DMA Email Marketing Council Blog

Best Practice in Email – Are you up to scratch?

Over the past week or so, I have received several marketing emails from very reputable major brands that are seriously missing the mark as far as Best Practice is concerned.  I have two gripes, the first being use of dubious email sources that the end user may or may not be aware of, the second being the unsubscribe options offered to the consumer by some third party email data companies.

In my inbox this week were campaigns from major UK brands in the Travel sector, Financial Services sector and Leisure sector.  On each occasion, the domain name of the sender was a website that simply does not exist.  To compound things further, the small print detailed, “We only practice true permission based emailing. To view our privacy policy please visit the website you originally opted into or contact us.”  Sounds OK in principle doesn’t it? Err…no.  The recipient has no way of knowing where their data has come from let alone being able to figure out which website they originally gave their permission on.  The email industry has really cleaned up it’s act in the past few years and there are more than enough reputable email marketing companies out there to ensure that your communications hit the mark.  I suspect that some of these campaigns may be coming through affiliates who are using cheap inventory to achieve required CPA deals.  There’s a great article on the DMA’s Email marketing blog which explores this further - www.dmaemailblog.org.uk. Every email marketer needs to ensure that they are aware of what inventory is being used to fulfil their campaigns, as ultimately the brand advertiser is responsible even if they are using 3rd party opted in data.  While these campaigns still make money for the advertiser, what is the cost of the potential damage to the brand image amongst consumers?

OK, moving onto 3rd party email lists specifically.  I have seen numerous campaigns of late that have come through reputable email marketing companies.  The issue I have is that they contain a link to unsubscribe from the advertiser, but not from the 3rd party list being used.  I understand completely why list owners would want to do this.  They have spent time and money creating their lists and are understandably keen to ensure that they keep the volumes up and minimise unsubscribes.  Therefore, if I unsubscribe from one advertiser, they can still sell my data to a different advertiser.  My question is…is it better to have a large list of annoyed people, or a smaller list of people with a genuine interest in 3rd party offers?  I see two solutions.  Either the unsubscribe should remove the recipient from the source list – which I appreciate may result in more unsubscribes than necessary.  Otherwise, why not include two unsubscribes – one that is advertiser specific and one that relates to the 3rd party list being used.  This enables better targeting for the list buyer as you can remove people that you know are not interested in certain types of offer, while still giving them the flexibility to receive other types of offer.

Email is a fantastic channel that allows quick, instantly measurable, low cost results when done properly.  Let’s make sure that this continues to be the case and that we don’t end up inviting restrictive legislation by abusing it.

Rupert Harrison
Data Planner
News International Ltd
www.newsint.co.uk

Latest research suggests your subject line test strategy needs a complete overhaul!

Last week infobox, the DMA Email Council’s newsletter featured the UK launch of a free white paper on subject line length published by my company Alchemy Worx.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it yet the main findings of the research were pretty startling and run counter to conventional wisdom.

The research suggests that although subject lines with 60 characters or less make more people open your message (the traditional view) these people are less likely to then go on and click on content or offers within the message than people who open an email with a longer subject line. More opens = less clicks! There seems to be an inverse relationship between opens and both click and CTO rates.

As you might expect, we monitor a large number of UK email campaigns, from a cross-section of sectors and companies including British Airways, figleaves, Apple, Amazon JD Sports and Reuters; so I thought it might be interesting find out what subject line lengths email marketers are using and was astonished to find out just how are following conventional wisdom!

Out of 700 subject lines we monitored in the last 90 days, the vast majority—87% of them — were under 60 characters in length. A further 7% fell into the ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 character where neither opens nor the CTO rate is optimized, and only 6% of the subject lines were over 70 characters long and therefore likely to optimize click and CTO rates.

Does his mean that everybody out there is only interested in opens and doesn’t care about clicks?  Perhaps we could conclude that email marketers, having extensively and regularly tested longer subject lines, know for a fact that they don’t work?

Somehow I think not.

What’s more likely to be the case is that as an industry we’ve done such a fantastic job of believing the hype that we have stopped testing outside of the accepted norms.

Our whitepaper also found subject lines with a higher word count also optimize clicks and CTO rates. So how do the numbers break down when it came to word count?

The numbers are equally amazing. Only 13% of subject lines monitored contained above 10 words—where clicks and CTO are optimized. 60% fell into the ‘dead zone’ of between 6 and 10 words, where neither clicks nor opens are optimized; and 26% of the subject lines contained fewer than 6 words, and therefore optimized open rates.

What I have learned from this exercise and would like to share with you all is that email marketers need to completely overhaul their subject line test strategy:

● Subject line tests should be more granular—long and short just isn’t good enough. Subject lines need to be broken down into more character groupings (1-10, 11-20, ...91-100).

