SPONSORED SUPPLEMENT: E-mail marketers raise the performance bar
Consumers may be more receptive to e-mail marketing, but that hasn’t made it any easier for e-retailers to get their message to the customer’s inbox and opened. More stringent spam filtering rules, sender authentication policies imposed by ISPs to reduce unwanted clutter in consumer mailboxes, the threat of phishing attacks, new technologies such as embedded video (see sidebar), and mailings to mobile devices have e-retailers scrambling to stay ahead of the curve.
“Retailers that stay on top of the evolution of e-mail marketing are solving problems and gaining ground,” says Barry Abel, vice president of field operations for Message Systems, a provider of e-mail marketing applications. “E-mail marketing is more than just throwing together a campaign and hitting the Send button, it is about maximizing the potential of new messaging techniques and strategies.”
Quality first
The starting point for any successful e-mail campaign is the quality of the mailing list. Too often retailers focus on gathering as many e-mail addresses as possible rather than gathering quality addresses through an opt-in process. Failure to maintain quality of the mailing list by purging bad addresses adds to delivery problems. Poorly maintained lists also result in a substantial portion of messages never being opened because they go straight into the customer’s spam folder or are immediately deleted.
“Most retailers have a deliverability rate of between 70% and 80% and their goal ought to be 95%,” says Abel. “A lot of retailers think they have reached the maximum delivery capacity when they haven’t.”
Too often inactive addresses are the result of recipients having little affinity to the retailer’s brand. These are usually one-time customers who have a specific need or comparison shoppers who bought because of a low price. Nevertheless, their e-mail addresses remain in the mailing list.
“Size of the mailing list no longer equates reach, so it is not enough to just collect addresses during the transaction confirmation process and send messages whether the recipient has a strong relationship with the brand or not,” says Stefan Pollard, director of consulting services for e-mail marketing application provider EmailLabs. “Smaller lists with more active recipients are far more productive.”
Cleansing a mailing list of inactive addresses ought not to be done in haste, as non-responsiveness can be due to sending the wrong type of information. “Before purging a list, retailers need to look at activity rates and refine the messages being sent to inactive addresses by running A/B tests to see if they will respond,” says Pollard. “Retailers want to confirm the inactive addresses first.”
Clean up those lists
Cleaner mailing lists also help the retailer’s reputation with the ISP because campaigns built around these lists result in fewer complaints by recipients to their ISPs about unwanted mail and lower bounce-back rates. When consumer complaints and bounce-backs rates pile up, ISPs typically impose restrictions on e-mail marketers that limit their access to consumers, such as blocking messages sent in bulk from the retailer’s URL.
One way to reduce consumer complaints to their ISP and bounce-backs is to build permission-based mailing lists. While not a difficult practice, many retailers overlook including an opt-in feature when gathering e-mail addresses.
“Retailers need to be more cognizant of how to gather permission to market to an e-mail address rather than apply direct mail concepts,” says Chip House, vice president of marketing services for ExactTarget Email Marketing, which specializes in permission-based e-mail campaigns. “E-mail is not a cheaper form of direct mail, it is a one-to-one marketing technique that allows retailers to understand who is opening their e-mail and how customers respond to it, which translates into a higher level of customer engagement.”
The first benefit of opt-in mailing lists is that customers on the list have expressed interest in receiving further information, which means they have an affinity for the retailer’s brand. That gives each message a better chance of not just getting past a spam filter, but also of being opened and generating a sale.
“Opt-in mailings are part of best practices for meeting customer expectations of the retailer’s brand,” says House. “The opt-in process also provides an opportunity for retailers to ask at the time of enrollment about the type of content the customer wants to be mailed and the frequency of those mailings.”
Combining information
Understanding the desired content and frequency of mailings for each customer helps retailers create a targeted communications stream with the customer. For example, e-mail addresses captured during a sale are typically passed to the shipping, marketing and customer service departments, each of which follows up with its own message after a sale, resulting in an unnecessary flood of e-mail to the customer.
