Two tips for making email campaigns more effective

Relevance is key. We all know that. Letting recipients see that what you are offering is relevant, can be challenging but it is of the utmost importance.

1. Refine your segmentation. And how do you do that?

• Base your segmentation on your client behaviour, not just demographic
  information.
• Identify an increased number of sub segments and personalise more relevant
  offers to each.
• Create different versions of your messages.
• Continually test.

2. Improve transactional messaging. Transactional emails are highly relevant and very likely to be opened and read. Therefore, they should offer the customer something, furthering his or her relationship with you. Recommend additional products or services the customer might want or need; offer a subscription to your newsletter; and send transactional messages in HTML format to reinforce your brand.

Better Subject Lines

Here are a five practical tips for better subject lines in email marketing:

1. Leverage your company brand. A subject line that says ‘70% off from Acme Bananas’ is going to have a far better response than one that simply says ‘70% off.’
   
2. Think segmentation. It’s important to test different subject lines for different customer segments.
   
3. Question almost everything. Subject lines that pose a question, such as ‘Is it time for you to find a better copywriter?’ tend to work very well.
   
4. Make it about them, not you. ‘We’re having a sale’ won’t cut it as a subject line but ‘You can save money’ interests the reader more.
   
5. Inform before you sell. If you describe what’s in the email in the subject line, a recipient will be much more likely to open it rather than if you try to sell too early.

Writing Tip - the Ellipsis

The ellipsis is a series of three -- and only three -- full stops used to mark missing words, an uncertain pause, or an abrupt interruption.

Avoid the temptation to use more than three dots -- it looks amateurish. For example, we write:
We asked Miss Savage her age but there was no answer . . .

But we do not write:

We asked Miss Savage her age but there was no answer . . . . . . .

Similarly, the same thing applies with excessive punctuation: Only one exclamation mark or question mark should be used at a time. Consider the following over-punctuated examples:

• Buy now!!!
• Great bargains!!!!!!!!!!

Excessive punctuation looks too much like hysteria and detracts from your credibility. Professional writers avoid it.

Making email marketing work better

Probably all marketers are now aware that there are very effective web analytics tools to optimise web site sales.

However, Jupiter Research suggests that few marketers are integrating their web analytics into their email marketing programs. As email newsletters are mostly geared towards driving customers to web sites, there is obviously an opportunity that marketers may be missing.

By integrating your site analytics data into your email platform you can make your email marketing program more profitable. Analytics data is especially useful to create segments based on how your customers are behaving on your web site.

And remember, it is not just a matter of monitoring what has been purchased. You can gather valuable insights by knowing what was not purchased. For example, analytics can help marketers understand which products and categories are frequently abandoned. These non-completed purchases can be followed up with email.

Of course, it is imperative to keep privacy issues in mind. Customers are uncomfortable if they feel they are being followed.

One simple but effective technique is to note what product a customer has abandoned, then include that product as one of several “featured products” in a future email. With this sort of tactic, customers are likely to find such an email relevant without feeling like they have been followed.

Apart from making better use of analytics, there is still the troubling issue of how often to send emails.

Taking a one-size-fits-all approach, might seem like the easy way out of this one, but it is unlikely to be the best answer.

One proven approach to getting frequency right is to ask customers when they sign up how frequently they would like to receive your newsletters. Be sure to include a sample version so they understand the full value of the publication and have an idea of what to expect.

But there is a more sophisticated way. You can analyse your email response data and segment it using customer behaviour methods such as RFM, or other profitability metrics, to determine the optimal number of contacts for each segment.

Of course, there is nothing better than testing. Ideally, you should segment your list and run tests around frequency. There have been many cases where marketers have found that they can increase their frequency provided the communications are relevant and offer appropriate value with each interaction.

You can get a FREE copy of a 12-page PDF on “Direct Marketing Foundations”, written by Frank Chamberlin.

Response Rate Trends Report

The latest “Response Rate Trends Report” released by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) in the US includes data from more than 1,600 campaigns covering 19 different business sectors.

The results indicate that some US Direct Marketers are surviving on some very low response rates.
Six media channels are explored:

• Direct mail
• Catalogues
• Email
• Inserts
• Outbound telephone
• Newspapers and magazines.

The report not only looks at the channels but also the types of lists used, e.g. house files vs. prospect files. While it covers US campaigns exclusively, the data can be used by Australian direct marketers for benchmarking.

Four direct marketing objectives are isolated and reported on separately:

• Direct orders
• Lead generation
• Traffic building
• Fundraising.

Among the findings contained in the latest report:

• In financial services lead generation, email house files achieved an average response rate of 3.94%.
• In traffic building, the majority of campaigns were in the B-to-C sector with direct mail achieving an average response of 5.46%

The report is very detailed and for best value needs to be studied carefully. The full report, “Response Rate Trends Report” released in October 2007 at the annual Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference sells for $US 445. See: www.the-dma.org/bookstore

Writing Tip - It's not about you. It's about them.

It's not about you. It's about them.

When people come to your site, they want to know how your business can help them. Before you start writing web text you have to focus on WIIFM – that’s the question they will be asking: What’s In It For Me?

The writer needs to:

• Identify likely visitors
• Clarify what benefits are important to visitors; and
• Explain in simple terms how the site visitor can obtain those benefits.

If you use that sort of framework for your site text, your writing will connect with prospects and you will build your business.

Online mistakes you don’t want to know about

For most businesses, the website has taken on huge importance. Yet, we continue to see some fundamental mistakes being made over and over again.

Forgetting the user or visitor is probably the biggest mistake of all. When you are building a site you have to ask, what will the prospect want? If you are not clear, then it is better to stop. And don’t proceed until you have a clear answer.

The whole point of having a site in the first place is for the benefit of the visitor. So why not develop it from the point of view of that same visitor?

And developing the site is not the end. Just the beginning. How many sites do you find that are out-of-date. If your site does not carry accurate, up-to-the-minute information, you lose credibility.

Beyond that, some other classic, and all too common, mistakes include:

1. Launching into the creation of a site, or redevelopment of one, without a clear idea of what you actually want to do. Is your website going to be used to sell products online, drive leads to your sales team, provide support or self-service, provide information or deliver online content? All these objectives are valid options. But you better know which one is right for you because they each require a different design focus and a different method of measurement.
   
2. Still in 2008, there remain many organisations with a 'build it and they will come' approach. For most businesses, you can’t overestimate the importance of Search Engine Optimisation. And you should not ignore the opportunities offered by Pay-Per-Click campaigns. If you don’t, at least, have a high level understanding of how you can benefit from search engines, you need to give yourself a good talking to.
   
3. Packing too much in is another mistake that you see every day. How many times have you left a site because the busy-ness and over-design has overwhelmed you? If you must include everything, package it carefully in lots of separate pages and bite size chunks. Make it easy on the reader.There’s lots of other serious mistakes online, but at least if you avoid these, you’ll be giving yourself a reasonable chance to fulfill the needs that are important to your site visitors.