Tamara Gielen: The Relevance of Email Marketing

Tamara Gielen has over 10 years hands-on experience in online and direct marketing, working with companies such as Cognos and eBay. In 2009 Tamara became an independent email marketing consultant. She currently provides expertise on email marketing through her blog “Be Relevant!” and regularly attends and presents at international email marketing conferences.

When it comes to email marketing, there is nothing Tamara can’t help you with. In RedEye’s most recent interview, Tamara offers advice and guidance on targeting, segmentation and common mistakes marketers make when it comes to creating relevant email marketing campaigns.

Tamara, thank you for agreeing to let RedEye interview you!

You’ve managed email marketing campaigns for some well recognised corporations including Cognos and eBay and are now well recognised as an independent email marketing consultant. Why is the relevance of email so important?

If you value your subscribers and you don’t want them to unsubscribe from your campaigns or mark them as spam, you need to make sure to send them only things that they find interesting. If you don’t, then you will scare your subscribers away quickly and you’ll have to work twice as hard to attract new subscribers. Relevance alone is not enough though. You need to make sure the emails you send to your list provide value to the subscriber, over and over again. If you don’t you’ll see your results go down and your list shrink.

What are the main mistakes you see email marketers making?

I think the biggest mistake is not taking enough time to test what works for their audience. There really is only one way to improve your results and that is by continuous testing of copy, content, design, segmentation and targeting.

What tips and advice would you give to marketers wanting to make their emails more relevant to their audience?

There are a couple of things you could do. Firstly ask subscribers what they find interesting through a preference centre or just by making the sign-up incentive very specific (eg. sign up to receive weekly tips on xyz). You could also analyse past campaigns to see which messages they responded to in the past or what links they clicked. Even if you don’t have a lot of data about your subscribers, their click and web behaviour could give you the information you need.

Can website behaviour be used to improve relevance in email marketing?

Absolutely! If you can trigger emails based on what pages a user browsed and what action they did or did not take on your website, those emails will typically be very effective! And these campaigns usually deliver a very high ROI.

In a recent benchmark study produced by RedEye, only 12% of online retailers were found to be using abandoned basket email to target customers. Does this surprise you? Why do you think the number of online retailers using abandoned basket email is so low?

To be honest, that doesn’t surprise me. Setting up an abandoned basket email is usually not an easy task because you need to integrate your email platform with your web analytics and other systems. And that takes quite a bit of effort and development resources. But I think the main reason why a lot of online retailers don’t use an abandoned shopping cart email is because they are not aware of the potential revenue they are missing out on.

What considerations should marketers take into account with technological advances such as mobile marketing and small screens?

First of all there is the need to design emails that look good and are readable on smaller screens and secondly there is an even bigger need to be relevant. Why? Because more and more subscribers are doing what we call “inbox triage” on their mobile devices. They check their mailbox when they are on the road and delete what they don’t think is interesting. And they often make that decision based on how they’ve perceived your previous emails.

With all this talk of segmentation and automated email triggers, does this mean there is no room for the good old fashioned email newsletter?

I think there most definitely is but it all depends on your goals and objectives. A newsletter typically is a very good way to showcase expertise and thought leadership.

And finally, as you say on your website “email marketing evolves constantly, what worked yesterday doesn’t necessarily work today.” What can email marketers do to keep up in this ever changing industry?

You mean apart from reading my blog? No seriously, I think that instead of trying to keep up with everything that is new, I would recommend testing and implementing some proven tactics and programmes, like advanced segmentation and automated email campaigns.

For more information from Tamara about the importance of email relevance read Tamara’s blog Be Relevant! at www.b2bemailmarketing.com.

To find out more about Tamara Gielen visit www.tamaragielen.com or to contact her directly email tamara@tamaragielen.com.

Tamara will be speaking at the ICSC European Marketing Conference in Instanbul on 7th April 2011 about the ‘Intergration between Email and Social’.