Direct mail is dead? I keep hearing this, but I also look at stats from various campaigns and see that a combination of direct mail and email seems to get the best results. In fact with the overall drop in direct mail and the exponential increase in email we could argue that cut through and conversion of well thought out highly personalised direct mail could result in improved conversions in the coming year.
However, as the economic outlook continues to be uncertain for the UK I fear a number of companies will cut back their direct mail in favour of cheaper alternatives such as email and add to their overall woes.
It all comes back to multiple channel marketing. You need a good mix, and swapping your DM for email isn’t likely to cut it.
We’ve met with some very bright companies through 2009 that have cracked the personalisation of direct mail and created turnkey digital print and centralised distribution vehicles, and we’re gobsmacked that so few of the bigger direct marketing brands haven’t taken advantage of them.
Our worry is that generic poorly executed email marketing is going to really struggle to get cut through in 2010, and that it will become over used by both those who understand direct marketing techniques and even worse those that don’t.
In our client base we now only work with clients that supply opt-in lists from their own site subscribers, and even with well though out and relevant content the click through rates are rarely better than 15% with opens rates being in the low 30′s as an average. Deliverability is good, we use a well respected carrier for our delivery, but over the past 12 months we’ve seen a slight decline in opens rates and an uplift in unsubscribes.
Our approach to email marketing for clients has been to work hard on the creative to create standout work that has a clear call to action, either through to an incentivised landing page for e-commerce, often using a coupon to allow for overall tracking not just relying on the email or GA stats. Its the joined up approach that really makes the difference. If someone clicks through you then need to get them to do something, whether the goal is brand awareness, lead generation or an online sale.
In a lot of cases we are now developing not just online creative, but offline as well, utilising advanced digital print solutions for personalisation and pushing the mailer out 3-4 days prior to the email marketing campaigns starting. Make sure you use different coupon codes for the offline and online creative, or for lead gen different landing page urls, (keep ‘em simple) and hone your analytics with a campaign filter to cut out all of the other noise. We also like to keep it simple and try to inject some personality into the campaign creative. Seems to be working well at the moment by providing differentiation.
At the end of the day, its all going to come back to commonsense. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Cut down on the print and postage to non-buying customers and poor prospects and use the money saved to test tracked email marketing creative to see if your customer base responds in the right way. If it doesn’t after several properly executed well timed campaigns you’ll need a real rethink.
The guys at 37 Signals in their new publication ‘rework’ have a great chapter about promotion, if you are working with a small advertising budget you should try their approach of building a following rather than throwing money at marketing tactics you can’t measure.
Oh and if you can’t measure it don’t do it.
Posted by rogerm on Mar 21, 2010 in
Analytics,
Digital Marketing Looks like the privacy argument at Google just runs and runs as the company becomes bigger and bigger.
They are going to release browser plug-ins for users to opt-out of being recorded in analytics in the next few weeks.
We will wait to see details of this, but its likely that it will only apply to specific data such as ISP network location and the like, so for the main user base (SME’s) it shouldn’t be overly problematic.
Could be something and nothing?
The key differentiators between a poor email campaign and an effective one is the level of measurement you can apply.
Design and build requirements
It goes without saying that you need to be able to design and construct quality email in the first place, and that is hurdle number one for a lot of smaller companies using self service email packages – they don’t even get into the inbox.
Well crafted creative does cut through, and when combined with a policy of testing in different browsers, and scrutinising the soft bounce statistics we can build a reasonably clear picture of deliverability. We can even do on the fly split testing of creative and subject lines.
Good Data in Good Data out
But you should not overlook the importance of data. You get out what you put in, and with email marketing you would be well advised to have not just a name and email address but also a telephone number, mailing address, date of subscriber addition and a mailing address. This means that multiple marketing vehicles can be triggered from resultant data in your email lists such as DM and more qualified outbound phone calling.
Be Critical in interpreting email analytics
So what about the analytics you ask?
Well, most packages now give good data now on the following metrics;
- Hard bounces
- Soft bounces
- Emails opened
- Links clicked
- Email forwarded
- Date and Time of opening
- Unsubscribers
- SPAM reporters
Most packages give a good overall staistical view of what went on per send. But this dashboard is not enough, you need to get into the data and apply a propensity scoring model to drive subscribers through a logically sequenced sales funnel
In addition you can use appended URL’s within the email to track users that click through into the web site as an individual marketing campaign.
Some email marketing systems, ours included can even track individual users through to a thank you page on a lead generation or ecommerce web site.
URL Appending allows us to see how email traffic interacts with web assets. In this case the clickthroughs spent an average of 10 minutes 45 seconds viewing just over 22 pages of content. It's also worth noting the long tail as well, as users continue to clickthrough some days after the initial mailing.
However, most people aren’t using the email reports properly. They send the emails out and tick the box, thinking that enough has been done.
