Email 101: Getting the basics right

Last month I was at an Ask the Experts conference organised by postal advice and management company Onepost. One topic that came up in most of the sessions was email and how to get the most from your email marketing efforts.

One delegate said that for his first foray into email marketing he used a rented email list and failed to generate a single response from it. The delegate insisted that the list was clean, legal and that the named contacts on it were the most relevant to his business. But I was baffled; what concerned me was that the whole campaign was based on the rented list when, as he's been in business for almost 20 years, he should have had a list of his own existing and prospective customers. Where was his housefile; why didn’t he know anything about his customers; was the copy all wrong; was the timing out of whack?

It was almost enough to put him off email for life. What he needed was Email 101, some back-to-basics advice on email marketing. As the day went on, I realised he wasn’t the only one. Several of the delegates were new to the sector and were keen to learn the tricks of the trade. To help them—and others in their position—get the most from email, below are some tips gleaned from the day and some suggested further reading from the Catalogue e-business archive.

1. Build your own list
Supplementing a mailing with rented names is standard practice in catalogue marketing and it can work in email too. However, a catalogue business should be building its own email list of current customers instead of relying on a rented file.
If you’re just moving into ecommerce after trading via bricks-and-mortar stores, for example, start capturing customer details in-store. If you mail a print catalogue, send a postcard or flyer asking for customers’ email addresses, you can even incentivise this by giving email subscribers 10 percent off their next order. To further grow your list, you can ask customers to send you their friends' details too. M and M Direct does this by including a Freepost postcard within its catalogue. If you trade online, make your email sign-up box clearly visible and be mindful not to ask for too much information at sign-up as this may put people off. Once you have a list of people you know are interested in what you’ve got to say, your emails are more like to elicit a response.
For more info see How to bolster your email list.

2. Subject line
At the conference, Dan Croxen-John of Applied Web Analytics advised email marketers—novices and experts—to test all aspects of an email campaign. Among the elements he suggested looking at were subject lines and personalisation—such as including a first-name salutation vs last name vs no name in the subject line.

There is still some debate about whether the word Free in the subject line will get you flagged as a spammer. It’s probably best to avoid it if you are new to email marketing and have not yet established a good reputation.
For more about testing subject lines and what else you should measure take a look at Five tips for better email testing.

3. Maximise your deliverability
Working with a good email service provider (ESP) is more likely to get your email whitelisted (the opposite of blacklisted) and past the spam filters. You can also improve your chances of being added to recipients’ whitelists by having a recognisable “From” field—this is usually your company name or the brand your customers will know you by.
To find out about improving deliverability see Ten tips for improved email deliverability.

4. Timing
According to speaker Mike Broomfield from digital marketing firm Intellegentia, getting the timing of your email right can reap great rewards. For business-to-business marketers, Broomfield suggests 11am on a weekday is a good time as most workers will have cleared their morning emails and attended their early meetings. For consumers, a lunchtime offer can work—Wallis recently sent me an email promising free delivery if I ordered between noon and 3pm on a specified day. You may also have noticed as a consumer that you’re being sent more emails at the end of the month and that “pay-day offers” are becoming much more prevalent. But get the timing wrong, and your efforts will be wasted. As always, the best advice from the experts is to test different timings and see which works best.
Here are Six common email marketing mistakes--and how to fix them

5. Content
None of the above tips will do much good if your copy and offers aren’t up to scratch. Think carefully about what you want your emails to say, and craft them with your customers in mind. Do you know what they want from you? Again, the experts recommend testing offers and copy before sending the email to the entire list.
You might also want to consider your image-to-copy ratio. Consider whether you have enough images, or too many. Do the images distract from the message? What does the email look like when images are disabled in a recipient’s inbox?
For more advice on design see Seven tips for improving your email design.--MT

What we learnt from 188 pre-Mother’s Day emails

As our UK readers are well aware, this past Sunday was Mother’s Day —a major event in the gift-giving calendar. You’d assume, as I did, that most of the email newsletters landing in my inbox in the days prior would have a special Mother’s Day offer—at the very least a cursory note not to forget 14th March. So it came as quite a revelation that out of a total of 188 promotional emails from cataloguers and online retailers received between 3rd March and 11th March*, 112 emails, or 59.6 percent of them, did not reference Mother’s Day at all.

As expected, business-to-business merchants didn’t promote Mother’s Day. I received emails from Slingsby, Machine Mart, Filplastic, and Teknomek that understandably did not factor Mother’s Day into their promotions. Out of those emails, my favourite was Teknomek, which used the opportunity to let recipients know of its presence at an upcoming trade show.

