Email marketing’s popularity is attributable to its low cost, high ROI (Return-On-Investment) and focus on customer retention. While the economic crisis will force retailers to cut back on many important marketing and technology initiatives, email programs will survive relatively unscathed.
Small businesses and large corporations alike have been forced to erase entire sections of their 2009 marketing “wish list” in response to a bleak economic forecast. Amid such turmoil, Email marketing has remained a staple due to its cost-effectiveness, highly measurable results and flexibility. At a fraction of a penny per message, the value of an email campaign compared to an expensive direct mail communication is substantial. However, getting the most from your email marketing campaigns during tough economic times may require a different approach than what you’ve done before. Also, in email’s favor is its measurability. Marketers can quickly and effectively measure who is responding to messages, which promotions work best and so much more.
It is not surprising to see how advertisers continue adding to the budget for marketing activities that are generating the greatest ROI, like searches and email marketing. According to eMarketer, at the beginning of this 2009 year, 14% of the online marketing budget is destined for email marketing.
Today, with the growing reach of the Internet, broadband connectivity, search engines, social networks, and increased demand for Smart Phones, we have arrived at an era on which the consumer is truly the manager. Taking into account that technology has to facilitate things, but it is not everything, advertisers have to give the consumers the value they demand. For this reason, when we speak of email marketing, it is very important to speak of RELEVANCE of the messages and the level of personalization in the conversations that are initiated through email.
The actual situation of the use and abuse of email marketing has led the consumers to fight more against SPAM and has driven them to different avenues of communication like social networks, text messaging and other methods that allow the consumer to regain control over their communication and relations with retailers.
If retailers want to avoid being blacklisted or ignored, they must improve the relevancy of their email programs. The solution lies in using segmentation and personalization techniques to target emails. Of course, retailers also need to be vigilant about testing their tactics to determine which are most effective.
Focus on Customers’ Needs or Lose Them Forever
Marketers must use measurement tools in order to provide personalized messaging. In a 2008 Merkle
Study, half of email recipients said good email influenced their decision to make a purchase, and 38% said they tend to spend more money with a company that sends emails they read regularly. Thirty-two percent said they stopped doing business with a company because of poor email marketing practices.
Looking forward, some of the most exciting possibilities for email marketing are appearing in social networks. The social inbox, for instance, promises to provide an integrated view of a user’s email and other communication channels. Furthermore, new applications will make it easier for people to virally share emails with friends in their social networks.
Email Marketing’s Effectiveness
Email marketing’s ROI in 2008 was $45.06 for every dollar spent on it, according to the DMA’s report
“The Power of Direct Marketing,” which analyzed direct marketing activity across major industries.However, compared to other media, the ROI of email marketing has been in a faster decline than other advertising avenues. This decline could be attributed to the maturation of this method. But also to how companies are investing more on emails that are not focused on generating revenue, like order confirmations, or the failure that companies have experienced by using “rented” databases. Despite these issues, advertisers and retailers do not want to reduce their media budget for email marketing, because they recognize the ROI is going to be affected by the relevance of the messages sent and the segmentation done on the databases, and also the low cost compared to other online marketing strategies.
Five Email Strategies for 2009
1. Clean and Nurture Your Email List
Be sure to perform a thorough cleaning of your email lists. This does not mean blindly deleting a bunch of names, but rather using segmentation strategies to treat historically inactive recipients differently than people who are actively opening and clicking on your email messages. Here are some suggestions for cleaning house:
a) Take a close look at your lists and list segments. Are there some list segments you are never using? If so, clean them out.
b) Today’s email success is about quality, not quantity. Review lists of people who have not responded to messages in the past few months and contact them in a different way than the rest of your list. If they still do not respond, consider removing them.
- c) Review any new list segments you may want to make. Are there any ways to segment and strengthen messages to various groups? If so, segment them now and start communicating more effectively to those groups.
