Email marketing strategy – book review

A review of "Successful Email marketing strategies" book

By Arthur Middleton Hughes and Arthur Sweetser

Despite all the interest in social media marketing in 2009, the direct contact and targeting available through email marketing means that email remains one of the most potent digital communications methods for encouraging repeat site visits and sales.

When my review copy arrived, I was pleased to see a new book on Email with "strategy" in the title since in my training workshops and consulting I find that Email communications strategy is one of the biggest issues that many organisations are grappling with.

I was also pleased to see that the book authors were two experienced direct marketers familiar with the database marketing aproaches which have been used so effectively for marketing with direct mail. Some of you may know Arthur Hughes from his previous books such as "Strategic Database Marketing" or from his Database Marketing site (no longer regularly updated, but with some recent speeches such as this one for Predictive Modelling for Email Marketing (.ppt).

Today, both authors work as email strategists for Email Service Provider e-Dialog who manage the email marketing for many global companies including British Airways, HP, Office Max and Reuters. So it is natural that much of their advice applies to managing large scale customer email lists in the retail, travel, financial services sector. So the book is particularly relevant if you work in one of these sectors.

The systems from email service providers make it deceptively easy to broadcast an enewsletter or promotional emails, but that doesn't amount to a communications strategy and that's where this book can help most.

How to deliver relevant and timely emails

I call my blog "Right Touching" since many of the challenges of digital marketing involve taking the right decisions about precisely how, when and where to reach customers online and integrate with traditional communications. This book certainly  does a great job of answering these questions for the email channel.

The subtitle of the book "From Hunting to Farming" shows its emphasis on delivering relevant emails. While "farming customers" may seem a cynical approach and not advisable given the failures of modern farming methods, the authors explain how they see farmers as "studying their herds, learning to care for them and meeting their needs...farming in the US today is generally highly scientific and profitable. That sentiment is certainly consistent with the modern marketing concept and I think most would agree that email marketing is no longer in its infancy and requires a more structured, analytical approach.

So what will you learn if you invest in this book? Well it will help you take what I believe are these key decisions on email communications strategy.

1. Benchmarking your email marketing. The book gives a relevance scoring framework for auditing your existing email marketing approach.

2. Segmenting and targeting approaches. The book describes 3 level of segmentation from basic (e.g. purchase, email or web activity) through intermediate (RFM and clusters) to advanced (combined behavioural, value and channel approaches).

3. Selecting the right frequency. Lifetime value-based models to test and model the impact of changing the frequency on response and unsubscribe activity are explained.

4. Defining event trigger email activity.  This approach is often underused perhaps because companies are fixed in a "campaign mindset". The authors give a range of tips on different types of event-triggered emails.

5. Testing to improve email marketing. A surpringly basic section given the level of treatment elsewher in the book.

6. Advanced analytics and propensity modelling. Including integration with site web analytics.

What's missing?

What is missing from the book is what you'd expect from a book on email marketing strategy. The emphasis isn't on creative and copywriting.

There are brief sections on email copywriting and defining subject lines, but I would have liked more guidance and tips with examples of how companies are integrating personalised content into emails through dynamic content insertion.

The authors background as database marketers shows with relatively little on developing the overall email value proposition to support a brand. The focus is very much on direct response, although there is a section looking at interactivity and listening to customers.

Reviewing the book as a whole, I recommend this book for all email marketers looking to increase the relevance and value of their emails through using advanced segmentation and targeting as part of a unified communications strategy.