Total E-mail Marketing

Dave Chaffey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781136354601
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

E-mail is a powerful marketing communications tool which excels at developing relationships with existing customers and acquiring new customers. This second edition builds on the author's successful formula, describing a practical approach to e-mail marketing for all marketers looking to exploit its potential or take their e-mail to the next level. Total e-Mail Marketing 2e draws on expertise and latest examples from leading European practitioners to detail practical tips to improve campaign results. Packed with brand new case studies and checklists to get you started or improve on past campaigns, the book covers all aspects of e-mail marketing, including: * Planning effective, integrated e-mail campaigns and e-newsletters
* How to rapidly build a quality house list and select the best tools to manage it
* Ethical and legal constraints in a fast-moving sector
* Design and write HTML and text format e-mails for maximum response
* Getting through the SPAM filters to maximize deliverability
* Targeting, personalizing, measuring and improving e-mail campaigns
* Integrating emerging technologies like blogs, RSS and mobile messaging
* Practical dos and don'ts A vital supplement to the author's book e-Marketing eXcellence, also in its 2nd editon and co-written with PR Smith, this text is relevant to all marketers – specializing in e-marketing or not – as it offers an integrated campaign perspective and shows how to maximize integrated e-marketing results.

Chapter at a Glance

Overview

This chapter highlights the power of e-mail marketing. We compare e-mail marketing with traditional direct marketing, and show its benefits and disadvantages.

Chapter Objectives

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• assess the benefits and risks of e-mail marketing
• describe the typical structure and metrics of an e-mail campaign
• outline the different types of e-mail marketing and how they integrate with other forms of marketing and e-marketing.

Chapter Structure

• Introduction – typical e-mail marketing questions
• Modelling and measuring e-mail marketing effectiveness
• Why e-mail marketing matters
• Why e-mail marketing beats direct mail
• Why e-mail marketing beats web-site based marketing
• Why ‘total e-mail marketing’?
• Meeting the challenges of total e-mail marketing
• References
• Web links

Introduction – Typical E-Mail Marketing Questions

What success rate can I expect for an e-mail-shot to 20 000 prospects from a vendor list rented from a vendor, where the e-mail contains a hyperlink to a web site?

We have collected e-mail addresses for 20 per cent of our customer base. We are looking to start using e-mail newsletters and promotions to encourage repeat business. Which factors will govern the success of our e-mail campaigns?

These are typical questions from marketers keen to run e-mail campaigns, but unsure of the results they are likely to achieve. We have all heard campaign success stories with response rates in double figures, but at the same time we all receive an ever-increasing amount of e-mail in our inbox. As Internet users receive thousands of e-mail messages every year, many of them unsolicited, how can we maximize our response rate?

Think about the factors that will govern the response rate to an e-mail campaign. The starting point is permission – consent is no longer just ‘nice to have’; consumer opt-in to receive e-mail communications is required by law in many countries, as we will see in Chapter 2. One factor you may have identified is how well targeted the campaign is to the interests and needs of the recipients – are the e-mails relevant to the audience? The offer made to encourage clickthrough to the site is another key factor. You may also have considered the quality of the creative – is it enticing in drawing the recipient in, how well does the copy explain the offer? These are, of course, very similar to the factors that govern the success of traditional postal mail. You may also have considered some factors that are specific to e-mail marketing – are the copy and e-mail headers compiled such that the message is not intercepted via spam filters and recorded as a ‘false positive’ which is placed in the inbox? The characteristics of the message are also important – what is the subject line of the e-mail? Which time and day of the week did it arrive? Who is it from – is it a plain text message or is it a HTML page including images? Finally, you may have mentioned the importance of the web page that recipients’ click through to – i.e. is the design of this page effective in encouraging further action? So there is a whole host of factors involved – some familiar to direct marketers and some new.

