DMA Email Marketing Council Blog

Getting opened in the business inbox

The way people handle their business inbox has changed a lot over the last few years. This impacts how you should craft your content, the subject line and the from. It also highlights how your permission gets challenged every time you appear - and how your emails must not over step the boundaries of the relationship (i.e. too frequent), and are relentlessly relevant to their business needs.

People delete, read now or read later. There are different levels of ‘delete’: If you’ve annoyed them by being too frequent, not recognised, or not relevant (even if you once were) they might mark you to automatically end up in the junk box. If you’ve really bugged them by overstepping the boundaries of the relationship or wasting their time - they’ll take the time to unsubscribe. If you’ve crossed the line with them, you’ll be reported as spam (hello black list!).

Other things to take into consideration - they’re obvious, because it’s how most of us handle email:

• You are competing with lots of emails from the recipient’s co-workers, their own clients, notifications (social networking, forum replies, etc) along with all the emails they’ve subscribed to, all the emails they don’t recall signing up to - and the pure out-and-out nasty spam.
• The from and subject line are critical. Rarely do people open emails they’re not sure about simply out of curiosity.
• Using false urgency in subject lines annoys people. Do this once and you will lose the trust of the busy subscriber. Use the subject line to help them assign a priority to your mailing. If it is time sensitive, have the end date listed. If it is a useful e-newsletter, but not time sensitive, highlight this - along with indications of content, so the reader knows to set it aside and read later.
• In B2B we have found that people open an email newsletter they signed up for on average about 1 in every 3 mailings. There are many reasons for this, time being one of them. Another is they’ve been out of the office for a couple of days and simply clear out the inbox and start fresh.
• We’re always sifting, scanning, sorting, deleting or moving into folders. The inbox is scanned by people with a hair trigger mouse just waiting to delete if they don’t immediately recognise the email.
• Recipients do know how to set aside emails that they’re subscribed to - and will read them later. That includes e-newsletters which don’t need to be digested on a handheld on the road and are saved for viewing at a desk. Sometimes they open and read emails days, even weeks later. This contributes to the longer tail B2B marketers are seeing in their stats. No longer is it just the 24-72 hour window of activity. Be sure to trend activity weeks and months after a send.
• Storage space is not much of an issue these days - people rarely get ‘inbox full’ messages. In the old days we were always deleting emails to make room for new ones. Now with GBs of space available, and a good search functionality in most email software, people have acquired a habit of saving emails to search through and find specific items / products/ services at a later date. Often to print out and bring to a meeting. This means email newsletters and communications have a much longer shelf life then the previous read-or-delete era.

Jennifer Curtin, Head of Marketing, Newsweaver

DMA Conference Feb 08 Takeaways

Earlier this year in February, the DMA Email Marketing Council held "Effective Email Marketing" conferences in Bristol and Edinburgh. The events were very well attended and feedback was extremely good. As chair of them both I had the pleasure of attending both conferences and here are some of my 'takeaways'.

Phil Singh, emailvision gave some great pointers on building your list, database management and segmentation.

• In answer to a JupiterResearch quesion: "how do you acquire email addresses for your email marketing efforts", 83% of respondants selected 'web site registration'.
• Make it quick and easy to subscribe
• Give newsletter examples when subscribing
• Always obtain permission with affirmative consent (i.e don't use negative tick boxes "If you don't want to recieve emails, tick here")
• Let them know the 'From address' so they can add it to their address book
• Only 32% of forms had privacy policy highlighted (JupiterResearch executive survey 2006)
• Remove spam flag addresses: go through your database and remove all addresses which contain abuse@, postmaste@ or nospam@.

