Editorial Articles

Email marketing is a highly cost effective and measurable channel, two traits which are valuable in a slow economy but in today’s market, how can you ensure your messages stand out in a crowded inbox? 

The key is to understand the needs of your customers and only deliver campaigns that are relevant and timely to the individual. Doing this will not only help increase sales but also build loyalty and turn customers into brand advocates. It sounds simple but in reality it isn’t always easy to achieve, but there are a number of techniques to help.

Understand what your customers want

Use data and insight to help understand customers better. Develop methodologies such as RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) to recognise the value of each customer so you can determine which are the most profitable. This information can then be used to build specific programmes that make sure you retain them. For example, give your most valuable customers exclusive offers and invite them to special events to increase loyalty. This insight can also be used to profile a segment of lapsed customers and identify those with similar attributes to your best current customers. Reactivation programmes can then be built based on the messages and offers you find work for your best customers.

Preference centres also provide a way for subscribers to tell you more about themselves. This information can then be used to send more engaging emails and relevant offers – if you sell music for example, knowing your subscribers favourite music genre provides a springboard to tailor content and offers specifically around their preferences.

Stand out of a crowded inbox

It’s not only important to know your customer, but email messages should be delivered at the right time in the right way to help them stand out. Trigger campaigns and using dynamic content can make messages more engaging. For example, upgrading transactional emails from plain text to HTML and including opportunities to cross sell messages based on customer preferences can help drive additional revenue opportunities. From experience, we’ve found that making these changes can increase conversion rates by 19 times over previous transactional messages. Also, automated welcome programmes can be developed, communicating the benefits of being a subscriber and adding additional value by giving small offers and discounts to existing subscribers, helping build loyalty as quickly as possible.

Linking other events to drive targeted emails is also key. One area is abandoned shopping carts on the web. Done intelligently and in line with the brand’s personality shopping cart abandonment email programmes can generate revenue per email results up to 24 times higher than standard promotional emails.

Be innovative

Tap into the power of social media to help strengthen your email marketing campaigns and always look for new ways to drive campaign innovation. One way to achieve this is by integrating user generated content in the form of star ratings of reviews in your emails. By providing honest feedback from other people on your products you increase the level of trust in your brand. By including a ‘forward to a friend’ option you also help drive the viral element of campaigns, giving customers the option to share information they find valuable.

Measure for success

One of the strengths of email marketing campaigns lies in measurability, enabling marketers to tweak and refine campaigns to best engage with customers. Measuring click through rates and the value of sales direct from email communications is only one step and other techniques such as tracking in-store redemption rates of a voucher sent via email or calculating average purchase value of email subscribers over a set timeframe can offer real business insight on campaigns.

Responsible email marketing with relevant messaging can help build engagement, trust and loyalty so that when the customer arrives at the point of purchase, your organisation will benefit from the ROI and not a competitor.

Author: Steve Lomax, Managing Director of Experian CheetahMail Europe