to set goals for your email marketing
Through creating a simple conversion model for your email campaign you can set
realistic goals for your email marketing. You can also set realistic expectations among
colleagues since the multi-step response means that response may not be as much as
they expect.
2
2
Set your goals
This will be tracked through your analytics package. To implement tracking you will need
to tag your emails as described in Step 7. This will allow you to monitor check whether you
have achieved these goals.
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
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Test, learn and refine
You can quickly calculate the Return On Investment of your email marketing program or
campaigns using the online ROI calculator at www.emailmarketingroi.com or the spreadsheet
equivalent in our toolkit.
1
Prioritise
The success of direct response campaigns is often measured 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 – the number of recipients
that 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.
4
Segmentation
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.
3
Defining proposition
Success refers to achieving the objectives set – does the campaign deliver the required
outcomes?
2
Set your goals
2
Growing your list
If you don’t have a plan to grow your email list then new subscribers will still opt-in, 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.
6
Creating
This pie chart shows the percentage of new addresses acquired by a variety of sources used.
5
Defining strategy
rr Q. Do we have a structured process for growing our email list?
7
Test, learn and refine
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1
Prioritise
A simple baseline for list growth is the number and percentage of current customers for which
you have email addresses. You can then set targets for this metric and devise techniques to
increase it. 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? Just one
character wrong and the email address is no good to anyone, since you cannot reach the
subscriber via a faulty email address. 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.
Control your email list acquisition costs
rr Q. Did we define an allowable cost of email address acquisition to help control the costs
of list-building?
Setting SMART objectives for your list can help grow the list faster, giving more opportunities
to generate sales.
5
Defining strategy
Define objectives for email list building and list quality
4
Segmentation
Key Strategy Recommendation 6 Set an allowable cost of email acquisition
It 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.
3
Defining proposition
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 where you obtained permission to email them.
2
2
Set your goals
It is only opt-in if the customer has proactively agreed, and expects to receive email
communications. Perhaps there are ranges 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?
rr Q. Have SMART objectives for our email list been set?
Here are some examples of list-building objectives for you to review:
6
Creating
Checklist – email list size and quality
rr 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.
rr Email address quality – Aim to increase the 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).
rr Email permission level. 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,
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rr 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.
have you got permission to send the full range of e-communications, or just some, e.g.
alerts and e-newsletters? Aim to increase the (average) permission levels.
rr List value – Aim to increase the value generated in total or per 1000 list members in terms
of sales/leads in a time period.
1
Prioritise
rr Targeting quality – Increase proportion of subscribers qualified for your products who you
have collected profiling information about.
rr Data quality – Increasing the proportion of specific, valuable, up to date and accurate profile
fields held about individuals. The next 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.
rr Q. Have all touchpoints for collecting and updating email addresses been reviewed?
þþ Digital channels, websites, social channels, mobile apps, blogs, SMS.
þþ Offline, events, in-store, customer service, all paper responses
þþ Existing customers.
þþ New customers.
The chart below offers a good starting point for a company to review all the possible methods
of capturing email addresses and other profile information. Some examples are shown.
5
Defining strategy
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.
4
Segmentation
Best Practice Tip 9 Use a range of customer touchpoints to grow your list
Both online and offline contact moments are an opportunity for gaining new permission
email addresses and adding valuable profile data to your current recipients.
3
Defining proposition
It is important to have a structured approach to collecting and maintaining customer data. A
good way for marketers to review all the possible methods of capturing email addresses is to
brainstorm alternative methods for capturing email addresses. Opportunities for capture are:
2
2
Set your goals
Review touchpoints to improve email marketing
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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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 list
Here are nine online methods to help build a house list:
rr 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.
rr 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).
rr 8. Any other forms of online traffic-building not mentioned above. Examples include
online banner ads or Pay Per Click text search engine ads.
Pop-ups warrant a separate look since they have grown dramatically in importance over the
last few years. In this article on Smart Insights10 Kath Pay shows many examples of the trend
to increased use of Pop-ups to grow lists including on Smart Insights.
10
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Smart Insights: Growing your subscriber list with pop-ups and lightboxes
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Test, learn and refine
Pop-ups!
6
Creating
r r 9. Email append and correction services. Companies such as Freshaddress
StrikeIron, Mintigo or Hunter.io 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 Smith@aol.om. Similar verification services like Brightverify can attempt to
correct email addresses with typos even real-time (during form fill out) Note that
gathering an email address through email append doesn’t constitute opt-in permission and appending data is subjective to applicable law and jurisdiction.
5
Defining strategy
rr 7. Campaigns with social sharing or viral elements where a friend, colleague or follower is referred can also increase the size of the house list. Before further communications
are sent, permission marketing and data protection law require you to get the referred
person to opt-in himself so be sure to bring that option to their attention.
4
Segmentation
rr 5. Placing an ad in a third-party e-newsletter. This has the same aims as renting an
email list, but may be more cost effective and can often be tightly targeted.
3
Defining proposition
rr 3. Social networks. Social media can be a good place to start a conversation or relationship but email can help monetise it. Make capturing email subscribers a part of your
social media strategy.
2
2
Set your goals
rr 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 former Chocollect promotion from Mars which was
featured in TV ads).
1
Prioritise
r 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 are given use real-time verification of email addresses and/or double optin to gain the incentive.
Your potential customers don’t care what conversion rate you want, what targets you’re trying
to meet or when you need to achieve them by. They care about their own experience and
what’s in it for them.
Think about why they’re on your site in the first place and what might make them want to give
you their details and come visit you again.
1
Prioritise
Many would tell you to offer a piece of content, or a download as a “bribe to subscribe”, but
this is not always the most effective. In cases, a general benefit highlighted as Creativiu11
realised during one of their tests. Where a general benefit saw a 7,8% sign-up while ebook
only 4,46%. So always test!
2
Set your goals
2
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
Here’s an example from online kids shoe retailer wee squeak – incentivized with a 10%
discount on first order when signing up.
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
11
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Source: Content marketing Institute
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There’s nothing more irritating than being unapologetically interrupted, and that’s essentially
what popovers do, digitally. So minimizing the interruption, by identifying the optimal time to
approach, is imperative.
Offline opportunities for data capture encompass the full range of offline customer
touchpoints. Here are eight to consider:
rr 1. Any form of paper registration or order form. But be sure to check the wording on
your form such that an opt-in to all forms of future communications is achieved.
rr 3. A phone contact at a call centre. For example a bank could ask customers whether
they have an email address during or at the end of a routine phone enquiry.
rr 4. Telemarketing. This can be specifically to capture email addresses, but is more costeffective if it is part of a general telemarketing campaign.
rr 6. Trade show or conference. For example12 from a prize draw collecting business cards
or registration. (but take care to collect a proper opt-in).
5
Defining strategy
rr 5. Point-of-sale. Collect email addresses at the store in a retail context. This can be at
the cash register or instore using catalog displays or tablets.
4
Segmentation
rr 2. Visit from sales representatives. Can be used for opt-in either on paper or through
subscribing online.
3
Defining proposition
Checklist – offline methods to build your house list
2
2
Set your goals
The beauty here is that it’s actually the very intrusiveness of popovers that make them
effective, particularly for email acquisition purposes, so the key is zoning in on the optimal
time for your customers to engage with the popover.
1
Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 10 If you use pop-ups or lightboxes for email capture, get the timing right
Naturally, the best timing will vary depending on your site and business offering so testing
thoroughly is the best way to ensure you gain the best results for both you and your
customer. So consider the length of time before the pop-up pops and which pages you use
it, for example, the home page is high volume, but first time visitors may not want to be
greeted by a pop-up. You can also arrange to show pop-ups on a user action like scrolling
down or moving the mouse, so enabling to read some content first.
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
12
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rr 7. Paper response to a direct mail offer. Traditional direct response.
rr 8. Phone response to direct mail or ad. Again traditional direct response.
1
Prioritise
When email addresses are captured offline, a common problem is the level of errors in the
addresses – this can often reach a double figure percentage. So plan for Quality Insurance
– staff should be trained in the importance of getting the email address correct and how to
check for invalid address formats. Some call centres have even incentivised staff according
to the number of valid email addresses they collect.
When collecting addresses on paper, often small practical steps can make the difference such as
allowing sufficient space for the email address and asking for it to be written in CAPS.
Double or single opt-in?
Double opt-in is not a requirement by law in the US and most of the European countries.
Double opt-in addresses are of higher quality but there is a higher chance of drop off in the
double opt-in process so you will get fewer subscribers on your list if you use this method.
Examples of opt-in techniques
5
Defining strategy
We advise using double opt-in for publishers who will use their lists for rental and companies
that experience poor subscriber quality, aligning to US standard practice or have deliverability
problems. However, it is not general practice in Europe, single agreement to sign-up on a
form is taken as consent.
4
Segmentation
What is it? Double-opt-in
Double opt-in requires new subscribers to confirm their email address by clicking a link
within an email sent to the address they provided.
