by Arthur Middleton Hughes
and Arthur Sweetser
A
summary of the original text.
Successful E-Mail Marketing
Strategies, summarized
by arrangement with Racom Communications, Inc., from Successful E-Mail
Marketing Strategies: From Hunting to Farming by Arthur
Middleton Hughes and Arthur Sweetser. Copyright © 2009 by Arthur
Middleton Hughes and Arthur Sweetser.
In this summary...
·
Discover how to use e-mail as an effective tool for
finding new customers and mining existing customers more profitably.
·
Build relationships with your customers by taking a
farming approach, instead of hunting for sales by sending millions of e-mails.
·
Develop state-of-the-art e-mail marketing strategies to
turn more prospects into loyal customers, segment your customers, and make more
money for your company.
·
Learn why the subject line is the single, most-important
element in a promotional e-mail, and the eight rules for writing powerful
subject lines.
·
Win with transactional and triggered e-mails, which
have open rates of up to 90 percent, vs. promotional e-mail’s open rates of 13
percent.
Successful E-Mail Marketing
Strategies
Something new, sophisticated,
and wonderful has happened to the marketing industry: e-mail
marketing. New because it's only about 15 years old,
having started in a big way only in 1998. Sophisticated because
it permits marketers to do very targeted and interactive marketing. And wonderful because,
when used correctly, it produces more bottom-line results per dollar than any
other marketing method ever developed.
There are two basic ways to
approach e-mail marketing today. The first is the traditional way — hunting for
sales — which involves blasting identical e-mails to millions of unknown
subscribers.
The second way — farming —
involves sending personalized, relevant e-mail communications to individual
subscribers based on a database of demographic and behavioral
information.
Most e-mail marketers today are
engaged in hunting. They know little about their subscribers except their
e-mail addresses. They are unaware of their subscriber's ages, incomes,
lifestyles, off-line purchases, children in the home, or any of about a hundred
relevant facts that are usually known to database marketing
professionals.
Like hunters, they set out
their traps, in the form of e-mails, in a wilderness of unknown subscribers,
hoping that some of them will be caught. It is getting harder to succeed
because there are more traps set by a growing number of hunters.
Farming, on the other hand, is
quite different. Each permission-based e-mail subscriber is listed in a
marketing database with a wealth of demographic, behavioral, and preference
data. It is possible today to send a different promotional e-mail to
every single customer — an e-mail tailored to what you can learn of the
customer's preferences, behavior, and lifestyle.
These marketing e-mails can
produce amazing results in increased retention and sales that beat anything
that could come from any other form of marketing.
This type of e-mail marketing
allows marketers to build one-on-one relationships by learning each customer's
personal preferences, and then delivering to her exactly what she wants.
It's what the old corner grocers used to do.
Before there were supermarkets,
groceries were sold in small grocery stores. In many cases, the
proprietor stood at the entrance, greeting the customers by name. He got
to know each customer personally, and what she liked to buy.
Most of these grocers no longer
exist. As businesses have gotten bigger, it's gotten harder to get to
know customers. But now, with e-mail marketing, a large corporation can
build relationships with its customers that re-create the recognition and
loyalty that the corner grocer built.
To get from here to there, you
will need to do a number of things:
1.
Build a database to hold all the information you'll need to
create effective e-mails. The database should store everything
you've learned and serve up information to draft the e-mail so they seem like a
conversation to subscribers.
2.
Get your customers' e-mail addresses and names, and use them
to personalize your conversation. Personalized e-mail are opened more,
clicked more, and sell more.
3.
Create segments. Depending on your business, you can create
marketing segments: college students, families with young children,
affluent seniors, or small businesses.
4.
Keep track of your customer's lifecycle. There is a big
difference between buyers and people who have never bought anything from
you. When they buy something, welcome them and thank them. If they
buy a lot, tell them how much you appreciate their business.
5.
Make every e-mail interactive. Every e-mail should be
filled with interactive links: preference centers, polls, surveys,
drill-downs, and paths to more information.
There are two broad categories
of marketing e-mails: promotional e-mails and transactional
e-mails.
·
Promotional e-mails say, "Here is what we have.
Review it, and click on anything that interests you. You can buy it
online by clicking here right now, or go to one of our stores to get
it."
·
Transactional e-mails occur after a purchase is made. They
thank the customer for the order, let her know that the order has shipped, and
give her the tracking number for the shipment.
The Case for Farming
Database marketing is analogous
to farming because when doing it, you study the customers and prospects (your
domestic livestock) instead of the campaigns (the traps for wild
animals). You create a database of business or consumer prospects and customers.
By asking for a street address,
you can append more than 100 fields of relevant data to more than 90 percent of
all consumers and businesses from compiled sources like AmeriLINK. With
consumers, you can learn their exact age, their estimated income, wealth,
housing type, whether they rent or own, length of residence, marital status,
children, ethnicity, direct mail responsiveness, credit worthiness, and dozens
of other facts. For business customers, you can learn annual revenue and
number of employees. These data cost just $0.04 to $0.05 per subscriber.
In these databases, you also
record your prospects' online and off-line behavior:
·
Did
they open, click, download, complete a profile, or fill out a preference
form?
·
Did
they buy something online, from a catalog, or from a retail store?
·
What
was it, when was it, how much did they pay?
·
What
promotions have they received?
·
Where
do they live?
Armed with this data, you can
create subscriber segments, such as affluent retired, college students,
families with young children, condo dwellers, home office owners, major league
sports attendees, frequent travelers, and golfers. You can then create
marketing messages specifically for each profitable segment.
