How to get more from your email this Christmas

By: Mark Patron | July 21st, 2010

Catalogue e-business – July 2010

We’ve seen a shift in catalogue marketing moving towards better targeting and more channels. In the eighties, catalogues mainly used off-the-page advertising for customer aquisition. The nineties saw the advent of co-op databases, such as Abacus and Transactis, which led to an increase in direct mail targeting. With the new millennium the Internet started to generate meaningful sales for cataloguers. In the next decade catalogues will use more effective online targeting tools such as behavioural email.

Email is a very cost effective media. Repeat website visitors are eight times more likely to buy than first time visitors and the best way to get someone back to your website is via email. Forrester Research estimates that within five years consumers will opt-in to receive over 9,000 email marketing messages annually. That is an average of over 24 every day. It is fairly safe to assume that there will be an even larger number of non-opted in spam emails in addition to this. With irrelevancy being the main reason for consumers to unsubscribe, making emails relevant is going to be an important challenge.

On best behaviour

There are two primary types of data online, transactional and behavioural. Transactional data is about clicks and actions. Behavioural data is about pages viewed and intent. E-commerce systems obviously track transactional data like sales. Web analytics systems track behavioural data. Email databases are mostly based on transactional data, with behavioural data now starting to be more commonly used.

Offline catalogers typically target using lifestyle and RFM data (recency, frequency and monetary value). Online RFM is also important, but rather than lifestyle or demographic data, it is the rich behavioural data that should be used. For example, an increasing number of email marketers generate over half of their email revenues from behavioural email. Behavioural email creates relevant and targeted email based on a user’s website behaviour by using web analytics to target emails. According to Forrester, integrating web analytics with email can generate four times more revenue and eighteen times greater net profits than untargeted mailings.

A salvage operation

When you consider how hard online retailers have to work to get people to buy from their websites – everything from driving people to the site via search enginues to creative merchandising – not going back to people who abandon their shopping basket is madness. The best time to contact someone is when he has nearly bought something, so follow up with an email when the consumer abandons their basket. Similarly if a customer buys product A online but also regularly views pages on product B it makes sense to target product B offers.

To get you started, the following are examples of behavioural emails, which you can begin to implement in time for Christmas:

Abandoned basket
Regular browser never purchased
Previous customer visited site but did not buy
Registered not purchased
Loyal customer programme
Content triggers to existing customer (for example, viewed baby product pages)
Welcome programme
Nursery programme (introductory offers for the new customers)
Add on product up-sell (such as insurance for example)

From a classic basket abandonment programme you can expect to get click-through rates of 20 percent to 35 percent, with up to 20% of these converting into sales. This is probably one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get incremental sales this Christmas. But it does not stop there. Behavioural email programmes should develop from single emails to dozens of different emails. For example, send a free delivery offer to first time abandoners but not to repeat abandoners. We have many clients running hundreds of different behavioural emails with each and everyone making money. That is the beauty of these programmes, you set one up, test it and if it makes money you let it run forever. The future of email marketing will be about sending less and making more revenue from targeting based on what the consumer wants to buy.

So how do you get a behavioural email programme going? Most email service providers (ESP’s) have partnerships with web analytics companies such as Omniture or Coremetrics. Make sure you can target all basket abandoners and not just those that abandon baskets after receiving emails. Only targeting email users will miss 80% of total traffic. If you use Google Analytics you will need to find an ESP who can tag your site because you can not use Google Analytics tags for personalised targeting. This should be no more onerous than putting the original Google Analytics tags on your site.

What’s the frequency?

Behaviour should also define the frequency someone receives an email. For instance a customer engaged with email is over six times more likely to purchase than one who is not. According to a survey by customer relationship marketing agency Merkle 66% of respondents said frequency of emails was the reason they unsubscribe. Clearly managing frequency of emails is important; it can also help avoid deliverability issues by reducing complaints. Contact people who have clicked on an email recently more frequently than those who have not clicked for six months; the less engaged someone is the less email they should get and of course vice versa. Ideally include website engagement as well as email engagement to decide how frequently to email someone. The main ISP’s, such as Hotmail or AOL, are already starting to use user engagement to decide whether to deliver emails to the Inbox. To see this for yourself just take a look in your Hotmail junk folder; how many of those “junk” emails are you opted in to receive? Because you haven’t opened emails for the sender recently Hotmail’s standard email screening algorithm has decided to send the emails to junk. The next stage in improving email deliverability is whitelisting.

A white Christmas

Yes, you really could have a white Christmas and it could make you money. We have seen open rates increase by 25% for retailers and client email revenues up by 30% with whitelisting. Other benefits include increased “complaint thresholds” resulting in being able to mail more data. The inbox default for your emails becomes images on and links enabled. To get whitelisted you will need a CAN-SPAM compliant opt in or pre-ticked box. If your email service provider works with an email deliverability specialist such as Return Path then it should be possible to be whitelisted for Christmas.

In the future email marketing will respond automatically, dynamically and intelligently to inbound web activity utilising behavioural email and maximising conversion. Whilst offline is “push marketing” that gets the consumer to, say, pick up the phone, online it is “pull marketing” where the customer or prospect becomes increasingly engaged with your brand. The beauty of the internet is the ability to track and measure engagement, enabling marketers to take the next best action to move the sale along.