Instead, combining customer information across all departments in a central database allows retailers to streamline communications according to the customer’s wishes. “If a customer that just bought a digital camera did not buy additional memory cards, the marketing pitch for that cross-sell can be included in the transaction confirmation message, rather than sending two separate mailings,” says Ryan Deutsche, director of strategic services for StrongMail Systems Inc., provider of e-mail delivery applications and services.
While this is a more efficient and less intrusive practice that meets customer expectations of brand quality, it is still not a widely accepted practice among retailers. “A lot of retailers still place control over certain types of mailings with individual departments. Marketing typically doesn’t interact with operations on transactional messages,” says Deutsche. “The key is to leverage customer information across all departments in a more meaningful way for the customer.”
Coordinating e-mail strategies with marketing partners, such as manufacturers, also needs to be taken into account. While marketing partners have good intentions, their mailing practices can trigger an ISP’s spam filter, resulting in high bounce-back rates or having the mailings blocked by an ISP for violation of e-mail guidelines. The latter can spell trouble for retailers that consent to having a link to their site included in the partner’s mailing, since ISPs will also block mailings that come from the URL for the enclosed link.
“Marketing partners need to follow best practices when it comes to opt-in mailings, because their mailing strategies can impact the retailer,” says Deutsche. “If partner mailings hit spam traps or get their URL blocked by the ISP then separate mailings from the retailer that use the same URL that appeared in a blocked message as a link can also get blocked.”
Beware the spam trap
Detecting spam traps requires testing of an e-mail list. E-mail marketing experts recommend creating seed mailing lists for each ISP used to deliver messages. The addresses in the list can be monitored to see how the message appears to the ISP and to the customer when finally opened. The seed list can be addresses of employees or consumers that have agreed to be part of the trial.
The practice provides insights into the characteristics that earn an e-mail the classification of spam from ISPs and consumers. “It can be a specific keyword, a broken link or image that does not appear that gets the message tagged as spam,” says Message Systems’ Abel.
Knowing why a message bounced or was blocked makes it possible to categorize the reason it was not delivered, such as the customer’s inbox is full, the address was invalid or the message was marked by the ISP as spam. Message Systems has 20 categories for undelivered messages.
“Once the retailer knows the reason the message was not delivered, they can take action to correct delivery issues based on the value or projected value of the customer, such as contacting them through another channel to verify the e-mail address or getting another address,” adds Abel. “It is important for retailers to know how ISPs view their e-mail marketing, because it makes it easier to develop a good reputation with the ISP so mail can get through.”
Testing can also reveal the format in which e-mail marketing messages appear. About 60% of all e-mail applications will automatically disable images embedded in an e-mail when opened as a security precaution, according to EmailLabs’ Pollard. This is true of Microsoft Outlook, one of the most popular e-mail applications. The culprit is cascading style sheets, which are commonly used for displaying images on web sites, but when detected by an e-mail application get blocked due to lack of recognition.
Checking formats
To compensate, retailers can include a message that appears directly below the subject line that states some images may have been blocked and to click on this message line to view the images. Even better is to include a few words about what the images are to further encourage the customer to take the extra step needed to view them.
“Letting the customer know they can’t see images in the e-mail when it is opened positively impacts the brand and prevents the message from being deleted or routed directly to the spam box,” says Pollard. “If a message looks like spam, it will be treated like spam.”
EmailLabs interfaces with 40 ISPs so retailers can see the formatting of their messages to improve recognition rates and determine which e-mails are being delivered into the inbox and which are being inappropriately blocked or filtered to a bulk folder
EmailAdvisor, a recently added feature, audits message appearance, content, inbox delivery, blacklisting, and real-time ISP delivery problems to minimize undeliverable or improperly formatted messages. Retailers can view how their message will appear and where it will end up in the 35 most popular e-mail applications prior to sending.
Retailers can even check messages against common spam filters and run them against more than 150 blacklists to determine potential spam triggers and which ISPs are filtering e-mail, as well as identify when an ISP is experiencing delays in distributing mail to ensure timely delivery.
Know all the restrictions
“With all the restrictions ISPs have in place that impact deliverability and how a message is viewed, retailers need to know them all,” says Pollard, who adds that it is best for retailers to focus on the three or four ISPs with the largest subscriber bases for distribution. Doing so makes it easier to manage best practices for each ISP.
