Maxine-Laurie Marshall cuts through the rumour to reveal the truth about email marketing
arketers should be aware of rumours but only act on fact. According to rumour, email marketing is dead. I think it died last year as well, and the year before that. But the fact is 70 per cent of the 250 client-side marketers surveyed in our Email Marketing Benchmarking Report regard email as critical or very important. This is the truth about email marketing.
Email is a staple in the marketing mix but also has some rumours of its own to deal with. The first being you can’t use video or moving images in email without it ending up in the spam folder. This untruth has been around for as long as video itself. It was once founded on fact as Tom Sather, senior director of email research at Return Path explains: “It used to be a concern, probably about 10 years ago when people were literally attaching it to the email and sending that out, inboxes were a lot smaller then. Hotmail for example had a 2MB limit so video and other more advanced things were frowned upon because most inboxes were already quite full and it would just bounce out.”
Video isn’t bad for email marketing
Marketing seems to be changing on a daily basis, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that what was true 10 years ago isn’t today. Technology has advanced and what was once fact is now just a lie. The advent of HTML5 is the key to video in email. Simon Billington, creative director at Purestone has had first-hand experience in putting together email campaigns containing videos for clients. He says: “HTML5 means you don’t need to use java script to inbed videos in html email. The java script is the thing spam filters were looking at, so that’s why it would never go through. But you can now inbed video using the HTML5 tags.”
While it’s possible to view video in email it’s always advisable to have a back up. Billington details the four alternative layers that should sit behind the video: the video is backed up with an animated gif, that with a standard image, styled up alt tags and then simply plain text. This enables marketers to provide their audiences with the most engaging content they are able to receive.
Billington says: “If you look at email in terms of preconceived ideas, everyone says keep it really basic and you always get through, but in reality to get great engagement you want to give them the maximum they can receive.”
Purestone has been using HTML5 and video in emails for clients for around six months and Billington hasn’t seen an increase in bounce backs or a detrimental effect on the emails. He says: “The last stat I read, and our findings have echoed this in the broadcasts we’ve been doing, about 50 per cent of all email clients receiving these can view the video. Then you’ve got about 30-35 per cent who can see the animated gif, about 10 per cent will see images and there’s about five per cent that don’t have any of it and they roll back on to the styled up alt tags.”
So it works. But John Watton, senior marketing director at Silverpop doesn’t expect marketers to be filling their emails with video yet. He says: “Like everything there’s fashions in email. Video isn’t a hot topic right now but it’s in the mix and I’m sure we’ll see it come back. Now it’s more about responsive design and reacting
to multi-device.”
While it’s a fair observation, it should probably be noted that marketers are always being told to stand out from the crowd. In an age of content overload, each marketing message has a habit of looking like the next. If you’re one of the only B2B brands using video in email marketing, chances are you’ll stand out and be remembered.
Watton’s comment about multi-device optimisation highlights how technology changes are at the forefront of dispelling email myths. Thanks to mobile, people have increased access to inboxes that will allow them to watch video and people no longer need to wait until they reach the office before they clear their inbox.
What used to be strategic thinking by sending an email at 10am, after the recipient has cleared out the overnight and early morning junk from their inbox leaving you in prime position at the top, is now redundant. As Sather explains: “People check their mobile devices multiple times a day. For a lot of people, the first thing they do before they even get out of bed is check their email. The thought of ‘I need to be at the top of the inbox’ is something people need to get out of their head because people are always in their inboxes today.”
Frequency of send
People spending more time checking their inboxes also has a knock-on effect that dispels another email marketing myth; frequency of send. Marketers have always been told not to send emails too frequently, email schedules are drawn up to ensure customers aren’t mailed several times a week and arguments about who gets to send an email today are rife. But this no longer needs to be the case. Because inboxes are checked more often, they feel smaller and more manageable so respondents may not notice, or mind, higher frequency sends.
Rachel Dennis, senior director of demand generation at Getty Images, carried out a study with one of its email partners to look at the impact send frequency had on engagement and revenue. She found higher frequency of send positively correlates with increased engagement metrics and revenue per contact, and opt-out rates from higher frequency touches were not worryingly higher than industry benchmarks. Dennis says: “Obviously we’re not talking about batch and blast, and segmentation of file and relevant content has a significant impact on performance. However, our study provided us with the room to play around with frequency, to test and measure, without concern about impact to engagement metrics or revenue performance.”
Watton is in agreement with Dennis’ findings: “One hundred per cent it’s a myth the more you send the less you get in return. You just can’t generalise.” It’s possible for some brands to email customers daily and those customers will be happy with that, while it’s also possible for a brand to email twice a week and really irritate customers. You should be able to guess what’s coming, it all depends on that ‘c’ word: content.
Watton says: “If you are tailoring your emails based on an individual’s interaction with you, they are guiding you to when you should be sending your emails. If they’re interacting with a lot of content and requesting information, watching a lot of demo videos, they themselves are giving you the behavioural clues that say I want to have quite an interactive relationship with your brand.”
Personalisation
Watton details the most common areas marketers should be looking at when it comes to personalising an email:Reading these clues and acting on them will end in companies giving customers what they want, therefore increased frequency of send won’t be detrimental because the messages are relevant. Acting on behavioural clues left by customers is advanced personalisation and has been made easier with the adoption of CRM and marketing automation technologies. Personalisation used to be ‘Dear Firstname’. But that isn’t going to cut it any more, sending an email with the correct first name but irrelevant content will not trick a customer into thinking you understand their needs.
“First of all is website content. Knowing what an individual has looked at on a website allows you to dynamically tailor the content in an email. Second, if you have an ecommerce platform online, you could use that to tailor the content in your email. Understanding what they bought on the site can mean you’re able to provide other relevant products, recommendations and reviews, offers and promotions. Thirdly, and going beyond that, is knowing that I am a middle-aged marketing manager who lives in west London, you can tailor your comms to industry and geographical location. The final area, which is directly related to a lot of what marketing automation is about, is tailoring the content to where that customer or prospect is in their relationship with you.”
This seems daunting and requires more effort than pulling in a name from your data sheet but it doesn’t have to be done all at once. Start small and remember the technology is there to help you. Watton sees marketers are trying but are still a little daunted at by the size of the task. “I think people are consciously incompetent. They know what they’re not doing and they know what they need to do.”
Subject lines
Our final rumour to dispel is related to subject lines. Marketers were once told to avoid words like ‘free’, ‘offer’ and characters that aren’t letters otherwise the email could be flagged as spam. Continuing the theme of evolving technologies Ndubuisi Aja, marketing automation manager at Mason Zimbler, explains: “The technology used in spam filters has evolved significantly over the past five years, and many of the old rules governing email subject line content aren’t relevant anymore. Most filters now use a more sophisticated ‘send score’ approach – it’s like a credit score for IP addresses, based on the reputation of the server sending the email.”
While content will play a role, there’s no need to be so constrained when it comes to your subject lines. It’s more important to focus on your reputation as a sender i.e. how many times users mark you as spam, the history of your IP address and the infrastructure of your email. Dennis of Getty Images encourages marketers to think of their subject lines as a series of tweets. She says: “Think of inboxes and subject lines as an opportunity to get your message across. Just because someone is not showing active engagement with your email doesn’t mean it isn’t having an impact.” Watton feels similarly saying: “A lot of people like the fact it’s an index, you may not open the emails but it’s all there for reference.”
Thanks to technology advancements it is possible to dispel the rumours above and highlight the truth. The initial time and monetary investment in the new tech may be daunting, but once systems are in place and you are familiar with them, your emails could be seeing a greater return and end up working harder for you. So don’t hide behind the rumours.
