The most successful e-mail marketing programs are built on a strong foundation—a core of ideas that can support even the most sophisticated and complex campaigns. E-mail marketers who consistently achieve great results do so by paying close attention to the following five areas:
1. Metrics
2. Deliverability
3. Frequency
4. List Growth
5. Legislation
Let’s review these core competency and how each should fit together with the others to ensure a sound footing for your e-mail marketing programs.
Metrics: Vital for Relevance
Metrics, one of the very reasons marketers love e-mail, also frequently bedevils them. I’m often asked what to measure, how to measure and what to do with the data once gathered. Basic elements for marketers to examine include open rates, click-throughs and bounce rates. A solid open rate is useful for evaluating the combination of your brand value and subject line. Click-through rates are valuable for evaluating your call-to-action.
Now here’s where that pinch of bedevilment comes in. Although studies have consistently shown open rates to be on the decline, click-through rates are either staying steady or increasing slightly, depending on which report you read. The discrepancy arises for two reasons. Because open rates are measured through the use of image pixels embedded in the e-mail, the increasing prevalence of image-blocking in e-mail programs like Gmail and Outlook 2003 may tend to depress open rates. At the same time, the “preview” function in some e-mail browsers can artificially inflate open rates. So although open rates should be part of the overall e-mail measurement mix, marketers should not rely on them exclusively as a measurement of campaign success.
If your call to action was to click through to a Web site, examining click-throughs can be an excellent measure of how enticing your e-mail message was. If sending e-mails with multiple links, track each separately so you can evaluate what works best.
Using click-through behavior to segment customers can prove extraordinarily beneficial, enabling the marketer to enhance the relevance of e-mail messages by responding to areas of proven interest to the recipient based on what “clicked” with them, so to speak. JupiterResearch reports that only about a third of all e-mail marketers segment by click-through data. To give your e-mail program a significant competitive advantage, monitor click-throughs closely and use the information to enhance the relevance of your e-mail content and offers.
Another metric to monitor closely is your bounce rate. Bounces are e-mails that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it to the intended recipient and were returned. Hard bounces, in which the domain or individual e-mail address no longer exists, should be removed from your list immediately. Soft bounces, caused by full mailboxes, downed servers or other reasons, should be monitored closely. A good rule of thumb I generally recommend is to remove addresses that have soft-bounced three times in a row over a span of at least 21 days.
Whatever you do, don’t take bounces lightly. ISPs don’t like bounces and a high percentage can get your entire mailing blocked.
Deliverability: Get Your Message Through
According to JupiterResearch, despite the fact that, year-over-year, delivery rates have gone up, increasing to 88 percent in 2005 from 82 percent in 2004, deliverability is still the number one challenge for e-mail marketers. However, poor deliverability can seriously undermine the performance of a campaign. E-mail marketers should spend extra care in this area.
While a top e-mail service provider can help your deliverability rates tremendously, all the technology in the world won’t get your e-mail into recipients’ inboxes if your lists are riddled with bad addresses. A high percentage of undeliverable mail is a hallmark of spammers, so keep close tabs on your bounce rate and keep it low.
Also keep in mind that e-mail addresses churn at an incredible rate. If you don’t communicate to your list regularly, bad addresses will collect over time, resulting in skyrocketing bounce rates. To keep your list fresh, e-mail everyone on it regularly—at least once every 90 days.
Additionally, The Direct Marketing Association urges all members to implement authentication standards, which can benefit delivery rates. All e-mailers should be considering the implementation of SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys as part of their deliverability program. Also, have in place a list hygiene policy that deals with issues like opt-outs, bounces, reply/inbound handling and address formation validation. It’s also important to realize that in order to get a really firm handle on your true deliverability rate, you should periodically employ the services of a delivery auditing company. You simply send e-mails to their list of monitored e-mail addresses to see what percentage actually arrive, and what percentage, if any, is blocked.
Frequency: Know How Often Is Too Often
One of the reasons marketers love e-mail is because it’s so inexpensive. Unfortunately, because cost isn’t a limiting factor, many marketers mail without regard for frequency. Rather than blasting away within a given budget, the question to ask yourself regarding frequency is simply: “How often do I have something to say that my recipients want to hear?”