With email marketing you have to take the time and invest it in understanding what interests your audience. If all you do is continue to send out uninteresting content then that’s how the audience will remain, uninterested. They will gradually unsubscribe and over time your list will become depleted.
Apply the Propensity Scoring Model to your email broadcasts
For each broadcast you make, you should use a method known as propensity scoring to understand whether the content worked for the subscriber.
We suggest the following propensity scoring methodology where 0 is cold and 5 is hot
- 5 - Subscriber opens email and clicks on links
- 4 – Subscriber opens email and clicks on single link
- 3 - Subscriber opens email
- 2 – Subscriber receives email but does not open
- 1 – Soft Bounce
- 0 – Hard Bounce
Most email marketing systems will remove the hard bounces automatically, and in general they won’t be any use to you hence the 0 propensity rating. However, a hard bounce might have become a customer, so don’t completely write them off particularly in a B2B environment, and if you have other data on the subscriber such as a phone number, don’t be afraid to give them a call.
Soft bounces need further investigation, as they may be due to a firewall, a full inbox or seen as SPAM. They aren’t a priority though and therefore have a propensity score of 1. We recommend you segment them into a new list and resend your email a few days later.
When a subscriber receives an email but doesn’t open it, it could be due to a number of factors such as date and time being wrong for the user, or that they have viewed it an a preview pane, or in their inbox without images allowed which hasn’t activated the tracking images within the email. Don’t necessarily make a judgement that they didn’t read the content. Therefore we score thsi group as a 2, and segment them into a separate list to measure success of future broadcasts.
The next prospect is the opener. With HTML email most email readers ask the user to download images. The very fact that the user has allowed the images to download, resulting in you tracking them in your statistics suggest a propensity to engage with your content. These users have a propensity score of 3, and should be segmented into a list for more targeted follow up emails.
Your statistics will then tell you how many of your subscribers have actually clicked on a link which shows a real affinity with your messaging. Segment this list now and create a more focused message relating to the content they clicked on. Send this out and then follow up with a telephone call if you have details on your database. Their propensity score of 4 means they may well be in research or buyer mode.
Subscribers clicking on multiple links are the highest propensity scores, and we give them a 5. These subscribers are clearly engaged by your email content and are worthy of personal treatment. If they’ve purchased before they may be receptive to a personalised discount offer, or if they are a B2B prospect it would be worth going for a sales meeting. Multiple clickers should be added to a high performance list segmented from other lists, so that even when they receive the same creative as others you can report on their interaction separately.
In Conclusion
Being critical about data will make your email marketing campaigns more successful. Testing subject lines, personalisation vs non-personalisation. How do you continue the sales cycle to people who have engaged with your email?
Do you send some direct mail, make a phone call.?
Your email anlaytics will help you decide, but only if you take the time to analyse them.
About Roger Martin: Roger holds the Diploma in Digital Marketing from the IDM with credit, and has been working in digital marketing strategy for over 10 years across EMEA and the US.
Tags: Digital Marketing, Email Marketing
We’ve been a bit too busy to post anything lately due to the volume of work over here at STAR Digital.
We’ve had new web builds to do for Swatkins Silverware, Crown Green Bowler Discount Centre and Filtersource, all of which are complex solutions.
As always we made sure that each site was properly configured with Google Analytics so that our customers can get a good gauge of the traffic coming into their sites, and for the Bowlers, understanding the ROI on any advertising or email marketing spend.
To that end we noticed that Google have launched a Google Analytics Individual qualification, and updated the Analytics University with some great videos that form the curriculum to the exam. Matt Cutts used Twitter to promote it.
The great thing is that some of the videos really do help to explain some of the more complex but highly valuable features of the tracking software, such as using regular expressions, amongst others such as Event tracking and virtual pageviews. What’s more these are all presented using the excellent Adobe Presenter, so you get full screen, unlike the tiny vidcasts of the past.
So for anyone wanting to go deeper into Google Analytics get yourself over to the Conversion University and learn how to unleash the power of Google Analytics.
If we can find some spare time amongst all of this work, we’ll get on and take the exam!
Posted by rogerm on Feb 15, 2009 in
Analytics Our first port of call when we have a question, http://analytics.blogspot.com/and if we really want to dig deep we reference Advanced Web Metrics with Google Anlaytics by Brian Clifton. You can get it from Amazon here Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics
We also recommend checking out Web Metrics by Jim Sterne, and you can get that on the following link Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success
Posted by rogerm on Feb 10, 2009 in
Analytics,
Digital Marketing We’ve had a few clients ask us how best to create specific reports for areas of their site such as paid search landing pages and ebrochures separately to their main website metrics.
Well in Google Analytics it’s Simple! Just create a subfolder on your web server and put the content you want to track in there. Make sure it has the main website GA tracking code in place before the closing
