As B2B marketers, we know that email marketing can generate ROI, it is an important part of our marketing mix and it is relied upon than ever as a channel.
We also know that as inboxes become more cluttered, the potential success rates are becoming harder and harder to achieve.
So, what can you do to get the success rates you need?
At Concep we have seen some client’s email marketing campaigns flourish. These are the clients who have adapted accordingly to the new environment and changed their approach to suit.
We’ve picked out the key areas that we recommend you start building into your communication strategy to help you to maximise your email marketing success rates specifically for 2010!
Delivery & domain reputation
More and more SPAM filters are placing emphasis on reputation over content; you need to be aware of how this will impact your success rates.
If you have opted for an installed solution, you will need to manage this yourself. There are many reputable sources out there which can help you to keep up to date with reputation measures and advise on best practices, for example, www.returnpath.com and www.certifiedsendersalliance.com/csa_html/en/index_en.htm.
Most ESPs (like Concep) will offer this service, but it’s always useful to have an understanding of the basics.
The key things that dictate your reputation are:
- Your recipients hitting the SPAM button- The more frequently this happens, the worse your reputation will become.
- Continuing to mail to undeliverables (AKA soft or hard bounce backs) – This is a waste of your marketing budget as well as being very detrimental to the reputation of your domain. You should be filtering out undeliverables on a per campaign basis and getting the relationship managers in your company to update these contacts.
- Sending to high volumes- This signifies to the ISPs that you are likely to be a spammer. Sending your campaign to as many people as possible will not guarantee better success rates. Although you will be reaching more people, the chances are you will be upsetting a larger proportion who don’t find the communication of interest. Any spam classifications or opt outs received in conjunction with a high volume send will be viewed negatively in light of your reputation.
- Authentication – this allows ISPs to verify that you are who you say you are as a sender i.e. having a known return address. Your IT should be considering this when they register your domain. Again, partnership with an ESP will mean that they will manage this process for you as part of their service and will be covered as part of your dedicated or sub domain set up.
Relevance
Relevance is still very important in email this year, as people can consume highly tailored media from a greater diversity of platforms, such as twitter, LinkedIn and RSS. As a result they have far higher expectations over how relevant the content is that they engage with. You need to think: “why am I sending this content to this audience now?” How will this potentially benefit their company or job role?
No interaction, no delivery
Major ISPs are now taking email interaction such as link clicks into account when filtering email. This means that if a recipient has not clicked or interacted with any of your email campaigns in a while the likely hood of you reaching other inboxes will be reduced.
It is incredibly important to use your reporting to monitor contacts interactions, and then change your approach quickly to those who fail to interact. Don’t be precious over your contacts that have lost interest, if a re-engagement campaign doesn’t work, conduct a data cleanse on those contacts to see if they still want your communications or are just too lazy to opt out.
Strategy
Include an email strategy for those contacts that do not interact with your email campaigns, be that around re-engagement or adding them to the do not send list or asking for their preferences. This strategy should definitely tie in with your offline marketing such as telephone calls, print ads, TV and press. See our Cushman and Wakefield case study for a great example of how email can be successfully supported by other marketing channels.
Content
More is less, less is more, more or less. When putting together your content think about how much time and value the recipient will give to your email. If your audience is unlikely to spend 15 minutes reading an email do not send them a campaign with 5 relevant articles, spread them out so that people can digest it easily within their working day.
Fantastic creative will never outweigh good content. Make sure you have involved the content writers early on so that you don’t have to put dull copy in to fill the gaps.
Video is quickly becoming the preferred format to consume information quickly and easily, especially when you have a lot to say. Most email marketing vendors will be able help you to incorporate this on a secondary landing page, or via a link in the email. This should never be included on the first page of an email due to inbox restrictions.
Internal Stakeholders
This is the year for educating internal teams and management on the importance of owning an email strategy. Successful campaigns must be celebrated and poor campaigns learnt from. Everyone in the business must understand that email is not quick and cheap post, but a key relationship tool for the business.
Retention
Make sure your emails are relevant to your clients and support your company relationships. We all know it is cheaper to retain a client than win a new one. So spend the time putting client programmes together, get your client facing contacts to gather feedback on their relevance and don’t forget about those clients that are not viewing your emails.
Acquisition
Think twice about using email as a standalone acquisition tool. People view unrecognised emails in their inbox as SPAM, even if it is not SPAM’ in the eyes of the law. You may get 15 per cent positive interaction but that leaves 85 per cent of the list with a negative impact.
Try and use other people’s client communications as a way to meet your prospects e.g; provide an article to a newsletter that is being sent to someone else’s client base which also includes your prospects.
If you do use a data provider make sure they are reassuringly expensive and very reputable.
Mobile
How and where we read our emails is forever changing, make sure you have a web version of your emails as a minimum, but also consider designing for smaller screens
DATA!!!!
This has been and still is the most important aspect of email marketing. No matter how sculpted the content or subject line is, if the person doesn’t want to receive it or is not suited to them, they won’t read it.
A massive drive should be to put processes in place to ensure that your data is accurate and segmented. Speak with your CRM data stewards and IT managers as you will find they can generally help in this area.
The ICO now has powers to issue fines of up to £500,000. You must ensure all the data you use is correctly permissioned and that you abide by the data protection laws.
Reporting
A lot of effort and emphasis is put on the creation and delivery aspects of an email campaign. However, the effort shouldn’t stop after delivery. In digital, valuable reporting is readily available, but not always utilised as well as it should be. Make reporting an equally important part of your campaign process. Delve deeper into the statistics and pass relevant information on to critical client facing business units (account managers and sales teams etc). This will help them do their job and benefit the business as a whole.
In summary
Email is not simply a selling medium or a quick lead generator anymore, especially in the B2B arena where the sales cycle can be very long. Think of email as a channel to support your face-to-face relationships and adopt the same etiquette. Consider your strategy, the value of knowledge shared, relevance and targeting when you communicate. This approach will help ensure you are on the road to achieving much greater email marketing success rates moving forward.