Total E-mail Marketing will give you detailed guidance on all these factors to enable you to devise powerful e-mail campaigns that maximize response. To start this process, consider my mnemonic of the ‘CRITICAL’ factors for e-mail marketing success. CRITICAL is a useful checklist of questions to ask about your e-mail campaigns. CRITICAL represents:

• Creative. This assesses the design of the e-mail, including its layout, use of colour and image, and the copy. The form and location of the calls-to-action are also critical.
• Relevance. This is arguably the most important factor. Ask yourself, does the offer and creative of the e-mail meet the needs of recipients?
• Incentive (or offer). This is the WIFM (what’s in it for me?) factor for the recipient. What benefit does the recipient gain from clicking on the hyperlink(s) in the e-mail?
• Targeting and timing. Targeting is related to the relevance – is a single message sent to all prospects or customers on the list, or are e-mails with tailored creative, incentive and copy sent to the different segments on the list? Timing refers to when the e-mail is received – the time of day, the day of the week, the point in the month and even the year, does it relate to any particular event? There is also the relative timing – when is the e-mail received compared to other marketing communications? This depends on the integration.
• Integration. Are the e-mail campaigns part of your integrated marketing communications? Questions to ask include the following: are the creative and copy consistent with my brand? Does the message reinforce other communications? Does the timing of the e-mail campaign fit with offline communications?
• Copy. This is part of the creative, and refers to the structure, style and explanation of the offer together with the location of hyperlinks in the e-mail.
• Attributes (header attributes of the e-mail). Assess the message characteristics, such as the subject line, From address, To address, date/time of receipt, and format (HTML or text). These can also influence deliverability of the message if they contain the wrong structure, or keywords identified as spam.
• Landing page or microsite. These are terms given for the page(s) reached after the recipient clicks on a link in the e-mail. Typically, on clickthrough recipients will be presented with an online form to profile or learn more about them. Designing the page so the form is easy to complete can affect the overall success of the campaign.

E-Mail Marketing Insight

Don’t focus solely on the e-mail when trying to maximize response – remember that the quality of the landing page(s) or microsite also affects the success of your e-mail campaign.

Which of the CRITICAL factors do you think are more important? While the mnemonic starts with ‘Creative’, other aspects, such as Targeting, Integration and Incentive, are arguably more important. This is in keeping with the old direct marketing adage that success is based 40 per cent on offer quality, 40 per cent on list quality and 20 per cent on creative quality. The content and structure of Total E-mail Marketing is in keeping with this, with much of the material we will cover looking at how we can achieve Relevance. Figure 1.1 gives an example of an e-mail that delivers Relevance and combines all of the CRITICAL factors well. It is a brief, timely e-mail, sent just after Christmas in the sales period to entice bargain hunters.

Figure 1.1 Virgin Wines deliver relevance

Modelling and Measuring E-Mail Marketing Effectiveness

Further common questions from marketers starting out with e-mail marketing include:

How do I build my e-mail list to meet my objectives?

How do I assess the success of my campaign?

Looking at the second question, one of the great benefits of e-mail, in common with other forms of direct marketing, is its accountability. In Total E-mail Marketing I present a simple Excel spreadsheet-based model that you can use for setting objectives and comparing the effectiveness of different tests or campaigns. Figure 1.2 shows the framework used for this model, and some points to bear in mind.

Figure 1.2 A simple model for objective setting for e-mail marketing

To evaluate the success of a direct response e-mail campaign, we can best understand what worked and what didn’t if we break down response into different stages. The effectiveness of each stage can be assessed by two measures – the absolute number of people who interact with the message, and the relative percentage effectiveness compared to the previous stage. The key measures for e-mail marketing are as follows.

• Number of e-mails sent. How many e-mails are broadcast to list members?
• Number of e-mails delivered (deliverability,%). How many e-mails get through to the inbox? This is dependent on the accuracy of the addresses, i.e. how up-to-date and clean your list is, and the proportion of e-mails that are blocked by spam filters. Improving deliverability is a key issue for e-mail marketers, and we will look at this in detail in Chapter 8.
• Number of e-mails opened (open rate,%). How many e-mails are viewed by recipients? As we explain later, this figure is approximate, since it is calculated by images in an e-mail downloaded from a server. This is dependent on the combination of the proportion of people who click on the e-mail to open it, have the preview pane enabled and have images blocked.
• Number of clickthroughs (clickthrough rate,%). This is the percentage of recipients who respond to the e-mail by clicking on a link. It is best to measure this as unique clicks from unique individu...