John Wanamaker, the 19 Century price tag inventor, said “I know that half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half.” Wanamaker would have felt dizzy at the sight of 21 Century businesses tracking and measuring click-through responses to their personalised and targeted email campaigns.
Mark Power, managing director of Concep explains, “It’s so satisfying when a client, using one of our email marketing packages, says they’ve tracked a click-through, a download or email feedback to a £100,000 sale.”
You can almost hear the sound of Wanamaker’s jaw clunk on the floor.
“Businesses are keeping their customers informed too, all that for just a £2000 investment,” adds Power, part of a growing posse of email marketing specialists.”That’s the beauty of email marketing. You can track who’s viewing you, ask questions and get feedback without taking people to a website.”
Plus, it’s cheaper than a conventional snail mail shot and no franking is required. For instance, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) spent a fortune trying to communicate with its 80,000 worldwide members through printed, packaged and posted mail. Concep provided ICE with a professionally designed e-newsletter that carried branded content directly to over 30,000 recipients. Click-through rates for individual recipients, helped the ICE to tailor future e-newsletter issues with more relevant content.
“Email marketing isn’t just about selling a washing powder on a train ticket,” waxes Power. “It works best for membership organisations, financial services or property companies that are trying to manage high-value relationships with clients across a longer buying process.”
A growing medium
Certainly, as the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reports, mushrooming email marketing campaigns are consistently promoting corporate brands, services and events across new audiences. Alternatively, increasingly sophisticated email marketing techniques are targeting niche brands at specific market segments.
Professer Patrick Barwise of the London Business School has charted the growth of email marketing across the UK, USA, Japan, Germany, France, China and Brazil. It now accounts for 10 per cent of total marketing expenditure in B2B firms, compared to four per cent in B2C companies.
“Permission email is one of the fastest growing interactive marketing activities,” says Professor Barwise. “I expect this trend to continue.”
Nick Martin is general manager of Mardev, a specialist in lead generation and customer acquisition around B2B data. “We started email marketing in a small way in 2000 but now it’s grown to about one third of our business.
“That’s not just simply because it’s really cheap and knocks every other marketing format into a cocked hat in terms of cost-per-lead,” says Martin. “Email marketing is simply an increasingly effective means of reaching a target audience with a business proposition.”
However, Martin points out that it’s too easy to be seduced by a sophisticated email response tracking software and become over-excited by the ‘leg-show’ of new, potential business generated at next-to-nothing cost.
He has cautioned businesses to put basic direct marketing principles into practice to avoid an email marketing thrust churning up disappointing response rates or cultivating disastrous complaints.
Before you press ‘send’
Use email as part of a strategic approach to marketing.
- Assess how email marketing can fit into an overall marketing plan and integrate your campaign with tailored content in your website.
- Look at the email message itself. Think through the navigation from an email to ensure its website is built in such a way that makes it as easy as possible for the email recipient to buy, sample, download etc.
- Don’t run a high-speed train on a crooked track. A well-designed campaign can fall flat on its face if the email message content is sloppy – research shows people dislike badly spelt emails.
- Attention spans with emails are notoriously short. So, keep your content short, simple and snappy.
- Don’t splash out too much with the colour palate.
- Offer downloads such as white papers which interest.
- Invite recipients to respond to questionnaires.
- Keep the theme of subsequent messages consistent (but refresh with new comments and images).
- Send a confirmation email after your prospect has subscribed and add a customer service phone number.
- Capture some basic information. It may seem obvious but data captured must include the individual’s first and last name, date of birth and postcode.
You are then able to use the technology that allows personalised emails to communicate more intimately with prospects, both within the body of the email and the subject line, responding personally to each individual’s specific purchase history, enquiries or preferences.
Don’t fall foul of legislation
Without fail, ensure that your data capture complies with the laws on data collection and re-use, particularly, the Data Protection Act 1998. The bottom line is not to stray from the basic principle of getting active permission from a recipient to send them information or messages. Give recipients the chance to tick an ‘opt-in’ check box.
Note that some 34 per cent of the UK’s top companies are failing to comply with the EU Directive on Privacy & Electronic Communications 2003, which insists on positive consent.
Prominently display a privacy policy. Remember that you will be breaking the law, reaping complaints and harming your business if you harvest email addresses from websites and emails without obtaining each individual recipient’s personal consent.
Some of the growing phalanx of specialist email marketing companies can genuinely help you at a fair price, but shop around. Choose a company with a sophisticated online package but one that’s easy to use. Look for one offering support and advice on how to interpret the response data.
“The screen is where people interact. Spam will soon be filtered out,” Power of Concep predicts. “Firewalls will come down. Websites will remain number one but valid email marketing is now part of the standard marketing arsenal.”
Supplemental: Email marketing glossary
- Above-the-fold: The bit of an email or web page that can be seen without scrolling.
- Blocking: Emails that are prevented from reaching targeted individuals.
- Click-through rate: The percentage of people who click through to a specific web page that is embedded in an email, banner ad, text or graphic.
- Cookies: A cookie stores an individual’s personal information so that personalised emails or web pages can be sent to them and a profile built.
- Harvesting: Collecting email addresses from websites and emails without seeking consent to use them.
- Hard bounce: An email can’t ever be delivered, for instance, due to a wrong address.
- HTML emails: Emails with colour graphics and images that are becoming the standard for email marketing.
- Landing page: The website page where a prospective customer has been directed to by an email.
- Opt-in: An individual positively subscribes to receiving unsolicited direct marketing emails.
- Opt-out: An individual requests not to be included on an email list.
- Soft bounce: An email can’t be delivered for the time being, for instance, due to a full mailbox.
- Soft opt-in: An individual is considered to have opted-in to receive information as they knowingly provided their email address during a sale or negotiation.
- Unsolicited commercial email: A specific email that has not been specifically invited by a recipient.