● Introduce word count testing. Words are a much better way of conveying meaning than characters.

● Assess the impact of the number of propositions contained in the subject line on your campaign performance.

● Finally, open rates are just a small part of the story. Your tests should assess the impact of subject lines on clicks, CTO rate and conversions, as well as sales.

My greatest fear is that the people reading the whitepaper will be looking for a simple answer such as “when it comes to email subject lines, short is best”, when in fact the central message is keep searching, keep optimising and keep on challenging assumptions.

Dela Quist
CEO
Alchemy Worx

The Email Form Factor

I had the pleasure of presenting at the DMA E-mail Marketing conference recently and discussed the subject of using forms in e-mail marketing campaigns as a method of data collection. This seemed to touch a few raw nerves with some of the delegates I spoke to afterwards who are finding it increasingly complex to include this functionality in their campaigns. This certainly tallies with our experience but this tactic can still deliver great results if implemented cleverly.   So I thought I’d use this blog to share e-Dialog’s experience in this area.

E-mail compatibility across multiple e-mail clients is a major challenge for all e-mail vendors. Now, with the recent boom in e-mail on mobile devices, the possible browser, machine, operating system, and e-mail client combinations jumped from 20 or so (of the most widely used software) to tens of thousands.  One of the most contentious issues with compatibility is the functionality of data collection forms within e-mail. AOL.com, Hotmail.com and Outlook 2007 have stripped form functionality from their e-mail clients, though Gmail has yet to follow suit.

Our approach has been to offer the functionality of forms by offering the capability to merge in textual links and calls-to-action to web-based versions of forms for AOL.com and Hotmail to get around this issue.  Search forms in e-mail still remain the most popular features of our clients' e-mail campaigns, consistently ranking in the top 3 of links clicked in their campaigns. We have also found a significantly high number of AOL and Hotmail users clicking through to the web-based versions of the e-mail to complete forms.

So called ‘Drip-Poll’ programs which use a series of single question, prioritised, data acquisition forms to complete a customer's e-mail profile are still some of e-Dialog's most effective and popular campaigns for our clients. Interestingly we have not noticed a significant decrease in the submission of embedded forms in e-mail since AOL and Hotmail limited form functionality over a year ago. In fact, we've seen many more clicks to the hosted versions of e-mails, activating imagery and forms for clients in webmail clients and mobile browsers.

So yes the use of forms in e-mail, like the channel as a whole is becoming more complicated. However, if your e-mail marketing partner offers you the proper tools, you can still deliver the most interactive, relevant marketing experience to your customers and collect valuable data through forms at the same time.

Hope this helps

Simone Barratt, Managing Director, e-Dialog EMEA

Making the Case for Email Resources

Email marketing is the darling of direct marketing for a reason - it is inexpensive and it works really well.   Maybe too well.   Whenever we send out a blast, we earn revenue.  It costs us little in hard expenses to do so.  Just like letting children loose in the candy store, this can be very addicting!  And so many email marketers send more messages than are relevant to most subscribers, and often many more than promised at the point of sign up.   Alas, eating too many sweets will give you a tummy ache.  There is a cost to over-mailing - both in real missed revenue opportunity as well as deliverability, whether your messages actually reach the inbox.

It's no secret that subscriber experience matters. Relevancy matters. We all know that creating great subscriber experiences is key to driving even more revenue and higher ROI.  Yet, in order to do that, we need resources.  Those resources are technology and human -- and often involve expertise that we don't have resident in our marketing departments.  How can do the data integration, segmentation strategy, list management, tracking and analysis, deliverability management and compelling creative when we barely have enough resources to get the messages out the door each week?

How?  We have to make a business case for the email channel.  I presented two ways to do this during my keynote presentation at the recent Email Marketing Conference at the London Zoo.  Central to both strategies is speaking the language of our CFOs and executive management.  We need to speak in terms of real costs, real customer satisfaction measures and real revenue upside. 

The first way to make a business case is to show the real costs of sending more messages than are relevant and valuable to subscribers. The short term revenue boost from sending "just one more" email blast this month has a real long term negative effect. 

Your CFO (or CMO or CEO) thinks that sending more messages is simply the cost of broadcasting them - the CPM we pay to our email delivery vendor.  Actually, the real costs include the costs of replacing all those lost via increased unsubscribe requests, complaints (clicks on the This is Spam button) and fatigue.  It also includes the cost of unrealized future revenue from those lost subscribers.  And it includes a "brand slam" factor based on negative brand impression and lower loyalty.  When we do the math on an sample mailing of 100.000 records, we show that a mailing that the CFO thought cost 300 GBP actually cost us 8.000 GBP.  That is real revenue!  And a real missed opportunity for future sales.

