Does your email marketing need a new prescription?
Being an email marketer, it’s funny how often you bump into something that makes you think of work! A little while ago after visiting the doctor, I received an email about ordering repeat prescriptions.
So far, so good you’d think. Some good targeting going on there.
But when I gave it a read, what struck me were all the missed opportunities. For example, the email ‘from address’ was totally unrecognisable, and there was litte in the way of clever personalisation that you often see in the private sector.
What’s more, it’s the only email (indeed, the only communication of all types) I’ve had from them in the last 18 months or so. It was an interesting message to kick off our e-relationship.
Why be a stranger?
Multichannel boosts email: new report
It's an exciting time for the email marketing industry, and no matter what Mark Zuckerberg says, the end is certainly not nigh, according to new research published this week from Econsultancy.
According to Econsultancy's 2012 Email Marketing Platforms Buyer's Guide, the UK email marketing industry grew by an estimated 15.5% last year to a value of £388 million by the end of 2011.
The research highlights that the rise of cross-channel marketing is helping to fuel growth in the email marketing industry. Rather than operating in its own silo, email is now seen as an essential component of a wider campaign. Thanks to the rise of mobile, email is now everywhere, accessible anywhere, at any time and at any location.
Measuring email: past, present and future
How marketers measure email is changing and will continue to change.
Where we used to look at open and click rates, today we are putting in place plans to measure email lifetime value. So what is going on?
I was reviewing results from a split creative test on a basket abandonment email recently (names removed to protect the successful) and it struck me how the methodology for measuring email results can, quite erroneously, determine how we use email marketing and develop marketing strategies.
So I thought I would combine the results here with my recommendations on how to measure email marketing.
Email is much more than a cheap marketing channel
It is frankly maddening when I hear marketers talk about how ‘valuable’ email is because it is ‘cheap’.
It says to me this marketer is likely to be banging out high frequency emails to produce orders without due consideration to the real value of email marketing in CRM terms.
Top 10 tips for improving basket abandonment emails
RedEye’s latest Behavioural Email Benchmark Report shows that the number of online retailers employing a basket abandonment strategy has doubled from 7% to 14%.
So, I’ve asked the key guys at RedEye for their ideas about how to improve a basket abandonment email campaign. I got the fun of ranking them.
And in the style of Jimmy Savile, I’m counting down starting at number 10!
Dust your dirty email database for pristine profits
It’s a commonly believed myth in email marketing that the more email addresses a sender has on their database, the higher their chance of success.
In fact, this is an inaccurate and detrimental approach and many email marketers don’t consider the consequences of contacting people who aren’t interested in their brand or, worse still, don’t exist.
Basket abandonment myths debunked: No.2
I've seen a lot of advice recently suggesting that 'recency is the key', and all basket abandonment emails should be sent immediately.
I find it quite depressing. Individuals giving this advice assume that all customers are the same. Segmentation, customer analysis, research and even good old fashioned ‘thought’ is ignored for the sake of a headline.
In translation, these vendors are screaming ‘Spam the lot of them immediately!!’
Check out this supermarket’s email
The seemingly endless parade of thousands of brands you’re faced with in the weekly ‘big shop’ means it’s sometimes impossible to know where to start.
Similarly, opening my email inbox only to be confronted by a mob of generic and impersonal marketing emails trying to feed me their latest offers can be overwhelming to say the least.
How to use Google Analytics to find the best time to send emails
In my experience, the day of the week and hour of the day at which marketing emails are sent is often based on little more than the gut feeling of the email marketer and the performance of previous emails, rather than real data.
As someone who could put the anal in analytics, I think that's a rather inexact science. Surely there's a more accurate way to figure out whether the assumption is really true?
Basket abandonment myths debunked: No.1
“You can’t use offers in Basket Abandonment emails because it trains customers to deliberately abandon”.
What tosh! All marketers know that offers improve conversion. To blandly state that you can’t use an offer to improve conversion on a basket abandonment campaign is at best a lazy excuse.
