Editorial Articles

Consumerchoices.co.uk is a white label price comparison service with a group of 10 of its own websites that provide independent money saving advice and price comparison. Email marketing is a fundamental part of how the business supports its partner campaigns, so all campaigns need to be efficient, relevant and timely. Simon Piper, Head of Business Development and Partnerships talks to Figaro about the company's email marketing strategy.

Why do you use email marketing as part of your marketing mix?
Email marketing is a valuable communications channel with our customers that helps to drive and support a broad range of activities:

• It allows us to build a deeper relationship with our users and engage them across a range of areas;
• It allows us to generate significant user data and customer feedback through questionnaires and surveys
• It helps to drive our PR activities through market/customer insight that we get from our registered users
• It helps to support PR activities through customer quotes and case studies; and
• It drives sales through carefully targeted offers to our registered user base.

Do you use a third party email company to administer campaigns?
We have recently switch to Lyris to manage the broadcast and analytics for the Consumerchoices.co.uk e-mail programme. The deliverability rates they offer ensures we are more or less 100% confident that our e-mails will make it to our customer’s inboxes. Using a third party ensures that we can focus on providing great offers and content for our users rather than worrying about the technicalities of things like webmail white lists.

How important is it to target your 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 specified preferences and make sure that there are genuine benefits to them. Your registered users will walk-out without explanation and unsubscribe if you abuse their trust by sending barely-relevant communications.

What techniques produce the best results?
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.

How do you decide the frequency of emails to send to each user?
We send regular communications so that our users know when we’ll be emailing them and so build trust. 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.

What campaigns – past or present – really stand out for you?
The Broadbandchoices.co.uk annual Broadband Customer Satisfaction Awards are entirely predicted on the opinions measured within a survey completed by our customers that subscribe to our weekly newsletters. Over 10,000 users complete the online forms, providing us with valuable data that is used in PR and highly successful consumer materials, whichare anticipated by the national media. Response is incentivised by the chance of winning state of the art prizes, like iPads – which excites users with the chance of winning and the opportunity to provide an opinion. Essentially we are driving user engagement.

The aggregated survey results are presented back to users in subsequent newsletters so that consumers get “closure” on their initial feedback. The data in the survey also provides valuable industry trends which helps Consumerchoices.co.uk make marketing decisions that also drive switching sales.

What businesses might email marketing campaigns work for?
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. 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; and so on and so forth.

What's your best advice for folks that are new to email marketing?
The best move we made was to build a Consumerchoices.co.uk user base by “natural” methods, rather than buying in third party email lists. 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 if we can collect email addresses and send relevant newsletters to those users. Clearly users can opt out of receiving marketing communications, however those that do sign up to our newsletters are significantly engaged with our proposition – which is much more effective than e-mail addresses from external sources.

We have made big investments in tools, video and editorial – but the life time value analysis we have carried out tells us the strategy has been a “no brainer”.

Email marketing has its sceptics – why do you think that it’s still a relevant/powerful marketing tool?
Don’t believe the hype that e-mail is dead. Our customers are predominantly over 45 years and as a result our users prioritise e-mail over social media. E-mail 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.