Tink Taylor, Dotmailer and Nick Cole, Blonde shared how to create effective emails:

• Rendering: 19% of recipients  assume  an email is spam if it fails to render properly and 19% of recipients delete mails entirely constructed from images assuming it is blank
• Friendly 'From' address: For B2B, a known contact may work best. For B2C, company branding is extremely important.
• Subject line: 35% of email users open messages because of what is contained in the subject line (JupiterResearch) and consider the length & key message
• Consumers deal with more than 250 emails per week (Forrester 2007)
• 32% of consumers thin that email is a great way to find out about products or promotions (Forrester 2007)
• Email delivers the most value when they offer a timely, coherent message in a tone the  reader can relate to.
• There should be a clear call to action above the fold, (i.e within the preview pane) with other paths elsewhere in the email to entice the user to take action.
• Image Blocking: The message should be able to be read without graphic aids.
• 83.2% of marketers listed email as #1 advertising tactic (Datran Media 2007)

Kath Pay, Managing Director, Ezemail

Beyond opens and clicks: why it’s time for new email metrics

What would you do if you found out that 1% of your email list was generating 20% of your revenue? You might target your big spenders in a different way or develop products aimed specifically at them; alternatively, you might look at ways of persuading the other 99% of subscribers to buy more.

Both of these options rely on knowing which customers are your most valuable – but with only the blunt instruments of open and click rates available to you, you simply can’t tell. When we rely on these metrics to measure success we end up with “one size fits all” communications: any serious knowledge of our audience begins and ends with the registration process.

By focusing on customer behaviour rather than campaign performance we have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of what customers do when they read our emails.

Informed planning = improved ROI

Let’s say your monthly newsletter has an average open rate of 25%. Are the same people opening your newsletter every month?

One month the open rate falls to 15%. Have you lost people who normally open every mail (a drop in open frequency), or just attracted fewer casual openers (a drop in reach)?
In fact, our research at Alchemy Worx has found that falling open rates are most likely to be the result of regular customers opening your mails less often – and the tactics demanded by a drop in frequency are very different from those required by a drop in reach.

This is the kind of insight that customer-based reporting can give you. It gives answers to crucial questions such as:

• which customers respond to pricing offers, and which to promises of added value?
• how long is it since a particular person opened one of your messages?
• what proportion of your audience opens every one of your messages, and how many never open a single one?

Answering these questions opens up exciting new strategic options for measurement, campaign planning and customer targeting – all leading to improved ROI for your email marketing.

I will be delivering a seminar at Internet World which will show you the metrics you should be tracking, strategies to help you implement them and the tactical responses that can turn your understanding into increased ROI. You’ll see your email marketing in a whole new light.

Dela Quist is CEO of Alchemy Worx. His seminar “Beyond Opens and Clicks: Using Customer Based Metrics to Drive Performance Improvement” is at Internet World on 1/5/08 in the Masterclass Theatre.

Has Legislation Helped?

I was asked an interesting question this week in an interview for an Australian Publication, Marketing Magazine. They asked: "In your opinion, has the tightening of laws and regulations around email marketing been beneficial or detrimental to the industry? Why?"

Hmmm...where to begin? I believe it has been totally beneficial - but not for the reasons you may suspect. The actual problem of spam isn't caused by legitimate marketers and as such the real spam issue can't be resolved by tightening legislation. A recent consumer survey was conducted by Q Interactive, which revealed that consumers' definition of spam varies greatly with that of legislation...it seems to have evolved from being 'unsolicited' to 'unwanted' emails. That said however, I believe legislation serves another purpose - which is to force marketers to continually look at their email marketing practices and find ways to improve so that their efforts are not only not unsolicited but are actually wanted.

Consumers are becoming less tolerant of irrelevant offers - not just in email marketing but in all areas of direct marketing. As a marketing medium, email is brilliant and allows you to segment and target so that you are able to send relevant emails. Without legislation, marketers could very well still be sending untargeted, irrelevant offers and therefore not be achieving the excellent ROI that email campaigns achieve today. The e-consultancy/Adestra's Email Marketing Census 2008 reveals that email is rated as the second best channel for ROI after SEO. Therefore I believe the introduction of legislation has refined email marketing and helped to make it the successful marketing channel it is today.

Kath Pay, Managing Director, Ezemail