3
Defining proposition
13
2
2
Set your goals
Best Practice Tip 11 Prioritise list growth opportunities
Jordie van Rijn advises to keep a list growth dashboard13 of opportunities to find the best
mix and optimally use of your budget for list growth including the following scoring factors:
Feasibility, Reach and Possible conversion rate, Opt-in data quality, Costs: time, effort and
expense, Rivalry: Missed other incomes / opportunities, Ease of implementation, Control
and Predictability and Time to implement
Let’s return to the Lucky Voice example which Tim Watson has written up in more detail.14
þþ Incentivising the home page sign-up, increased sign-ups by 92%
þþ Adding Facebook Social Connect sign in, increased sign-ups 40%
6
Creating
The nine list growth methods that worked well were:
þþ Using online competitions, prized appropriate to target audience
þþ Promotion through X-Factor partnership
þþ Adding incentivised email sign-up via Facebook
þþ Facebook App to vote for best customer Karaoke pic, with integrated email collection
þþ Quiz events at Lucky Voice venues with raffle entry in exchange for email address
þþ Cross-selling between venue and online databases
13
14
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þþ Incentivise customers who booked to recommend to friends
You can see the home page social sign-in and incentives here:
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
2
3
Defining proposition
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.
Accompanying Microsite
5
Defining strategy
WE Fashion a fashion retailer ran a promotion and list growth action, together with agency
BaseBuilder. The goal was to activate anonymous in-store customers, register their email
addresses and create rich customer profiles. Scratch cards given with each purchase. Each
revealed a unique code that on registration at a microsite and opt-in would show if you had
won any of the prizes.
4
Segmentation
Here is a collection of examples of offline paper opt-in subscription forms.
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Scratch card
1
Prioritise
840,000 scratch vouchers given in 146 stores
125,350 email registrations, 117,000 unique web visitors
844 direct online sales, with $74,863 revenue
4
Segmentation
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
giving of permission.
3
Defining proposition
174,000 participants
2
2
Set your goals
Case study results15:
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Source: https://www.basebuilder.com/cases/
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Finally, a simple low-tech call to action in a pub/restaurant, to chalk up some new
subscribers!
1
Prioritise
rr Q. Are our options for list maintenance reviewed?
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.
4
Segmentation
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:
3
Defining proposition
Techniques for list maintenance
2
Set your goals
2
3. Subscribers often hold multiple email addresses, often to counter spam and inbox
overload.
Collecting the email address should be an in-built part of the sales process. Whenever a
prospect or customer has to fill in a form this is an opportunity for gaining email addresses
Direct mail promotions also gives this opportunity
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 Towerd@ta.com, FullContact and
Mintigo.
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It is advised to encourage self-service updating of the subscriber data through an online
profile or permission centre.
6
Creating
All the ways 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.
5
Defining strategy
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 for a house list is 0.5% or below per
broadcast .
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
2
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Step 3
Defining your email marketing proposition
rr Q. Have we defined how our email communications offer differential value?
1
Prioritise
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 for email strategy is the
customer’s needs and interests. 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:
2
Set your goals
þþ Be admired by friends.
þþ Impress a boss.
þþ Increase ego.
þþ Save money.
þþ Have fun and be entertained.
þþ Save time and be efficient.
þþ Maintain good health.
þþ Care for family and friends.
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.
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.
rr Engaging text content that makes the subscriber feel happy, angry or as if they are learning.
rr More in-depth content or alternately a summary of content.
rr Sharing of other subscriber views and opinions through votes, product ratings and polls.
rr Exclusive discounts or coupons only available through the channel.
The email value proposition is tightly connected to the sign-up. Expectations can be set at
time of sign-up and in your welcome emails. The emails should deliver any promise of value
that has been made to the customer.
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rr Engaging non-text or rich media content such as videos, podcasts, presentations, blog
posts, photos, etc.
6
Creating
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:
5
Defining strategy
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.
4
Segmentation
To be successful in integrated communication, each channel like email marketing must offer its
own unique form of value that is distinct from other channels. This defines how the digital channel
supports the core brand values. Every channel needs a distinctive online value proposition (OVP)
to succeed in adding its own unique value in combination with the other channels.
3
3
Defining proposition
þþ Get something exclusive.
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.
1
Prioritise
What is the focus of each campaign? In many cases the direct focus is revenue. This can be
more specific. Reduce old stock, cross sell into new categories, up sell to more expensive or
higher margin products, increase basket size.
2
Set your goals
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’.
Is the focus on ensuring customers are getting the most value from your service so that they
are retained?
Write down different types of value that you do offer or could offer:
Competitors’ offer?
Should offer?
3
2.
3
Defining proposition
Do offer?
1.
3.
4
Segmentation
4.
5.
5
Defining strategy
6.
Define the value offered through email marketing communications
rr Q. Do we get the sell-inform-entertain-share balance right?
6
Creating
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 probably also underselling where
the call to action or connections to products is too limited.
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. You can mix this up and emphasize the sales and
offers in certain emails while giving it less attention in others.
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Remember that this relates to the structure also – the most enticing content is best placed in
a place of high attention, often this is at the top, where it can be directly seen when the email
is opened. We often still call this ‘above the fold’ since the term is used in direct mail for the
first part of the lrtter. Start with what you feel are the strongest articles for your audience.
Have regular features plus new, topical, content separate in each issue.
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.
1
Prioritise
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
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:
2
Set your goals
Sell (___/10)
__________________________________________________________________________
Inform (___/10)
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
Share (___/10)
__________________________________________________________________________
rr Q. Do we communicate our email value proposition effectively?
Having clear goals around the value you want to offer will help copywriters focus. The
promise of this value can also be used on the website to encourage sign-up.
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 informationbased value will not be cheap as the content will have to be up-to-date, relevant, accurate,
concise and clearly presented.
6
Creating
Best Practice Tip 12 Define and communicate value of your e-newsletter or email
programme
You should explain your newsletter proposition, i.e. how it will deliver value to subscribers,
for example, through:
5
Defining strategy
For business-to-business e-newsletters, think about how you can add value by acting as a
filter for information about your market sectors.
4
Segmentation
Define email value proposition
3
3
Defining proposition
Entertain (___/10)
þþ Saving time. By providing a single, up-to-date source.
þþ Saving money. For instance through exclusive offers, discounts or offering new ways
of working through a company’s products.
þþ Entertaining. All newsletters can and should be enticing or fun for their audiences – this
is not only the preserve of B2C newsletters.
þþ Sharing. Sharing information about your organisation or facilitating sharing of content
from customers.
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þþ Learning. Increasing knowledge and solving day-to-day problems.
To achieve engagement, you should review how the newsletter should deliver value and
translate it into the content and topics of the e-newsletter.
You should answer these questions and emphasise them through the design of the
e-newsletter.
B2C Proposition
Make my life easier
Help me learn/have fun
Make me look good
Give me a great deal
1
Prioritise
B2B Proposition
Make my work easier
Help me develop
Make me look good
Give me a great, logically defendable deal
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
3
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
And here is an example for an engaging newsletter for a consumer brand. The focus is not
around product or offer but customer need and interest. Sales offers are below the fold:
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Integrating value into social media marketing communications
rr Q. Do we show the value we offer from our email marketing in our social media
communications?
1
Prioritise
With social media channels available for costumer interaction, companies have invested in
channels like Twitter and Facebook to also offering value to their audience. A marketer can
choose between campaigns and messaging per channel or let them complement each other.
2
Set your goals
Alternatively, it can be argued that a company simply needs to offer choice and many
customers will prefer email for its convenience and richer media. Email can help the
time-poor audience by filtering or summarising the high frequency messages from blogs and
social networks. Yet the options to share and engage through social media platforms is much
more elaborate.
In the example below, Meundies is using email to promote their product categories and
gifting, with an Instagram (the ‘Gram) spin, showing pictures that enforce the product
branding and culture.
3
Defining proposition
3
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Best Practice Tip 13 Enable ‘share to social’ options
A ‘share to social’ feature allows email marketers to include links from the email so
recipients can easily post (part of) the content of the email to their social network page,
where friends and followers can see the message, make comments and even re-share the
email on their own pages.
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
3
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
‘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
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Speaking about the ‘share to social’ concept, Matt Lindenberg, assistant director of marketing
for Diapers.com, explained the benefits like this:
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.
1
Prioritise
For example, just a Facebook logo on its own doesn’t explain whether clicking will like the
brand or share the content. So indicate the action (like, share) and the benefits to the reader
when interacting on the social channel.
This example of icons in the footer from Screwfix does a better job of explaining what
customers can expect from the social presence.
2
Set your goals
3
3
Defining proposition
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.
rr Dedicate more space to the social share.
rr Explain the benefit of clicking.
rr Use an incentive.
This example from Revolution, shows a two step campaign. First ask for the reviews, then
email the results and give a discount.
5
Defining strategy
A simple, but effective approach is to include more reference to customer ratings within your
emails. as this can encouraging purchase based on customer-picks. Yet, customer reviews /
ratings don’t always increase the conversion rates, so it will be something you should test.
4
Segmentation
rr Use headlines, copy and images to highlight the call to action.
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
3
4
Segmentation
16
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Test, learn and refine
You can even get the best of both worlds by encouraging email sign-up and liking
simultaneously. Just like Scribblers use as described in this post16 and in the more detailed
case study.
6
Creating
Now that many brands have grown fan bases and have ongoing social media activity, the
social media and email integration opportunities are both ways. This includes bringing
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.
5
Defining strategy
Best Practice Tip 14 Using social media channels to encourage email opt-in
A like or a follow is essentially a low commitment action. Whereas providing an email
address and marketing permission is a higher commitment. Email offers more personal,
targeted communication and generally leads to higher conversion rates. So it is a logical
step to encourage email opt-in via your social presence.
