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Few direct marketing channels are as challenging to navigate as e-mail, with its awkward dance between marketers, e-mail service providers (ESPs), ISPs, corporate IT departments and end-users. Your success is based on an ever-changing list of best practices that boil down to one overarching principle: Do everything possible to ensure your e-mail will not be detested by anyone in the receiving audience. Since, of course, campaign execution is far more complicated than this, let’s try to pin down a few of the best practices that current research shows are vital to reaching your e-mail marketing goals.
Anne Holland, president and founder of MarketingSherpa, a Warren, R.I.-based research firm that publishes case studies, survey findings and other information on successful marketing strategies in both online and offline channels, shared with Target Marketing her observations on the top four opportunities marketers are overlooking in their e-mail marketing programs.
Missed opportunity #1: Make sure your message is visible to recipients.
This sounds obvious: If people can’t see your e-mail message, they can’t respond. Holland points out that the vast majority of marketers never review what their e-mail creative looks like in Outlook with the images blocked—especially when it’s viewed in the horizontal preview pane. Of the roughly 60 percent of business people who use preview panes, she explains, the majority opt for the horizontal preview. What’s more, of the consumers who have e-mail software that allows them to use a preview pane, more than 30 percent use this feature. Finally, regardless of whether consumers use a preview pane or not, about half use e-mail clients that block images, Holland adds.
The solution is to design your e-mail layout so that if images are blocked, what the recipient sees still looks good. Holland says, “If the very top portion of your e-mail is all images, then nothing shows up in the preview pane.” Instead, intersperse text and images so that the copy is still visible and compelling enough to drive recipients to click through to your Web site.
One last point on design: “Companies think that when they publish their e-mails in multi-part MIME, the text version will show—but that’s not the case,” says Holland. Instead, Outlook will display the code, not a text default. So design your e-mails based on the assumption that the images could be blocked.
Missed opportunity #2: Send a welcome message.
At MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ‘07, which took place earlier this week in Miami, the firm released study results based on 650 e-mail marketers’ practices. The key finding on welcome messages is that the majority of e-mail marketers do not send such a communication within 72 hours of receiving a customer’s/prospect’s sign-up to receive e-mail contact. Or, they don’t send anything at all until the first regular e-mail blast goes out; they just add new sign-ups to the general e-mail rank and file.
This is a huge mistake, says Holland. How so? According to other MarketingSherpa research, the welcome message or first few e-mails after a person signs on to receive e-mail communication from a marketer pulls significant open and clickthrough rates compared to any other type of e-mail contact. If the welcome message or first e-mail leverages some aspect of the benefit promise made in the sign-up process—say, you offered to send secret sales promotions to e-mail registrants, and your welcome e-mail contains an advance sales notice for a new product about to debut on your site that the general public has not yet seen—then the open rate can be, in Holland’s words “insane.” She reports average open rates of 50 percent or more for tied-in welcome messages.
Missed opportunity #3: Segment your e-mails.
“The segmentation trend du jour is to look at people who opened an e-mail but did not click or people who clicked but did not convert,” says Holland, and then to e-mail these groups follow-up messages to prompt them to take the next step by clicking through or placing an order.
You want to avoid acting like Big Brother when you send these follow-ups; don’t use the e-mail message to indicate what steps people took and didn’t take. The idea is to simply pursue the desired result by sending an e-mail for the same product or service with a different subject line, benefit or offer. For example, Holland says, try making the offer a little stronger or put a time limit on it.
Missed opportunity #4: Work with the right deliverability metrics.
OK, this tip isn’t so much an opportunity as it is a cross between a clarification and a best practice that more marketers need to pay attention to and rectify. One of Holland’s major pet peeves is the way in which ESP deliverability reports inaccurately label the percent of e-mails delivered that didn’t hard bounce as “percent of e-mails delivered.” Those two metrics are nowhere near the same thing, and yet this misnomer continues to exist on most deliverability reports. She stresses that marketers should be demanding that their ESPs rename this line item on their reports, because it’s misleading and could train inexperienced e-mail marketers (and C-level executives) to accept a false metric.
Another deliverability issue that Holland believes should get more exposure is the large false positive rates generated by corporate spam filters, resulting in the blocking of e-mails requested by employees. “Everybody knows [it’s happening],” she points out, but few employees are asking their IT departments to help them rectify the situation and to get this e-mail delivered. Holland’s advice is for business people to talk to their IT managers and CEOs about how they can whitelist companies from whom they desire to receive e-mail. It’s only fair that if your company wants its own marketing-oriented e-mails to get delivered to business prospects, it should investigate how to stop large false positive rates when it’s managing incoming e-mail.
