Chapter 9:
Marketing
communications using
Email Marketing
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Email Marketing and Mobile
messaging
We have grouped email marketing with mobile messaging since these are both ‘push media’
that share much in terms of their applications for prospect and customer communications.
Outbound email marketing where email campaigns are used as a form of direct marketing
to encourage trial and purchases and as part of a CRM dialogue.
Inbound email marketing: where emails from customers, such as service enquiries, are
managed (Management of emails from customers)
The applications of outbound email marketing communications depend on the type of
business. According to a survey , marketers in the United Kingdom say the primary objective
for email marketing is
Sales 31%
Brand Awareness 16%
Building relationships and loyalty 16%
Audience Engagement 14 %
lead generation 10 %
Customer Service 9 %
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Opt-in email options for customer acquisition
For acquiring new visitors and customers to a site, there are three main options for
email marketing. From the point of view of the recipient
Cold email campaign. In this case, the recipient receives an opt-in email from an
organization that has rented an email list from a consumer email list or trade
publisher and event provider. List rental is not practical today under privacy laws
since permission hasn’t been sought. Instead, co-branded emails and newsletters are
used.
Co-branded email. Here, the recipient receives an email with an offer from a
company they have an affinity with and from whom they have agreed to receive ads,
for example a publisher or retailer. Email marketing is used to increase awareness as
part of an integrated campaign combined with display advertising.
Third-party e-newsletter. In this visitor acquisition option, a company publicises
itself in a third-party e-newsletter. This could be in the form of an ad, sponsorship or
PR (editorial) in a publisher newsletter, which links through to a destination site.
Since e-newsletter recipients tend to engage with them by scanning the headlines or
reading them if they have time, e-newsletter placements can be relatively cost-
effective.
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Opt-in email options for prospect conversion
and customer retention (house list)
Opt-in: An individual gives consent to receive further communications (such
as a newsletter) or agrees to a privacy policy (such as enabling personalization
using cookies).
House list: A list of prospect and customer names, email addresses and profile
information owned by an organisation.
Conversion email. Someone visits a website and expresses interest in a
product or service by registering and providing their email address, although
they do not buy. Automated follow-up emails can be sent out to persuade the
recipient to trial the service or buy a product. For example, retailers will
follow-up with ‘abandoned basket’ emails to encourage purchase where
consumers have added a product to a basket and not yet purchased.
Regular e-newsletter. Options are reviewed for different frequencies such as
weekly, monthly or quarterly, with different content for different audiences and
segments. These are commonly used to update consumers on the latest products
or promotions, or business customers on developments within a market.
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Opt-in email options for prospect conversion
and customer retention (house list)
House-list campaign.
These are periodic emails to a list of contacts to support different objectives
such as encouraging trial of a service or newly launched product, repeat
purchases or reactivation of customers who no longer use a service.
Event-triggered or behavioural emails and sequences.
The marketing automation services send out a series of emails, with the
interval between emails and messages determined by the marketer.
Examples include welcome or onboarding sequences, nurture sequences or
reactivation sequences when a subscriber has become less active.
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Advantages of Email Marketing
Relatively low cost of fulfilment. The physical costs of email are substantially
less than direct mail.
Direct-response medium encourages immediate action. Email marketing
encourages click-through to a website where the offer can be redeemed
immediately – this increases the likelihood of an immediate, impulsive response.
For this reason, it is one of the best methods of attracting existing customers to
return to a site (it’s a push media).
Faster campaign deployment. Lead times for producing creative and the whole
campaign lifecycle tend to be shorter than traditional media.
Ease of personalisation. It is easier and cheaper to personalise email than for
physical media, and also than for a website.
Options for testing. It is relatively easy and cost-effective to test different email
creative and messaging.
Integration. Through combining email marketing with other direct media that
can be personalised, such as direct mail, mobile messaging or web
personalisation, campaign response can be increased as the message is
reinforced by different media.
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Disadvantages of Email
Marketing
Deliverability. Difficulty of getting messages delivered through different internet
service providers (ISPs), corporate firewalls and webmail systems.
Renderability. Difficulty of displaying the creative as intended within the inbox
of different email reading systems.
Email response decay. Email recipients are most responsive when they first
subscribe to an email but it is difficult to keep them engaged.
Communications preferences. Recipients will have different preferences for
email offers, content and frequency that affect engagement and response. These
have to be managed through communications preferences.
Resource intensive. Although email offers great opportunities for targeting,
personalization and more frequent communications, additional people and
technology resources are required to deliver these.
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Best practice for Email Marketing
Email service providers
Email service providers (ESPs), or marketing automation services, are a
popular method companies use to manage their email marketing.
ESPs provide a web-based service used by marketers to manage their
email activities with less recourse to an agency.
Rather than buying software that you host and manage on your server, the
software is effectively used on a subscription basis, with a cost based on
number of emails sent and runs on another company’s server.
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Best practice for Email Marketing
Measuring email marketing effectiveness
The key measures for email marketing are:
• Delivery rate (here indicated by ‘non-bounce rate’). Emails will bounce
if the email address is no longer valid or a spam filter blocks the email.
• Open rate. This is measured for HTML messages through downloaded
images. It is an indication of how many customers open an email, but is not
accurate since some users have preview panes in their email readers that
load the message even if it is deleted without reading, and some email
readers such as Outlook now block images by default (this has resulted in a
decline in open rates through time). The open rate for particular types of
email address, e.g. Outlook, is also an indication of deliverability problems.
• Click-through or click rate. This is the number of people who click
through on the email of those delivered (strictly unique clicks rather than
total clicks). You can see that response rates are quite high at around 10 per
cent.
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Email marketing success factors
•Creative. This assesses the design of the email including its layout, use of
colour and image.
• Relevance. Does the offer and creative of the email meet the needs of the
recipients? This is dependent on the list quality and targeting variables used.
• Incentive (or offer). The WIFM (‘What’s in it for me?’) factor for the
recipient. What benefit does the recipient gain from clicking on the
hyperlink(s) in the email? For example, a prize draw is a common offer for
B2C brands.
•Conversation. This is to remind us that email shouldn’t just be considered
as a broadcast medium and opportunities should be taken to encourage
response.
• Attributes (of the email). Assess the message characteristics such as the
subject line, from address, to address, date/time of receipt and format (HTML
or text). Send out multipart/MIME messages that can display HTML or text
according to the capability of the email reader. Offer choice of HTML or text
to match users’ preferences.
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