At the very least, testing is an inexpensive way for retailers to find out what works and what doesn’t, according to ExactTarget’s House. “The low cost of testing e-mail campaigns makes it easier to hit customers with a message to which they are likely to respond at a time when they are likely to respond to it and improves the retailer’s credibility with the customer,” House says.
To help retailers design effective e-mails, ExactTarget’s design and deployment team works with retailers to create e-mail templates and campaign management plans.
Still, no matter how responsive most customers are to e-mail marketing, there will come a time when they want to opt out. Since retailers cannot predict when that will occur, best practices dictate that e-mail messages contain a method for opting out of the list at any time and provide options for other ways to receive information from the retailer.
“Eventually, customers will desire to opt out of the mailing list, so it is best to let them know they have choices for other communications channels through which to receive information, such as RSS feeds,” says Pollard. “It is just as important to be professional in the opt-out process as it is in the opt-in process.”
Learning mobile
One emerging communications channel that few retailers leverage in their e-mail marketing strategies is sending to mobile phones. The barrier is formatting the data to the smaller screen size. The smaller screen is less conducive to multiple images and large blocks of text, yet many retailers attempt to use the same web-designed HTML pages for sending to mobile devices, even though the format of the message may not be supported by the mobile device, according to Exact Target’s House.
To compensate, some retailers send simple text messages with no graphics. The downside to that strategy is consumers will mark a promotional message spotted on their phone to be opened later on their PC, only to find no graphics when viewed on the PC.
“Consumers interact with e-mail on their mobile phones differently than they do their PCs,” says House. “It is best to send a multi-part message designed with text and HTML, so each format can be read by the device that supports it.”
Mobile phones are also proving to be a powerful tool for opening e-mail communications with customers. Some multi-channel retailers gather cell phone numbers at the retail point of sale and send text messages to the phone informing the customer of a special offer or that they have won a prize, such as a discount coupon, according to Strongmail’s Deutsche. In order to receive the promotion, they must notify the retailer of their e-mail address.
When the promotion is received, customers can then be offered the opportunity to opt-in to the retailer’s mailing list or approve receipt of future promotions through other channels, such as text messages to their phone. “Text messages to mobile phones are a way to create retailer originated communications that encourage the customer to engage the marketing message virtually anywhere,” says Deutsche. “A lot of retailers are having trouble initiating digital communications with their customers, because they only think in terms of e-mail blasts.”
Deutsche cautions retailers to remember that some cell phone plans bill minutes for receipt of a text message, so it is best not to be sending too many text messages without the customer’s consent. “The cost of receiving unwanted messages can be an irritant and text messaging in general can be invasive,” he adds. “That’s why getting the customer to opt-in is important.”
Do they know you?
Equally as important as getting e-mail marketing messages through to the consumer is making certain ISPs can authenticate the identity of the sender. The escalation of phishing and spoofing attacks by criminals looking to gather personal and account information from consumers has brought pressure on ISPs to authenticate e-mail marketers using their network, according to Message Systems’ Abel.
Message Systems includes authentication tools in its Delivery Manager application such as digital message signing with DKIM (domain key identified mail), an emerging open standard. Retailers can also purchase the company’s Goodmail service, which sends certified mail using a native Goodmail Token Imprinter.
E-mail messages sent through Goodmail Imprinters are embedded with a cryptographically-secure token based upon business rules set by the retailer. Authenticating the sender reduces the risk of e-mail being sent by criminals that direct customers to a spoofed web site and helps prevent messages from being deposited in bulk or junk mail folders.
“When the ISP can quickly authenticate the sender, mail flows through an ISP’s filters faster and allows the ISP to put more scrutiny on e-mail marketers that don’t use authentication,” says Abel.
Because the ISPs are still working toward an authentication standard solution, the burden is on the sender to support all of the authentication protocols that ISPs might require. Leading authentication protocols include SPF, Sender-ID from Microsoft, DomainKeys from Yahoo, and DKIM from Yahoo and Cisco.
