All the Right Moves for Shifting $ to Email
Heinrich Marketing
All the Right Moves: How to Shift Dollars from Print to Email
Commercial email will continue to claim the top growth ranking among direct marketing channels for 2009, according to the Direct Marketing Association. It’s no surprise, since many case studies and industry reports show huge ROI potential from email.
Yet those results are far from a sure thing — and they’re getting tougher to achieve as more marketers crowd the email space and more customers get overwhelmed with the sheer number of incoming emails — spam or no spam.
Matt Elliott, director of client services at Listrak, says these are the top five mistakes he’s seen clients make in shifting budget dollars from print direct mail to email.
Say goodbye to batch-and-blast.
“Buying a list and doing batch-and-blast mailing sometimes works for direct mail, but spells doom for an email program,” says Elliot.
This goes for appending email addresses, too. Permission and relevance are crucial to achieving strong ROI with email marketing, so you may be better off incentivizing your customers to give you their email addresses vs. buying a list.
“There can be short term gains and advantages to buying lists,” explains Elliot, “but there are many drawbacks — you don’t know if the data is accurate, and you’ll get a lot of spam complaints, which will damage your reputation. For a long-term email strategy, you have to have a program to build your list organically.”
See past the glitz of low-delivery costs.
“Email as a delivery channel is cheap,” says Heinrich Senior Vice President Sandi McCann, “but to deliver on revenue goals, you still have to invest in developing your marketing and messaging strategy.”
“Email is also more relational than offline marketing,” Elliot points out, “so the messaging and strategy are different. It’s very difficult to run cost-effective email campaigns if you focus on the inexpensiveness of email and the whiz-bang technology, and lose sight of the importance of messaging strategy. It’s imperative to focus on the entire subscriber lifecycle strategy, not just the results of each individual campaign.”
Step away from the dead addresses.
Too many companies are so eager to have a massive list of email addresses that they cling to them too desperately — with no real plan for identifying which addresses are dying or dead. The cost to mail to inactive addresses can get big in a hurry, and is being scrutinized more and more by companies scouring the books for cost-savings targets.
“A smaller but more qualified list will always out-perform a larger unqualified list,” says Elliot. “If there are old email addresses on your list that haven’t opened or clicked on one of your messages in over a year, there is a danger of those addresses becoming spam traps, which can ruin your reputation.”
Map out an email subscriber retention matrix including specific triggers that point to possible attrition, specific retention messaging and incentives, and a clear line in the sand — which, when crossed, marks an address to be scrapped.
Ask your customers what they want via email.
“The new paradigm in email marketing is that subscribers are in control of the content,” says Elliot. “It’s the golden ticket to relevancy and engagement.
“Subscribers are guarding their inboxes more carefully and protecting against spammers,” he adds. “Even if they did opt-in to your list, if they don’t like the types of messages you send them, they’re more likely to report a message as spam than they are to unsubscribe from your list.”
Sometimes subscribers don't know they want something until/unless you show it to them as an option. For example, they may prefer less-frequent emails, or an informational newsletter instead of (or in addition to) promotional emails, or offers from another business under your umbrella that’s more targeted to their interests.
“It’s not enough just to ask for email addresses,” Elliot points out. Set up a quick-scan yet meaningful email preference center and invite new and existing subscribers to check the boxes. And clearly state the frequency of mailings, your privacy policy, the types of messages that will be received, etc., at every point of contact where email addresses are collected (which should be every point of contact, by the way).
From there, continue increasing relevance by tracking purchase behavior from your emails and segmenting messaging and offers accordingly.
Talk differently to loyal customers.
“Having a subscriber’s email address and permission to communicate with them is a privilege,” Elliot observes. “It’s really important to distinguish your engaged subscribers and to speak to them differently.”
If you’ve heard that advice once, you’ve heard it a thousand times — yet it’s all too easy to get mired in the angst of meeting week to week revenue goals. Focusing on retention strategy in your day-to-day customer communications takes discipline, and you’ve got to be aligned on your retention strategy from top to bottom. But The Ultimate Question author Frederick Reicheld of Bain & Co. says every 5 percent increase in retention equals a 25-100 percent increase in profitability.
Reward your customers with special offers through your email program, he urges. “Whether it’s free shipping, a special discount for email members only, or content that isn’t available to the general public …. Whatever you can do to make your subscribers feel special and exclusive will work.”