Editorial Articles

Brands love email marketing. It’s cost effective, measurable and quick to deploy. And what’s more, if timing, call to action and the offer are relevant, consumers love it too. Pizza Express’s email voucher campaign is an example of targeted delivery and measurable open-rate conversion that directly correlates to how many dough balls will be bought in restaurants. For finance directors, return on investment doesn’t get more linear than that and for marketing professionals, email results are often the key to next year’s budget.

As an evolving media channel there are still improvements to be made in the production and fulfilment of email marketing campaigns to improve effectiveness still further; even for Pizza Express.

Closing the creative loop
With just 800 pixels of preview pane to work with and 46 subject-line characters of inspiring copy, creative directors often dismiss email as a limited medium. Brands often merge email marketing into a digital brief which allows the agency to tell clients ‘yes, we do email’. And how hard can it be?

Close collaboration with digital production and email fulfilment specialists at the design stage is vital to reach consumers with a visual brand communication that looks how it was intended. More importantly, integrating the whole production chain is critical for the email to stand a chance of arriving at its destination at all.

Connect creative, production and fulfilment to eliminate issues
Most agencies outsource the fulfilment or broadcast of the email and contract out the HTML production, browser testing and ISP rendering to another supplier.
This fragmented approach builds in inefficiency between the core production and fulfilment areas, and in turn, this increases cost for agencies which is tough to absorb in email project budgets. A too common scenario is the nasty surprise that creative supplied to the coding and production team cannot be delivered correctly on the broadcast or test platform, causing delays, re-versioning and in extreme cases a complete overhaul of the design from square one.

A better approach engages the design team much earlier in the process and helps them to eliminate future production hurdles in advance. This seamless production is complemented by comprehensive test and fulfilment from an expert partner like Database Group Interactive (DbGi) to ensure every stage is as efficient and hassle-free as possible. By keeping the production and fulfilment roles within one single function, lead times to deployment reduce substantially, and the end product stands a far greater chance of being 100% right first time. Freeing up time earlier on in the creative cycle also avoids the concertina effect at the tail end of delivery, which impacts on campaign planning. Collectively, this allows digital agencies to stick to what they’re best at.

Overnight delivery improvement
Programme certification, with a global authority such as Return Path, is the golden ticket to marketing email delivery. This independent accreditation, on average increases true inbox delivery rate of outbound emails by 25%. Working with a specialist email service provider to achieve Return Path certification resolves the issue of sender reputation, effectively making your broadcast whitelisted as a trusted sender with ISPs, opening up access and the ability to automatically deliver images and links to Hotmail, Yahoo!, the top spam vendors and numerous local email client junk filters.

Deliver email better; then measure it better
Most email service providers can’t prove delivery to the inbox, so they prefer not to talk about it. Using our unique seeding approach, we record close to nine and a half in every ten emails hitting the inbox, which enables more meaningful metrics to e-marketing such as engagement and not only opens, clicks and conversions stats. Building up an understanding of the relationship between these metrics and the behavioural engagement of your market is something all digital marketers should pay attention to.

Connecting the email marketing lifecycle is straightforward, generating huge positive impact on the already stellar performance many brands experience and ensuring digital agencies stay lean and focused on creative. 

Ivan Skoric
Managing Director, TSL