British mums must not be very sporty if the emails I received are anything to go by. Two golf-equipment retailers, County Golf and Direct Golf, sent out enewsletters during that (extended) week and neither suggested buying mum a new set of clubs for Mother’s Day. Derby House, a cataloguer that specialises in equine-related equipment and accessories, sent us at least four emails during the period and none gave us a mother-related special offer. Further, snow and surf brands Ellis Brigham, Extremepie, and Blue Tomato were just too cool to promote mums.

Also surprising was that quite a few apparel brands decided not to send out Mother’s Day-related offers. Kaleidoscope, Joe Browns, and Plumo were among those that didn’t mention Mother’s Day in any of their emails. The “worst offenders” in this category, however, were Wall London and Wallis. Wall sent three emails during that week and Wallis sent five—none promoted Mothering Sunday. This was made even worse by Wallis’s inclusion of a competition that would have been a perfect Mother’s Day hook. It was offering a two-night Champneys Spa break for the recipient and a friend. Why it did not add “or take your mum!” to the offer is beyond me.

Many of the retailers sent us more than one email during that week. This gave them scope to send one email with a Mother’s Day offer, and one without. Of those that sent us multiple messages, Roman Originals targeted the more organised of shoppers. It sent out an email on the 4th March with an offer for Mother’s Day; five days later, the offer was removed from the email. The same tactic was used by Baker Ross, Past Times, and John Lewis. Curiously, lingerie etailer Figleaves approached it the other way round. Its emails sent prior to 9th March were Mother’s Day-free zones. However, come the 9th, Figleaves’ subject line was: New spring arrivals, 20% off lingerie offer + 20% off nightwear - perfect for Mother's Day! Neom Organics also made a point of targeting last-minute shoppers on 9th March with the subject line: FREE Gift & Mother's Day Special Offers.

What did we learn from 188 pre-Mother's Day emails? That the majority of retailers aren't concerned with Mother's Day at all. So what were they promoting if not Mother’s Day? Seven percent promoted spring—or new arrivals for spring—whilst just two percent promoted Easter. Most of the offers focused either on specific ranges, promoting existing sales, or pushing product.

Of the 112 emails that didn’t promote Mother’s Day my favourites were:

Boden
Sent on 4th March with the subject line “Today's your last chance for 15% off at Boden, online. Shop now or miss out‏”, Boden’s email appeals to my cute receptors. It sent a similar email six months ago, I liked that one too!

Hotel Chocolat
Although the email has a tab labelled Mother’s Day, it didn’t directly promote Mother’s Day offers. What it did promote were Easter eggs—and lots of them. The email has an almost irresistible selection of chocolate eggs (irresistible because I cannot justify spending £22 on one Easter egg). Despite the amount of product featured in this email, it’s not confusing and doesn’t seem crowded. Hotel Chocolat called it its “Easter Eggs-ibition”, and it certainly seems to have a gallery feel to it. I particularly like the graphic at the bottom which compares the egg sizes to one another—a little “happy” egg right through to a giant chocolaty “Ostrich” egg.

Oli
This gets top marks for concept rather than execution. Received on 10th March—three days after the Academy Awards ceremony—the email from fashion etailer Oli is titled “The Oli Awards are here‏”. The categories are Best red-carpet dress, Hottest heels, and Must have accessory. There are three nominees and a winner. I like the idea—but the follow-through is lacklustre. Why did that green dress, or those platform shoes, win? Are they the most popular with customers? What makes them better than the other pieces in the list? The pieces were chosen by Oli staff, but there’s no reason behind their choices. What I’d liked to see is a pre-Oscars competition where Oli customers vote on their favourite pieces. The winner gets her favourite item and the reason for loving it into the email. Maybe next year?--MT

* Why did I choose the 3rd to 11th March? For a start, I factored in delivery dates; the 11th fell on a Thursday which still enabled delivery by Saturday. The 3rd was chosen to allow for emails with an early-bird offer to be included.

What we learned from 150 marketing emails

In this day and age, you’d think that a significant portion of marketing emails would be personalised to some degree. I’m not talking about something sophisticated like a product recommendation based on previous visits to the company’s website; a simple “Dear Sherry” would do. But of the 150 emails that Miri and I tallied during the past week, just 13 had some sort of personalisation. That’s a scant 8.7 percent--even though studies have indicated that personalising an email greeting can increase both open and click-through rates. (For instance, in a study by MailerMailer, emails with a personalised message had an average open rate of 15.15 percent, compared with 13.01 percent for nonpersonalised messages. And personalised messages had a 4.12-percent click-through rate, compared with 2.59 percent for nonpersonalised ones.)

