New DMA research shows the trends in email effectiveness - which these types of emails work for you?
We are excited to share the findings from the DMA's 'National Client Email Report 2015' which has just been published. It reinforces the effectiveness of email as one of the core digital marketing techniques and shows that email marketing is still growing in popularity and its success is derived from an integrated marketing approach, accessibility to Marketing Automation and being impacted by the rise in mobile with an email-mobile relationship, which they refer to as a 'mobile first-medium'.
Companies are seeing return from continuing to use email marketing - according to the report Email has an average return of 38:1!'
Which emails generate the most revenue?
We know intuitively that effective emails are personalised, so it's good to see an improvement in targeting practice with revenue from unsegmented emails to the whole list…
Customers have similar traits but are not all alike and should not be spoken to with a single message in the same manner and tone. This was initially looked at in an earlier article ‘Talk to your customers or talk to your customer?’, but once the need to communicate with and not at all your customers is understood, providing different messages/offer/content using surface level details is a tempting approach, for example splitting the message by gender and/or age group.
This approach assumes that the surface level details represent the best groups of customers which will not always be the case. Looking at the sand in the first image at first glance all the grains seems to be identical with some obvious differences becoming apparent when a more detailed…
Email marketing best practice - 4 Smart techniques to resend to your non-openers for your email campaigns
If at first you don’t succeed – try and try again. It’s a message that’s been drilled into us since childhood, but how well does it stack up against improving your email marketing?
For a long time it has been argued that resending emails to recipients that didn’t open the first time around could do more harm than good, but there is also a lot of evidence to suggest it can be an effective way to re-engage with your subscribers so long as you proceed with caution. Here are 4 simple, practical techniques that we have found effective.
1. Only resend the most important email campaigns
Suppose that every time a subscriber left one of your emails unopened, you resent it. Imagine how annoyed your subscriber would get. It probably wouldn’t be too long until they unsubscribed from all of your…
Creating more relevant personalised communications
Receiving messages from a company you have never spoken to can be annoying and intrusive at best, often referred to as spam. Therefore, gaining permission to speak is a critical element in building a relationship with your customers, but using this right to broadcast the same communication to all customers will eventually turn your message to “noise”. Having a conversation is not a one way speech, but an interactive communication which listens and speaks to, not at the customer.
Within the travel and tourism industry the need to provide the personal touch is a key differentiator of single and smaller hotel chains, with the service and attention to detail making the experience memorable and distinctive. This unique and distinguishing service is often carried across to the digital world, with some very elegant, evocative images and…
Reviewing content strategy for your email marketing
It’s a simple equation. Provide sufficient value in your emails and customers will continue to welcome you into their inbox. Not enough and you’ll be ignored or banished. Value can be delivered in many forms, it isn’t just measured in pounds and dollars. A proven currency for value is content. But want content should you provide to whom across your email marketing?
Different email subscribers have different interests and needs depending on their characteristics and situation. The following matrix is taken from Dan’s post on generating content ideas. It provides an easy to use breakdown to review the options for different types of content for a defined segment or persona. You can use it to audit your current content and identify new content types to engage audiences at different points in the buying process.
If you’ve already a…
7 simple and effective ways to use email segmentation
A database filled with a lot of quality data offers many possibilities. The best way to send an email is to send one that's personal and completely adjusted to fit the needs, interests, and (buying) behaviour. And more relevant email campaigns means a better shot at more opens and clicks.
In this blog post, I'll show you different options to segment your customer database, enabling you to better target each customer.
7 ways to segment your email lists
1. By gender
One of the more obvious ways to segment your email campaigns: do you want to target men or women? When creating your email templates, try to design a template which is able to switch content based on the variable 'gender'.
Adjust the images in your campaigns to appeal to men as soon as you are targeting the men in your marketing database. The same…
What Email Marketers need to learn from Retailers
How email marketers can use behavioural email to increase customer loyalty and drive more purchases
I believe email marketers have major lessons to learn from how the world’s leading offline retailers market to customers before, during and after their purchases. These companies serve as great examples of why email marketers need to go beyond the basic newsletter.
One of the best ways to frame email marketing is to focus on one key event; the purchase and then break it into three phases:
3 Phases of behavioural email marketing related to purchase
1. Before: The customer isn’t necessarily ready to make the purchase, but your goal is to stay top of mind and nurture the relationship until they are.
2. During: The customer is in the process of making a purchase, and your goal is to ensure they have…
Buyometrics’ success formula for 7% click rates on daily emails
Email campaigns with unique open rates of 30% and unique click rates of 7% beat email marketing benchmarks and represent great performance that any campaign manager would be happy with. Now try doing that for a daily email across your entire customer database...
That’s harder, but it’s a reality for the Buyometric Daily Deal campaigns. Buyometric are letting me lift the lid on their success formula.
The corner-stone is using highly dynamic and automated deal content targeting driven from a predictive algorithm which factors in several signals about what will most likely appeal to subscribers.
It starts with collecting user preference information after signup. Providing preference information is optional after the signup, yet Buyometric get a massive 78% of new signups to complete this optional step. Its all down to the incredibly smooth user experience, I’ve previously posted about how this works…
Is it a knockout or a points decision?
Last year Mark Zuckerberg spoke out against email marketing claiming that in the future, email will be replaced by message-based services such as Facebook. While it’s true that we now have more choice when it comes to our preferred method of communication, this doesn’t mean that email no longer has a place. In fact, research has shown that the use of email in our marketing and CRM activities has grown significantly over the past few years. And let’s not forget that in order to sign up to Facebook you still need an email address.
According to a report produced by Royal Pingdom, Internet 2011 in numbers, there were more than 2.2bn email users in 2011 and 3.4bn email accounts, this figure growing by 500m. According to Radicati, this number is expected to grow to 4.1bn by the end of 2015.
There is always a tendency…
A case study showing the power of Email remarketing and testing
In part 1, Email Remarketing – why aren’t more people using it? we showed how Email Remarketing is surprisingly rare and discussed why this might be. Thanks for the in-depth comments by the way! I hope they help someone make the business case!
In this follow-up, we have a great case study example from VE Interactive, because it not only shows the uplift from email remarketing, but also what types of offer and messaging can be tested.
3 testing options for Remarketing
The remarketing here was a classic abandoned shopping cart follow-up email, but with 3 alternative follow-ups which were tested with these results:
1. Generic branded follow-up email : +10% conversion rate.
2. Personalised remarketing email with a promotional code for a 5% discount time limited to 72 hours: +100% conversion rate.
3. Personalised remarketing email with a promotional code…