Companies that have done this
find that a personalized customized message to a profitable segment has much
higher open, click, and conversion rates than a one-size-fits-all blasted
e-mail promotion.
If your prospect list contains
only a name and an e-mail address, however, it's impossible to get appended
demographics. You have no idea who these people are, making it very
difficult to send relevant e-mail.
Some advanced e-mail marketers
are turning to database marketing because blasted e-mails have begun to lose
their effectiveness now that everyone is doing it. Open, click, and
conversion rates are falling. Unsubscribes, undeliverables, and spam
designation rates are going up. The return from the hunt is falling
because too many hunters are chasing the same subscribers.
E-mail marketing based on
database marketing, on the other hand, is becoming more productive.
E-mail recipients open e-mails from trusted sources that consistently send them
personalized, customized content of interest to them.
This is the future of e-mail
marketing: putting your prospects and customers into marketing databases,
using the databases to create marketing segments, and designing custom
marketing strategies for each segment.
Farming Subscribers
The way to measure performance
is to focus on the subscriber, rather than the campaign. Again, this is
the difference between hunting and farming.
Campaigns are easier to
measure. Tracking systems have been set up so that e-mail marketers can
count opens, clicks, conversions, and unsubscribes.
Studying subscribers is more
complicated. It requires learning about each subscriber and putting that
knowledge into a marketing database. The database is used to create
subscriber segments that, in turn, are used to craft personalized messages
designed to appeal to each subscriber.
Subscriber performance
measurement is more profitable in the long run. You learn each
subscriber's physical mailing address. You track everything a subscriber
does on your Web site, while reading your e-mails, while shopping at your
retail stores, and when calling your catalog desk. You add all this to
your subscriber database. You then use the database to manage these
customers. The goal is to understand these subscribers, maintain contact
with them, build their loyalty to your company, and boost sales through
personalized communications.
The first key technique in the
farming process centers on the customer-marketing database because it contains
all your subscribers, customers, and former customers. It may contain not
just the subscriber's e-mail address but also many other fields as well,
including:
·
Name
and street address
·
Date of
birth, income, wealth, education, marital status, children
·
Type of
housing, house value, own vs. rent
·
Purchases
made online, from catalogs, and in retail stores
·
Promotions
and transactional e-mails sent
·
Record
of clicks, downloads and Web visits
·
Loyalty
program points, subscriber preferences, and special interests
·
Segment
and status level into which the subscriber has been put
·
Source
of the subscriber and the source date
The idea is to put all you know
about the various individuals who have registered their e-mail address with you
or bought something from you into a relational database. When you send
promotional e-mails, you select names from this database.
To farm your subscribers, you
must know a lot of information about them. How can you get it?
There are at least four methods that work.
·
First,
capture events. Keep track of everything they do, including which e-mails
they open, what they click, and what they buy in any channel.
·
Second,
you can gather preferences. Ask customers what they prefer.
·
Third,
you can infer their preferences. By studying what your customer does on
your Web site, in your e-mails, with your catalog, or in your retail stores,
you can infer what she is interested in.
·
Finally,
you can append data, which you can get from one of the four major consumer data
compilers in the U.S. For about $0.04 for each subscriber, you can get
demographic data appended to a consumer's entry that contains an accurate
street address.
Now that you have the data on
your subscribers stored in a database, your job is to make the subscribers
happy with your company and its services. You want them to read your
communications, be loyal, and purchase lots of products. You divide them
into useful segments, such as college students, seniors, married with children,
and home-office workers, and develop a marketing strategy for each
segment. Their database records will be the focal point for all future
contacts and communications.
Once you have relevant
information in your subscriber file, you can stop sending e-mails about lawn
mowers to people who live in high-rise apartments or condos. You can stop
sending e-mails about baby food to houses whose occupants are all over
60. You can start sending e-mails about life insurance that are relevant
to subscribers' incomes.
What's wrong with sending an
e-mail offering a $2,000 life insurance policy to a consumer whose income is
$150,000? It's not relevant. The consumer opens the e-mail and sees
that his bank does not understand him at all. He may not open another
e-mail from that bank in the future as a result. It has lost the chance
to sell him a $100,000 home equity loan with an irrelevant life insurance
e-mail.
Before you had a customer database,
you had no way of knowing your offer wasn't relevant to some of your
depositors. You sent e-mails to everyone on your list and hoped for the
best.
With your database, you can
begin farming subscribers and give up hunting for them. Determine what
type of person would buy each of your products or services. One way to do
this is to consult your database of existing customers. Figure out the
characteristics of those who bought the product compared to those who didn't
buy it.
Create a profile of the typical
buyer, and use it to select subscribers from your database that fit the
profile. Create e-mails just for them. To make sure you are doing
this correctly, also create a control group: subscribers selected at
random from your database without regard to demographics or behavior.
For example, from a database of
2 million subscribers, 273,334 people were selected who matched the buyer
profile of a particular product and sent a promotional e-mail. Of these
people, 842 people purchased the product.
At the same time, 20,000
randomly selected subscribers were sent the same e-mail. Three of them
bought the product.
What would have happened if the
company had randomly selected the original 273,334? Assuming the same
purchase rate, 41 people would have bought the product, and 3,553 people would
have unsubscribed because the e-mail was irrelevant to them.
You have a limited number of
chances to be relevant to your subscriber base. Every time you send them
something they aren't interested in, you turn some of them off, and your
unsubscribe rate goes up.
So what will you offer to the
remaining subscribers? This is where farming your subscribers becomes
very useful. Three techniques can help you discover what your subscribers
want: link categorization, collaborative filtering, and the NPB (next
best product).