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
4
Segmentation
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
their email service provider’s Social Campaigns app was created to give people access to
the PDF in exchange for a like.
3
Defining proposition
3
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
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Step 4
Segmentation and targeting techniques
1
Prioritise
rr Q. Have our strategic approaches to segmentation and targeting been reviewed and
selected?
2
Set your goals
There are many different levels in sophistication of targeting, some of which may or may not
be worthwhile depending on the value the segmentation can add. This always relates to the
size of your list as well. 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.
Related guides
3
Defining proposition
Recommended resource Marketing automation Best Practices Guide
Segmentation, Scoring and Life Cycle marketing form a large part of Marketing Automation
functionality. The Smart Insights Marketing automation Best Practices Guide goes in
deeper and among other answers these questions:
þþ How can we best score our leads?
þþ How should we nurture our leads to convert more to sale?
þþ Which criteria should I use to selection the best marketing automation vendor?
Checklist – six email targeting approaches
rr 1. Customer profile characteristics. Demographics , geographics and customer set
preferences.
rr 3. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted). This is
the most powerful method, though also requires more technology to deliver it.
rr 4. Customer multi-channel behaviour. Targeting based on channel preference.
rr 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.
Key Strategy Recommendation 7 Combining and layering your segmentation can offer the
best combination of all the options
A layered segmentation approach summarising the segmentation approach used by eBay
UK is shown below.
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The wider the audience and the product or service offering and the narrower the needs and
preferences the more segmentation layers and sophistication within them are needed. This is
how eBay manages this:
6
Creating
rr 5. Customer value. The value a recipient represents at this moment and future expected
value..
5
Defining strategy
rr 2. Customer lifecycle groups. Most commonly grouped in categories like new
subscribers or prospects, active customers and lapsed or no longer engaging in email.
4
4
Segmentation
We outline the six segmentation and targeting approaches that you could use.
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
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.
4
Segmentation
4
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
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Test, learn and refine
A company with just a handful of related products will need relatively little segmentation,
since by definition anyone who subscribes is already targeted via self-selection. Simply
choosing to sign up to such a list can by definition be enough to properly target and offer
value.
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.
1
Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 15 Use event-triggered emails and dynamic content insertion to deliver
highly relevant emails
To implement this level of email marketing a capable email marketing system that supports
event-triggered marketing and dynamic content insertion is needed. Business rules are
used to drop different offers and email messages into a container as described in this post
alongside our mail sequence contact strategy template.
2
Set your goals
We also see eBay using triggered emails. This example shows the event that someone bids
but does not win the auction. eBay sends a triggered email showing ‘Buy It Now’ options and
more current auctions for the same item.
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
4
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
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Let’s now review the six core targeting options available through email. Review which you
use now and which would be relevant in the future.
Targeting option 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics)
rr Q. Are the options for profile-based targeting used?
1
Prioritise
This is where most will start; with traditional strategic customer segmentation based on fields
of their profile that describe the type of customer and its.
2
Set your goals
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
vs. healthy eating for females.
4
4
Segmentation
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).
3
Defining proposition
Best Practice Tip 16 Test different targeting options
Thanks to the low cost of email creative and broadcast, it can be very effective to test
different targeting methods and increase relevance of your emails for your audience as well
as conversion rates.
The data acquisition source may also convey information for targeting. Here are a couple of
examples when this is the case.
Sophisticated companies will test for this in customers or infer it using profile characteristics and response behaviour and then develop different creative treatments accordingly.
Companies that use polls and surveys can potentially use these to infer style preferences.
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Best Practice Tip 17 Consider tone and style preference
Some demographics will naturally have heightened response to a certain type 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.
6
Creating
rr 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. Similarly, consider tracking the site behaviour and capturing previous
visited pages in their browsing session to get even more data on the new subscriber’s
initial interest.
5
Defining strategy
rr Offline data collection. A paper form based collection gives likely geography for future
targeting.
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
The most traditional way of gaining customer demographic and profile information for
targeting is by means of a preference centre.
5
Defining strategy
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. Be careful with promising to give incentives on the recipient’s birthday
though. Some users tend to fill in a date very close (not their actual birthday) to receive the
incentive sooner rather than later.
4
4
Segmentation
Since customer interests are not always so black and white, rather than tick boxes for
choices. Amazon uses Like, Neutral and Dislike in this 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.
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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Targeting option 2. Current and predicted value
rr Q. Are the options for targeting based on customer value reviewed?
Marketers work hard to understand their most valuable customers, so that they can develop
loyalty and retain this group. A useful way of thinking about customer value is these three
groups, originally identified by Peppers and Rogers:
1
Prioritise
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.
2
Set your goals
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.
3
Defining proposition
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. Alternatively, if they are identified as “sleepers” (people that are unaware of
their product use, as can be with subscription based products) you can try to wake them up
by communicating more or choose to communicate even less.
2. Most-growable customers (MGCs)
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.
4
4
Segmentation
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 current value
is relatively low compared with the MVCs.
Online marketing offers great opportunities to make personalised recommendations through
the website and email.
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.
6
Creating
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 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.
5
Defining strategy
3. Below-zero customers (BZCs)
7
Test, learn and refine
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1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
Targeting option 3. Customer lifecycle groups
As visitors use online services they can potentially pass through several stages, often known
as the online loyalty ladder.
The actual period of inactivity should reflect the product or service. Holidays are purchased
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:
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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 like a
discount for next purchase 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.
6
Creating
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 with a one-time purchase versus customers who have purchased multiple
times. A customer is sometimes not considered to be a loyal or repeat customer until they
have purchased two to five times, in which case the single purchase segment is more akin to
a warm prospect than a loyal customer.
5
Defining strategy
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.
4
4
Segmentation
rr Q. Are the options for targeting based on customer lifecycle or relationship used?
rr ‘Logged-on’
rr ‘Cautionary’
rr ‘Developing’
rr ‘Established’
1
Prioritise
rr ‘Dedicated’
rr ‘Logged-off’ (the aim here is to win back).
The next example of what we think is an excellent branded welcome email from Groupon:
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
4
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
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As emails should be typically kept short there may be too much to say than possible in a single
welcome email. The welcome 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 behaviour based. So what
comes next in the series depends on what engagement, if any, occurred in the previous welcome
emails, sometimes combined with their buying behaviour.
1
Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 18 Use behavioural email marketing
Rather than manually planning email campaigns, use automated event-triggered
messaging to encourage continued purchase.
2
Set your goals
Here is a win-back example here from Skillshare, a subscription service targeting previous
service subscribers with a discount to get them to subscribe to the service again:
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
4
5
Defining strategy
Email reactivation guide
The aim of the Smart Insights Email Marketing Reengagement and Reactivation Guide is
to help marketers who are engaged in email marketing campaigns to tackle the issue of
inactive email subscribers. Inactive email subscribers don’t have to be lost opportunities
and there are ways to reengage those users and potentially turn them into paying
customers or clients.
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Advanced lifecycle email marketing guide
6
Creating
Recommended resource Advanced Lifecycle marketing guides
Welcome email and onboarding guide
For example, Tesco.com has a touch strategy that includes a sequence of follow-up
communications triggered after different events in the customer lifecycle.
1
Prioritise
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.
Trigger event 1: Customer first registers on site (but does not buy)
þþ Auto-response (AR) 1: Two days after registration an email is sent offering phone
assistance and £5 discount off first purchase to encourage trial.
2
Set your goals
Trigger event 2: Customer first purchases online
þþ AR1: Immediate order confirmation.
3
Defining proposition
þþ AR2: Five days after purchase an email is sent with link to online customer satisfaction
survey, asking about quality of service from driver and picker (e.g. item quality and
substitutions).
þþ 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.
þþ AR4: Generic monthly e-newsletter with online exclusive offers encouraging cross-selling.
þþ AR5: Bi-weekly alert with personalised offers for customer.
þþ AR7: Quarterly mailing of coupons encouraging repeat sales and cross-sales.
Trigger event 3: Customer does not purchase for an extended period
þþ AR2: A further discount incentive is used to encourage continued usage to shop after the
first shop after a break.
5
Defining strategy
þþ AR1: Dormancy detected – reactivation email with customer satisfaction survey (to
identify any problems) and a £5 incentive.
4
4
Segmentation
þþ AR6: After 2 months – £5 discount for next purchase.
The next example shows an excellent option for visualising these types of campaigns - we
suggest you create a before and after version mapping emails across the customer lifecycle.
6
Creating
To see the full size visuals see this post on the case study17.
7
Test, learn and refine
17
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Smart Insights; Two Email marketing case studies
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1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
rr Q. Are the options for targeting based on response behaviour used?
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 as
customers progress through the lifecycle.
Statistics18 say that by employing abandoned shopping cart mails on average sales are
increased by 7 to 9 percent. Combined with browse abandonment (based on search and
browse behaviour on the site, an additional 2 to 3 percent can be achieved.
18
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Source: Triggered Messaging
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A classic abandoned shopping cart email is an example of targeting based on customer
behaviour. This form triggered messaging is triggered by a web visitor that places a product
in the online shopping cart, but not completing the sale. By encouraging the visitor to return
to their cart and finishing the process, the chance of conversion increases,
6
Creating
Browse and cart abandonment emails
5
Defining strategy
Targeting option 4. Current and predicted behaviour in response
and purchase
4
Segmentation
4
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
4
4
Segmentation
Similarly, reassuring cart abandoners about your Return Policy, Shipping Costs and Secure
Shopping - can work in increasing the conversions. As well as having product images and
clear call to actions like in this example19 by Blaze.
