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The Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. of Marysville, Ohio, knows for a fact that there are people who enjoy watching grass grow. The company's even weeded out the ones who enjoy it so much that they want as much information as they can get about how to make it grow taller, thicker and greener.
But first, the lawn and garden care company follows best practices to add data into the e-newsletters it sends out. That way, the 355 variations the company creates each week on its primary monthly e-newsletter, the Lawn Care Update, are more likely to be personal and relevant to each recipient, says Stephanie Miller, vice president of global market development at New York-based Return Path, an e-mail performance management company. (She adds that a content management system aids in the personalization.)
Those in the field provide marketers with advice on how they can best integrate data into their e-mail programs. In addition to Miller, those weighing in include: Jordan Cohen, vice president of business development of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Pontiflex, a cost-per-lead marketplace; and Mark Smith, executive vice president of global sales for U.K.-based integrated marketing solutions provider Portrait Software.
1. Track the correlation between relevance and response, then adjust the e-mail strategy accordingly. "A deeper look into [response rate] actually analyzes what types of campaigns different customers actually respond to; whether the look or the content of the e-mail or the type of offer actually changes with the customer data that you've got on each of your customers," Smith says. "So it's a little bit like the relevance ... but it's the other way around. Relevance is all about you as the organization figuring out from the customer data what you think is relevant. Responsiveness is all about listening to the customers and actually monitoring what they do respond to and then using that next time around."
Miller points out that the way Scotts improved relevance was to ensure, at the front end, that the company had plenty of customer preference information to tailor the Lawn Care Update properly for each recipient. Whether registrants have yards filled with bluegrass, rye or fescue—or even a mix thereof—and whether they're in ZIP code 43201 or 11023, Scotts provides them with seasonal tips and timetables for nurturing their turf.
Miller says companies don't have to be as advanced as being able to tailor e-mails down to grass genus and species—they can set goals of tailoring at least one e-mail message a month per subscriber. She suggest ways to customize the message: "Open and click history, source of sign-up, customer status, date of sign-up or purchase history. ... Consider a different subject line for different segments, based on interest level. Shift content up or down in the same newsletter template to place the most relevant at the top. Replace generic promotions with specifics—a targeted white paper or a highlight of an untapped product feature. Track performance by segment against generic messages. You'll see higher response, and may also find that fewer messages a month will generate the same or higher response."
Cohen says digging even deeper to find out when, where and how recipients are viewing e-mails can improve results. "New technologies can tell you whether John is opening your e-mails on his iPhone on the weekend or if Jane is checking them out on her laptop on weekday afternoons. With this knowledge, a retailer might send John e-mail offers that are redeemable at brick-and-mortar locations on Fridays, and send Jane online-only offers on Monday."
2. Pay attention to "mental opt-outs" and other regularly overlooked data, such as why hard opt-outs happen. Smith says there's more to opt-out percentages than just the numbers. Take a look, for instance, at e-mail recipients who've never opened or clicked through. In his case, he receives two e-mails a day from a company that doesn't personalize the content or provide anything relevant to him. He believes that after 500 ignored sends, they should be getting the message that's he's mentally opted out and take him off of the list.
Smith says marketers should take a cue from the preference and relevance best practices to figure out why customers opted out. What was the e-mail content at the time of the opt-out? Matching that back to the customer preferences and determining whether the communication was relevant can help companies look for "what kinds of things can drive customers to actually opting out. And, ultimately, working toward a prediction of when you might be at risk of driving a customer to opt out."
Miller says marketers can sign up for complaint data (spam reports) from major ISPs, such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo. If marketers don't have access to deliverability tracking, they can sign up for a service or request it from their e-mail service providers.
3. Run data hygiene checks at the time of deployment, not just during campaign creation. Smith says sometimes, customers change their preferences or opt out after campaigns are built and before they're deployed. (Also check for duplicate e-mail addresses and multiple e-mail addresses that send to the same person during the regular data hygiene process.)
4. Ensure data is easily accessible to the e-mail management system. Smith says while having a full-blown customer relations management system is nice, it's not a requirement. "The place where they keep their customer data, that's where they should keep all of this electronic e-mail communication data," he says. "So the data from their preferences and their opt-out status and whether they might be a potential mental opt out, that should all be in one place; which is, ideally, ... the database that's easily accessible for the e-mail management system."
5. Consider not sending e-mail, at all, to certain customers. Smith says to pay attention to customer preferences. If a customer allows e-mail communication but her phone number is listed as her primary contact channel, respect that choice, he says.
Paying attention to preferences, in general, ties back to the response rate. "Their feeling of loyalty to you, as an organization, will go up if they feel they're being listened to and you're responding to them," Smith says.
6. Incorporate data from other channels into the e-mail program in order to enhance loyalty and retention efforts, as well as to increase sales. Smith says this way it's easy to, for instance, send an e-mail to a customer who phoned the call center and let her know the company's following up on her request.
"Every swipe of a consumer's loyalty card at the counter should be entered as a new attribute into that consumer's profile," Cohen says. "For example, ... you don't need to buy a single bottle of scotch on [the] website for BevMo to know that you're a scotch aficionado. If you buy a nice bottle of single malt in the store, they'll shoot you an e-mail a few days later featuring three more. And so, by incorporating offline data into your e-mail marketing profile, BevMo will spare you from receiving any half-off offers for Zima."
Cohen says adding Web analytics into e-mail programs helps travel sites like Expedia. "If they see that you've checked out pricing on a trip from New York to London, but haven't completed the purchase, they'll send a triggered message with the latest fares and discounts from New York to London." (Abandoned cart reminders also boost sales, he adds.)
7. Start incorporating data into the e-mail program, even if there's no initial internal technical support. "There is no reason not to tap the advanced and easily accessible technology to utilize data better. Just start," Miller says. "It will be imperfect. Manage some tests by hand at first, in order to build up enough expertise and a cadre of benchmark and performance [data] so you can make the case for investment in deeper data integration and automation."
8. Realize that e-mail isn't free, because doing it wrong is costly. Just because the hard cost of e-mail deployment is relatively inexpensive, don't be blasé about your company's efforts in this channel, Smith says. A lost customer here may be a lost customer in all channels, he adds.
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