E-mail fundamentals

E-mail is inexpensive, but start with realistic expectations. Because of spam, return rates are pretty low. Still, this channel has some nice advantages. It has the same direct-response measurement potential as direct mail, without the printing and postage costs.

The key to an effective e-mail is a “From” address that indicates a human (more on that below), and the subject line that distinguishes it from spam. Like this: “3 months free when you subscribe to the Local Sentinel.” This assumes your newspaper is a widely recognized household name in your community, as most newspaper are. An alternative is a subject line tied to local events, like this one related to basketball: “Follow State University’s Final Four Quest.”

You can keep the length to three or four sentences, because you can use links to explanatory information.

The most important thing of all is to make the process easy once a person feels motivated. You can ask customers to call in their order. This is better than an online ordering process unless you can do it in a very smooth, seamless transaction that is very user-friendly. If your IT folks can’t achieve that high standard, just encourage people to call instead.

Begin by trying the offers that have worked best for you in the past. In e-mail marketing, as in direct mail, testing is everything. Let’s say you want to mail to 20,000 people. Try three or four variations of your offer, and send them to 1,000 people each. Monitor the results and adjust accordingly before sending to the remaining addresses.

It’s a good idea to tie your e-mail to your postal direct mail efforts for continuity and synergy.

Trends in e-mail marketing

What trends can we expect in e-mail marketing? Here are some observations adapted from a January 2005 statement published by ExactTarget, a developer of on-demand e-mail marketing software:

1. Relevance is King.  Relevance means sending unique messages based on individual attributes at an appropriate frequency.  “We see the final and well-deserved demise of batch-and-blast e-mailing, and to some extent the move away from large-batch segmentation,” says Chris Baggott, Chief Marketing Officer of ExactTarget.  “Marketers are beginning to appreciate the unique value of email in building person-to-person relationships.  While this has been a stated goal for years, execution historically has followed the mass marketing approach.”

2. Frequency Becomes Individually Driven.  As e-mails become more relevant, the question of how frequently to e-mail subscribers goes away.  “People shouldn’t be batch-blasted on a monthly or weekly schedule; that is a relic of print marketing campaigns,” says Baggott.  “Relationships are not ‘campaigns,’ they are communications between people.”  E-mail enables customers’ requests and actual behaviors to dictate how often marketers reach out to them. There will be occasions when it is appropriate to talk with subscribers three times a month and then not again for three months.

3. Software User Interface is Critical.   As marketers desire to do more with their e-mail, the ease of use of their tools becomes very important.  “If marketers have to reach out to technology resources every time they want to change a content rule or test a concept, they won’t do it, and therefore will fail to market to their full potential,” says Baggott.  “Batch & Blast has been the default because marketers haven’t had easy tools to do sophisticated email marketing.”

4. Data Integration Fuels Relationship Marketing.  Database marketing drives relevance, and data integration drives database marketing.  In 2005, e-mail marketers will move towards unfettered access to marketing data with stronger and more invisible integration between their e-mail systems and their other marketing technology solutions, such as point of sale and marketing resource management.  We’re already seeing this with e-mail integration to web analytics and CRM.  “Accessing data hasn’t historically been a problem for marketers, it’s been executing on the data,” says Baggott.  “E-mail is uniquely positioned to take data and execute to the level of relationship marketing that most marketers have only dreamed of.”

5. Automated E-mail.  Well, not quite, but automated or event-driven e-mail is getting a lot of attention.  Marketers can use customer data with automated e-mail triggers to deliver relevant one-to-one communications with subscribers.  For example, if an “upsell” subscription offer is right for a subscriber, an e-mail automatically is sent to that particular subscriber.  “There’s no reason to waste a ‘touch’ on an entire database when only a few subscribers are interested in receiving a particular message,” Baggott said.  “Automating e-mail allows marketers to easily communicate with subscribers in a targeted and intelligent way.”

6. Marketing Democracy.  E-mail will become the great marketing equalizer. The company that drives the better customer relationship will have the advantage. With the cost of data going down and e-mail continuing to be affordable, smaller businesses now have the tools to compete with their larger counterparts when it comes to relationship marketing. That’s good news for small-but-growing papers in competitive markets, and cautionary news for the Big Boys.

7. The Importance of a Human “From” Address.  The “From” address will become the most important factor in determining the initial success of an e-mail program.  In terms of relevancy and growing relationships, the “From” address must reflect a person, not an institution. The fastest way to build a relationship between your prospects/customers and your company is to engage with them one-on-one. E-mail is the perfect tool to do this. You’ll see more email coming from salespeople, customer service reps, and other specific humans than ever before, even though much will be automated with ‘relationship owner’ entered as another data field.

8. Compliance. It is becoming mission critical that systems are in place to monitor compliance with lists, bounces, filters and everything else associated with managing blacklists complying with the rules of various ISP white lists.  No organization can afford to appear on a blacklist that might affect the entire enterprise because of the irresponsible action of perhaps one person or department.