The goal in setting frequency is to squeeze the maximum return-on-investment from the fewest e-mails by making each message highly relevant, targeted and customized. Do that by evaluating your messages from your customers’ point of view. You should bring an understanding regarding their level of engagement with your brand, and evaluate the persuasive power of the intended messages accordingly. If you let your customers control how often they hear from you through the use of preference centers, you’ll greatly diminish the risk of over-mailing and alienating them altogether.
Ultimately, the only way to determine optimal frequency is to test. Testing should always be integrated into e-mail marketing programs. Without it, improving campaigns becomes a hit-or-miss operation. Despite the importance and benefits of testing, JupiterResearch found only 40 percent of marketers regularly test their e-mail campaigns. Yet marketers who test on a regular basis are more likely to have e-mail conversion rates that exceed industry averages. Segment off small portions of your list and test different frequencies. Run the test for four to six months in order to get complete results. Measure and compare conversions, and note any activity drop-off.
List Growth: Quality Over Quantity
While it may give you bragging rights at the next e-mail marketing seminar you attend, a huge list can actually be quite worthless if nobody on it wants to hear from you. There are a number of excellent ways to increase the size of your in-house list with the e-mail addresses of people who actually want to receive your e-mail messages. The first one is surprisingly overlooked by marketers: place a highly-visible e-mail opt-in on your Web site. In fact, Silverpop’s “2005 Retail E-mail Marketing Study” found 23 percent of companies failed to include e-mail registration information on the company’s home page. Ideally, because search engines often take visitors to internal pages, opt-in information should be added to every page in your Web site.
But don’t just plug in a button marked “subscribe” or “opt-in” at the bottom of the page. Give visitors a reason to allow you to communicate with them. Silverpop’s Retail E-mail Study found that one-fourth of the companies reviewed failed to offer Web-site visitors any benefit to registering for their e-mails.
During the opt-in process, marketers must weigh their desire for personal information from a prospect that will help them offer relevant products, services and information against a prospect’s desire for privacy. The best approach is to keep the opt-in page clean, simple and painless to complete. Be sure to convey in the most persuasive ways possible the value recipients will receive in exchange for trusting you with their e-mail addresses. Then deliver the value you promised.
Legislation: Compliance Is Required And Can Improve Results
The CAN-SPAM Act attempts to draw a line between irresponsible spammers and legitimate, permission-based e-mail marketers. Ensuring your e-mail program is legally compliant is a first and basic step toward successful e-mail marketing. Legal blunders can not only be costly, they can seriously damage your brand and company reputation. Keep in mind that annoyed consumers will hit the “this is spam” button—even from messages they have opted-in to receive. If an ISP blocks your mailing as a result of spam complaints, not only will it damage the campaign caught in the filter, it can ultimately impact your overall e-mail marketing program.
While CAN-SPAM was created to avoid a mish-mash of state laws restricting e-mail marketing, new child protection legislation targeting e-mail recently passed in Utah and Michigan. The laws prohibit sending certain types of e-mail messages to addresses listed on registries maintained by an outside company on behalf of each state. Both states created registries for minors as well as schools and organizations that serve them. Companies may not send those on the registries messages that advertise or link to goods or services that are illegal for a minor to buy or possess.
This legislation has been extremely controversial, and at least one lawsuit has been filed in Utah. E-mail marketers must monitor such legislation and be aware of the pitfalls that can sink not only an e-mail campaign but an entire brand if they run afoul of such laws.
Building on Core Competencies
E-mail campaigns built upon a solid base can be enhanced further by content and timing that improve relevance and show dramatic improvement over industry average return-on-investments. A solid base allows e-mail marketers to build into their campaigns advanced practices such as lifecycle targeting, dynamic content and more. With attention to the five core competencies upon which all successful campaigns are built, e-mail marketers can add the embellishments that can drive significant results without worrying that their campaign could collapse at any moment like a proverbial house of cards.