3
Defining proposition
þþ This example by CustomInk, is one of a abandoned cart series. This specific email
addresses three concerns that a shopper might have while ordering: Timely delivery,
quality of the product and their own (custom) design not being right. Not only attending
the shopper to the unfinished shopping process, but also lowering barriers that might
prohibit from buying.
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
19
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Best Practice Tip 19 Develop a scoring method to show levels of customer activity
Here 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 channels such as direct mail and phone.
1
Prioritise
We advise you to take the length of the (email) relationship into consideration when
analysing email activity. Epsilon suggests splitting your file into 5 activity groups which they
call EASE or Email Activity Segmentation Evaluation.
2
Set your goals
The ease analysis first breaks down the email file into two categories: New and Mature.
New represents addresses that have been on a marketer’s file for less than three months.
Mature are those addresses that have been on a marketer’s file for over three months. Each
category is then further segmented based on customer email activity.
The New segment is broken into two categories:
rr Rising Stars: Subscribers who have both opened and/or clicked on an email
3
Defining proposition
rr Question Marks: Subscribers who have been inactive for the previous three months
The Mature segment is broken into three categories:
rr Superstars: Subscribers who have opened or clicked within the most recent three months
rr Nappers: Subscribers who have opened or clicked emails more than three months ago
rr Dormants: Subscribers who have been inactive for the past 12 months
The new segment will have other communication needs and therefore should be handled
than the mature segment. This split can also give an indication of the effectiveness of your
email communication during the ‘honeymoon period’ of the email relationship.
Using these RFM techniques in combination with the other targeting techniques it becomes
possible to use predictive modelling and identify the ‘Next Best Product’ for particular
customer types.
As we want our emails to be as relevant as possible, marketers have been trying to know,
beforehand, what the subscriber will like and act on. All segmentation and targeting options
discussed are methods to do so. There is one specific methodology that is gaining more
traction: The Email Recommendation Engine, be it rule based or partially self-learning
(Artificial Intelligence).
Think of the days that Amazon pioneered “people like you also bought” as an example.
Presenting a Next Best Offer, product recommendations or other content based on
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Email Recommendation Engines
6
Creating
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 database selection 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.
5
Defining strategy
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 later on in this guide.
4
4
Segmentation
Rising Stars, Superstars and Nappers are considered active segments. Question Marks and
Dormants are considered inactive segments.
behaviour, purchases and customer profile is smart. The use of email personalization is
by no means a new topic, however what can be done today with the latest recommender
technology is much more exciting and impactful than adding a bit of custom text to a
message.
1
Prioritise
For example, by allowing predictive recommendations to be added to any email, research20
from Liveintent (previously Avari) found an average lift in CTOR (click-to-open rate) of 73%
versus emails with no predictive content.
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
6
Creating
The example21 below, shows product recommendation based on previously purchased
product at the top. A helmet to accompany a tricycle. As well as Recommended products
based on similar user purchases “More popular products”. The email is built up technically to
fetch product information, it can dynamically insert the right images, product names, as well
as display the satisfaction rating and prices.
5
Defining strategy
Adoption is growing, as prices for the software go down and implementation is becoming
easier. Marketing automation software, for instance, already needs monitoring of site
behaviour to be able to do proper lead scoring and send out abandoned cart / abandoned
browse campaigns. From that connection it is only a small step to content recommendations.
4
Segmentation
4
7
Test, learn and refine
20
21
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Source: http://www.emailvendorselection.com/recommendation-engines-for-email-marketing/
Source: Bluecore Spring 2016 Lookbook
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1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
4
Segmentation
For more detail and examples of using Artifcial Intelligence and predictive analytics for
examples, see our guide on this topic in the Marketing Technology toolkit (available from May
2017).
Targeting option 5. Multi-channel behaviour (channel preference)
You will want to deliver the perfect message for each customer, we call this ‘Right
Touching’22 – this is the holy grail of digital marketing. Just one aspect of this is determining
which customers prefer email and then upweighting email activity more for them, while
using more traditional communications for contacts who prefer these and at the same time
reducing frequency in other channels like email and direct social media contact.
22
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Dave’s definition of Right Touching.
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Rather than asking explicitly for channel preference Orange tested the same message sent
in different channels, including email, MMS (mobile messaging service) andDM 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 require online action work better in email than DM, whereas calls to
action to text to a short code or download a mobile app work fine within a DM.
6
Creating
Best Practice Tip 20 Use a right touching approach to channel preference
It is useful to have a flag within the database which indicates customers’ channel
preference and by implications, the best channel to target them by.
5
Defining strategy
No matter how enthusiastic you are about online channels, some customers will prefer using
online communications channels while others will prefer traditional channels.
Channel preference will be indicated by RFM and response analysis, since customers with
a preference for certain online channels will be more responsive in them and will make more
purchases online. Customers can also be asked directly through surveys.
1
Prioritise
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.
2
Set your goals
Best Practice Tip 21 Optimize ROMI in multi-channel communications
The high cost of DM and phone channels changes the business equation. Here we can
try to optimize the Return On our Marketing Investments (ROMI). 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.
3
Defining proposition
Targeting option 6. Customer personas including psychographics
rr Q. Are the 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 to design personas for typical customer types.
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.
þþ Impulsive or rational decision maker
þþ Price-conscious
6
Creating
We can also include psychographics which summarise the mental attitudes, motivations and
opinions of customers, for example:
5
Defining strategy
What is it? Digital customer personas
Digital customer personas are a summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and
access platform preferences of different groups of users.
4
4
Segmentation
Best Practice Tip 22 Use digital customer personas
Personas are a powerful technique increasingly used to improve the usability and customer
centricity of a website and other communications.
þþ Risk-taker or conservative
þþ View they want to project of themselves.
The persona concept can also be used for e-newsletters and other forms of communication.
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 and usability design by companies who have applied
the technique.
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þþ Willingness to share information or participate socially
I have not heard about personas being used that much in an email context, but they can
be usefully applied, particularly for e-newsletters. The American National Football League
(NFL) used personas and identified three types of scenarios – one following a particular team
who wanted to check upcoming games, another who was very interested in the statistics
associated with the fantasy league and another who tended to be more interested in the
position in the league.
1
Prioritise
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:
2
Set your goals
þþ Demographic: age, gender, education, occupation and for B2B, company size, position in
buying unit.
þþ Psychographic: goals, tasks, motivation.
þþ Webographics: web experience (months), typical usage location (home, work, while on
the run), usage platform (broadband, mobile), usage frequency, favourite sites and online
channels.
3
Defining proposition
2. Remember that personas are only models of characteristics and environment:
þþ Design targets.
þþ Avoid over stereotyping.
þþ Three or four usually suffice to improve general usability, but more needed for specific
behaviours.
þþ Choose one primary persona whom, if satisfied, means others are likely to be satisfied.
‘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.’
To summarise the approaches described in this section, the example of Euroffice is a good one.
Euroffice targeted email marketing case study
Euroffice (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
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Recommended resource? Personas toolkit
See our Personas toolkit showing key issues to consider when creating personas and with
examples of different styles of personas.
6
Creating
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.
5
Defining strategy
Once different personas have been developed who are representative of key site visitor
types or customer types, a primary persona is sometimes identified. Wodtke, a specialist
in the area of user experience design, says:
4
4
Segmentation
What is it? Primary persona
A primary persona is the most important persona summarising the typical characteristics,
needs, motivations and preferences that will be leading in your communication efforts.
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 supplies 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.
1
Prioritise
Rather than manually developing campaigns for each segment, which is time consuming,
Euroffice mainly used 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 a 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
have heightened response to different promotions.
2
Set your goals
Through using fields within the database to identify which segment customers belong to we
can target them and then using mass customisation and personalisation to tailor offers to
these customers as described in the following section.
5
Defining strategy
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 them, so achieving ‘soft lock-in’.
4
4
Segmentation
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.
3
Defining proposition
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 Group 1, Euroffice believes that creating
impulse-buying through price-promotions is most important. These will be based on
categories purchased in the past.
6
Creating
7
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Step 5
Defining an integrated view on RFM and email
frequency
1
Prioritise
One of the mayor strategic concerns in email involves selecting the best frequency and
types of touches for your business. This is a topic close to developing adoptive tactics for
engagement and customer purchase optimization. So we will dive into (e)RFM and setting
the right email frequency.
2
Set your goals
RFM analysis
RFM analysis is potentially a powerful technique for email marketers, particularly in
transactional businesses such as catalogue retailers, knowledge.
3
Defining proposition
What is it? RFM
The classic use of RFM is to analyse customer purchase behaviour typically falls into three
key areas:
þþ Recency of last purchase, e.g. three months ago.
þþ Frequency of purchase, e.g. twice per quarter or twice per year.
4
Segmentation
þþ Monetary value of purchase(s), e.g. average order value of £50, total annual purchase
value of £5,000. A primary persona is the most important persona summarising the
typical characteristics, needs, motivations and preferences that will be leading in your
communication efforts.
We will see that considering just Recency and Frequency can be used by businesses of all
types whether they are transactional or not.
þþ Frequency.
þþ Recency.
