There is an interesting article in this week’s edition of New Media Age discussing the virtues of email marketing by Mike Hills, president on Yesmail.com. One of the most prominent points to note is that “acquisition email delivery rates” are increasing as companies look to boost income via email marketing campaigns. This is in all probability is due to the need to try and increase revenue in a time of economic turbulence and in a cost efficient manner. Email marketing, when compared to other forms of online marketing activities, is fairly cheap to organise.
However the success of a campaign depends on many different variables such as the quality of the creative, the content, delivery times, frequency of delivery and crucially segmentation of the data. Basically the more targeted you can make the email itself, based on as much empirical evidence about that customer, the greater the chance of a response. One such example of this, raised in the article, is that of the Tesco clubcard. The data that Tesco has means that they can produce offers that are highly targeted to what each customer has a preference for buying. Presumably from this, they are able to target each customer group (s) with an email that is relevant to them based on data such as what they bought, how much they spend on average and how often they visit the store.
Email marketing software is sophisticated in that it can measure different recipient responses to emails that have been received such as bounce rates, open rates, deletions, click thru’s, auto responses and response times from code embedded in the email itself. Once a campaign is launched, analysing the data can help to refine a campaign and help improve these metrics each time a new creative is composed and then subsequently delivered. NMA notes that the two most successful email marketing campaigns over Christmas were that of Amazon and John Lewis, who also incidentally had a good festive period in terms of sales.
As with most promotional emails I receive, I tend to ignore them or only read them when I have nothing better to do. Tesco have clearly picked up on this and have stopped sending me promotional emails, which from their perspective is good practice as eventually it would get tiresome seeing email that I never read. ASOS on the other hand seem to send one out on a daily basis, at around 6am, meaning I now have to put my Blackberry on silent because I (a) get woken up and (b) have not bothered to unsubscribe.
Some companies have started to think more laterally when it comes to email marketing by including non promotion content within the email in an attempt to increase the response rate. For example, some job web sites I signed up to after University send job alerts with the subject line that is not directly related to the jobs on offer such as “Graduate Salaries to fall in 2009″. Basically embedding some supposedly interesting content to try and increase the chance of me opening it. These along with the other techniques and the reporting metrics mentioned above, are what marketers should be looking towards when composing and refining a campaign.
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