We also discussed how deliverability failure -- caused primarily by things like overmailing, low relevancy and poor list hygiene  -- can have a dramatic effect on the bottom line. Most permission-based email marketers who do not actively manage their Sender Reputation and deliverability can expect that up to 20% of their messages never reach the inbox.  You can hit "send" all you want.  But some of those messages will get blocked by the ISPs and receivers because of a low Sender Reputation.  The good news is that all of the factors that go into a great Sender Reputation (and high inbox deliverability) are the same things that smart email marketers do to drive higher response and revenue.  Like keeping the list clean, honoring permission grants, processing bounces properly, removing complainers (those who click the This is Spam button) from your file and making sure your content is well constructed.  Sender Reputation is all about how your messages are valued. If your messages are welcome by most subscribers most of the time, your Sender Reputation will be good. 

How do you know?  Use this free site to get more info on your own Sender Reputation:  www.senderscore.org  (disclaimer, it's owned by my company Return Path)

And use this simple calculator to understand the impact of poor deliverability on the ROI of your programme: 
http://www.returnpath.net/senderscore/calculator/

Okay, you may be thinking.  "Focus on the customer."  That sounds reasonable.  Yet, if this is so obvious, why don't we do it?  Oh yes, we love our subscribers.  But we are so caught up in telling our own stories through email that we forget our subscribers have THEIR own goals.   Sure, they give us permission.  But then they don’t respond.  They don’t unsubscribe, but they ignore our messages.  They click on links to take advantage of offers, and they also click on the This is Spam button and (without knowledge) also tarnish our Sender Reputations and thus lower our chances of reaching the inbox for any of our messages.

We must effectively make the case for more resources and more support, so that we can optimize subscriber experiences and ensure that our email programs continue to deliver for us in the long term.  Feel free to email me for a copy of the presentation, or to discuss in more detail how you can effectively make a case for email marketing resources.

Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst
Return Path, Inc.

Affiliate Networks - Email Best Practice?

The email marketplace is a crowded one.  Volumes of emails being sent are rapidly increasing as it is continually being proven to be a responsive and cost effective means of customer communication and acquisition.  It has therefore never been more important to ensure that communication with consumers via this media is effectively managed so as to ensure solid response levels and perhaps more importantly, sender reputation with ISPs.

Of late it seems even affiliate networks are starting to get in on the act too, delivering email to support the activity running across their partner sites.  Networks offer an important way of delivering response on a CPC and CPA basis, but is it sensible to support this activity with email and is the necessary caution and understanding of the media being applied?

There is a danger that unregulated email communication from networks seeking to boost sales or fulfil response can serve to undermine a lot of the good work being done by Email Service Providers and media owners.   Where specialist ESPs are at pains to develop quality services and products taking into account all the fundamental hurdles and challenges this media presents, it is a concern that such insight is not always exploited or understood by those using email as an acquisition tool.

A number of issues are worthy of attention where email is used as part and parcel of network activity.  Central to these is the issue of control as an advertiser may have no knowledge that response is also being driven through email channels.  Given that the brand being promoted is considered the instigator of any campaign, it is ultimately the brand owner that must carry the can for any fall out should recipients feel they have received an unsolicited communication.  Would a brand  want to be put in the position of being held up as a spammer where they had no knowledge of running an email campaign?  Probably not.

It would be churlish to suggest that all email resource used by networks is unsuitable for third party purposes, but the ability to audit its provenance is seriously challenged if a brand does not know where it is being used.  That being the case another fundamental issue concerns data quality.  Any sensible advertiser using email for acquisition purposes should be 100% confident that the necessary permissions have been obtained and that the delivery of any campaign is in line with PECR and DMA best practice guidelines.  Under normal circumstances it is extremely easy to check, although with network sends it’s not always the case and communications can be received with no indication of where an email has been sourced from.  Normally you would expect this to be indicated in the from line and again within the email template.  There is no excuse for any media owner to conceal their identity especially if the source or brand from where the permission has been obtained to send commercial email can actually endorse the communication and reassure the recipient that their personal information is not being misused.

It is equally important to consider the extent to which a network might be able to translate the demands of using email to their affiliates or other media resource being used.  Where email-centric organisations are often able to educate their clients as to how best utilise email for either CRM or acquisition purposes, it is because of a solid understanding of the email marketing landscape.  Gone are the days of bulk untargeted sends to recipients who have offered only the flimsiest of permissions.  Such an approach these days is unsustainable in the face of increasing scrutiny from ISPs and recipients alike.  Quality media, robust delivery procedures, more sophisticated database management and relevant targeting are some of the most important factors to consider for email marketing to flourish.

