Customer Strategists Kurt Neckebrouck and Isabelle Jansen: Building a Sticky Email Marketing Strategy
Compared to paper-based customer communications, email marketing is often considered to be a more cost-efficient tool. Still, many marketing leaders continue to struggle with effective approaches for delivering relevant email content to recipients to help boost opt-ins and response rates.
These challenges are further complicated as email - and by association, email marketing - continue to compete with social media for consumers' mindshare. According to MarketingSherpa's 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, while 81 percent of executives polled say they believe that social media helps to extend the reach of email content to new markets, 71 percent of decision-makers say this ongoing battle for eye-share between email marketing and social media will increase in importance over the coming year.
As the survey results suggest, decision-makers must continually fine-tune their email marketing strategies to help ensure that their message resonates with their intended audience and helps companies to meet their goals. When considering those objectives, decision-makers need to ask themselves the following questions:
-What is the message you're trying to deliver? Is it purely about image building or do you hope that the email recipients will take action?
-What is the recipient's call to action? A mobile SMS reply? A return phone call? A mouse click?
-What type of action do you expect? A coupon redemption? Participation in an event? To generate a sale?
Each of these will have an immediate impact on the success rate of a campaign. The answers to these questions will also determine whether the communication was as cost-effective as intended.
A Blended Approach
As decision-makers ponder the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns, it's important for them to recognize that the key to success often involves a careful blending of email, paper, and SMS-based communications. Some campaigns can be supported by one or more channels. For instance, an email invitation can be followed up by an SMS reminder.
Ultimately, the success (or failure) of email campaigns is often driven by the quality of the database and how the message is formulated. For instance, if the intended recipient is Lauren Anderson and the email is addressed to "Lorrin," chances are fairly good that she's not going to act on it.
Meanwhile, some companies may craft email messages that may make perfect sense to specialists or recipients in the B2B world but are confusing to the average consumer. Therefore, agencies and companies should make their email communications as customer-friendly as possible while adhering to the following guidelines:
- Prior to launching an email marketing campaign, ensure that you have a qualitative customer database to work with as this will make or break your campaign
-Use an appealing and clear subject line. If you don't immediately capture a recipient's attention in the first two or three seconds, they're out
- Avoid words like "free," "hot," or "sexy" in the subject line or chances are that your message will be picked up by the spam filter and end up unread in the junk mailbox or as a deleted item.
-Make a strong offer
-Set a maximum limit of 2 messages per communication
- Don't get lost in the details of the e-communication. Pull the customer to the landing pages where the terms and conditions for an offer and other information can be explained
-Establish a clear call to action (C2A) for the recipient
- If for some reason your campaign requires a complex C2A, make sure you counter this with an important customer advantage (big incentive, important discount)
- Never send an email on a Monday since it's statistically proven to result in poor open rates
Personalizing the message is recommended and achievable, even when sending out email blasts to hundreds of recipients. Companies can and should make use of customer or prospect profile information and craft offers and provide preferred response mechanisms (e.g., SMS) based on that information.
Measuring the Impact
Although there are multiple ways to measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, the most efficient metrics are:
- Open rate
-Click-throughs
-Participation rate (e.g., for an event)
- Redemption rate (e.g., exchange of points)
-Number of bounced emails
-Number of emails sent and not delivered
-Percentage of unsubscribers
Using these metrics, return on investment (ROI) can be calculated based on two components. One is the cost of the email campaign, which can be separated into two parts: fixed development costs and variable sending costs (per email). The other ROI measurement is the type and amount of return the campaign is expected to generate for the company, such as the number of products sold or services activated.
Ultimately, companies need to make sure that the message they're sending to email recipients is easy to understand and is aimed at meeting a customer's preferences and requirements. The message shouldn't be about your company. Make sure the message is crystal clear and meets customers' needs.
