Email Marketing. Seven Steps to Success Guide. Dr Dave Chaffey. Published: November 2011. Plan > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage

Email Marketing Seven Steps to Success Guide Dr Dave Chaffey Published: November 2011 Plan > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage

Email marketing Seven Steps to Success Guide Contents 03 Introduction 12 Step 1 Prioritise with the CRITICAL 18 Step 2 Set your goals and build a quality list 25 Step 3 Defining your 30 Step 4 techniques 45 Step 5 Defining your integrated email communications strategy 48 Step 6 Creating effective email templates and 57 Step 7 Test, learn and refine

Introduction Your options for using to grow your business Email marketing is far from dead as some have suggested in this age of social networking 1 As we ll see in this section, you can use both for gaining new customers and selling more to existing customers. In this guide we ll look at the options for each, but we ll focus on using email as a customer communication tool, which is where it works best and can integrate well with your social media marketing efforts. Strategy Recommendation 1 Focus your efforts on customer retention Email marketing tends to work best as a tool to improve customer retention and growth. This is because your emails are received by a warm contact that is already aware of you. Email doesn t work so well when it s with a cold contact. That said, there are a range of options to use email for customer acquisition and it s worth considering them. Let s start here. Using email for customer acquisition r Q. Have we reviewed our options for customer acquisition through email? Although many just think of email as a customer acquisition tool there are still some great options to use for acquiring new customers through reaching new prospects. Checklist email acquisition options These are the main options to review: 1. Rented list email 2. Co-branded email (and/or co-registration) 3. 3 rd party email newsletter 4. Viral email 5. Event-triggered email 6. House e-newsletter Best Practice Tip 1 Don t miss the opportunities of advertising in others enewsletters We highlight the 3 rd option as particularly worth considering, especially for business-tobusiness marketing since the banner blindness that we see with display ads doesn t occur to the same degree with enewsletters since visitors scan them. To help you quickly review the options for acquisition using, this table shows their benefits, disadvantages and issues to consider to help manage. 1 Facebook s view on Email marketing 3

Table. Summary of methods of using e-mail marketing for customer acquisition and their advantages and disadvantages Option What is it? Benefits Issues 1. Rented list Buying access to contacts from a list owner who broadcasts on your behalf 2. Co-branded list 3. 3rd party e-newsletter ad/ sponsorship Email sent from list-owner but with your brand, message and offer Placing an ad, sponsorship, editorial in a publishers enewsletter. 4. Viral E-mail An email is designed to be shared and seeded to a house list or a rented list in combination with social media 5. Event-triggered e-mail 6. House E-newsletter Conversion of leads Enewsletters are mainly aimed at customers and most sales will come from this source, but they can work well for prospects who haven t bought from you yet Reach into new contacts Leverage partner brand. Can also co-register signup on their site Responsiveness compared to other options Reach. Potentially low-cost and high reach. Automated just sit back and relax Helps build a relationship with recipient over time. List source. High typical cost of acquisition (CPA). Low responsiveness Perception of spam buy from a reputable list owner Exclusivity Prime position Clutter Cost Achieving cut-through Negative brand impact Optimising, offer and frequency Achieving balance between informing the list-member and selling to them. 4

Using email for customer retention and growth r Q. Have we reviewed our options for customer retention and growth through email? Most marketers agree that works best as a relationship-building tool. Check out the options in the table. Checklist email retention options These are the main options email acquisition options to review: r 1. House e-newsletter r 2. House campaign r 3. Triggered email r 4. Research email r 5. Service email r 6. Sales force email r 7. Integration with blogs, mobile and social media messaging 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 What is it? Benefits Issues 1. House enewsletter 2. House campaign Still one of the best digital marketing tools to build a brand and develop relationships. A focused e-blast or e-postcard on a single offer often has better response than an enewsletter because of its clarity 3. Triggered emails Behavioural emails following up on abandoned shopping basket, search or category browses on site or interest expressed through a click on an email can be a cost-effective way to increase conversion to sale Add value, gain response Permissionbased: Responsive Low cost. Defining the best sell/ inform/entertain balance. Integration with social media. Resourcing. Managing contact strategies of frequency so that the impact is not reduced. Targeting. Testing the best template layouts and offers. There is growing customer distrust of tracking so transparency on this is required and opt-in is essential. 4. Research email Research + Responsiveness Selection of sample. Managing frequency 5

