What with the Data Protection Act, anti-spam software and firewalls, email communication has a lot to contend with. But even hedged round as it is, email is still a powerful medium and takes an important place in the marketing mix. Graham Ellor, planner at TDA, advises that businesses should consider email marketing a core element to their overall strategy and should plan how to build their own in-house lists safely.
Businesses can collect and use email data themselves or buy the services of an email database owned by a third party. Businesses building their own list must conform to privacy legislation, but also need to have a system and procedures which can handle replies generated by an email campaign. These could vary from a bounced email to data correction and from an opt-out request to asking for further information. As Jane Byrne, product manager at Thomson, says: Businesses shouldn’t underestimate the amount of money and time which needs to be invested to keep email databases up to date.
Getting help
Third-party suppliers of email data are useful for companies which:
- Don’t want to build and maintain their own list
- Seek new ways to communicate with clients
- Want to enhance their datasets
- Are testing email as a marketing medium
- Are developing new products and services
- Are selling to a new market.
Third-party providers of email data should handle the legalities of data collection and cleansing, and be able to sift from their list the contacts most appropriate for your campaign. Ed Gorman, data sales manager at AP Information Services, comments: Marketers should use a supplier that’s able to promise and deliver a money-back guarantee for any goneaways. Businesses looking for suppliers should ask:
- Where the data comes from
- Whether it’s collected on- or offline
- How and how often it’s cleaned
- How it’s sorted/categorised
- Who is the email service provider (ESP)
- What recent email campaigns have been handled.
Richard Gibson, commercial director at RSA Direct, suggests testing suppliers by signing on to their websites and seeing what marketing communications arrive as a result. This way you can check who is renting the information and how close to your own marketing goals and sector they’re working.
Detail development
Scale and anonymity are the two major differences between email data for the B2B and B2C environments. There are over 60 million people in the UK but only 3-4 million businesses, so for sheer volume B2B datasets are fewer and smaller. Additional information such as job titles, personal preferences, etc. is much scantier in B2B email data. Even where such information is provided there is little indication of the business value of the information, or the contacts’ place in the hierarchy of their firm. But as Ben Bailey, head of data planning at Information Arts, says: The more routine email campaigns become, the more data accuracy, data selections and choice will increase.
Email data is significantly more expensive than offline data; the latter tends to be around £100-150 per 1000, while Thomson for example holder of the largest business email database in the UK charges £280 per 1000. With some suppliers, the more selective the client is of the data, the more it costs.
Richard Lloyd, managing director of business information at Experian, comments: Buying email data is more expensive than traditional media, basically because it’s more successful. And prices are falling as more people use the medium. Gibson at RSA Direct, explains: Market research in the US suggests that the costs attached to using email data have decreased over time. As North America is traditionally 2-3 years ahead of the UK it’s likely that we’ll see a similar fall in the costs of email data over here.
Email has advantages other than being a merely cost-effective way to reach target audiences. Bailey of Information Arts says: We’ve found that email marketing can achieve one to two times the response of direct mail with a cost saving of up to 70 per cent. Businesses can monitor response rates in real time, allowing campaigns to be re-tailored, copy amended or even the target audience adjusted. Jason Goodwin, head of customer intelligence solutions at SAS UK, says: You can even send notification of a special offer, a technical broadsheet or a case study to different recipients within the same campaign. Unlike most marketing channels, email can also have an advantage when running marketing campaigns overseas. Unless businesses have an office within the country of destination, the laws of the country of origin apply.
The secret of success
The success of email is self-perpetuating providing data is maintained accurately. Lists of direct contacts can legally only be made of people who have specifically agreed to receive information. As such, they may contact only those people they know to be interested and businesses should realise much higher conversion rates.
Sometimes success is even down to the time of day the message is delivered. Sam Gray, database manager at Thomson, comments: We’ve done a lot of trials on email marketing and messages which arrive at their destination around 10 am usually have a much better response rate than those which arrive in the afternoon. Lloyd narrows it down even further: For some reason the best time for an email to arrive in order to elicit a response appears to be Tuesday morning.
Email success rate is also due to the care taken by responsible owners of datasets over how they maintain their lists. If an email account closes, it generates a hard bounce which means that the message is returned as undeliverable. The list holder then removes the incorrect email details from the list, records them and contacts the company concerned to request new information.
To ensure that its list stays up to date Thomson makes about 10,000 calls per day checking email details and explaining to businesses what it means to be on the database. Its database manager Gray continues: We’ve currently about 400,000 B2B contacts who have opted in to the system and the reviewing, checking and updating is a constant rolling process.
The opt-out rates for firms such as Thomson and Experian are very low, partly because of the careful screening, partly because people find that what they are sent is generally relevant and partly because the firms voluntarily restrict themselves to contacting each address no more than once a week. Experian’s Lloyd explains: Our clients specify which data subjects they’d like to contact and when. We then respond, for example, that a certain proportion of them can be contacted that week while the rest may have to wait for the following week if another client has already booked an email communication for that week.
The way to go
Despite concerns about a possible increase in privacy laws, email marketing has grown significantly in the last 12 months and continues to develop. Demand for good data has increased competition between suppliers and prompted data collection to become more detailed and more precise.
Goodwin at SAS, says: At the moment email is used mainly for marketing communications, but I think its use will broaden. As the multimedia and mobile markets converge more scope will be offered for receiving email on the move with hard links to web bases, etc. Lloyd adds: It’s valuable to businesses to receive new ideas and I think individuals would be willing to trade some of their privacy in order to receive the emails they choose.
Email data can generate leads, raise awareness, add urgency and create an instant response, perhaps by offering a price differential. As Goodwin says: Email is cheap, easy to use, quick to customise, you can get an immediate response and the channel is underexploited. Yet sophisticated use of email is common in the B2C environment. It’s time B2B organisations caught on.
Supplemental: Legal obligations of email data
Note that the legalities surrounding the collection and use of email data have detailed differences in England, Scotland and Wales. 1. Individual subscribers (which include sole traders and partnerships) must give their permission (opt-in) to receive marketing communications via email. 2. If the contact details of individual subscribers have been collected during the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale, and the individual has not opted out at that time, they are deemed to have opted in to receive marketing emails (soft opt-in). 3. Employees ie. not individual subscribers may be sent unsolicited email marketing communications providing the communication clearly provides the choice of opting out and the means to do so. 4. No marketing communication may be sent by email without the sender being clearly identified, plus the option to opt-out of future messages and the means to do so provided. 5. Businesses using email data collected by a third party may not contact people directly but must do so through the third party. However, if a contact responds direct to the business concerned, then it may contact them directly and use the response to form the core of its own list.