2. Enhance Your Segmentation
Email marketing data offers incredible segmentation power and the ability to take advantage of small audience segments that might otherwise be financially or technically difficult to reach. If you haven’t started segmenting your list and sending more targeted messages based on recipient data or behaviors, start in 2009. Most of the research in the email industry indicates that segmentation yields significant gains in email conversions. Some typical strategies for segmentation include:
a) Geography - This is an easy, fairly obvious segment. For example, your customer in Florida is likely not interested in a snowmobile. And your customer in Minnesota probably isn’t interested in a jet ski—not in the winter, anyway. Geography can also be an indicator of buying patterns and other influences on the purchase cycle. Take the technology industry, for example. In high-tech pockets like Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin, early adopters are far more common.
b) Demographics – This is another easy one, and can make a lot of sense. For example, we know men and women can interpret information quite differently. Younger vs. older audiences taking in information in different ways as well.
c) Job title and function – Are you emailing potential users with none–or all–of the buying power? An owner or CFO may want to know about ROI, while a middle manager may just want to make his or her job easier. An engineer or programmer may want to find better ways to work, and so on…
d) Purchasing frequency – Less frequent purchasers may require a time-sensitive offer to encourage them to act. Another approach would be to reward frequent buyers with exclusive privileges via email.
e) Monetary spending – Adjust resources so you’re dedicating your efforts toward customers who spend the most money with your company.
If you have been segmenting your email audiences, don’t stop. Try to find new ways to segment and look at segmentation based on historical email activity, perhaps treating people who are frequent “clickers” or “openers” differently.
3. Review and Refine Your Opt-in Campaigns
Review everything from the data fields you’re collecting to the confirmation emails you are sending afterwards. Small changes can mean big gains in new audiences, as well as setting the proper expectations for subscribers. Ask yourself the following –
a) Can you increase opt-ins by reducing unneeded data collection?
b) Are you prominently directing web visitors to sign up for email? Can you place this on more pages, or in more visible locations?
c) Do you clearly define significant benefits for subscribers signing up for your email? Does the email you send confirming the opt-in restate the benefits?
d) Can you set expectations and ask subscribers to “add this address to your safe list” in the opt-in process?
e) The language you use, the support graphics, and the staging techniques you employ can make a huge difference between being ignored and creating an evolving, dynamic relationship that can enhance database precision, enrich dialogue, and help you showcase a larger scope of services.
If you’re not using strict opt-in policies, 2009 is the year to start. As consumers continue to tire of unwanted email, you’ll continue to see declining response rates if you are not using an opt-in-only process.
4. Design for “Images Off” and Preview Panes
In 2009, you’ll find your audiences are increasingly looking at your messages without images turned on (it may not be their choice, but rather the default of their email client or a corporate IT policy). Make sure your messages are still readable and compelling without images. This may mean designing messages using fewer images, or including a short list of articles at the top of your newsletter. This technique works well for people who are viewing your message through a preview pane as well. Making sure enough content is placed at the top of the message to give recipients something to act on will be important to success rates. Without designing your messages with “images off” in mind, your campaigns may end up looking like this to recipients:
5. Integrate Social Media into Your Email Program
Like email, social media has quickly become one of the most widely used communication mediums on the web, so it only makes sense that integrating the two can serve to increase the overall effectiveness of your online marketing. The power of social media lies in the ability of its users to quickly and easily share information with their contacts, which might then turn around and share with their own contacts. If the information being shared is, for example, a piece of content from one of your emails, this type of “word-of-mouth” marketing can extend the reach of your message by a tremendous margin.
Few ways to integrate social media into your email program
a) Incorporate a social media bookmarking tool into your emails, allowing subscribers to share your newsletter to their contacts on various social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
b) Develop and maintain a company profile on various social media networks, and prompt social media contacts to consider subscribing to your email newsletter(s)
c) Promote your social media presence on your emails in order to build a larger social media following. Start a company blog and use your emails and social media profiles as traffic generators.
Social Email Marketing: The Next Big Thing
While the World Wide Web continues to generate exciting new forms of human interaction, including such Web 2.0 offshoots as social networking and video-sharing sites, wikis and blogs; what is just as exciting are the new engagement-marketing opportunities that result from the joining of both old and new Internet-based communication technologies. Email and social networks represent such a nexus.