Every time a link in one of
your e-mails is clicked, an invisible beacon in the e-mail sends a packet back
to your server that in effect says, "Show this subscriber the link's
landing page." Your e-mail tracking software will keep track of who
clicked the link and what the link was. It will store this information in
the subscriber's database record. Your job is to categorize the links so
you can use the information later.
From the links, you can learn
what each subscriber is interested in. In designing the next e-mail to
this subscriber, you should first research all the links she clicked. If
you have a good categorization system, you will know that she is interested in
books on, say, interior design and European furniture. In addition to
anything else you plan to communicate with her about, these two subjects should
be included in some way.
This is powerful
information. Such an advanced farming technique makes the subscriber feel
that you are really paying attention to her and her interests, just as a corner
grocer would.
A second key technique is
collaborative filtering. The idea is to make automatic predictions about
a user's interests by collecting information from many similar users.
Both Amazon and Netflix use this technique.
The underlying assumption of
collaborative filtering is that those who agreed in the past tend to agree
again in the future. For example, a collaborative filtering for music
tastes could predict which music a user will like, given a partial list of that
user's likes or dislikes. These predictions are specific to the
particular person but uses information gleaned from many subscribers.
Netflix asks each member to
report on movies they liked and those they didn't like. From the reports
of millions of people, it is able to create "soul mates" — people who
have likes and dislikes in common.
For example, if Netflix knows
you like Jane Austen, Alfred Hitchcock, and "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
and dislike "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," it can pair
you with "soul mates" who have the same likes and dislikes.
Knowing that, it can predict that you are likely to want to see a new movie
based on what your soul mates thought of that particular movie.
Collaborative filtering is very
powerful. It can produce outstandingly successful results. GUS, the
largest cataloger in the UK, used this software to increase its cross-sale rate
from 20 percent to 40 percent by correctly identifying the next product
customers would like to hear about, based on their soul mates' preferences.
The third technique is NBP
analysis. Suppose you have promoted a particular product to a group of
subscribers in the past. Of subscribers getting the promotion, only 3
percent buy it. You select 6,000 buyers of the product who bought it as a
result of an e-mail, and 30,000 of those who got the same e-mail but did not
buy.
Using segmentation and
analytics, you can calculate the likelihood of a particular customer being
interested in buying each of your products, based on the segment she is in and
the percentage interest in each product demonstrated by members of that
particular segment.
It is possible to use
demographics and behavior to create a NBP for every subscriber on your
database. As a result of promoting customers by their individual NBPs
instead of blasting everyone with your product of the month, you can greatly
increase the open, click, and conversion rates and reduce the unsubscribe
rate.
No matter how clever your
one-size-fits-all e-mails are, personalized, segmented, targeted e-mails based
on farming a subscriber database will be more relevant and profitable.
You can prove that by testing on a small scale. Once you know that
farming works better, get busy and do it.
Relevant E-mails
Forrester Research reports that
about 72 percent of North American online consumers "delete most e-mail
advertising without reading it." Why? A primary reason is that
the e-mail doesn't contain content that is relevant to the recipient's current
interests.
Nearly three-quarters of
respondents to a Merkle study ranked irrelevancy as their top reason for
unsubscribing from a company's e-mail program.
Relevant e-mail has content
that relates to the recipient's location, interests, attributes, behavior, and
other factors that grab her attention. Relevance increases e-mail productivity
by improving opens, clicks, conversions, revenue, and profit.
The relevance of an e-mail can
be measured by six factors, each of which contributes to making a particular
e-mail message relevant to the reader.
1.
Segmentation. Divide subscribers into segments based on
their particular demographics, lifestyle, preferences, locations, or
behavior. Use different marketing strategies for each segment.
2.
Lifecycle management. Customer lifecycles could be defined as
prospects, first-time buyers, multibuyers, advocates, or lapsed
customers. Send different e-mails to each group.
3.
Triggers. Send trigger e-mails based on a subscriber's life
events, such as making a first purchase, having a birthday, or achieving gold
status.
4.
Personalization. Use the subscriber's name in the e-mail
salutation. Then vary the e-mail's content based on what you have learned
about her preferences, previous purchases, clicks, downloads, and so on.
5.
Interactivity. Every e-mail should be an adventure:
full of links to products, polls, surveys, drill-downs, and downloads.
6.
Testing and Measurement. Test the audience, subject line, offer,
content, and frequency. Study the tests, draw conclusions, and make
changes to make e-mails better and better.
Relevance sounds like a nice
idea, but how do you know that relevant e-mail marketing programs, as defined
by these six factors, are more successful than other e-mail marketing programs?
JupiterResearch has answered
this question. It used actual e-mail performance data to establish that
relevant e-mails produced more conversions, revenue, and profit than one-size-fits-all
broadcast e-mails did.
In its research,
JupiterResearch established that targeting tactics such as segmentation with
dynamic content produced 5 times more revenue and 16 times more profit than did
broadcast campaigns.
The relevance of e-mail
marketing programs is measured on a scale of 0 to 3. The success of each
of the six relevance factors is graded by the following criteria:
A score of 3 means the e-mail
uses this factor on more than half of e-mail programs in a sophisticated way; 2
means the e-mail uses this factor on between one-quarter and one-half of
e-mails in a sophisticated way; 1 means the e-mail uses this factor on less
than one quarter of e-mails in an unsophisticated way; and 0 means it does not
use this factor at all.
To convert your e-mails into
communications that your subscribers will be delighted to receive, calculate
your own e-mail program relevance. Take an honest look at the product you
are delivering and score your e-mail campaigns on the 0-to-3 scale for each of
the six relevance factors.
