Email marketing and Optimization Best Practices
Delfina Balestra (CEO & Founder, ClickExperts)
The number one concern today in this arena is the fact that email interaction rates are slowly going down. Many say that an issue influencing this situation is the uncertainty about images being displayed or not on email messages and if this is bringing down open rates.
Still, email ranks high with marketers. The key driver behind this is that their ROI (57.25%) is still very high compared to other channels.
David Baker (VP of Email Solutions, Avenue A │Razorfish)
Email is not going away - it is ubiquitous it is pervasive. It is a syndication tool.
You wouldn’t have the joke pool you have today without emails!
Everyone uses email - personal and work related… during work days and vacations… People use it all the time every day, during children’s events, in the restroom, at church, they send emails to their spouse from the other room, they have fights via email, and they even email neighbors instead of walking over to talk to them. For kids email is just second nature.
Consumers will consume email. It is the number one activity, period.
The question is how do you create brand relationships and persuasion via email?
You have to understand how email will help you build the brand relationship with your customers.
5 keys to a good email program:
1.Understand an email’s functional value to its intended audience;
2.The timing and cadence has to be appropriate to the customer’s need of the brand/product (life stage, cyclical, seasonality);
3.Its content must be optimized and tied to a functional need - email is about syndicating and sharing relevant information;
4.Your email program must be consistent and bi-directional;
5.You must understand what response and measurement mean to your business.
Cristopher Marriott (VP, GM, Eastern Region, Acxiom Digital)
One of the challenges with email marketing in general is that it is too easy to abuse your customers. This happens because of poor regulations and the fact that it is so inexpensive. Since companies have free access to their house list, they get to blast it without giving any thought to the message’s relevance or value, or if they are abusing their clients.
It is not necessarily in your ESP’s benefit to send out more emails. (You won’t always hear this from an ESP).
Whether your email meets the definition of spam is not relevant. Nowadays, individuals have less patience with marketers.
•90.6% of people say spam is coming an unknown sender;
•50% define spam as email from a company they do business with but receive them too frequently;
•45% say they once gave the company permission to contact them but no longer wish to receive their emails;
•44% say they receive multiple emails from different parts of the same company.
Marketers need to maintain relevance with subscribers lest they be lumped with spammers.
Users want to receive emails as long as these are relevant to them. Consumers are fed up with irrelevant content. Increasingly, they expect to have content tailored for their needs and are willing to reveal info on themselves for this.
It is important to consolidate and personalize email messages. Instead of sending five different emails to a person, send one with the info they are looking for or have signed up to. Every piece of the email must be dynamic; this will help increase their open rate.
Marc Désenfant (President, Come&Stay USA)
Companies need to reach their customers following the “Just In Time” concept.
He contends that email is really good for both acquisition and retention. In Europe, many very well known big companies are using email for customer acquisition. Email is a good channel with a good ROI; the key is to have good data and to be relevant, coming at the right time, with the right data to the right customers.
Be there, “just in time” with the customer when the need for specific products is identified. When people go to websites and search for a specific product, they give you a signal of what they want/need; then is a good time to send them an email with an offer about that product. Do not send that offer three months earlier; you must find the right timing!
In the auto industry, people buy a car every 3-5 years… therefore if you are in that industry, you look for those persons who will be in the market for a car according to your records and market to them around that time. Spot for people doing search for a given product or service and you can target them at that moment. If people give you their information and opt in, you now can then send them emails. If you present people a clear opt in, the email open rate is around 40%. You must give people relevant offers.
Ignacio Roizman (US Country Manager, Eastern Region, e-volution digital marketing)
In some ways the Hispanic Market is different than the Latin American… I’ve seen that whatever happens in the US will happen in the next 6-8 weeks in Latin America.
Countries like Mexico and Argentina, that have more mature online markets, are showing similar email open rates as the US. Others with slower adoption of the internet are at higher open rates in comparison.
In Latin America there are fewer regulations than in the US, but if you are a global player you could be liable in the US for something you do wrong in Latin America. South of the border there aren’t so many policies in place on how data bases should be used; so you (or your agency) must auto-police yourself in order to get the best results out of your email campaign.
Remember that Latin America is comprised of 20 different countries, with different languages, different slang, and different cultures. You can use this to your advantage by giving your email messages local tones and local flavors depending on where you are sending them to.
One of the biggest challenges in Latin America is maintaining consistency throughout, given the varying languages, laws and policies in all the different countries.
Another challenge is balancing regional versus local content. You need to create an email template with areas reserved for regional and for local content, besides the content that will be used for all of Latin America.
To maximize your Latin American initiatives you have to be fully aware of every tool you are utilizing elsewhere and implement all those that can be utilized in the region.
Finally some general remarks on how to correctly use and grow your email address list:
•Use your opt-in ACTIVE email addresses to remarket.
•Work on reviving your “Silent Unsubscribers” (those who haven’t opened one of your emails during the last 12 months) by sending them a completely different campaign, with a subject line along the lines of “We haven’t seen you in a while”.