“Retailers that don’t raise the sophistication of their e-mail technology to support authentication standards risk losing ground to competitors,” says Stongmail’s Deutsche, who adds StrongMail supports all current authentication protocols.
Make use of analytics
Finally, retailers are best served in e-mail marketing when they can integrate analytics into mailing strategies. Pulling data from an analytics package tells retailers not only open and conversion rates, but also pages visited after the e-mail was opened and customer movement from page-to-page.
Understanding these metrics makes it possible for retailers to send follow-up messages to e-mail recipients while they are visiting their sites. The aim is to modify the marketing message based on real-time page views of the e-mail recipient.
“It may be a matter of changing an image to coincide with a product they have viewed, or the subject head, but taking advantage of analytics enables e-mail marketers to modify their campaigns in real time and still get the message to the customer in a relevant timeframe, even after they have logged off the site,” says ExactTarget’s House.
The goal of any e-mail marketing campaign is to create a better customer experience by delivering relevant information in every message. List cleansing, leveraging new communications channels and adhering to authentication standards are all essential to achieving this goal.
“E-mail marketing is far from reaching its peak,” says Message Systems’ Abel. “It can evolve so much further.”
Bridging the gap between direct marketing and techno advertising
With video one of the hottest trends in web technology, it is not surprising the medium has spread to e-mail marketing as a way to engage consumers on a deeper level. The most common uses of e-mails with embedded videos are customer testimonials, product demonstrations or “Thank you” and “Welcome” messages from the company.
“Embedding video in e-mail delivers a new element that generates interest in the marketing message because it promises to make the message more informative,” says Mike Adams, co-founder of Zeop Inc., provider of applications that enable e-mail marketers to embed video into e-mail messages.
Zeop enables retailers to host their own videos and will even help them create a video community on their web site that allows customers to upload and share videos related to the company’s marketing objectives. Retailers can use video e-mail to direct customers to the community.
To make its service work, Zeop embeds a JPEG file containing a linking code to the video in the message. When clicked, the JPEG file launches the video from the host server on which the clip resides. The process is far more efficient than attaching a video file to the e-mail, which in most cases would be too large to pass through most ISPs in bulk.
The clickable JPEG file appears to ISPs like any other image embedded in e-mail marketing messages and uses open formatting standards, making it compatible with any e-mail application and inoffensive to spam filters. The video launches only when the JPEG is clicked, which keeps the message consistent with opt-in e-mail practices.
“A lot of retailers don’t necessarily have the skills to support video, so we have tried to make it as easy as possible to support sending video e-mails,” says Adams, who is also president and CEO of Arial Software, a provider of e-mail marketing applications. Zeop was created earlier this year specifically to service the video needs of e-mail marketers.
When sending a video, e-mail experts recommend that retailers place a statement in the subject line that the message includes a playable video. Next, retailers ought to include a preview pane—a single image of the video—at the beginning of the message’s body along with a thumbnail description about the video.
“The aim is to place the information that generates interest in the video high-up in the message so the customer does not have to scroll through the message to know what it is about,” explains Adams. “When the JPEG is clicked on, we include a large superimposed Play button.”
Production values of the video do not necessarily have to be of motion picture quality as many testimonials and product demonstrations already posted on the web are not of that caliber.
“We do recommend creating a quality video, because poor production values hurt the reputation of the marketer, but they don’t have to be big-budget productions, just genuine messages to which people can relate,” adds Adams. “It is better not to produce a video for e-mail than to produce a poor quality video. Quality videos can be produced in house.”
The other advantage Zeop offers e-mail marketers is greater control over placement of their message, especially when they create their own video communities. “Retailers can post a testimonial or demonstration video on YouTube, but they have no control over what appears next to them,” Adams says. “The content of the video that appears next to a retailer’s video on YouTube and other video communities can end up diluting their marketing message.”
Video e-mails are for e-mail marketers that want to see their message translate into an action that engages the customer on a higher level and supports the customer relationship in a new way, according to Adams.
“Video e-mail is a way to bridge the gap between old school direct marketing and new age techno advertising,” he adds.
That is why it is one of the hottest trends in e-mail marketing.