Retention option What is it? Benefits Issues 5. Service email Service + Responsiveness Cross-selling 6. Sales force Relationship build. Relationship Control email Sell. Integration 7. Blogs/RSS/ Social and mobile messaging Other alerting and messaging tools should be made to integrate with your email marketing for efficiency. Permission-based r Q. Is our permission-based? Brand and relationship building Adoption of different networks by different customers. Permission marketing, or gaining consent for marketing communications to be received, is fundamental to successful. If you don t practice permission marketing, customers will see you as a spammer and you may lose them forever. Then there are the legal requirements in many countries which make permission marketing a must. Strategy Recommendation 2 Ensure your is permission-based Audit your to ensure that your is permission-based. Since Email marketing underpins much of digital marketing, but especially, let s take a look at what s involved. You will know most of this, but it s worth checking. Permission marketing Permission marketing is an established approach that still gives a practical foundation for CRM and online customer engagement. Permission marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin way back in 1999, but it s still valid and we think that many still don t work hard enough to get permission. What is it? Permission marketing Customers agree (opt in) to be involved in an organization s marketing activities by email, social networks or traditional channels in return for the value offered. The classic exchange is based on information or entertainment a B2B site can offer a free report in exchange for a customer sharing their e-mail address and details, while a B2C site can offer a newsletter or company Facebook page with valuable content and offers. This is stage 2 in the classic permission marketing process shown in the next diagram. 6

It s worthwhile optimising this process to ensure you re using the best engagement devices, messaging and placement to maximise lead generation. 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: E-permission marketing checklist - how effective are our engagement devices? Appeal and range of devices? How effective compared to competitors? Balance of lead-generation and non-lead generation devices Placement and call-to-action? Ability to track (see our article on campaign tracking 2, the section Assess engagement beyond the click through web analytics on page 59 or the guidance on event tracking in our Google Analytics guide) Type of engagement device Videos Content download Poll, survey or interactive quiz Social recommendation (share through social networks or email) Strategy Recommendation 3 Review engagement and lead-generation devices Check that you have the best methods of generating leads 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 do not require registration to maximise reach. 2 Campaign tracking for email guide 7

Common customer profile 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. This can be achieved through a common customer profile. What is it? Common customer profile A definition of all the database fields that are relevant to the marketer in order to understand and target the customer with a relevant offering. It is best if different levels,1-3 of profile can be defined to encourage more customers to sign-up. Once defined, the common customer profile can then be used as a means of structuring e-permission marketing and refining understanding about the customer. A plan with targets for each level can be created about how to learn more about the customer. Best Practice Tip 2 Identify key profile fields Identify the profile fields you really need to be able to understand your audience and target them with future messages. These are level 1 or 2 of the common customer profile. A structured approach to customer data capture is needed otherwise some data will be missed, as is the case with the utility company that collected 80,000 e-mail addresses, but forgot to ask for the postcode for geo-targeting The customer profile can have different levels to set targets for data quality: Level 1 is contact details and key profile fields only Level 2 includes preferences Level 3 includes full purchase and response behaviour E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed? r Q. E-CRM and data profiling approach reviewed? We can refine Seth Godin s permission marketing ideas, which have been described in the previous steps, to make them more practical to apply to retention marketing. Permission marketing E-permission marketing Opt-in Opt-out Initial profiling Continued profiling Targeted communications Selective opt-in Selective opt-out Communications preferences Sense & Respond These are some of the key features of E-CRM implementation we suggest you work through for your organisation. r r 1. Offer selective opt-in to communications. Offer choice in communications preferences to the customer to ensure 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 opt-out is a legal requirement in most countries. 8

Four key opt-in options, selected by tick-box are: Content News, products, offers, events Frequency weekly, monthly, quarterly, or alerts Channel Email, direct mail, phone or SMS Format Text vs HTML vs Mobile and now a choice of mobile as Amazon have in their preference centre This is an example of a preference centre or customer profile. Although many mega-brands use these, they are now within the reach of smaller companies through low-cost E-CRM tools, IF they have a strategy that acknowledges their importance. Best Practice Tip 3 Create a customer communications preferences centre A preference centre enables customers to adjust the frequency and type of communications so increasing the likelihood of engagement. 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 is needed for delivering targeted e-mails 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 Sears 3 are using social sign to integrate customer profile information with email and CRM database information. What is it? Social sign-on Site visitors log-in to site services through their prefeed 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 An example of how Sears use Social signon 9