Elaine O’Gorman is vice president of strategy, for Atlanta, Ga.-based e-mail marketing solutions, strategy and services provider Silverpop. She works closely with various Silverpop clients, providing advice on managing risk in today’s volatile legislative and legal environment, creating enterprise e-mail governance policies, maximizing deliverability and optimizing campaign effectiveness. She can be reached at elaineogorman@silverpop.com
1. Metrics
2. Deliverability
3. Frequency
4. List Growth
5. Legislation
Let’s review these core competency and how each should fit together with the others to ensure a sound footing for your e-mail marketing programs.
Metrics: Vital for Relevance
Metrics, one of the very reasons marketers love e-mail, also frequently bedevils them. I’m often asked what to measure, how to measure and what to do with the data once gathered. Basic elements for marketers to examine include open rates, click-throughs and bounce rates. A solid open rate is useful for evaluating the combination of your brand value and subject line. Click-through rates are valuable for evaluating your call-to-action.
Now here’s where that pinch of bedevilment comes in. Although studies have consistently shown open rates to be on the decline, click-through rates are either staying steady or increasing slightly, depending on which report you read. The discrepancy arises for two reasons. Because open rates are measured through the use of image pixels embedded in the e-mail, the increasing prevalence of image-blocking in e-mail programs like Gmail and Outlook 2003 may tend to depress open rates. At the same time, the “preview” function in some e-mail browsers can artificially inflate open rates. So although open rates should be part of the overall e-mail measurement mix, marketers should not rely on them exclusively as a measurement of campaign success.
If your call to action was to click through to a Web site, examining click-throughs can be an excellent measure of how enticing your e-mail message was. If sending e-mails with multiple links, track each separately so you can evaluate what works best.
Using click-through behavior to segment customers can prove extraordinarily beneficial, enabling the marketer to enhance the relevance of e-mail messages by responding to areas of proven interest to the recipient based on what “clicked” with them, so to speak. JupiterResearch reports that only about a third of all e-mail marketers segment by click-through data. To give your e-mail program a significant competitive advantage, monitor click-throughs closely and use the information to enhance the relevance of your e-mail content and offers.
Another metric to monitor closely is your bounce rate. Bounces are e-mails that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it to the intended recipient and were returned. Hard bounces, in which the domain or individual e-mail address no longer exists, should be removed from your list immediately. Soft bounces, caused by full mailboxes, downed servers or other reasons, should be monitored closely. A good rule of thumb I generally recommend is to remove addresses that have soft-bounced three times in a row over a span of at least 21 days.
Whatever you do, don’t take bounces lightly. ISPs don’t like bounces and a high percentage can get your entire mailing blocked.
Deliverability: Get Your Message Through
According to JupiterResearch, despite the fact that, year-over-year, delivery rates have gone up, increasing to 88 percent in 2005 from 82 percent in 2004, deliverability is still the number one challenge for e-mail marketers. However, poor deliverability can seriously undermine the performance of a campaign. E-mail marketers should spend extra care in this area.
While a top e-mail service provider can help your deliverability rates tremendously, all the technology in the world won’t get your e-mail into recipients’ inboxes if your lists are riddled with bad addresses. A high percentage of undeliverable mail is a hallmark of spammers, so keep close tabs on your bounce rate and keep it low.
Also keep in mind that e-mail addresses churn at an incredible rate. If you don’t communicate to your list regularly, bad addresses will collect over time, resulting in skyrocketing bounce rates. To keep your list fresh, e-mail everyone on it regularly—at least once every 90 days.
Additionally, The Direct Marketing Association urges all members to implement authentication standards, which can benefit delivery rates. All e-mailers should be considering the implementation of SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys as part of their deliverability program. Also, have in place a list hygiene policy that deals with issues like opt-outs, bounces, reply/inbound handling and address formation validation. It’s also important to realize that in order to get a really firm handle on your true deliverability rate, you should periodically employ the services of a delivery auditing company. You simply send e-mails to their list of monitored e-mail addresses to see what percentage actually arrive, and what percentage, if any, is blocked.
Frequency: Know How Often Is Too Often
One of the reasons marketers love e-mail is because it’s so inexpensive. Unfortunately, because cost isn’t a limiting factor, many marketers mail without regard for frequency. Rather than blasting away within a given budget, the question to ask yourself regarding frequency is simply: “How often do I have something to say that my recipients want to hear?”