Personalisation, or the lack thereof, was just one of the basics that the majority of companies that emailed us got wrong. And even when companies did try to personalise a message, there were snafus. Stainless-steel equipment seller Teknomek tried, bless ‘em, but the salutation read “Dear –”. And health-food purveyor Higher Nature evidently thinks I’m a man (“Dear Mr Chiger”).

Judging by the emails, social networking is something direct marketers love in theory more than in practice. Only 25 of the emails—16.7 percent—included a link to the company’s Facebook page, Twitter feed, or other third-party social-media site.

Granted, more of the messages included some sort of “forward to a friend” link. But not that many more: only 29.3 percent. And it’s not as if adding this sort of link to an email template should be all that difficult. As Tink Taylor of DotMailer wrote recently for Catalogue e-business, “viral and word-of-mouth marketing is an inexpensive way to spread your marketing messages, drive traffic, collect contact information, and ultimately boost sales”.

Nor should proofreading the emails be all that difficult either, yet too many had obvious misspellings. The subject line of a message from menswear cataloguer Jolliman, for instance, read “Jolliman Summer Bargins”. A Pet-Supermarket subject line read “New website, 4,000 new product & 3 new animal categories”. Office and industrial supplies mailer Slingsby urged recipients to “Safeguard your employee’s health”, which would have been fine if that particular subject line appeared only on emails to people who supervised just one staffer. It was particularly depressing to see a company misspell its own name in the subject line, as The Children’s Furniture Company did: “The Childrens Furniture Company Summer Sale Now On!” Ironmongery Direct ended an email with this caveat: “30% Offer ends: 5th July 2009”; unfortunately we received the message on 16th July. In one of its emails, Staples labelled a link "Click here to view our full range of clearance itmes". Am I being pedantic? I don’t think so. Spam tends to be riddled with typos, so I think many consumers are immediately suspicious of messages that are misspelled.

Not all of the emails were dire. Some were simply uninspired. Nearly three-quarters (71.3 percent) of the messages we received promoted some sort of sale or discount in the subject line. Yes, I know that “Free” does translate to opens and click-throughs, and that “sale” and “one-third off” are similarly magical. And yes, chances are good that the people who receive your marketing emails probably don’t have as many competing messages in their inbox as we do. But the similarity of the promotional subject lines left me both overwhelmed (by the sheer volume) and underwhelmed (by the sheer tedium).

That’s why I liked the subject lines that added a sense of urgency to the promotion (“Free delivery on holiday shop - 3 days only!” from Figleaves.com) or did something clever with the offer (from Peeks Party, “How low can you go? Summer party limbo kit 27% off”).

Because I don’t want to end this lengthy post on a down note, I’m going to close with a few more examples of emails we liked:

* The sales promotion email from fashion brand Ben Sherman (above) had some eye-grabbing cartoon graphics that set off the silhouetted product shots gorgeously.

* The subject line from supplements mailer Trust William certainly stood out: “Every 10th Order Refunded!” Trust William planned to notify the lucky 10 percent within seven days after the specified time frame, so recipients couldn’t try to cheat the system. The notification emails also provided the company with an excuse to contact its customers again.

* The “denim heaven” email from plus-size womenswear retailer Evans (above) promoted a sale (two pairs of selected jeans for £30), but the email text gave additional reasons besides price to buy jeans from Evans. In bullet points, it spelled out “why our jeans are a great fit”: three leg lengths for most styles; stretch added to the fabric; “a higher waist for an amazing fit”; “we fit all our jeans on real women, which means you get a better, more-flattering fit every time”. That’s great, benefit-driven, easy-to-digest selling copy.

* In addition to promoting its summer sale, womenswear retailer Wallis used its email to encourage recipients to take a survey about the company, by offering participants the chance to win £150 in vouchers. Menswear merchant Brook Taverner did something similar: It included a link to its survey but rewarded all participants with a £20 voucher.

* The “minimail” message from Firebox (above) featured just one product, the Cool-er eBook Reader, but the graphics and the copy made a real hero of that item. My favourite line from the product description: “…this wafer-thin eReader is the greatest thing to happen to literature since Jeffrey Archer got banged up”.

My number-one lesson learned from this experiment? That next time I come up with a brilliant idea along the lines of "let's log and analyse all the marketing emails we receive in a week; how long could it possibly take?", I should ignore it.--SC