3. Don t make opt-out too easy (selective opt-out). A bit radical, but my view is that we 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 some form of opt-out is now a legal requirement in many countries due to privacy laws, 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 to some or potentially all communications. Amazon s communications preferences page is a good example of this approach. Remember though, that offering opt-out that works is a legal requirement. Many opt-out processes still don t work so instead subscribers may report as spam which can hit your overall deliverability. Still, we still think there s some merit in what we said way back: 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 e-mail prompt the user to keep their contact details up-to-date. 4. Watch don t ask use Sense and Respond. The need to ask inteuptive questions to better profile customers can be reduced through the use of monitoring of clicks to better understand customer needs and to trigger follow-up communications or Sense and Respond. Some examples of personalisation through this technique include: Monitoring click-through to different types of content or offer. The interests of individual list members can be assessed through monitoring what they click through to. Lastminute. com reputedly tailor their newsletters to many different template types according to content clickthrough. For example, if you click through to theatres or city-breaks, then you will receive more of this type of content in future. Monitoring the engagement of individual customers with e-mail communications. This is achieved by monitoring trends of opening and click-through by individual customer. These metrics indicate the level of interest of individual customers and we can monitor how these vary through time and use follow-up communications. For example, perhaps a buying signal is suggested by a customer who has not previously responded to e-mails who starts clicking through to the web site more frequently. This could be followed up by a tailored e-mail communication or a phone call. Follow-up of response to a specific e-mail. 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. The second approach may result in more sales, but of course there is a danger that the customer may react negatively to monitoring or stalking of this type and it is arguably not permission marketing. How is this guide structured? In this section we have introduced the concept of permission marketing and showed 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. We then cover each of these in more detail in the next steps of the guide. 10

What makes our guides different? We ve created our guides to be your constant companion as you learn, review and improve your approach to digital marketing. We know you re busy and under-pressure to get results so they re written to help you do just that by taking you through the questions you should be asking to improve performance and suggesting the right approaches for you. Our Ebooks are all created to help you: þ Improve results. A focus on getting the best results from your digital marketing. þ Review your cuent approach. A unique workbook format helps identify priorities. þ Apply analytics. Inegrated advice on using Google Analytics to improve performance. þ Learn best practice. Strategy recommendations and practical tips highlighted throughout. How will the guides help you? Our Ebooks are designed to help you and your team if you are actively managing digital marketing. They are also packed full of practical advice if you re working hands-on on a company website or campaigns like search, email or social media marketing. This is how our guides are designed to help create different types of people: þ Company owners and marketing managers. We help you create a plan so you can invest in the approaches that matter. We help you set goals and put in place a system to measure and improve since all our guides cover how to get more from Google Analytics. þ Digital marketing and Ecommerce managers. We help you get more from each of the key digital marketing channels plus your web and social presences through reviewing your approach using using our comprehensive workbook templates. þ Digital marketing specialists. Whether you work on social media marketing, SEO, PPC, or conversion rate optimisation for the website we have a guide to help you boost your approach. þ Consultants and agencies. Many consultants and agencies use our guides to check and refi ne their approach and recommendations to clients on digital marketing. They re also used to help educate team members on the latest digital marketing best practice and techniques. Guide features All our guides include these features to help you improve: þ Checklists of questions to ask to review your marketing approach þ Guidance on using Google Analytics to improve performance þ Colour-coded defi nitions, key strategy recommendations and best practice tips þ Diagrams giving frameworks to develop your strategy þ Lots of examples of best practice through mini case studies and screen captures Tell us what you think Dave Chaffey and team have developed these guides based on working with many types of companies and in training. But improvements are always possible, so we d be grateful if you could email: support@smartinsights.com with your comments, good or bad. In particular, we re interested in ideas on improving these guides or for other guides you would fi nd useful. Thanks 11