Then create a plan to improve
each relevance factor. Let's take personalization as an example.
Make a list of the things that
should be done. For example:
·
Welcome
visitors to your Web site by name by using cookies.
·
Provide
a similar salutation, using the subscriber's name, in each e‑mail.
·
Organize
e-mail content around what you know about the customer: her previous
purchases, what she clicked on in previous visits to your Web site or in your
e-mails, and her expressed preferences.
·
Provide
plenty of opportunities for her to share her opinion and preferences.
What kind of results can you
expect from personalization? Williams-Sonoma tested personalized images
and saw conversions increase 50 percent. Golfsmith saw revenue jump 167
percent when it used personalization.
E-mail Marketing to Subscriber
Segments
To create relevant e-mails, you
first have to divide your subscribers into segments.
Most e-mail marketers today are
at the primitive level of segmentation; all they know about most of their
subscribers is their e-mail address.
There are some things that you
can do to send more relevant e-mails, however, even if you are in this
situation.
Primitive subscriber
segmentation can be broken down into six areas:
·
Purchase behavior, such as buyer vs. non-buyer
·
E-mail activity, such as active clicker vs. non-clicker
·
Web activity, such as added items to cart vs. never
visited site
·
Tenure on database, such as within 30 days vs. more than 90
days
·
Channel shopped, such as on Web vs. at store
·
Click categorization, based on number of clicks on opened e-mails
At a minimum, separate
subscribers into buyers and non-buyers. Many e‑mail marketers have a
million or more subscribers, but less than 10 percent of them have ever bought
anything online. You have little excuse for treating them alike; buyers
should be treated better.
Another thing a primitive
segment marketer must do is to have a preference profile button in every
e-mail. The more information you have on each subscriber, the faster you
can move to advanced segmentation.
The preference center should
ask for the information you need to make that leap, such as street address, the
category of products the subscriber is most interested in, and demographics
such as income, presence of children, type of home, own vs. rent, and length of
residence.
Offer your subscribers a
discount on their first order if they complete the preference profile.
Soon you will have enough data to use advanced segmentation tactics.
Say you have the opt-in e-mail
addresses with profile and preference data on 1 million customers. How
will you create e-mail content that each customer would consider relevant?
Create less than a dozen
customer segments, and design particular e-mail content for each segment.
You can break segmentation marketing into four main tasks:
1.
Getting
data about your customers that can be used to put them into segments and to
design content for the e-mails sent to them.
2.
Creating
workable segments based on your customer base and the information you can
collect.
3.
Designing
marketing programs for each segment, managing the segments, and sending
relevant e-mails to each segment.
4.
Creating
reports on each segment, reviewing your success, then revising your marketing
program based on the reports.
Every time a customer opens an
e-mail, clicks, or buys a product or service, the data should be stored in your
database.
A major online retailer of bags
and accessories, eBags, wanted to identify the day and time it should send
promotional e-mails to generate the highest response rates and online
sales. The company decided the best time to reach each customer would be
the same day and time the customer had originally opted in. It reasoned
that if the customer's schedule afforded her time to opt in, it might also be
the best time for her to consider an offer and make an online purchase.
To test this segmentation
strategy, eBags sent promotions to recipients on the same day of the week and
time of day as they had originally opted in. The results were
amazing. Compared with a control group's results, the test group's click-throughs
were 20 percent higher, and conversion rates increased by 65 percent. The
average order size was 45 percent higher, while the average revenue per
recipient was 187 percent more than the control group.
This is really a great
segmentation idea. Most marketers keep track of the date and time that
subscribers subscribed already. See if you can match these outstanding
results.
Many operational systems record
purchases by item number. But how will you use this information to create
a segment?
To make sense out of the data,
get a spreadsheet file of a couple thousand transactions. As you look at
the records, think about how to categorize them, then sort them in different
ways until something clicks in your head.
Some people buy only sale
items. Some buy top-of-the-line merchandise. Some buy women's
apparel. You are on your way to creating segments that you can use for
e-mail marketing.
Once you have spent a week or
two doing this kind of analysis, you can come up with a method of categorizing
purchases that enables you to put your customers into different segments for
some campaigns based on purchase data. Armed with this method, you can
develop some business rules that enable your database managers to categorize
purchases by your scheme.
As noted earlier, with a
consumer's name and street address, you can get demographic data appended to
your customer file. The data include about 100 fields of information that
can be really useful in creating segments. After all, you wouldn't send the
same e-mails to a couple over 65 that you would to college students or to
families with young children.
Start by getting the
demographic data for a file of 100,000 customers. Categorize these
customers' purchases by the when and the what, and see if by blending all three
together you can create a meaningful segmentation scheme. While you do
this, keep thinking, "How can I use this information to help create
relevant e-mails for this customer?"
Creating Powerful Subject Lines
A relevant e-mail starts with a
great subject line. In fact, the subject line is the single,
most-important element in a promotional e-mail. If the subject line isn't
relevant, interesting, and stimulating, the e-mail will never be opened, and
everything else you have put into the e-mail will be wasted because no one will
ever see it.
You should spend most of your
creative energy on the subject line. The copy and offer are important, of
course, but the subject line is always more important. Pick the subject
first, then write copy that delivers on the subject line's promise.
As you draft your subject
lines, follow these rules.
1.
Tell rather than sell. The best subject lines tell the
subscriber what's inside, while the worst ones try to sell what's inside.
The stronger the commercial pitch in the subject line, the less likely it's
going to be opened.