If you want to hear more from Anne Holland on the topic of e-mail marketing trends, she will be speaking at thr Philadelphia Direct Marketing Association’s luncheon meeting on March 21 at the Hilton City Avenue. Holland will be presenting the “Top 5 E-mail Marketing Quick Fixes for Highest Impact.” To learn more about the event, visit http://www.the-pdma.org . Otherwise, Holland can be reached at (401) 247-7355.
Anne Holland, president and founder of MarketingSherpa, a Warren, R.I.-based research firm that publishes case studies, survey findings and other information on successful marketing strategies in both online and offline channels, shared with Target Marketing her observations on the top four opportunities marketers are overlooking in their e-mail marketing programs.
Missed opportunity #1: Make sure your message is visible to recipients.
This sounds obvious: If people can’t see your e-mail message, they can’t respond. Holland points out that the vast majority of marketers never review what their e-mail creative looks like in Outlook with the images blocked—especially when it’s viewed in the horizontal preview pane. Of the roughly 60 percent of business people who use preview panes, she explains, the majority opt for the horizontal preview. What’s more, of the consumers who have e-mail software that allows them to use a preview pane, more than 30 percent use this feature. Finally, regardless of whether consumers use a preview pane or not, about half use e-mail clients that block images, Holland adds.
The solution is to design your e-mail layout so that if images are blocked, what the recipient sees still looks good. Holland says, “If the very top portion of your e-mail is all images, then nothing shows up in the preview pane.” Instead, intersperse text and images so that the copy is still visible and compelling enough to drive recipients to click through to your Web site.
One last point on design: “Companies think that when they publish their e-mails in multi-part MIME, the text version will show—but that’s not the case,” says Holland. Instead, Outlook will display the code, not a text default. So design your e-mails based on the assumption that the images could be blocked.
Missed opportunity #2: Send a welcome message.
At MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ‘07, which took place earlier this week in Miami, the firm released study results based on 650 e-mail marketers’ practices. The key finding on welcome messages is that the majority of e-mail marketers do not send such a communication within 72 hours of receiving a customer’s/prospect’s sign-up to receive e-mail contact. Or, they don’t send anything at all until the first regular e-mail blast goes out; they just add new sign-ups to the general e-mail rank and file.
This is a huge mistake, says Holland. How so? According to other MarketingSherpa research, the welcome message or first few e-mails after a person signs on to receive e-mail communication from a marketer pulls significant open and clickthrough rates compared to any other type of e-mail contact. If the welcome message or first e-mail leverages some aspect of the benefit promise made in the sign-up process—say, you offered to send secret sales promotions to e-mail registrants, and your welcome e-mail contains an advance sales notice for a new product about to debut on your site that the general public has not yet seen—then the open rate can be, in Holland’s words “insane.” She reports average open rates of 50 percent or more for tied-in welcome messages.
Missed opportunity #3: Segment your e-mails.
“The segmentation trend du jour is to look at people who opened an e-mail but did not click or people who clicked but did not convert,” says Holland, and then to e-mail these groups follow-up messages to prompt them to take the next step by clicking through or placing an order.
You want to avoid acting like Big Brother when you send these follow-ups; don’t use the e-mail message to indicate what steps people took and didn’t take. The idea is to simply pursue the desired result by sending an e-mail for the same product or service with a different subject line, benefit or offer. For example, Holland says, try making the offer a little stronger or put a time limit on it.
Missed opportunity #4: Work with the right deliverability metrics.
OK, this tip isn’t so much an opportunity as it is a cross between a clarification and a best practice that more marketers need to pay attention to and rectify. One of Holland’s major pet peeves is the way in which ESP deliverability reports inaccurately label the percent of e-mails delivered that didn’t hard bounce as “percent of e-mails delivered.” Those two metrics are nowhere near the same thing, and yet this misnomer continues to exist on most deliverability reports. She stresses that marketers should be demanding that their ESPs rename this line item on their reports, because it’s misleading and could train inexperienced e-mail marketers (and C-level executives) to accept a false metric.
Another deliverability issue that Holland believes should get more exposure is the large false positive rates generated by corporate spam filters, resulting in the blocking of e-mails requested by employees. “Everybody knows [it’s happening],” she points out, but few employees are asking their IT departments to help them rectify the situation and to get this e-mail delivered. Holland’s advice is for business people to talk to their IT managers and CEOs about how they can whitelist companies from whom they desire to receive e-mail. It’s only fair that if your company wants its own marketing-oriented e-mails to get delivered to business prospects, it should investigate how to stop large false positive rates when it’s managing incoming e-mail.
If you want to hear more from Anne Holland on the topic of e-mail marketing trends, she will be speaking at thr Philadelphia Direct Marketing Association’s luncheon meeting on March 21 at the Hilton City Avenue. Holland will be presenting the “Top 5 E-mail Marketing Quick Fixes for Highest Impact.” To learn more about the event, visit http://www.the-pdma.org . Otherwise, Holland can be reached at (401) 247-7355.
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