Step 1 Prioritise your efforts with the CRITICAL A review of the CRITICAL success for is a useful place to start your journey to improved. CRITICAL summarises the main which will determine whether you re successful with your. Let s now briefly review each of the eight CRITICAL success. We ll look at some examples of good practice to learn from along the way and cover them in more detail later in this guide. Conversation r Q. Is our two-way are we engaging visitors in a dialogue or just pushing content? Email works best when it s part of a wider dialogue encouraging user participation and interaction with a brand. It s easy to just treat as a substitute for direct marketing. But it works best when it encourages interactions, for example through: Polls or surveys (for an e-newsletter) Reviews and ratings on products (for an e-retailer) Competitions which are announced in several emails Sharing of what s hot in the social channels like Facebook and Twitter Here s an example from the CIPD B2B Enewsletter showing how a poll is integrated: 1 Relevance r Q. Is our 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 we ll review 6 options to targeting which cover both traditional 12

targeting options and methods to deliver contextual emails through what my US marketing contacts call Sense and Respond communications. 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics). 2. Customer value (cuent and future) 3. Customer lifecycle groups. 4. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted). 5. Customer multi-channel behaviour (channel preference). 6. Customer personas including psychographics. 1 What is it? Sense and respond communications Delivering timely, relevant communications to customers as part of a contact strategy based on assessment of their position in the customer lifecycle and monitoring and following up automatically based on specific interactions with a company s website, emails and staff. The next diagram gives an example of how Sense and Respond 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 or phone call if they are a high value customer. Rules- E-mail based response database engine Phase 1 Campaign Initial e-mail Opens Promotion(s) Response Clickthroughs monitoring tool A. Don t Open New subject Line, New time Phase 2 Campaign B. C. D. Open Click Respond Don t Don t Click Respond New Offer New Creative Timely New Follow-up Offer Key Landing page response Responses E-mail Landing page or microsite It s apparent that 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. Incentive (or offer) r 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 reading the email or clicking on the links within? For promotional emails or e-blasts, there is a range of product or launch offers we can use in emails which are often in the Free, Win, Save category. For an enewsletter, this is the content which we ll review in the section on developing your email. Is the quality of content or offer consistent through time? 13

Best Practice Tip 2 Highlight your incentives through formatting Highlight your incentives in headlines, image text and call-to-action. This example shows how the WIIFM is included within the call-to-action buttons. 1 Timing r Q. Are we sending our emails at the right time? Timing refers to when the email is sent or 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 the working day or midweek. All of us have a full in-box to work through first thing in the morning, often containing SPAM and newsletters. It can help your email stand out if it aives during the day. However, only testing can show this for sure some email marketers get good results on Friday, when office workers are winding down for the weekend. Test the timing that works best for your audience by assessing the open rates for HTML emails at different times of the day and week. Read our posts on timing for more ideas. 4 Timing also means the context of when the email is received relative to user interactions the sense and response approach we mentioned above. 4 Best time of week to send an email. Best time of day to send an email. 14

Integration r Q. Are our emails integrated with other channels? This is looking at email as part of your integrated marketing communications. How it integrates with social media, websites and if you still use it, direct mail, are all important to getting your message across. Questions to ask include: Are the and copy consistent with my brand? Does the message reinforce other communications? Does the timing of the email campaign fit with offline communications? Do we encourage social interactions? Creative and copy r Q. Are our and copy engaging enough? Creative refers to the overall design of the email including layout, use of colour, images and copy. Best Practice Tip 3 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 link in the first three or four lines and then this call-to-action should be repeated in the close. Here s an example of an up-front offer repeated in the subject line, images and editorial text - which almost always receives a good clickthrough rate: 1 15

Key issues to consider are: How is the email structured? Are layouts commonly used in direct mail appropriate for email? Where are the calls-to-action? What are the best positions for calls-to-action and how can clickthroughs be encouraged? Up-front is best. How is the email branded? How should email campaigns and newsletters support the established brand and when should brand variants be used. Is the tone of voice right for the email? Attributes (of the email) r Q. Are our and copy engaging enough? The attributes of the email header which can all determine campaign success include the subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt and format (HTML or text). Of these, subject line, from address and format are most important in influencing response. The attributes also include: Deliverability Delivery will fail if your email is assessed as a spam email Renderability Your and email won t be effective if it isn t easy to read in the inbox We ll look at more tips on subject lines later, but for now, here s one - shorter can often work best. The lesson from this reseach from Mailer-Mailer 5 is clear. 1 Landing page (or microsite) r Q. Do we send readers to the right pages to engage them? 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. However you will get a much better result from a landing page focused on achieving action. Landing page is the term given for the page(s) reached after the recipient clicks on a link in the email. 5 http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/index.rwp 16

Typically, with a B2B email, on clickthrough, the recipient will be presented with an online form to profile or learn more about them. 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. The conversion rate on the landing page can make a dramatic difference to the success of an email campaign, yet this is often overlooked in favour of the email. Testing and improving landing pages can pay dividends. This is the landing page for the Euroffice email earlier in this section. You can see the customer journey is nicely integrated, encouraging fulfilment of the offer. 1 17