2.
Think like a customer, not like a marketer. Your e-mail readers are
interested in one thing: What's in it for them? Write with that in
mind; write about the benefits that matter to them, not features that matter to
you.
3.
Don't use first and last names in the subject line. Personalization is very
important for e-mail content, but that rule doesn't apply to subject
lines. Spammers steal names from the Internet and use them in the subject
line. But the recipient is smart enough to know the message is spam.
Don't use names in your subject lines, or you will be considered a
spammer. A MailerMailer study showed that e-mails with personalized
subject lines did worse than those with no personalization at all.
4.
Use your company name in the subject line. Many studies have shown that
putting your company name in the sender line and the subject line increases the
open rate. JupiterResearch found that including the company name in the
subject line increased open rates from 32 percent to 60 percent.
5.
Test several lines before a rollout. Which subject line will perform
best? Your subscribers can tell you by their response. Send each of
your proposed subject lines to a few thousand subscribers who are a
cross-section of your intended audience. See which subject line works
best.
6.
Send the e-mail to yourself. Once you have decided on a
subject line, before you roll it out, send it to yourself. Does it grab
your attention? Does it stand out from the other messages in your
inbox? Does it look interesting and worth opening? Does it look like
spam? Many times an e-mail in the inbox looks quite different from an
e-mail on the drawing board.
7.
Avoid using the same subject repeatedly. Just because a subject line
worked well yesterday doesn't mean it will work well today. You can
rarely repeat the same subject line with the same audience and get the same
good results week after week. Since e-mails often stay in subscribers'
inboxes for several days, using the same subject line in two different e-mails
will get them both deleted faster than if they had had different subject
lines.
If your competitors notice you're using the same subject line repeatedly,
they'll conclude it is successful and copy it. At that point, you'll be
competing against your own winning technique.
8.
8. Avoid certain words. Never put the subject lines in
all capital letters, and never use exclamation marks. Free is OK in a
subject line, as long as it isn't the first word or capitalized. Most
consumers will respond well to free, as long as you are truthful and avoid
looking like spam. Spam words like duty-free and sex are out, of
course. But there are words that aren't on the spam list that may also
kill your subject line response, such as help, percent off, and reminder.
In addition to these
guidelines, keep in mind that the space available for subject lines varies
greatly among ISPs and e-mail clients, from 45 to 80 spaces. But that
doesn't mean you should use all the space available.
How long should your subject
lines be? A MailerMailer study showed that open rates and clicks varied
by subject-line length. The study of 300 million e-mails sent in 3,200
permission-based campaigns showed that subject lines of 35 spaces or fewer were
opened 20.1 percent of the time, while those with subjects of more than 35
spaces had open rates of only 15.28 percent. This means that you can
increase your open rate by 31.6 percent by chopping your
subject lines to 35 spaces or less.
How to Write Compelling E-mails
To write compelling e-mails,
you must start with a plan for what you are trying to accomplish with the
message. What do you want readers to do?
Do you want them to download
something? Buy something? Sign up for something? Whatever it
is, it should be only one thing.
One study showed that e-mails
with multiple action items had much lower click-through rates than those with
single actions. One action item yielded a 56 percent click-through
rate. Two items yielded a 37 percent click-through rate, three yielded
less than 5 percent, and four yielded a mere 1.4 percent. If you have two
things you want readers to do, send two different e-mails — and space them a
couple of days apart.
Before you begin, imagine who
your readers will be. Picture them reading your e-mail. Try to
imagine what is going on in their minds.
One question readers ask is,
"Who is this person writing to me?" You can use yourself for
the e-mail author or create a persona. The writer should be a person,
such as the director of marketing, a product manager, or the CEO.
Give your reader a sense of who
you are as a person. Don't talk like a know-it-all; talk like a user or a
developer. Tell readers that you have tried the product or service
yourself and found that it works for you. Or tell them what you did to
develop the product so people would find it useful.
Most e-mails should be
conversational. Even for a business audience, don't be too formal.
The most successful e-mails are written like a conversation between two people,
one on one. Here's a quick summary:
·
Use
short sentences; the shorter the better.
·
Use a
familiar word rather than rare words, concrete terms rather than abstract ones,
short words rather than long ones, and single words rather than several ones.
·
Use
verbs; they give life to a sentence. Use the active voice rather than the
passive or subjunctive.
·
Be
careful with adjectives. For example, instead of saying "a large,
impressive house," simply say "a mansion."
Once you have written your
copy, read it out loud to yourself. Many times you will find that what
seemed good on paper doesn't read well out loud. It should, so change it.
One way to create interest is
to invite the reader to send in articles, questions, or comments to be included
in future e-mails. Lots of people like to see their name published.
You can make it possible and generate interest in your e-mails at the same
time. To do this, give readers a subject to write about. For
instance, if there was recently a conference or industry event, ask readers to
write a session summary and send it to you.
Another way to stir up interest
is to include a poll or survey in every newsletter, using multiple-choice
questions. The topic could be anything of interest to your readers.
Give the results in the next e-mail. Subscribers will want to read the
next e-mail to see how their responses compared to everyone else's.
The best e-mails are filled
with dynamic, database-driven customer preferences. They have customized
subject lines, greetings, offers, or special images inside the e-mail.
They strike a responsive chord in readers that helps them realize that you are
speaking directly to them as individuals, not to the world in general.
To create dynamic content, you
need demographic information about your subscribers, such as zip code,
occupation, hobbies, age, household income, or spending habits, and you need to
use that information to provide content that speaks to the reader's particular
interests.
