Does Email Marketing Really Work?

Email Marketing has been, and continues to be, one of the hot topics for all marketers, unfortunately not always for the right reasons. Whilst in essence it should be relatively cheap and easy to do, all too often people have failed miserably and have been left somewhat disillusioned. However, email marketing is rising in the ranks of importance for marketers and should form an element of an integrated and well-thought out marketing strategy.

According to Forrester Research, 88% of marketers are expecting email effectiveness to increase in the next three years. To see the sort of returns that are always spoken of with email marketing, we encourage people to take control and implement best practice. To help you achieve your campaign objectives, we have compiled some useful pointers on the various elements you need to get right.

Building Your Audience

You could have the best creative, most compelling subject line and irresistible call to action, but if you haven’t thought about who you are sending it to, all your hard work goes down the pan. Data strategy is an integral part of email marketing campaign planning. Excellent creative can be undermined by a failure to identify those contacts with a high propensity to respond. Invest time and budget in data collection and reap the rewards. Opt-in data is increasingly difficult to buy or lease from data providers and data collected on your own website is, by its very nature, of better quality (cheaper) and of more value to your business.

How many unique visitors a day do you get on your website? How many of them are you able to communicate with again? Visitors to your website have taken the time to seek you out or have found their way to your website courtesy of the marketing budget invested in SEO and PPC. Don’t let this expense be wasted – capture those visitors on your homepage by offering something of interest, e.g. newsletter/industry hot topics subscription, whitepaper downloads, event registrations or entry to a free draw for an iPod/bottle of champagne/book on relevant topic etc.

Keep it simple

Don’t put off potential prospects by presenting them with a lengthy form asking for details ranging from mailing address to inside leg measurement. Keep it simple; first name, last name, email address. You will be able to gather more information about them and their interests from subsequent email campaigns. Tell them that by entering their details they are subscribing to receive further information from you - this should help to keep the unsubscribe rate down as they will be expecting/wanting to receive communication from you.

Technology

Using an email marketing package that includes web capture functionality streamlines this process. A web capture form is created in the software and included on your website as an iframe. Results are fed directly back to the contact database enabling automated triggered campaigns. For example, a person has subscribed to receive late availability offers for holidays in Spain. In the web capture form they are able to tick their preferences, e.g. family holidays, tennis holidays etc. A triggered email is sent on submission of their details to thank them for subscribing. The message is a reassurance that their details have been successfully received; it communicates the framework for future emails and gives them contact details/links to the website for reference. Capturing preferences in this way enables intelligent marketing – campaigns promoting the type of holidays in which they have expressed an interest are targeted and relevant.

What not to do

Don’t go to the effort of capturing a prospect’s details on your website, feeding them into your contact database and then let that contact sit there with no contact for 6 months. Chances are, when you do get round to sending them an email campaign, they will have forgotten that they subscribed, will class the communication as SPAM and hit unsubscribe.

If you want a good email list – build one! And then make immediate and intelligent use of it.

Data Cleansing

Data cleansing is one of the most tedious, fault prone and time consuming tasks that comes under the marketers remit. Customer and prospect information tends to degrade at rates as high as 4% - 6% per month, with companies going out of business and employees changing jobs or titles. Compounding this, marketers often find employees
have entered data incorrectly, incompletely, or in the wrong field in CRM.

Gather data correctly in the first place.

When data is gathered via a form on your website keep it simple so that subscribers don’t get bored inputting information. Use field validation rules – is the data in the telephone field a number? Does the email address contain an @ symbol? If you have an in-house telesales team gathering data on outbound calls, have they had sufficient training on the CRM system or database? If they are only able to garner the first name of a contact it needs to be entered in the first name field and not last name otherwise emails will be addressed to Dear (blank space).

Use Email Marketing for Data Cleansing

Each campaign sent presents an opportunity to cleanse existing data and to add to it in terms of preferences and interests. Use pre-populated fields in surveys and web capture (registrations for events etc) and allow the recipient to update their details. With our solutions, the data can either be updated directly in the database or stored for approval in a holding/reconciliation space. This method is the ‘safest’ to ensure that relevant data is not over written by someone entering the wrong info to the wrong fields.

Having email marketing and CRM systems that don’t integrate not only prevents the effective measurement of ROI, but hampers effective marketing – particularly in a multichannel scenario.

