A correctly executed email marketing strategy can be a valuable communications channel for a business, helping to drive and support a broad range of activities. Simon Piper, head of partnerships at Consumerchoices.co.uk, describes why email marketing is so important and how to execute a great campaign.
Why use email marketing?
Email marketing can offer huge benefits for your company and it’s hard to imagine a consumer-facing business that couldn’t benefit from a correctly executed email strategy. Different companies will need to establish what, exactly, they want to achieve from their email communications and how they will measure the success of such activity.
In essence, it is it a way to keep existing customers informed of new product updates; is it an additional sales channel; is it a mechanic to generate valuable customer feedback and research or to allow you to support PR activities through customer quotes and case studies.
Targeting email campaigns
Highly targeted communications are crucial – your registered users have put trust in your business by providing their email details and agreeing to receive marketing communications. Don’t breach this trust – provide content relevant to their specific preferences and make sure that there are genuine benefits to them. Your registered users will be unresponsive and unsubscribe if you abuse their trust by sending barely-relevant communications. Our motto is “target, re-target and re-target again” – we have made giant steps in driving up response and conversion rates by using click data from our e-mail newsletters.
For example, if a user clicks on a story about a special offer from BT, we use this as an indication of “preference”. This can then be used for re-targeting the user with a dedicated e-mail communication just before the BT offer expires to act as a reminder for users and a sales driver.
Frequency of emails
Regular communication should be sent so that your users know when you will be emailing them and so build trust. For example, we have four different newsletters and each is sent once a month (so users could receive, up to, one email from us a week about specific issues). In addition to this we might also send highly targeted emails if a time-sensitive promotion or special offer is announced.
Bombarding your users with too many communications is a sure way for them to get fatigued and far from increasing the revenue/returns from your email campaigns, they will either unsubscribe or simply not open your emails.
Systems
There are a number of agencies and email service providers out there that can give you all the tools you need to run effective campaigns and it is worth investing the time and effort to get the right systems in place. We use a 3rd party that allows us to manage all our own campaigns, as well as creatives in-house, but with the back up of a dedicated team in place working with the likes of hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail day in, day out – so we are confident that our e-mails will make it to our customer’s inboxes.
On top of this, we get access to powerful reporting tools, allowing us to track not just the usual delivered emails, opens, clicks, unsubscribes and so on but also allowing us to segment and target efficiently using web analytics plug-ins to analyse user behavioral trends once they have clicked through from email campaigns.
Building a database
Our strategy has been to build a Consumerchoices.co.uk user base by “natural” methods, rather than buying in registrations. We have over 500,000 customers signed up to our in-house e-mail list and we achieved this by providing useful tools and services and asking for permission to collect email addresses and send relevant communications to those users.
Users can always opt out of receiving marketing communications; however those that do sign up to our newsletters are significantly engaged with our proposition – which in our experience is much more effective than e-mail addresses from other external sources.
Email is alive and kicking
Don’t believe the hype that e-mail is dead. Our customers are predominantly over 45 years old and as a result our users prioritise e-mail over social media. Email gives you the chance to segment and target your users, so that you can maximise relevance (and therefore conversion rates) and obviously keep costs down too.
We have made big investments in email but the lifetime value analysis we have carried out tells us the strategy has been a “no brainer”.
By Simon Piper
Head of partnerships
www.Consumerchoices.co.uk