Step 2 Set your goals and build a quality list for You probably know that interaction with email campaigns is measured through open and clickthrough rates. While it s great to review email response in this way, if this is all you measure, you re missing the bigger picture of how valuable email is to your company and it s customers. Define cuent value of your to customers To assess how valuable email is to customers it s best to measure the quality of their engagement how engaged are they? r Q. How well do we measure engagement of our subscribers? A review of campaign open, clickthrough 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 system will give you more insight. For a more detailed analysis, you should review: Checklist measuring engagement with Click to open rates (CTOR) these will enable you to see how engaging your and offer is Open and clickthrough 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. Open and clickthrough rates based on delivery time time of day and day of the week or time in month still make a significant difference so advanced email marketers are moving to target according to time when individual subscribers are most engaged. 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 through a welcome strategy, or if necessary reactivate them. Reviewing hurdle rates at different lengths of time from original subscription can help assess the success of these strategies. 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 standard link for hero product or featured category in an email. 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 rates. This is the big one If you have to choose just one measure to assess customer engagement, let this be it 3 18

Strategy Recommendation 4 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. This analysis can often shows that over half of your audience is not engaged, so this gives you a hurdle rate to benchmark your engagement efforts against. 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. Define value of activity to your company r Q. How well do we measure value generated from our? In the previous section on customer value we looked at value to the customer. But what about company value? To assess this we need to know about the marketing outcomes generated that lead to sales. So we suggest you set these as primary goals for your and how to track them. You can look at the efficiency from the point of view of emails sent which shows you overall campaign effectiveness or visits to the site from email that helps you assess the efficiency of your web conversion. Checklist measuring value generated from Outcomes (goals) per 1000 (or per 100) emails sent Revenue (profit) per 1000 (or per 100) emails sent You divide by 1000 to normalise value to make it easier to interpret, but it s not essential Outcomes (goals) from per website visit from email Revenue (profit) from per website visit from email This will be tracked through your analytics package. To implement your tracking to check whether you have achieved these goals you will need to tag your emails as described in Step 7. Best Practice Tip 4 Use a conversion funnel model to set goals for your Through creating a simple conversion model for your email campaign you can set realistic goals for your with an agency. You can also set expectations amongst colleagues since the multi-step response means that response may not be as much as they expect. 3 19

A conversion model to edit is available for members 6. Success refers to achieving the objectives set for the campaign does the campaign deliver the required outcomes? The success of direct response campaigns is often talked about in terms of clickthroughs 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 how many recipients 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. 3 Growing our list r Q. Do we have a structured process for growing our email list? If you don t have a plan to grow your email list then it will still grow, but not as fast as you would like since you will be missing opportunities from different touchpoints. A simple starting point to establish how well this is working is to assess is your cuent figure for the proportion of cuent customers for which you have email addresses. You can then set targets for this metric and devise techniques to increase this figure. 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? Email addresses which have just one character wrong are no good to anyone since you won t usually know which is the miscreant character. 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. It is only opt-in if the customer has proactively agreed, and expects to receive email communications. Perhaps there are a range 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? 6 Download Email campaign calculator. 20

Strategy Recommendation 5 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. r Q. Do we have an allowable cost of e-mail address acquisition (for non-customers) to help control the costs of list-building? Define objectives for email list building and list quality? Setting specific SMART objectives for your list can help grow the list faster, giving more opportunities to generate sales. r Q. SMART objectives for email list set? Checklist email list size and quality Here are some examples of objectives for list-building for you to review including: List size. Aim to increase the size of list over a particular time period, e.g. add 5,000 subscribers to an e-newsletter in a year Email address coverage. Aim to increase coverage of email addresses in customer base you may have 15% of customers opted into an e-newsletter, but you want to increase this to 35% over the next year Email address quality 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 clickthrough on emails within a defined period) Email permission quality. Although you may have collected email addresses, you may not have explicit permission to use them, which is required by laws in many countries. Also have you got permission to send the full-range of e-communications, or just some, e.g. alerts and e-newsletter? List value value generated per 1000 or list members in terms of sales/leads in a time period. Targeting quality increase proportion of subscribers qualified for your products who you have collected profiling information about. Data quality proportion of specific profile fields held about individuals (see 2 below) This section describes a range of offline and online techniques to increase e-mail address capture and make sure that the accuracy is a high as possible. Review touchpoints to improve r Q. All touchpoints for collecting and updating email addresses reviewed? It is important to have a structured approach to collecting and maintaining customer data. A good way to review all the possible methods of capturing email addresses is for marketers to brainstorm alternative methods for capturing email addresses by thinking about opportunities for capture which are: Online Offline 3 21