It is a big mistake to have too
many images in your e-mails. Use a combination of images and text; not
more than 60 percent of the e-mail should be images.
One important rule for
e-mails: Never send attachments, including PDFs. It creates two
problems. First, attachments usually appear suspicious to a spam
filter. And second, there is no way to track the action on an attached
file. You can't find out if readers opened your attachment or not.
The best way to provide
information is with a link in your e-mail to the file you want people to
see. With a link, you won't trigger any filters. And because you'll
house the file on your site, you will know how many opened your file and who
they were.
Writing text for a mobile
version of your e-mail is very different from writing text for the regular
version of your e-mail. A mobile device's screen is tiny — between two
and four inches.
When writing the mobile version
of your message, visualize your readers. What will they be doing while
they read your text? Riding in a cab, waiting for a plane, eating on a
train, or being stuck at the wheel of their car in traffic? They are
probably operating with one hand, and their attention is somewhere else.
They will scan their inbox rapidly and skip most of it.
If you use tracking URLs, you
will have to compress them to fit them on the small screen. The messages
must be short. Long sentences force readers to scroll a lot, which can be
frustrating.
Frequency
E-mail marketing is so
inexpensive that many retailers are seduced into using it too often. It
seems simple enough: if you send e-mails weekly, then shift to daily,
your sales are likely to increase. Doesn't this prove that more is
better? Yes and no. Here's why.
Relevance and frequency are
related. A relevant e-mail sent too often can lose its effectiveness over
time. In a study by Merkle, 66 percent of e-mail users listed excessive
frequency as a reason to unsubscribe. If you have a subscriber who might
give you $2,000 a year for 10 years and you lose her within a few weeks through
excessive e-mails, you have lost a lot of revenue — usually without even
realizing it.
But the reverse doesn't
necessarily hold true. If you send e-mails very infrequently, your
customers may forget about you and consider your e-mails as spam when they do
arrive.
The take-away is this:
Make it easy for subscribers to tell you what they think, and listen to what
they say and do.
To be sure you are doing things
the right way and not losing your most valuable customers, consider some of the
following tests.
In addition to an unsubscribe
link, test inserting an "Are we sending you too many messages?"
link. When subscribers click this link, tell them how often you have been
e-mailing them. Then offer them the opportunity to reduce or increase
mailing frequency or limit mailings to specific topics.
Another test to try is with
unsubscribers; they hold valuable information for you. Place a survey in
the "you have unsubscribed" message to find out why they are leaving
and what you could do to make your e-mails better. Take what you learn
very seriously. Think about it, and act on it.
Transactional E-mails
Transactional e-mails are the
most powerful e-mails you will ever send to your customers. They have
open rates of 70 to 90 percent, whereas promotional e‑mail's open rates hover
around 13 percent.
There are an unlimited number
of types of transactional e-mails. Some include:
·
Thank-you
messages
·
Order
shipment
·
Satisfaction
surveys
·
Important
reminders
·
Ticket
confirmations
·
Opt-in
e-mail confirmations
·
Welcome
e-mails
·
Service
confirmation
Each message gives you a chance
to build a strong relationship with your customers and to open the pathway to
gaining more information, more loyalty, and further sales.
Because this is a transactional
e-mail, the message should start with the information about the
transaction. There should be no promotional material above the fold or
above the transaction text. The subject line should tell subscriber what
the message contains, such as "Your order has shipped" or "Print
your boarding pass."
Further down in the message,
you can include some promotional material. But never bury
the transactional message beneath a lot of other copy. It has to be at
the top.
CAN-SPAM is one important
reason for beginning your message with the transaction. This law
restricts what you can do in transactional e-mails. But you can still get
a lot of customer-relationship building into your e-mails. There are
really only two basic requirements, which are easy to meet:
·
First,
the subject line should clearly identify the message as transactional.
"Your forthcoming trip to San Jose" is clearly about a
transaction. "Great deals on sheets and pillows" is clearly
not.
·
Second,
the beginning of the text should be about the transaction. No
problem. Put the promotional material below the fold, and you are OK.
If your transaction is an
introductory welcome, the message should include:
·
A
personalized greeting
·
A warm
welcome, explaining some of your products and services
·
A link
to a sample of the e-mails she will receive
·
A link
to your privacy policy
·
An idea
of your mailing frequency
·
A link
to a page on your site that is relevant to what she signed up for
·
An
opportunity to buy something else immediately
·
A link
to a preference page
·
A link
to a survey
The main body of the e-mail
should always begin with the subscriber's name. Never say "Dear
Valued Customer" in a transactional e-mail. In promotional messages
you may only know the e-mail, so you can't personalize. But all transactional
e-mails can be personalized. If you test, you will find that personalized
messages produce more clicks and conversions than nonpersonalized ones.
Transaction messages should be
sent within 10 seconds of the event that triggered the message. Your
customer has just made a purchase, and she is sitting at her computer waiting
for you to send her something. She is in a buying mood right now.
She may not be in a similar mood tomorrow
When you assemble the creative
that illustrates your cross-sell products, use a template. For example,
put links to the administrative information across the top. Then include
a personal greeting and a message about the transaction. Follow this with
images of the next best product and a related product. At the bottom,
offer a limited-time coupon.
Products can be assembled by
intuition — such as a belt, shoes, and coat to go with a dress — or by
something more sophisticated based on analysis of similar customers' purchasing
experiences.
However you do it, you need a
lookup table that lists the image location for each item that you sell, along
with the image location of its complementary products. The images are
automatically inserted into the lower half of any transaction message that
mentions its complementary product. The template has space for the other
images with suitable wording, such as "Here's what other customers bought
who ordered a Yellow Balau Wood Patio Bar Cart. Click on any item to
learn more."