About the Authors: Kurt Neckebrouck is a Senior Account Manager at Peppers & Rogers Group. Isabelle Jansen is a Communications Manager at Peppers & Rogers Group. Both are based in Brussels. Contact them at kneckebrouck@1to1.com and ijansen@1to1.com.
These challenges are further complicated as email - and by association, email marketing - continue to compete with social media for consumers' mindshare. According to MarketingSherpa's 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, while 81 percent of executives polled say they believe that social media helps to extend the reach of email content to new markets, 71 percent of decision-makers say this ongoing battle for eye-share between email marketing and social media will increase in importance over the coming year.
As the survey results suggest, decision-makers must continually fine-tune their email marketing strategies to help ensure that their message resonates with their intended audience and helps companies to meet their goals. When considering those objectives, decision-makers need to ask themselves the following questions:
-What is the message you're trying to deliver? Is it purely about image building or do you hope that the email recipients will take action?
-What is the recipient's call to action? A mobile SMS reply? A return phone call? A mouse click?
-What type of action do you expect? A coupon redemption? Participation in an event? To generate a sale?
Each of these will have an immediate impact on the success rate of a campaign. The answers to these questions will also determine whether the communication was as cost-effective as intended.
A Blended Approach
As decision-makers ponder the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns, it's important for them to recognize that the key to success often involves a careful blending of email, paper, and SMS-based communications. Some campaigns can be supported by one or more channels. For instance, an email invitation can be followed up by an SMS reminder.
Ultimately, the success (or failure) of email campaigns is often driven by the quality of the database and how the message is formulated. For instance, if the intended recipient is Lauren Anderson and the email is addressed to "Lorrin," chances are fairly good that she's not going to act on it.
Meanwhile, some companies may craft email messages that may make perfect sense to specialists or recipients in the B2B world but are confusing to the average consumer. Therefore, agencies and companies should make their email communications as customer-friendly as possible while adhering to the following guidelines:
- Prior to launching an email marketing campaign, ensure that you have a qualitative customer database to work with as this will make or break your campaign
-Use an appealing and clear subject line. If you don't immediately capture a recipient's attention in the first two or three seconds, they're out
- Avoid words like "free," "hot," or "sexy" in the subject line or chances are that your message will be picked up by the spam filter and end up unread in the junk mailbox or as a deleted item.
-Make a strong offer
-Set a maximum limit of 2 messages per communication
- Don't get lost in the details of the e-communication. Pull the customer to the landing pages where the terms and conditions for an offer and other information can be explained
-Establish a clear call to action (C2A) for the recipient
- If for some reason your campaign requires a complex C2A, make sure you counter this with an important customer advantage (big incentive, important discount)
- Never send an email on a Monday since it's statistically proven to result in poor open rates
Personalizing the message is recommended and achievable, even when sending out email blasts to hundreds of recipients. Companies can and should make use of customer or prospect profile information and craft offers and provide preferred response mechanisms (e.g., SMS) based on that information.
Measuring the Impact
Although there are multiple ways to measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, the most efficient metrics are:
- Open rate
-Click-throughs
-Participation rate (e.g., for an event)
- Redemption rate (e.g., exchange of points)
-Number of bounced emails
-Number of emails sent and not delivered
-Percentage of unsubscribers
Using these metrics, return on investment (ROI) can be calculated based on two components. One is the cost of the email campaign, which can be separated into two parts: fixed development costs and variable sending costs (per email). The other ROI measurement is the type and amount of return the campaign is expected to generate for the company, such as the number of products sold or services activated.
Ultimately, companies need to make sure that the message they're sending to email recipients is easy to understand and is aimed at meeting a customer's preferences and requirements. The message shouldn't be about your company. Make sure the message is crystal clear and meets customers' needs.
About the Authors: Kurt Neckebrouck is a Senior Account Manager at Peppers & Rogers Group. Isabelle Jansen is a Communications Manager at Peppers & Rogers Group. Both are based in Brussels. Contact them at kneckebrouck@1to1.com and ijansen@1to1.com.
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