Existing customers New customers Best Practice Tip 5 Grow your list with online and offline contacts. Use all customer touchpoints as an opportunity for gaining email addresses. The chart below gives a good way for a company to review all the possible methods of capturing email addresses and other profile information. Some examples are shown. 3 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 eight online methods to help build a house list: 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. 2. Web response from offline communications. Here an offer is publicised offline and respondents are refeed to a website to sign-up. (e.g. Dell offered a monthly notebook prize draw (www.dell.co.uk/winanotebook)) or offline ads (such as the now discontinued Chocollect promotion from Mars (www.chocollect.com) which was featured in TV ads). 3. 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. 4. Placing an ad in a third party e-newsletter. This has the same aims as 3, but may be more cost effective and can often be tightly targeted. 5. Using a third party site, sometimes refeed to as an acquisition centre to provide offers with a view to sign-up (for example MyOffers (www.myoffers.co.uk)). r r 6. Campaigns with social sharing or viral elements where a friend or colleague is refeed can also increase the size of the house list. Here permission marketing and data 22

protection law require you to send an email offering the refeed person the option to optin before further communications are sent. 7. Any other forms of online traffic-building not mentioned above. Examples include graphical online ads or Pay Per Click text search engine ads. 8. E-mail appending services. US companies such as Freshaddress (www.freshaddess. com) or Email Movers (www.emailmovers.com) in the UK 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 John.Smith@ibm.com (perhaps not the best example). Similar services can also attempt to coect email addresses with typos. Checklist offline methods to build your house list Offline opportunities are the full-range of customer touch-points. Here are eight more: 1. Any form of paper registration or order form. But be sure to check the form of wording such that an opt-in to all forms of future communications is achieved. 2. Visit from sales representatives. Can be used for opt-in either on paper, or through subscribing online. 3. A phone contact at a call centre. For example a bank could ask customers whether they have an e-mail address during a routine phone enquiry. 4. Telemarketing. This can be specifically to capture email addresses, but is more costeffective if it is part of a telemarketing campaign. 5. Point-of-sale. For a retail context. 6. Trade show or conference. For example from a prize draw collecting business cards (but care with the opt-in). 7. Paper response to a direct mail offer. Traditional direct response. 8. Phone response to direct mail or ad. Again traditional direct response. 2 When email addresses are captured offline, a common problem is the level of eors in the address this can often reach a double figure percentage. So plan to control this also staff should be trained in the importance of getting the email address coect and how to check for an invalid address format. Some call centres have even incentivised staff according to the number of valid email addresses they collect. When collecting addresses on paper, some practical steps can help such as allowing sufficient space for the email address and asking for it to be written in CAPS. Techniques for list maintenance 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: 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 3. Multiple email addresses are held, often to counter spam. If your e-newsletter or email campaigns are good quality, then the unsubscribe rate shouldn t be too much of a problem. A typical rate for unsubscribes is 1% or below per broadcast for a house list. All the forms 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 23

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 coect? it is best if this is only asked when an address becomes inactive as described in the section below. Encouraging self-service through an online profile or permission centre should also be used. Direct mail promotions also give opportunities for gaining email addresses. In fact, whenever a prospect or customer has to fill in a form this is an opportunity. Collecting the email address should be an inbuilt part of the sales process. 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 Rapleaf.com. 2 24

Step 3 Defining your r Q. We have defined how our email communications offer differential value? Discussions of how to engage email audiences often start with reviewing or the offers presented to subscribers, but in our view, a better starting point is the customer s needs. Email is like any other digital channel, whether it s a social media presence like Twitter or Facebook, Adwords in Google or mobile marketing To be successful in comparison with the other channels each channel like must offer its own unique form of value that is distinct from other channels. Every channel needs a distinctive online value (OVP) to succeed. This defines how the digital channel supports the core brand values but adds its own unique value. Within email marketing, this is particularly important for an e-newsletter. 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: Engaging text content that makes the subscriber feel happy, angry or as if they are learning Engaging non-text or rich media content such as videos, podcasts, presentations, blog posts, photos, etc More in-depth content or alternately a summary of content Sharing of other subscriber views and opinions through votes, product ratings and polls Exclusive discounts or coupons only available through the channel. 3 What is the focus of what this campaign is looking to achieve, i.e. focus on acquisition / retention/awareness/brand building/roi? Write down different types of value that you do offer or could offer: Do offer? Competitors offer? Should offer? 1. 2 3. 4. 5. 6. 25