The goal in setting frequency is to squeeze the maximum return-on-investment from the fewest e-mails by making each message highly relevant, targeted and customized. Do that by evaluating your messages from your customers’ point of view. You should bring an understanding regarding their level of engagement with your brand, and evaluate the persuasive power of the intended messages accordingly. If you let your customers control how often they hear from you through the use of preference centers, you’ll greatly diminish the risk of over-mailing and alienating them altogether.
Ultimately, the only way to determine optimal frequency is to test. Testing should always be integrated into e-mail marketing programs. Without it, improving campaigns becomes a hit-or-miss operation. Despite the importance and benefits of testing, JupiterResearch found only 40 percent of marketers regularly test their e-mail campaigns. Yet marketers who test on a regular basis are more likely to have e-mail conversion rates that exceed industry averages. Segment off small portions of your list and test different frequencies. Run the test for four to six months in order to get complete results. Measure and compare conversions, and note any activity drop-off.
List Growth: Quality Over Quantity
While it may give you bragging rights at the next e-mail marketing seminar you attend, a huge list can actually be quite worthless if nobody on it wants to hear from you. There are a number of excellent ways to increase the size of your in-house list with the e-mail addresses of people who actually want to receive your e-mail messages. The first one is surprisingly overlooked by marketers: place a highly-visible e-mail opt-in on your Web site. In fact, Silverpop’s “2005 Retail E-mail Marketing Study” found 23 percent of companies failed to include e-mail registration information on the company’s home page. Ideally, because search engines often take visitors to internal pages, opt-in information should be added to every page in your Web site.
But don’t just plug in a button marked “subscribe” or “opt-in” at the bottom of the page. Give visitors a reason to allow you to communicate with them. Silverpop’s Retail E-mail Study found that one-fourth of the companies reviewed failed to offer Web-site visitors any benefit to registering for their e-mails.
During the opt-in process, marketers must weigh their desire for personal information from a prospect that will help them offer relevant products, services and information against a prospect’s desire for privacy. The best approach is to keep the opt-in page clean, simple and painless to complete. Be sure to convey in the most persuasive ways possible the value recipients will receive in exchange for trusting you with their e-mail addresses. Then deliver the value you promised.
Legislation: Compliance Is Required And Can Improve Results
The CAN-SPAM Act attempts to draw a line between irresponsible spammers and legitimate, permission-based e-mail marketers. Ensuring your e-mail program is legally compliant is a first and basic step toward successful e-mail marketing. Legal blunders can not only be costly, they can seriously damage your brand and company reputation. Keep in mind that annoyed consumers will hit the “this is spam” button—even from messages they have opted-in to receive. If an ISP blocks your mailing as a result of spam complaints, not only will it damage the campaign caught in the filter, it can ultimately impact your overall e-mail marketing program.
While CAN-SPAM was created to avoid a mish-mash of state laws restricting e-mail marketing, new child protection legislation targeting e-mail recently passed in Utah and Michigan. The laws prohibit sending certain types of e-mail messages to addresses listed on registries maintained by an outside company on behalf of each state. Both states created registries for minors as well as schools and organizations that serve them. Companies may not send those on the registries messages that advertise or link to goods or services that are illegal for a minor to buy or possess.
This legislation has been extremely controversial, and at least one lawsuit has been filed in Utah. E-mail marketers must monitor such legislation and be aware of the pitfalls that can sink not only an e-mail campaign but an entire brand if they run afoul of such laws.
Building on Core Competencies
E-mail campaigns built upon a solid base can be enhanced further by content and timing that improve relevance and show dramatic improvement over industry average return-on-investments. A solid base allows e-mail marketers to build into their campaigns advanced practices such as lifecycle targeting, dynamic content and more. With attention to the five core competencies upon which all successful campaigns are built, e-mail marketers can add the embellishments that can drive significant results without worrying that their campaign could collapse at any moment like a proverbial house of cards.
Elaine O’Gorman is vice president of strategy, for Atlanta, Ga.-based e-mail marketing solutions, strategy and services provider Silverpop. She works closely with various Silverpop clients, providing advice on managing risk in today’s volatile legislative and legal environment, creating enterprise e-mail governance policies, maximizing deliverability and optimizing campaign effectiveness. She can be reached at elaineogorman@silverpop.com
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