Is your email marketing moving in the right direction?
Looking back, I am surprised about the speed of development and thinking amongst emailers in 2009. It seems to me that all but the most backward of mailers have finally stopped bulk sending, chided as they were by deliverability concerns. The real sea change, however, is the recognition that in email terms less is often more (revenue, that is!). 2009 was also the year triggers became central to most email strategies, mobile handsets began truly to manage email and email platforms became integrated with social media.
Undoubtedly, email will continue to grow as a revenue driver both in terms of top line but also in relation to all other media. The underpinning fact is email is the only media by which an organisation can contact their customers and hot prospects directly and proactively. It is this fact that will continue to drive email marketing forward.
To maximise the potential of email in 2010, here are five key actions you can take now to ensure your moving in the right direction to continued income growth from email.
1. Get white listed
Apply through your ESP or directly to Return Path or Goodmail yourself. Costs are involved, but with Return Path this is limited to a set up fee (Goodmail is a per mailing charge that could add as much as 50% to your transmission charge). In our experience, open rates and click through rates improve very significantly, by 10% and 25% respectively. The reasons are straightforward… more of your customers see your images and emails as they were intended, immediately increasing the likelihood of engagement.
2. Think ‘engagement’
Switch your mindset away from focusing email purely on sending content to your base to drive them to your website and start to think how you can use email once someone has arrived. This is the future of email. Using engagement and behavioural information to target emails makes them relevant and takes the guesswork out of your targeting.
3. Automate everything you can
When you have tested your campaigns to death and you cannot squeeze any more improvements out, automate them. The prices will be a fraction of managed email fees and you will improve your ROI. Don’t stop your automation and engagement strategies at basket abandonment… look at all other major process drop outs and key programmes (welcome, upsell, cross sell etc). All of which can be automated and targeted on the basis of previous engagement behaviour.
4. Segment.
Once you are emailing on an engagement basis, then your main outbound email marketing can focus purely on the task at hand… engaging with the customer. Segmentation should begin with Activity. Separate active customers from inactive ones (but don’t forget to add web engaged customers to the active pot). The former can then be segmented based on, for example, previous purchase history, the latter purely on what you can do to get them to open and re-engage.
5. Give email the focus it deserves
It may not be your main media, it may not come in the top 3. But, because you are talking directly to your customers, email has a ‘halo effect’ outside purely direct driven revenue, playing an influencing role in many more purchases.