There is no reason why networks cannot work successfully alongside ESPs in order to make email an even more effective channel of communication.  It goes without saying that many publishers will have extremely valuable databases if used sensibly, and in this respect the DMA and the network operators have an important role to play in developing a far more credible and integrated online environment.

Simon Jeffs
Head of Data
www.tmnmedia.com

Spam is in the eye of the beholder

The spam issue reared its head again recently in a widely unreported, but very interesting survey from Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa. It revealed that over half of US respondents (56%) consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message "is just not interesting to me". A further 50% said they received "too-frequent e-mails from companies I know" and 31% were sent "e-mails that were once useful but aren't relevant anymore".

It is all too easy for marketers to rely simply on ‘opt-in’ or ‘data protection’ to keep their emails legal.

However, as the survey clearly demonstrates, recipients don’t view emails in these terms; the ‘data protection’ and ‘opt-in’ status of a message is not their primary concern. All they want is an email that is relevant to them - anything else is unwanted. A message that is not interesting is just as annoying as any phishing attempt or offer of a lottery win.

ISPs, whether rightly or wrongly, have much to do with this mindset. The junk/report button is now prominent in the majority of email clients. It is an easy click for any user and gives them the power to make a stance and a declaration of intent. And why not? For the recipient, it solves the problem of removing unwanted emails in their inbox. According to Jupiter Research, a staggering 26% of users admit to using the junk/report button to delete unwanted email.

But the consequences for marketers of users using this as a delete button can be catastrophic. Not only does this potentially end a relationship with a customer, it can result in significant damage to your sending reputation, contribute to brand apathy and, on a wider scale, diminish the effectiveness of email as a genre.

So what’s the solution?

There are two important steps to try and combat this. Both are fairly obvious and are not hard considering the range of tools that are now available to email marketers. Yet they are still widely ignored.

The first is to ensure that emails are relevant and targeted. This relies on having enough data about a recipient so that it is possible to make valid assessments about what they want and how often they want it. Finding this information is as easy as asking the questions and it is impossible to undertake any form of segmentation without it. Data acquisition should be developed over time as part of a sustained strategy, incorporating a number of techniques, from microsites and surveys to viral campaigns and competitions.

The second is to ensure that a recipient is offered the chance to feedback if they feel the email is either irrelevant or being sent at the wrong time or to the wrong person. This can be achieved through a simple link to ask for further preferences if an email is not appropriate. In addition, place an unsubscribe link in a clearly visible position; if someone wants to unsubscribe, don’t make it a difficult or arduous process.

With the right strategy it should be easy to send interesting and relevant emails. Once again, this survey suggests that we are at a crossroad. It is time for marketers to realise the value of email marketing as a highly targeted genre. With the DMA valuing an email address at nearly £9 it makes sense to fully appreciate and maximise the value of this asset .

Tink Taylor
Business Development Director
dotMailer

Test. Send. Analyse. Change. Repeat.

Email marketing is very cyclical by nature – it’s never ‘finished’, and that is the beauty of it. The cycle includes: testing, sending, analysing, changing and repeating. This process allows you to improve your results and ROI each and every time you send.

Here are a few of the cost-effective tools available to help you achieve your goals:

Testing - One of the most powerful aspects of email is how quickly you can get results from your testing. By testing elements of a mailing before you send, you can make changes based on the results prior to mailing to your entire list. Things to test include: subject line, sender from, day, time, call to action, article length, layout, clicks and conversions.

Metrics - A valuable element of email is its measurability. With analytics you can measure activities and behaviour of groups and individuals per mailing, as well as over a period of time. The metrics that can be measured include: delivery rates, response and click rates, identified opens, new subscribers and sales. Tracking this information will allow you to build a profile of your customers and prospects.

Benchmarking - If you are new to email marketing and don’t have benchmarks, then it's fine to start by measuring your results against general benchmarks. But you should then strive to create your own benchmarks to measure your own performance over time. Don’t measure just one mailing. Measure one mailing against many. Build up an overview of performance in general by doing trend analysis. Measure your key drivers of success, and seek to learn which links, promotions, offers, articles, etc are working (or not working) over time. Also check your list growth (and erosion) over time and measure your subscriber activity based on how active they are vs. how long they’ve been on the list.

Segmenting - Before repeating the cycle, your aim should be to use what you've learned from analysing to make changes. Segmenting out your lists based on this information will allow you to send more targeted (received by the right person), timely (coming at the right time) and relevant (containing the right information) emails to all of your subscribers. What can you segment by?  It can be as simple as separating customers from prospects, geographic region, type of business, size of business, who the email is from (e.g. Account Manager). It can be as sophisticated as dynamically generated content that reflects an individual reader’s interests, previous clicks and purchases.

Denise Cox, Newsletter Specialist,
Newsweaver

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.