þþ Amount (obviously equivalent to monetary value).
5
5
Defining strategy
Note that an alternative for assessing audience purchase behaviour is known as RFM or a
similar equivalent FRAC, which stands for:
þþ Category (types of product purchased – not included within RFM).
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
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With online the advent of web and email marketing, there are many more opportunities
for applying this behavioural customer information to use RF analysis in virtually every
market. This is possible since recency and frequency can be used to understand and
respond to other types of tracked 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.
6
Creating
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.
in which they deliver sustainable ROI. Catalogue companies simply can’t afford to send to
customers with lower propensity to buy.
1
Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 23 eRFM to reduce customer marketing fatigue
The business purpose behind using the RFM model in email marketing is quite different
than traditional RFM, it is not to control channel costs, because they are typically very
low, but rather to analyse and avoid customer marketing fatigue. The goal is to segment
based on subscriber activity, therefore this is common called eRFM or Engagement RFM
the two extremes are the active and involved email segment which have a high level of
Engagement and the non-responding and inactive part, the Non-engaged.
2
Set your goals
We will now give an overview of how (e)RFM approaches can be applied in online marketing,
with special reference to email marketing. Note that the major difference between eRFM
and RFM is mainly in the focus on activity and engagement versus purchase behaviour.
Traditional RFM is biased towards purchase activity.
Recency:
3
Defining proposition
Recency shows the number of days since a customer completed an action.
Jim Novo stresses the importance of recency to catalogue-style purchases 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 offer from a
company shortly after you make your first purchase from them.’
4
Segmentation
Online we can measure a lot more than days elapsed since last purchase. We can assess
many actions that monitor the level of Engagement:
þþ Purchase.
þþ Visit to site or particular type of content (using web analytics).
þþ Opening or clicking through on an email or e-newsletter.
Online applications of analysis include:
þþ Monitoring through time to identify vulnerable customers.
þþ Scoring customers to preferentially target more responsive customers for cost savings.
6
Creating
þþ 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.
5
5
Defining strategy
þþ Log-on to a site (more accurate than cookies provided user ID is not shared).
Frequency:
Frequency refers to the number of times an action is completed in a period.
þþ Five purchases per year.
þþ Five visits per month.
þþ Five log-ins per week.
þþ Five email opens per month, five email clicks per year.
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Examples are similar to those for recency, for example, but with reference to a time period:
Online applications of analysis include:
þþ A combination with recency for RF targeting.
þþ Adjusting email cadence and email pressure.
þþ Event driven email via sense and respond within a certain period.
Monetary:
1
Prioritise
Monetary value is the amount spent in the period. The amount could be per month, per
quarter or per year depending on the type of application. For an e-retailer, average order
value would be appropriate also.
2
Set your goals
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.
3
Defining proposition
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.
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 of purchase. Monetary value can also skew the analysis for high
value initial purchases.
Values could be assigned to each customer as follows:
4
Segmentation
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.
5
Defining strategy
5
6
Creating
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:
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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.
Recency:
þþ 0 – Not known.
þþ 1 – Within last 12 months.
þþ 2 – Within last six months.
þþ 3 – Within last three months.
1
Prioritise
þþ 4 – Within last one month.
This could be purchase frequency or, as here, recency of a visit to the website.
Frequency:
þþ 0 – Not known.
2
Set your goals
þþ 1 – Every six months.
þþ 2 – Every three months.
þþ 3 – Every two months.
þþ 4 – Monthly.
This could be purchase frequency or, as here, visits to the website.
3
Defining proposition
Monetary value:
þþ 0 – Less than 10 euro.
þþ 1 – 10–50 euro.
þþ 2 – 50–100 euro.
þþ 3 – 100–200 euro.
4
Segmentation
þþ 4 – More than 200 euro.
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.
5
5
Defining strategy
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.
6
Creating
7
Test, learn and refine
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:
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Oncers (attended theatre once):
þþ Recent oncers
attended <12 months.
þþ Rusty oncers
attended >12 <36 months.
þþ Very rusty oncers attended 36+ months.
Twicers:
attended <12 months.
þþ Rusty twicer
attended >12 <36 months.
1
Prioritise
þþ Recent twicer
þþ Very rusty twicer attended in 36+ months.
2+ subscribers:
Booked 2+ events in current season.
þþ Recent
Booked 2+ last season.
þþ Very rusty
Booked 2+ more than a season ago.
2
Set your goals
þþ Current subscribers
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.
3
Defining proposition
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.
4
Segmentation
Two additional measures of customer behaviour that can be used to understand behaviour
and also to set targets for retention marketing are latency and hurdle rate.
Latency is the average time between customer events in the customer lifecycle.
Latency can be applied to these events:
rr Website visits.
rr Second and third purchase.
rr Email click-throughs.
rr Use of channels like mobile apps.
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Latency
6
Creating
Additional methods of reviewing online customer behaviour
5
Defining strategy
5
Online applications of latency analysis include:
rr Put in place triggers that alert you to behaviour outside norm – increased interest or
disinterest, then…
rr Manage behaviour using e-communications or traditional communications.
1
Prioritise
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.
2
Set your goals
Hurdle rate
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 you can
compare groups or set targets to increase engagement with online channels as the examples
shown below.
3
Defining proposition
Online marketing examples of hurdle rates
þþ 20 percent of customers have visited in the past four months.
þþ 5 percent of customers have made three or more purchases in a year.
þþ 60 percent of registrants have logged on in a year.
þþ 30 percent have clicked through on email in six months.23
4
Segmentation
Online applications of analysis of include:
þþ Use for objectives to deepen relationship.
þþ Use for targeting communications on particular groups, e.g. reactivate those who are less
engaged.
6
Creating
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 characteristics also called
lookalikes through renting direct mail or email lists or advertising online in similar locations.
5
5
Defining strategy
þþ Use for monitoring impact of communications, i.e. how the change in (average) hurdle
rates as a result of tactics.
Lifetime value calculations
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.
23
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An 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.
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?’
1
Prioritise
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 in the long term.
2
Set your goals
2. We assume that each new customer is worth precisely the same to us and we ignore
differentials in profitability between differing types of customer.
3. We assume that there is an endless supply of potential customers, while often this is not
the case and work on customer loyalty is needed.
3
Defining proposition
Best Practice Tip 24 Calculate your SOLVE: Subscriber Opt-in Lifetime Value via Email
Jordie van Rijn suggests we calculate SOLVE24, exactly what a subscriber is worth during
his email relationship with your company. By taking the total of email marketing profits
divide it by the average number of active subscribers in your base during the last year
and multiply it by the average lifetime of an email address in your database.
24
Lifetime value analysis enables email marketers to:
þþ Plan and measure investment in customer acquisition programmes.
4
Segmentation
þþ 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.
þþ Establish the true value of a company’s customer base.
þþ Make decisions about products and offers.
þþ Make decisions about the value of introducing or replacing CRM and marketing
automation systems.
5
5
Defining strategy
þþ Measure the effectiveness of alternative customer retention strategies.
þþ Make decisions about the value of introducing or replacing CRM and marketing
automation systems.
rr Q. Has our email frequency been reviewed?
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 their email is being flooded. They
become ‘emotionally unsubscribed’. Worse than this is if they hit the report as spam or junk
button, as this has deliverability implications.
24
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Source: Customer Lifetime Value Calculation for Email Marketing
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Is there an optimal email frequency? Is it one email a quarter, week, month or day even? Is
less more or is more more?!
6
Creating
Set best email frequency
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 behaviour
1
Prioritise
The 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.
2
Set your goals
Best Practice Tip 25 Review your frequency and email types against competitors
Look at the average number of emails you and your competitors send to subscribers per
week, month or year. This can be a good starting point for determining your own email
frequency.
3
Defining proposition
The growth of the daily 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 that the customer
is happy to keep receiving the mails and will delete or ignore those that aren’t relevant.
4
Segmentation
Beyond this you must use statistics that most systems can’t report readily, so you need to do
some more analysis to identify:
rr Average frequency of email received and plot profile by frequency for different list members – to see the proportion of the list who are receiving too many or two few emails –
see chart.
rr 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.
5
5
Defining strategy
rr List activity – the percentage of your list that open, click and buy within a period, e.g.
quarterly or annual.
rr 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.
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rr Some e-mail systems do have statistics on per subscriber open and click activity or “engagement score”. If so, you should review if (combined) use of this functionality will be
sufficient for your reporting needs.
6
Creating
rr Break down list activity by time on list – common sense dictates that the longer they are
on your list the less responsive your emails will become.
Best Practice Tip 26 Review unsubscribe and email activity levels through time
Graph 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. Have a good look at total engagement as averages and percentages will
always go down with higher frequency, but results probably will go up.
1
Prioritise
Testing options to decide on the best email frequency
2
Set your goals
It’s not an easy question to answer by gut instinct, so 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 1
3
Defining proposition
Sean 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.
4
Segmentation
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 2
After the experiment Net-a-Porter.com now sends each user two automatically generated
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.
Example 3
Guess applied predictive analytics to inform their decision by first identifying and
understanding their customers across two dimensions: Purchase-based customer personas,
and high-value customers. These insights were then applied to predict future purchase
response to acquisition and retention campaigns. This has prompted a change in the Guess
email strategy. Three years ago we were emailing customers three, possibly four times a
25
26
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Brand Republic: Net-a-Porter ups conversion rate after cutting email activity
Custora customer interview
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In an interview with Guess Director of Marketing – CRM, Victoria Grahan, Custora26describes
how their decision on frequency is taken. They aim to use higher frequencies of one email a
day, but looking to keep relevance high.