Define the value offered through our communications r Q. Do we get the sell-inform-entertain-share balance right? Achieving the coect 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 maybe also underselling where the call-to-action or connections to products is too limited. Remember that this relates through to the structure also the most enticing content needs to be above the fold when the email is opened. Start with what you feel are the strongest articles for your audience. Have regular features plus new, topical, articles 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. Write down your assessment of the types of value you offer through your e-communications: Sell ( /10) 3 Inform ( /10) Entertain ( /10) Share ( /10) Define email value r Q. We communicate our email value effectively? Having clear goals around the value you want to offer will help internal copywriters focus and can also be defined on the website to encourage signup. For business-to-business e-newsletters, think about how you can add value by acting as a filter for information about your market sectors. 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. 26

Best Practice Tip 6 Define and communicate value of your e-newsletter or email programme You should explain your newsletter, i.e. how it will deliver value to subscribers, for example, through: Saving time. By providing a single, up-to-date source. Learning. Increasing knowledge and solving day-to-day problems. Saving money. For instance through exclusive offers or offering new ways of working through a company s products. Entertaining. All newsletters can and should be fun for their audiences this is not only the preserve of consumer newsletters. Sharing. Sharing information about your organisation or facilitating sharing of content from customers. To achieve engagement, you should review how the newsletter delivers value and try to incorporate these into the e-newsletter. You should answer these questions and emphasise them through the design of the e-newsletter. 3 B2B Proposition Make my work easier Help me develop Make me look good Give me a great deal B2C Proposition Make my life easier Help me learn/have fun Make me look good Give me a great deal The example below gives a great business-to-business example of the value an email can offer: 27

And here is an example for an engaging newsletter for a consumer brand focus not around product or offer but customer need and interest. Sales offers are below the fold: Integrating value into social media marketing communications r Q. Do we show the value we offer from our in our social media communications? With the rise and rise in popularity of social media, email faces competitors for customer attention, like Twitter and Facebook which are increasingly offering similar types of value. So the email channel needs to compete with or complement with these to stay relevant. Think how can be more valuable compared to these other media? Alternatively, it can be argued that a company simply needs to offer choice and many customers will prefer email for its lower frequency and richer media. Email can help the time-poor audience by filtering or summarizing the high frequency messages from blogs and social networks. In the example below, the retailer is using email to promote an exclusive campaign offer available through Twitter, but equally, the campaign could work in reverse. 3 Best Practice Tip 7 Enable share to social options A Share-to-Social feature allows email marketers to include links from the email so recipients can easily post emails to their social network profile page, where friends can see the message, make comments and even post the email on their own profile pages. Speaking about the Share-to-Social concept, Matt Lindenberg, assistant director of marketing for Diapers.com, explained the benefits thus: 28

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 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. Finally, a simple, but effective approach is to include more reference to customer ratings within email as this example campaign encouraging purchase based on customer-picks shows: 3 29

Step 4 techniques r Q. Strategic approaches to segmentation reviewed and selected? There are many different levels in sophistication of targeting, some of which may or may not be worthwhile according to the size of your list. But it s still useful to review the segmentation 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. Best Practice Tip 8 Different targeting options can be combined through layering the segmentation approaches A layered segmentation approach summarising the segmentation approach used by ebay UK is shown below. Here, I ll outline the five segmentation approaches that you could use. Checklist 5 email targeting approaches 1. Customer profile characteristics (demographics). 2. Customer value (cuent and future). 3. Customer lifecycle groups. 4. Customer behaviour in response and purchase (observed and predicted). 5. Customer multi-channel behaviour (channel preference). 6. Customer personas including psychographics. 4 Best Practice Tip 9 Using event-triggered emails and dynamic content insertion to deliver really relevant emails To implement this level of needs a capable system that supports event-triggered marketing and dynamic content insertion where rules are used to drop different offers and email messages into a container as described in this post: http:// www.smartinsights.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/how-to-plan-event-triggered-emailcampaigns/. 30