Tips for data cleansing and using the data

• Don’t talk to your existing contacts like you have never met them
• Don’t send multiple campaigns with the same message/offer unnecessarily
• Try not to lose track of contacts who change jobs – nurture the relationship so they let you know when they’ve moved on
• Don’t miss an opportunity to talk to the client at a personal level
• Select new prospects based on what you already know about your contacts
• Clean up profanity and nonsense text in data
• Check your original data capture form – will you use all the fields you ask subscribers to complete? Stop collecting data on your website that you don't have the confidence/need to use in your marketing.
• Don't try to do all the work yourself – encourage contacts to make use of ‘update your details/preferences’ forms

Summary

Use of accurate personalisation in email marketing campaigns generates increased response rates, in addition, the Data Protection Act of 1998 states that ‘Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date’.

Campaign Planning

What’s the right frequency for email?

Frequency and relevance go hand in hand. Only talk to individuals in your audience when you have something to say. The idea that “it’s Thursday and I’ve got to blast my email” is (or should be!) a thing of the past. Marketers have a few opportunities to engage their customers & prospects. You can’t afford to waste that touch, so don’t. If you don’t have something relevant to say to your audience, don’t say it. Some marketers say "twice a month is best." Others say "every Thursday." Still more say "Ask your subscribers when they want to be mailed." The reality is that frequency IS all about relevance. Say something when you have something to say - and when you don't, keep quiet.

One of the challenges marketers are facing in this area comes from the general economics of email - as sending email is so cheap, marketers often don't care if they're sending to a group of people that don't respond in order to get the 1 out of 1000 that does. It is shocking how pervasive this type of thinking is. Part of this thinking stems from marketers who are often under pressure from management to generate max revenue per campaign, even when that comes at the expense of the brand and customer relationships.

Often, there's another issue to be solved: control of the house list. Everyone in the organisation wants to use the email list to get their own message out, without considering how much email list members are receiving from other departments. Here are some quick tips to determine the right email frequency for your organisation.

Frequency

There's no quick answer. It depends on the goals for your email and the type of content
you send. Some rough guidelines:

Mail at least once a month/quarter. Mail less often than this, and you risk being forgotten by recipients. Quarterly is the bare minimum if you want to keep your brand or company name top of mind (a common email goal). If you do not communicate regularly, you risk diluting the power of permission that you achieved when you acquired them as an opt-in email subscriber – if you have signed up for various newsletters, updates and alerts from trusted websites and brands, but don’t hear from them for five months, you may grow disinterested or -- worse -- forget that you granted them permission to send you email communications in the first place.

Never more than once within 72 hours. With regard to a general newsletter or promotional piece, you should abide by this rule or run the risk of generating unsubscribes and low response rates. Exceptions to this are if the email is triggered based on breaking news (e.g. BBC Breaking News) or other timely content.

Let content be your guide. Look at what you provide readers and you'll get a feel for proper frequency. Analyse how often the information changes and how quickly readers must receive it to act on it.

Frequency segmentation. Some organisations offer daily email newsletters as well as weekly summaries of the same content to give readers a choice. Ask customers directly what frequency they would prefer at the time of opt in. This will save time on segmentation and ensure that your customers get exactly what they what. Many companies wisely use list segmentation to determine the types of content and offers in order to send different customers, but you should also use this technique to determine optimal frequency rates. While one group of customers’ responses may be higher with mailings every week, another group may respond better with a monthly frequency. Marketers should adjust frequencies for different types of customers based on list segmentation.

Work within your resources. A daily email requires many more resources than a monthly. Better a well-done monthly email than a shoddy weekly or daily.

Watch for trends. Declining response, open, and click-through rates can be signs of list fatigue. Though some decrease is normal, watch carefully and cut back frequency if you see a problem. Don't assume if the unsubscribe rate is stable you're OK. Many people prefer to forward email directly to their delete folder rather than unsubscribe. These people have ‘emotionally unsubscribed’.

Use your metrics. Frequency should not be as simple as "we don’t mail to our customers more than twice a month." Just like any marketing and sales program, email marketing campaigns should be adapted based on the responses to each program. Email provides marketers with more info than almost any other marketing medium, and this data should be used to evaluate and establish your frequency mix.

Tailor future campaigns to those who have expressed an interest in your product or service, test the creative and offer, and then send it about a week after their original click-through. Keep a close eye on their response.

Rules should guide, not restrict. The key to establishing the right email frequency with your customers, as in every aspect of email marketing, is to plan, test, adapt, analyse and refine. Each marketer will find that different rules apply for their customers. Establish guidelines for your business, but always be flexible as customers’ desires and preferences are quick to change.

Following the advice above will help you to create best practice emails and build and deliver a targeted, personalised email marketing campaign program that will produce results. Using an email marketing solution streamlines the process and enables accurate measurement of responses and further segmentation of your audience as a result of expressed preferences.