Clearly, social networks have changed the relationship between companies and their customers. Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow people to share their thoughts and quickly connect with hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends. An estimated 19 percent of online users log onto social networking sites at least monthly or more often, while 41 percent of youth ages 12 to 21 visit social sites daily. Individuals linked to one another on a social networking site are affiliated for a reason. They’re like each other in some important ways. Social email marketing, therefore, enables you to reach prospects that share some affinity with your best customers. The ability to reach out to others with attributes similar to your best customers is invaluable.
Will Email Just “Twitter” Away?
There’s mounting evidence that social networks are pulling certain audience segments away from the email inbox, and the numbers indicate it’s not just the Millennials, or Generation Y. Jupiter Research reports that 22 percent of email users say they use social networking sites instead of email. And in
England, Hitwise estimates that social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo receive more Internet traffic than email sites Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. So is this the death of email?
Though change is inevitable, most industry analysts and experts agree that email marketing won’t be going away anytime soon. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey found that 92 percent of adult Internet users send or read email — far more than regularly visit any social network. Email is simply too valuable a marketing channel to disappear or even diminish. Email marketers have long been the stewards of customer engagement. And Forrester Research projects that email marketing will grow to more than $4 billion by 2012. But new technologies that combine the rich reporting capabilities of email with the viral, consumer oriented nature of social networking have arrived to make reaching out to customers and their friends through social networks easier, allowing progressive marketers to enjoy the benefits of both.
In fact, a few companies are making it easier than ever to enable both email recipients and landing page visitors to post their favorite messages on social network sites. Such new technologies allow marketers to combine the power of email with the reach of social networking sites to engage with customers, friends of customers and friends-of-friends of customers.
New Technology Bridges the Email/Social Network Gap
Recently, Silverpop developed an industry-first technology that bridges the gap between email marketing and social networking. Using links within emails, recipients are able to quickly post messages to their profile page on Facebook or MySpace. When these social emails are posted on social sites, everyone connected to the original recipient can see the message, make a comment or post it on their own profile page. Dynamic content and personalization remains intact in the posted email. So when Golfsmith sends an email about a putter sale at its stores in Dallas, area recipients can post the message on their profile page to let Texan friends in on the good deal. And the golfer in Akron will be able to post a message on her profile page giving the details of the sale there. Share-to-Social feature gives email marketing a tremendously powerful viral effect. Plus, the ability to pull reports on who posted emails to social network sites resulting in additional opens and clicks provides marketers with the detailed data necessary to prove the campaign’s value.
Give Some Steroids to Your Email Campaigns
Combining the targeting and reporting capabilities of email with the reach of social networks enables companies to build marketing programs that change their relationships with customers in very real and dramatic ways. To help ensure effective outreach, take a customer-centric approach to your messaging.
Begin by listening to your customers and monitoring the way they currently interact with your messaging. Start with those recipients most connected to your brand as indicated by their behavior.
Those who open your messages most and click on links frequently are already in line to serve as brand ambassadors. Give them a good reason to share your promotional emails with their friends, and make it easy for them to connect by including links within the email and landing pages to their social site. Utilizing brand enthusiasts to post your emails onto their social sites signifies their endorsement—they posted them for others to see. But better yet, social emails can even result in the poster adding an influential comment or two, such as, “This is a cool watch, and it’s on sale. Did I mention my birthday is coming up soon?” Such postings add strong word-of-mouth marketing that helps sell products.
Studies by Bazaarvoice found that customer accolades can make Web site visitors who browse for highest-rated products 49 percent more likely to make a purchase. And sharing opinions is at the very essence of social networking, where consumers are frequently influenced by the thoughts of peers.
Conclusion –
Email marketing continues to prove itself to be a low cost retention and conversion tool that yields high response from consumers. However, using segmentation and personalization techniques to target emails is essential to prevent campaign failures. Remember, relevancy is king. By diligently studying the extensive reports that can be gathered from an email marketing campaign, a feature many other types of media lack, you will be able to apply the 5 email strategies and provide information about our products/services to the people that are truly interested in it. Lastly, keep up with the times! Social media is becoming huge and these two strategies (email marketing + social media) promise to skyrocket the ROI of your campaigns.
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