6
Creating
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.
5
5
Defining strategy
According to Brand Republic25, fashion e-retailer Net-a-Porter.com dramatically reduced the
number of emails 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.
week. Graham says: “We were very much “batch and blast”, and our email calendar was
driven by our merchant team: If there’s a product launch, or a big promotion, like 40% off all
sweaters, that was driving the email calendar. We’re now in the pro-cess of changing that”.
1
Prioritise
“We’ve been cognizant of the fact that it is quite likely that we were irritating our customers
with constantly talking to them. We had two options when we talked about getting
personalized with our emails: One option was to cut back on emails. If today’s email is about
denim, and you like accessories, you just don’t get today’s email. But the thought of cutting
down the number of emails we send out was scary. The other option was, if we’re going to
email everyone every day, let’s talk to them in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to them”.
2
Set your goals
In a test, they isolated the accessories persona and the non-accessories persona. They
compared the accessories customers who received the accessories-focused email (group
A) to accessories customers who received the regular email (group B). The CTR and
conversion rate of group A far exceeded those of group B.
3
Defining proposition
Another analysis approach was identifying high-value customers to optimize acquisition. This
dispelled a lot of assumptions according to Graham, such as assuming that top customers
were metropolitan customers, who liked core products like denim, but also loved accessories.
But this wasn’t necessarily the case, Graham explains: “when we looked at where our
customer really over-index and differentiate themselves from the rest of our customer
database, they found that they were more likely to live in suburban areas. Arizona popped
as a big state for high lifetime value customers. Their first purchase tended to be a knit or a
sweater or denim”.
4
Segmentation
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:
þþ B. Change frequency for different segments. One frequency size doesn’t 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.
þþ E. Re-engagement campaigns. Re-activation campaigns use content or discounts
to encourage email subscribers to become active again. Sometimes a preference
update or a renewal of opt-in is asked. Permanently inactive email subscribers can hurt
deliverability and can muddy the water in reporting.
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þþ D. Increase direct mail or other channels for customers with a lower email
response. This is sometimes called ‘touching’. 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 communication (for instance email or catalogue) at all.
6
Creating
þþ C. Give customers a choice on frequency. You do this through their profile page or
‘preference centre’. An alternative option is to provide opt-down as well as unsubscribe
choice. Opt-down can offer a temporary pause option from emails or unsubscribing
to certain types of emails and thus reducing frequency. Teletext Holidays found they
recovered five percent of customers by offering opt-down in the unsubscribe process.
5
5
Defining strategy
þþ A. Reduce email frequencies automatically for lower responding customers. Set a
database field for activity or engagement level for each customer to help implement. Amazon
is good at this and increases frequency through event-triggered emails sent in response to
someone browsing, searching or buying – that is one of the smartest approaches.
Step 6
Creating effective email templates and creative
rr Q. Have our email templates been reviewed for effectiveness?
1
Prioritise
Effective email templates should balance the need for visual prominence of:
þþ A main text headline.
þþ Copy to engage (where relevant, like an editorial on an e-newsletter).
þþ Sub-headings.
2
Set your goals
þþ Different blocks of content and offers.
þþ The call(s) to action.
3
Defining proposition
Best Practice Tip 27 Employ a flexible and reusable email template
By using email marketing software that allows you to re-use templates and possibly
copy complete emails, a marketer can save a lot of time while keeping brand and design
con-sistent. Some tools will have the option to add or remove pre-designed content blocks
in a drag-and-drop fashion, allowing for more flexibility within one multi-purpose template.
Email content automation
rr Q. Are we making our email production process efficient?
4
Segmentation
Time is money. One of the biggest problems marketers face is losing time in curation,
copy-pasting and sorting content for their email marketing messages. It can take up a big
portion of you and your teams time just to send a frequent “business as usual” email.
5
Defining strategy
What is it? Email content automation
Relevant, timely content to engage the user based on their profile or inferred interest and
location is automatically inserted into the design of the email using a technique sometimes
known as ‘dynamic content insertion’.
Email marketers know this, as their vast content and product libraries made them the first
to feel the challenge to get engaging, up-to-date content in the right email in front of every
single subscriber. This is what Content Automation can do for you.
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Dustin, a re-seller of IT products and services automatically displays each recipient
highly personalized products in the email, specific to their particular browse behavior and
preference, at the time email is opened. Therefore it is no longer necessary to insert the
products by hand, segment and split sends into for instance B2B and B2C target groups.
Significantly reducing email build and creation time.
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6
Creating
Best Practice Tip 28 Automate repetitive tasks where possible
If you can automate part of this process while still delivering timely, personalized and
rele-vant content, it is a big step ahead in email marketing maturity. Review your process
and see if there are any steps that can be automated to save time.
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
How does this work?
4
Segmentation
Dustin connect a live API and designed a real-time image template using27 Kickdynamic.
At time of send, a user ID and sendout ID is merged into a live Tag. This fetches the latest
product recommendations for each customer. Every time the email is opened, the product
information is updated. The recipient always sees the latest price and discount information.
Curating content per email is a resource challenge. Personalization is a tech challenge.
Creating personalized email and content from every recipient beyond preference
segmentation therefore is a technology resource challenge
5
Defining strategy
Email marketing template examples
To guide good practice we have created these outlines which you can reference against the
information in this section. These show the options of template sections to discuss with your
designers, most often not all of these features are required.
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Creating
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27
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Model solus email template
1
Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
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Creating
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Model enewsletter template layout
“Header”
From: <Display address – newsletter name> [Physical address]
Subject: Focused subject line (Newsletter issue, featured offers/articles)
Banner
<Visual engagement>
<Main message>
“Header”
<Offer description or additional offer, e.g. Catalogue>
Brand
Ident
Lead copy <Personalised>
<Initial call-to-action>
Can be left,
centre or right
Left
Sidebar
(optional)
Callto-action
Callto-action
Repeating feature offer sub-headlines
Options:
<Detailed offer description>
<Features list>
<Benefits list>
<Range of producs – images and text>
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Defining proposition
Table of
contents
above fold
essential
for information
or feature-led
Enewsletters
Product categories or site main navigation
Clickable text headline (+sub-head?)
Lead
Lead
paragraph
image
(optional)
<Salutation: Dear>
2
Set your goals
Note:
1
Prioritise
<Text: Offer / message summary : call-to-action>
“Pre-header”
<View in browser text hyperlink>
<Whitelist – “add to address book” / <Verification ID – Postcode/Member>
<My Profile / <Comms Preferences or occasionally unsubscribe>
Main block
“Body”
Callto-actions
Right
sidebar
(optional)
4
Segmentation
Note: Asymmetric layouts more visually appealing
<Summary of offers>
<Compelling reason to act now>
Closing
paragraph
Callto-actions
Sign-off
5
Defining strategy
<Sign-off text> <Person or company>
Optional P.S.
Main or category navigation
<Company
<Privacy statement>
<Unsubscribe>
<Terms and Conditions>
Footer
þþ Campaign monitor gallery
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Creating
You may also be interested in these compilations of examples templates to inform updates to
your templates or to use as a starting point:
þþ Email Gallery
Assess headlines
rr 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.
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þþ Really good emails)
1
Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 29 Ensure the email is scannable even when images are blocked
Since images are still blocked by some email software, you will get a better response where
the main headlines and headlines of sub-sections or containers are clear with images off.
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
mes-sages also.
rr Q. Are headings and text clear when images are blocked?
2
Set your goals
This is an example from a mail from CNET How To. The version on the left has full images
on, the right is a rendering preview as in Yahoo web client with images blocked. Even though
a large portion of the mail is not visible, the use of headers and alt-texts for the images,
ensures that we can still understand and act on that email.
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
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Visual focus or priority on a limited number of areas
rr Q. Does the email have a clear visual focus?
Although readers can scan quickly, a page will be much more effective if there are clear
visual priorities on a limited number of areas. An e-newsletter offers the option to add a
(visual) structure that indicates importance.
1
Prioritise
Use pyramid style copywriting
rr Q. Email effective if only first part of email “above-the-fold” displayed?
2
Set your goals
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. It is worth testing if a call to action should be visible
above the fold.
What is it? Above-the-fold
A term derived from direct mail where this is the first part of a letter when it is opened. The
equivalent in email is the top of the email. Starting with what appears in the preview pane
before the user scrolls down.
3
Defining proposition
Clear calls to action
rr Q. Are our calls to action clear?
4
Segmentation
Your call to action should describe what happens or which action is needed from the recipient
clicks on it. This tells the reader what to expect. The clarity is either made directly (preferred)
or because of its context. “Buy now” is an action oriented call to action, but only clear what
you should be buying now because of the product description next to it.
Ensure images are effective
rr Q. Has effective imagery been used and is it consistent with the email?
Some of the image issues to consider are:
5
Defining strategy
þþ Relevant to product or offer.
þþ Quality effective to support message and offer.
þþ Images linked rather than embedded to reduce weight of email.
þþ Alt-text tag used to explain message when images are blocked by the email client.
Crafting effective copy
rr 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.