Triggered E-mails
A triggered e-mail is sent because
of something unique that is happening in the receiver's life that he may know
about, such as his birthday, or may not know about, such as the cancellation of
his flight.
To trigger an e-mail, you need
information:
·
Direct information comes from the customer in a preference
form.
·
Indirect information comes from examining the various purchases,
Web visits, and transactions that reveal what the customer is thinking about.
It isn't as difficult as it
might seem. Using modern e-mail and database marketing techniques, you
can develop information to create relevant triggers for e-mails the same way
the grocer did: by listening to the customer. Marketers set their
systems up to listen for Web visits, registration and preference forms,
downloads, and transactions. These events are stored in the subscriber's
database record.
Capture a lot of customer
events and study them. You then develop business rules configured within
the software that takes any event and turns it into a conversation, just as the
airlines have done with flight departures.
Triggered e-mails get open
rates of up to 90 percent, compared to promotional e-mails, whose open rates
hover around 13 percent.
A welcome e-mail should be sent
to a subscriber within seconds of the subscriber's clicking the
"submit" button. You can also send an e-mail before an event,
such as an upcoming flight, a Webinar, live seminar, or other scheduled
events.
A birthday is usually an
excellent trigger with a very high opening rate. Many companies offer
something free on the subscriber's birthday: a dessert, 25 percent off,
or another suitable gift that gets the recipient to come in to claim her
gift.
Other useful triggered e-mails are
abandoned carts, store receipts, status-level changes, satisfaction surveys,
catalog arrival, airline check-in, and gift reminders.
As a first step, have a
brainstorming session to list events that would rate an e‑mail in subscribers'
minds. Next, figure out how you can easily capture the information needed
and store it in your database to support the triggers. Finally, develop
business rules to scan the database nightly to yield the occasions for an
automatic trigger.
Triggers are so personalized to
individuals' lives that you can't possibly have time to create them one by
one. Set up the business rules, and they will go out automatically, day
after day.
Interactivity
Whether you are sending a
triggered e-mail, a transactional e-mail, or a promotional e-mail, it should be
interactive. The more links you have, the more relevant your e-mails will
be to your subscribers.
Interactivity refers to the
degree to which a person can make choices within an e-mail. These choices
are based on the rules built into the e-mail.
Interactivity involves two-way
communications. The communication may take the form of data, video, or
audio. Instead of remaining passive, the reader becomes an active participant.
Interactive e-mails get the
reader doing something. The process helps maintain reader interest and
get reader input. Using cookies, e-mails should be personalized and
filled with content that, based on past behavior, readers find interesting.
A good interactive e-mail is
short. To be convincing to a reader, you do need a lot of content, but
most of it should be on your Web site or a landing page.
Using links within an e-mail,
you can let the reader:
·
Download
a report, whitepaper, or manual
·
Forward
the e-mail to a friend
·
Reply
to the e-mail
·
Find a
definition or background information on any subject in the e‑mail
·
See and
complete a form to order a product or to register for e-mails
·
See a
video, a photo, or an article on the subject
·
Go to a
Web site
·
Take a
quiz or a preference survey or vote on an issue
When a reader first opens the
e-mail, she thinks, "Oh, this is short and easy to read. I'll see
what it says." While reading the short e-mail, if she has questions
or wants to know more, she clicks on a link, which takes her to a Web page with
additional content. In a good interactive e-mail, 90 percent of the total
content is accessed by a link rather than actually in the e-mail.
Links are the secret to
interactivity. They are a wonderful way to get the user actively involved
in your e-mail. Instead of just reading it, the reader is clicking on
links.
The other reason for putting a
lot of links in an e-mail is the direct relationship between clicks and
sales. The more recipients click on your e-mails, the more they end up
converting and buying. No one knows why, but it is a fact of life.
So fill your e-mails with interesting links and valuable, relevant content to
encourage clicking.
When planning an interactive
e-mail, ask yourself what you want the reader to do when he looks at your
e-mail. Then design the e-mail with this plan in mind. When you
have completed the e-mail design, read it as you expect your readers will do —
to see if the finished product actually produces the results you want.
Testing
If you are going to run a
successful e-mail marketing program, you must test. Here are some rules
that you can use to start off right.
1.
Use your best previous promotion as your control. Use your best newsletter as
your newsletter control. Select your best welcome e-mail as a second
control. Find your winning transaction message as a third control.
In other words, for each type of campaign you send out, look for your best and
try to beat it.
2.
Define what was best about the control e-mail. Was it opens?
Clicks? The lower rate of unsubscribes or the high conversions? Be
sure you have a concrete definition of best.
3.
Create test groups. The people in your test groups
should be representative of your entire customer base. To define a test
group, you need criteria, such as:
4.
Buyers
vs. non-buyers
5.
Length
of time as subscribers
6.
Source
of the subscriber
7.
Demographics
1.
If you
don't have any test groups, you can simply use an A/B split: Send version
A to half your e-mail file and version B to the other half — and keep track of
which group got which version. This is a good way to begin and should
give you valid results.
2.
When
you want to get more sophisticated, however, you will need test groups.
Why? Suppose version B delivered a 4 percent conversion rate and version
A delivered a 2 percent conversion rate. Version B is so much better that
you will want to use that version from now on.
3.
But to
test something else, you don't want to risk losing a lot of sales by
restricting the number of people who get your best e-mail. You will want
to test your new ideas on only a small portion of your database. Hence,
use a small test group, and everyone else is your control.
