E-mail targeting options

It seems that for all the talk of eCRM and the power of targeted e-mail marketing, many marketers are still in the early phases of e-mail marketing and are blasting out the same message to all list members.

My evidence for this is anecdotal - I deliver the Chartered Institute of Marketing Workshops on E-mail Marketing - and when I ask about personalisation it is the minority of attendees who are working at this.

I have developed this checklist of the options for e-mail marketing targeting which we discussed as part of the recent e-consultancy roundtable on e-marketing. I hope it showcases all the options there are for e-mail targeting.

Please reply with any good examples of targeting that fit into the categories below, or any other options I've missed.

Options for e-mail targeting / mass customisation / personalization. Dave Chaffey, www.marketing-insights.co.uk.

It seems useful to break the options down into 3 - 1 are traditional direct marekting targeting options, 2 and 3 are mostly new to online / eCRM.

1. List member characteristics
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These are characteristics of the list members typically asked for when building profiled for segmentation.

E-mail personalization options:
1. No targeting.
2. Name.
3. Main web site audiences.
4. Major customer groupings - strategic segmentation. Examples:
Standard segmentation by geo-demographics, lifestyle group, company size/type/industry and DMU member (B2B)
6. Stage in buying process / buying status / sales pipeline. Customers vs Prospects.
7. Customer value (lifetime value)
8. See behaviour.

2. List member preferences
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These are customers online preferences, also asked for during profiling:
- E-mail Format preference (HTML vs Text)
- Channel preferences (e-mail, direct mail, phone)
- Frequency preferences (weekly, monthly, quarterly, major events)
- Content preferences (particularly topics, news stories, market reports, alerts, or offers)

3. List member behaviours
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1. E-mail response or click behaviour:
- Don't Open
- Open. Don't Click.
- Click. Don't act.
- Act.

This has been around for years - was showcased by e2communications (now Bluestreak), but is not used much and is a real 'lightbulb / aha!' moment in the training workshops.

E-mail response behaviour can be either:
- Use for a follow-up e-mail in multi-message campaign
- Use over long-period for categorising responders.

Requires identification of individual behaviours using a unique link id for each recipient.

2. Click content preferences.
Recipients in C. and D. can be targeted by their content or offer preferences - what do they tend to click on - e.g. lastminute.com can tailor content to customers who click on Euro city breaks. They have 125 different versions of newsletter, I believe delivered by e.piphany.

3. Post-click content preferences
Which content on site/microsite do the recipients in C and D visit. E.g. particular product pages, offer pages, main transaction path

4. Post-click purchase or transaction behaviour.
Place customers into RFM Recency, Frequency, Monetary value category buckets. This can be for online purchases or offline purchases.

Traditional lifetime value analysis - most valued customers, below-zero customers, most vulnerable customers. Next-best product.

Doesn't have to be sophisticated RFM - may be effective simply to target customers who have previously bought online or customers have registered / logged in / transacted within last 3 to 6 months.

5. Time-based behaviour (events)
- Target those one year from last purchase (travel).
- Follow-up e-mails during a trial, or before renewal or those who drop out of registration / sales channel

6. Customer initiated events on web site
Customer enters main transaction path, but drop-off occurs before purchase. E-mail used to encourage customer to complete transaction, e.g. Tesco.com, William Hill. RedEye.com have some great cases of how William Hill are targeting in this way.

Please let me know of anything obvious I have missed, or any other innovative examples of targeting using customer preferences or behaviour.

Dave Chaffey
Director, Marketing Insights
(www.marketing-insights.co.uk)

Fascinating posts.

I'd add to Ashley's comments about automated events. We've started looking at triggered events as a major route to build relationships, actions and ultimately sales.

Triggers are particularly interesting when you can assign them to automatically follow up on some of the behavioural elements that Dave brings up.

From my experience the technological capabilities are far ahead of most companies' usage of them. I'm sure this will change particularly as rates of response to more generic email marketing start to reduce.