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Effective subject lines
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Creating
To write successful email copy, you need to start by thinking about how readers interact
with email. 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. If you are familiar with writing copy for print, consider these three important
questions you should ask.
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.
1
Prioritise
We all know that subject lines are important, but do you know the part which is most
important? For us it’s the first two words. By using a technique called ‘frontloading’, you try
and craft subject lines that have the most important or most compelling words at the front of
the subject line.
Don’t forget that characters also matter. Comma’s, slashes, lines, stars, capitals can have an
impact on open rates. Also appropriate symbols like a heart (♥) can make you stand out in
the inbox, so should be tested.
2
Set your goals
What is it? Pre-header
Email clients like Gmail and Outlook.com and diverse on mobile devices display sender
name, subject and the first line of the email in the inbox. This first line is called the
Pre-header or “snippet” and can also influence your open rates and the user experience.
Make sure your template allows you to adjust your pre-header text.
3
Defining proposition
Make copy scannable
rr 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 slower
from a computer screen, this behaviour is likely to be exhibited in all on-screen copy, whether
web or email.
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Segmentation
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:
5
Defining strategy
þþ 1. Omit needless words! He says we should remove half our original words and then
strive to remove half again.
þþ 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
þþ The average saving.
þþ How many customers buy more than once.
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6
Creating
þþ How many new deals they have per week.
þþ Customer feedback and ratings on deals and service.
Of course the other implication of scanning behaviour is that we should make our emails
scannable! Nielsen suggests these as approaches to this:
þþ Highlighted keywords (we will look at different forms of highlighting for text and HTML
emails later in this guide).
þþ Meaningful not ‘clever or funny’ sub-headings.
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þþ 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.
þþ Bulleted lists.
þþ One idea per paragraph.
þþ The inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion.
þþ Half the word count (or less) than conventional writing.
Make email style conversational
1
Prioritise
rr 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.
2
Set your goals
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.
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.
3
Defining proposition
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:
4
Segmentation
‘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
rr Q. Does our email language connect with our readers?
5
Defining strategy
Professional email marketers have to work extra hard to establish credibility and prove their
benefits to their readers. 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:
þþ Try to achieve ‘connection’ with the reader to show that you understand them by using
customer language and their buzzwords.
þþ Backup with facts and numbers.
þþ Build testimonial elements into your emails such as customer quotes, number of
customers, client names and independent reviews and awards.
rr 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:
þþ How well do the recipients know your company? Are they prospects, customers or
first-time customers?
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þþ Customer-centric copy
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Creating
þþ Spell out the benefit the feature gives. For example a bulleted list could use different fonts
or formats to emphasise benefits.
þþ How well do they know your products? Have they bought single products or a range of
products?
þþ 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.
1
Prioritise
þþ How technologically literate are they? Some may have been using your website and
certain online tools for years, while others are new to them. Make it obvious for the
newbies, while avoiding patronising the old hands.
2
Set your goals
þþ 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
provide copy and design that works for both.
Through using customer personas and asking these types of questions you can 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.
3
Defining proposition
Effective email copy with CRABS?
rr Q. Does your email have CRABS 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 have even
less space and time to communicate. CRABS stands for:
4
Segmentation
þþ Chunking – Chunking means that paragraphs must be shorter than in paper copy. Think
one or two sentences. Three or four maximum. This helps scannability.
þþ 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.
Remove content or offers that do not fit with the recipient.
5
Defining strategy
þþ Accuracy – Don’t get carried away with your copy; don’t set expectations so high that
you overpromise and can’t deliver what you promised.
þþ 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. This also means that some information is more effective
if moved to the landing page and removed from the email.
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.
As with any direct mail piece, the first paragraph of an email must:
rr Engage – when reading this, perhaps in the preview pane, recipients are deciding whether to
delete or read (scan) further. So as for any creative, the opening needs to be powerful.
rr 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.
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If you have produced copy that follows the CRABS guidelines, you are only a part of the way
there, since there are many issues of style to make successful copy.
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6
Creating
þþ 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.
rr 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.
1
Prioritise
rr 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 paragraph. 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. It is often more effective to 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 here’.
2
Set your goals
Making copy engaging
rr Q. Have we developed engaging copy?
To complete Step 6 here are some other ideas to help your copy connect with your audience.
3
Defining proposition
Email campaign checklist – Eight key copy questions
rr 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?
4
Segmentation
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.
rr Question 2. Does your copy convince?
5
Defining strategy
You may believe that your service or your offer sells itself on its features. 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?
rr Question 3. Is your copy natural?
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’.
rr Question 4. Is the copy length right?
Let’s look at the extremes. Which is best – short copy or long copy?
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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 sounding as if it was
written by a machine.
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Creating
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 for instance. The only way to succeed is to develop empathy with your reader by
researching, maybe even living the role like method actors do.
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 start of the main copy which is above the fold.
1
Prioritise
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, however
this can be also pushed back to the landing page or website.
2
Set your goals
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.
rr Question 5. Did you repeat yourself?
This is a difficult one.
Direct mail wisdom says repeat to reinforce.
3
Defining proposition
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.
rr Question 6. Which copy stands out?
4
Segmentation
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 HTML emails, we have a broad scope for emphasis through mark-up to make copy stand out.
5
Defining strategy
þþ The
SPACE
before and after words and between lines is powerful in
highlighting offers or calls to action.
þþ CAPITALISATION, but don’t overuse it.
þþ Bulleted lists using asterisks or dots.
þþ 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.
þþ Font sizes – large font size as headings or separate messages work well for scanners
þþ Graphical animations of copy – but make sure your animation doesn’t prevent the
message being viewed by scanners
þþ 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.
þþ 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.
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þþ Hyperlinks – blue underlined or other formatted hyperlinks attract the eye online.
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Creating
þþ Font colour – using a different copy from body copy using vibrant colours such as red and
orange.
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.
2. Appeal to personal self-interest.
1
Prioritise
3. Get the right sort of attention.
4. Add news.
5. Offer to teach.
6. Ask a provocative question.
2
Set your goals
7. Use ‘Quotes’.
rr 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 the whole copy should be
structured around the outcomes we want to achieve!
3
Defining proposition
Approaches that can help achieve action are:
þþ A text-based call to action in first screen (for the impulsive) and last screen (for those with
the time to read).
þþ A time-limited offer which uses copy to encourage the reader to act NOW!
4
Segmentation
þþ Instructions such as ‘forward to a friend’ or ‘share to social’ can be other useful
outcomes.
þþ 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?
5
Defining strategy
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.
C. To receive your complimentary guide to reducing Total Cost of Ownership, click here.
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Creating
or
or
Landing page
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.
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D. To help you lower the costs of running your IT infrastructure we have prepared a
complimentary guide to reducing Total Cost of Ownership.
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.
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Think carefully about the colour of the hyperlink. It used to be that on the majority of web
pages, users were used to seeing a blue hyperlink on a white background. But if other
colours are used, high contrast is essential.
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Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
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Defining strategy
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In this section, we look at some of the more advanced techniques to get more from your
email marketing. We will cover:
þþ Automate content
þþ Improving email delivery.
þþ Tracking email campaigns.
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Set your goals
þþ Improving email marketing for mobile devices.
þþ Using A/B split testing for email optimisation.
Improving email delivery
rr Q. Have our email delivery techniques been reviewed?
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Defining proposition
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.
What is it? Spam
There are differences in law per country about what is legitimate email. Unsolicited
marketing emails are often also referred to as spam. But spam is these days defined in the
eye of the beholder and not only by law, classifying unwanted, too frequent or too sales
oriented emails as “spammy” even if they gave permission to receive them.
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Segmentation
How do ISPs identify spam?
In the case of the ISPs and webmail services, they define spam as emails that users don’t
want. They filter email based on sender IP address reputation and increasingly domain
reputation. A reputation score is defined from a variety of factors, including:
5
Defining strategy
ýý High bounce rates. This results from poor list hygiene. Often with limited ability or
interest to receive and process bounces from botnets, bouncing addresses stay on
spam lists.
ýý High spam complaints. Users clicking the junk and report as spam button in their email client.
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Creating
ýý 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.
ýý Very low engagement. Low open rates and a high number of deletes without reading.
No user will reply in response to a spam email.
ý ý Incomplete setup of technical criteria. These include correct DNS, SPF, DKIM and
DMARC email authentication28 settings that show that your email software and IP addresses
are allowed to send on your domains’ behalf.
28
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_authentication#Authentication_methods
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ýý Campaigns sent across hundreds if not thousands of IP addresses. The IP addresses 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.
ýý Sending from a dynamic IP address. For example, those allocated to home ADSL connections.
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ýý Send volume and consistency. Because spammers don’t tend to have a consistent
send frequency, ISPs look at how frequent you send your messages. If you suddenly start
to send more emails than usual, this might damage your email reputation. In particular
this is important when starting with a new email service provider or IP address. As Andy
Thorpe explains29; ISPs monitor new IP addresses more closely and you will have to build
up a reputation or warm up your IP-address.
So, to not be treated as spam by the ISPs means to not look like spam with the above characteristics!
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Set your goals
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
something that spammers can’t fake.
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Defining proposition
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
rr Q. Has our email delivery optimisation been reviewed?
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Segmentation
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.
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Defining strategy
What is it? Email marketing Bounce rate
Bounces are emails that could not be delivered and in turn return a bounce message.
Commonly they are 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.