8.
Only test one thing in each e-mail promotion. The best test is the
single-variable test.
9.
Always test the subject line first. This line is all that
most people see before they delete your e-mail. If it isn't good, most
subscribers won't see anything else. Create a random 10 percent of your
file, dividing it into six equal segments. Try one subject line on each
segment. Wait six hours. Look at your open rates for each.
Then send to the remaining 90 percent of your file using the winning subject
line.
10.
Test the other elements of the e-mail. For example, test the
offer. One retailer found that an e-mail offering "$50 off"
generated 170 percent more revenue than an e-mail offering the same amount of
savings but with the wording "15% off."
11.
Don't expect amazing results every time. If you are doing a lot of
tests, many tests will fail to prove anything significant. That's
OK. Be patient and try again.
Let's conclude with some final
advice. Here are 10 steps to improve the effectiveness of your e-mail
marketing:
1.
Build the database. If you lack a marketing database, the
existing subscriber database has to be converted into a true marketing
database, built on a relational platform. Decide what information about
each subscriber will be needed for the farming operation. Demographics should
be appended to all records that have postal addresses.
2.
Engage an ESP. E-mail marketing is too important to the success
of any enterprise to make it an in-house operation. Most marketers
outsource the entire e-mail creation and sending process to an e-mail service
provider (ESP), giving the provider instructions as to who is the audience for
the e-mails, what the content of each e-mail should be, what triggers will be
used, and so on. Other firms develop the content but outsource e-mail
sending, using an ESP's software. There are a dozen large, experienced
ESPs out there reviewed and recommended by JupiterResearch and Forrester
Research. Consult these agencies, write a request for proposal, and
started doing e-mail in a professional way.
3.
Automate as much as you can. Your ESP should provide you
with software that will automate most of your e-mail marketing program, leaving
you free to do long-range planning and creative content. All your
triggers should be automated. For example, as soon as a person
subscribes, a series of e-mails should go out automatically: confirmation
e-mail, welcome e-mail, and the start of the promotional e-mails. There
should be automated messages for abandoned shopping carts, subscribers who
haven't opened recently, birthday greetings, customers reaching status levels,
anniversary of gift purchases, and more.
4.
Use interactivity. Every e-mail should be an
adventure. Have a live agent available for text chat through every e-mail
sent to subscribers. Also include a search box that enables subscribers
to look up everything they might want to know about from any e-mail they
receive.
5.
Test constantly. Every e-mail campaign should
have at least one test built into it. You can test subject lines,
arrangement of offers above and below the fold, contests, incentives for
product reviews, and so on. The most important part of your testing
should be a scheduled review every month of test results. The review
should answer these questions: What changes in our e-mail program will we
make based on what we have learned from tests in the last month? And what
new tests will we conduct in each campaign during the next month?
6.
Regularly review e-mail frequency. Are subscribers happy with
their current frequency? Ask them what they want. Unsubscribing
buyers should be queried to determine what would have induced them to remain as
subscribers.
7.
Review competitive e-mails monthly. Staff members should subscribe
to e-mails from all the competition. Your goal is to be totally informed
about what is going on in the e-mail world.
8.
Select the best e-mails as controls. For each type of message,
determine your best previous message, with best defined by such measures as
opens, clicks, and conversions. These are your controls. Provide
recognition for any staff member who can devise an e-mail that beats the
control by a significant percentage.
9.
Set up subscriber controls. Always have a group of
subscribers that doesn't get your latest new idea, so you can
determine whether the new idea really is working and how much better (or worse)
it is. Someone needs to be in charge of selecting the controls and making
them available on a regular basis.
10.
Run a monthly set of reports. Have a monthly review to
determine changes needed in your e-mail program as a result of the tests and
the success of your previous programs.
Opens, clicks, and sales from
e-mails based on hunting techniques are getting lower each year. Farming,
rather than hunting, is the solution. These 10 steps will enable your
business to make the transition to successful e-mail marketing.
About the Authors
Arthur Middletown Hughes is founder of The
Database Marketing Institute, Ltd. and Senior Strategist for e-Dialog. He has
been designing and maintaining marketing databases for Fortune 500 companies
and others for more than twenty years. His database clients have included
catalogers, retailers, restaurants, telephone companies, insurance, banks,
pharmaceuticals, package goods, software and computer manufacturers, resorts,
hotels, automobiles, and nonprofit fund-raisers.
He is the author of The
Complete Database Marketer, 2nd Ed. (Mc-Graw Hill 1996); Strategic
Database Marketing 3rd Ed. (McGraw Hill 2006); The Customer
Loyalty Solution(McGraw Hill 2003); and Customer Churn Reduction
and Retention for Telecoms (Racom, 2008). His articles appear
regularly in leading industry publications. He is on the editorial board of The
International Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications.
Arthur Sweetser is CMO of Evergage, a
provider of real-time behavior-based web personalization. Prior to this
he was CMO of e-Dialog, where he guided the company from $7 to $90 million in
revenues, grew the global client base by 300%, and achieved consistent rankings
as the top e-mail service provider by Forrester Research. He has a long history
of successful direct marketing. His credits include work with Converse Athletic
Shoe (international markets); Ogilvy & Mather (Chicago), where he managed
Sears, Wagner Spray, BOSCH, and American Express; Cabot Advertising (Boston),
where he led the team for NYNEX; Hill, Holliday; and S&H greenpoints (SVP
of Marketing).
825
75th Street, Willowbrook, Illinois 60527
1-800-776-1910 • 1-630-734-0600 (fax) • www.audiotech.com
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