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But delivery rate isn’t the same as inbox placement. This is why the statistics defined by the
the Email Experience Council call it Email Accepted Rate30, not delivered rate. ReturnPath
have recently reported an average inbox placement as low 88 percent, even when the mailer
has a good IP reputation as measured by their SenderScore of over 91.
If your delivered rate is lower than 90 percent, then your next step is to review and change
to list hygiene best practice and reduce your bounce rate before moving on to other
optimisation tactics.
Deliverability is about more than just removing 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
29
30
Andy Thorpe: “Key Deliverability tactics when switching ESPs”
Email Experience Council
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You can review your Senderscore at https://www.senderscore.org/.
into additional filtering and the difference between deliverability and delivery arose.
An ISP will do one of four things for emails not bounced:
ýý Place in the inbox.
ýý Place in the junk folder.
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Prioritise
ýý Place it in another user specified or promotions folder.
ýý Throw the email away.
Unlike bounce issues, whereby the ISP tells you that you’ve not reached the inbox, there is
often no notification to senders by ISPs if you are put in junk or deleted.
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Set your goals
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:
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Defining proposition
þþ 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.
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
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.
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Segmentation
þþ 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 that
such a conclusion is nonsensical.
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Defining strategy
To use these campaign metrics you need to look at how these vary and trend per ISP like
Gmail or Outlook.com.
Best Practice Tip 30 Review delivery variation by ISP
Email 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.
Finally, Outlook.com provides a feedback loop service called SNDS. This shows you how they
rate your IP addresses and is one of the few ways to find out if you are hitting spam traps.
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Two more tools to consider are blocklists and Outlook.com (formerly 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.
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Creating
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 no one is seeing
your email and thus will no longer complain about it!
Assess engagement ‘beyond the click’ through web analytics
rr Q. Has the effectiveness of email ‘beyond the click’ been reviewed?
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Prioritise
For many years, it was difficult to track engagement of your visitors after they click through
on your email through to the site. This is important, because great open and click through
rates, don’t necessarily mean great conversions and we also want the email channel to
receive proper attribution of the revenues generated. In more email systems you can tag
the conversion page such as a sales or subscription thank you page oftentimes even fully
automated.
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Set your goals
Best Practice Tip 31 Integrate web analytics campaign tracking
You 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.
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Defining proposition
With the widespread adoption of web analytics and in particular Google Analytics for tracking
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
hyperlinks in your email templates. Integration with other advanced web analytics systems such
as Adobe 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 builder that shows how the Google Analytics tracking tag is introduced.
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Segmentation
Here is an example tagged URL (split across several lines):
http://www.domain.com/landing_page.htm?
utm_campaign=EnewsNov
&utm_medium=email
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Defining strategy
&utm_source=HouseList
&utm_term=editorial-link
&utm_content=header
For Email marketing the parameters (* are optional) I recommend are:
þþ utm_medium – medium used for marketing, i.e. email.
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Creating
þþ utm_campaign – campaign name, e.g. EnewsNovember.
þþ 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.
þþ * 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.
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þþ * 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.
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Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 32 Review web analytics bounce rates
Compare 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, and conversion rates low, 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
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Set your goals
rr 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. Data
from the Litmus Emailclientmarketshare.com shows the huge impact of emails being read on
mobile devices31 like iPhone, iPad and Google Android.
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
6
Creating
To find your mobile usage levels take a look in your Google Analytics at Audience, Mobile
Devices. You’ll be able to see your mobile audience and their devices. You can also set up
an Advanced Segment for email visits only to see the relative importance of mobile devices.
31
32
Litmus Email mobile statistics
Email Monday: The ultimate mobile email statistics overview
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We’ve seen the industry trends, you can check to see how important mobile email marketing
is for you. The majority of brands now have mobile opens making up between 35 percent and
75 percent of their total opens32, mobile open rates below 25 percent are an exception.
To 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 set up tracking.
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Prioritise
Best Practice Tip 33 Apply Advanced Segments for Email in Google Analytics
The Advanced segment should be based on a medium of ‘email’ if that is how you have
labelled your links. This can help you see the devices people who click through to your site
specifically from your emails.
You select the advanced segment using the down arrow at the top left above the reports in
Google Analytics, then choose “Create New Segment” and set the medium to “Email”.
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
Mobile email experience reviewed and conversions optimized
5
Defining strategy
rr Q. Has the effectiveness of email marketing on mobile devices been reviewed?
The most common approaches are now to design a less complex email that gives good
user experience on desktop and mobile or to use full responsive email design. Fortunately
smartphones now include browsers and email clients that are based on the WebKit rendering
engine, which has good HTML and CSS support. This includes the iPhone, Android devices,
webOS.
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Creating
What is it? Responsive email design
With responsive email design, we use @media queries to code and designing the email.
Responsive design allows the email to adapt to the device and screen size used at the time
of viewing the email. The goal is to improve the user experience and increase conversions.
You can read more about how responsive design is achieved through media queries33.
The device trend goes further than desktop or smartphone with the increasing usage of
tablets to read email. Tablets have large screen sizes akin to the desktop environment. The
main difference is the user context and use of touch rather than mouse.
33
Smart Insights: Media Queries
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So design and code an email that works on the desktop, while making sure that it will render
faithfully on all these devices. Alternatively, 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.
Tim Watson explains the diferent types of mobile optimized designs in this video on the
SmartInsights site. Here is a quick summary overview of the options.
þþ 1. Fluid Design: The text always takes up 100% of the width of the window, so as you
change the width of your email with your browser, it automatically reflows and fits in the
window - whether it’s for mobile, tablet, desktop etc.
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þþ 2. Skinny design. No reflow here, so as you change the width of the window, nothing
changes within the content. Companies such as Coke tend to design their email narrow
to 500 pixels wide so it works on a mobile first, but there is some compromise when
viewed on a Desktop device.
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Set your goals
þþ 3. Scaleable design: No reflow of text or fluidity here. For example, an email is designed
to roughly 630 pixels wide, you zoom out to fit on a mobile (approx 426 pixels wide) then
the email is still useable. All images and headings are still large enough to be displayed
when zoomed out to normal display.
þþ 4. Responsive design: Email changes dynamically to reflect the size of display. For
example, the text or images jump down if the email is viewed on a mobile and sometimes
the call to actions can be reduced for different devices.
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Defining proposition
Using responsive design allows an email to automatically adapt the device being used to
view the email, allowing changes such as:
þþ Hide content
þþ Change font sizes
þþ Change the email width
4
Segmentation
þþ Resize images
þþ Re-stack rows into columns
This example from Swarovski shows the use of responsive design to give a similar, yet better
fit for mobile experience.
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Defining strategy
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þþ The top navigation links are not shown in the mobile version
þþ The logo is shown relatively bigger and left aligned
þþ The navigation at the bottom has four mayor blocks and service icons.
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If you compare the two versions of the Swarovski email, you can see that several responsive
email techniques have been used in combination.
This example from Betty Crocker, shows exactly what a mobile optimized version can do.
The header image is scaled down, text wrapped (three lines, instead of two) and image and
text in the second block “Can’t wait?” is stacked.
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Prioritise
2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
Defining strategy
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In case you were wondering, it is a total a coincidence that this food newsletter mentions
“skinny”, for skinny also happens to be the name for emails that are limited in width from the
start.
This email by Dailyworth, has a simple enough design and with a skinny email of less than
500pixels wide and a large font type this email works on both mobile and desktop without the
need for much responsive email code beyond some small re-arrangement of the logo in the
header.
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Creating a responsive design often also increases the cost of the template and ongoing
campaigning. While some Email Marketing software offers standard mobile compatible
templates, it often needs extra coding and design effort. So it may not be worth it for
everyone. An alternative approach is to provide a skinny design.
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2
Set your goals
3
Defining proposition
4
Segmentation
5
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Some guidelines to consider when creating mobile first thinking emails:
rr Use pre-header text. This is shown in the iPhone inbox view.
rr Reduce the use of large branding headers and banner images in the area above the fold.
rr Use larger fonts or increase font size, 12pt for the body and 24pt for headings.
1
Prioritise
rr Use even shorter and chunked content. Already good advice for email in general and
even more important for mobile.
rr Only include images that add to the message, drop anything purely artistic.
rr Space out links so they are easy to touch without getting the wrong link.
2
Set your goals
rr Use buttons for calls to action, a 22 x 44 pixel minimum as this is the size of your touch
area.
rr Favour single column design or side by side when displaying many products.
rr Keep the HTML size and image sizes down, readers may be on a slow 3G connection.
3
Defining proposition
rr Place calls to action on images – there is no equivalent of the hand icon when ‘hovering
over’ on a touch interface.
rr Drop content, removing calls to action, text and design elements that aren’t central to the
email objective.
Mobile landing pages
4
Segmentation
Modern smartphones do a good job of making the largely passive reading experience of
an email work well. Another 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 had little benefit to improve conversions!
Related guides
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Defining strategy
Recommended resource Mobile marketing strategy Guide
Related to mobile email is the complete Mobile experience. The mobile marketing strategy
Guide Includes many examples of best practice for successful mobile sites, apps and
campaigns to inspire your implementation. Including mobile landing pages.
We hope you have found this guide useful to understand the potential of email marketing,
explore your options and, most important, helpful to improving your email marketing.
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Please let us know any feedback you have.
Thanks, Jordie van Rijn and Dave Chaffey
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