This article appeared in the March 2008 edition of New Zealand Marketing Magazine

In 2008, the budget for email marketing in the USA is expected to double – to US$2billion. Over 70% of Fortune 500 companies now use email as a primary marketing channel. In America, the email marketing industry is led by smart, slick campaigners who have identified the full potential of email as a channel for marketing – smart, personalised interactive dialogue with customers.

New Zealand offers an ideal venue for email marketing to thrive – higher than average internet take-up, spread population and smart, savvy domestic marketers are just some of the factors that should see email marketing playing a significant role in many Kiwi company budgets.

But so far there has been little more than toe-in-the-water experimentation from most major players. A lack of specialist knowledge, combined with insufficient commitment to the medium, has meant that most email marketing has failed to live up to expectations for NZ companies.

The power of email
Email is a precise medium. It is also potentially very powerful. Most of all, it exists in a very crowded, noisy marketplace.

The lessons learnt in the USA are simple. Commit to email, do it properly, and the results will speak for themselves. A half-hearted approach will have negative implications for your ability to communicate with your customers.

The fast, direct and personal nature of email makes it an opportunity, nothing more, to communicate with an audience. Whether that opportunity morphs into a process of ongoing, two way dialogue depends upon a raft of factors – personalisation, optimisation of design and content for mail, frequency and pattern of communication are just some of the key points.

All too often, marketing emails from NZ companies betray a lack of the knowledge which is required. Designs are clearly based on reproducing web pages, with large unsupported images dominating poorly written text. Campaigns are sent on an ad hoc basis, and personalisation does not extend beyond Dear Name.

This inadequacy has its roots in cost.

Because the cost of reaching a consumer by email is a fraction of other media, email marketing has been perceived as a throw-away marketing channel. Marketers have badly underestimated the investment in expertise and thought required to make email viable, then successful.

They have also woefully neglected the unavoidable fact that once you have disenfranchised a customer through a poor email campaign, it is very, very hard to win them back.

Success boils down to four main factors:
Strategy: planning a campaign, using each communication to tee up the next, tailoring each message to the individual recipient (which requires a programme that offers multiple personalisation fields) and integrating email with other media – especially the web. Email works best as a prompt and alert – to web based content.

Technology: broadcast email is sent via web based programmes. Some are cheap, and some are good, but even the most expensive will represent a fraction of the cost and a large multiple of the penetration of other media. Key factors within this will include IP isolation, ISP whitelisting and functional capabilities such as bounce management, tracking, and personalisation options.

Design and Delivery: From subject line to sender ID, image to content ratios, content style and beyond, it all boils down to “Optimised for Email”. Leading email specialists in the USA recently agreed that one single issue – preview pane impact – was the overriding factor in getting people to read marketing emails. In a recent survey of 500 NZ originated emails carried out by Inbox, 497 contained basic errors and dysfunctionalities which diminished preview pane impact.

A sub category of Design and Delivery is Testing and Measurement. Every function within an email should be thoroughly tested before the email is sent – nothing disenfranchises a recipient more than a dead image, or a link that does not work. It is not just the email that loses face, but the company that sent it.

Testing also applies to rendering. How many email marketers in NZ test their emails through the majority of commonly used browsers – Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, Gmail etc? Nothing looks worse that an Html email which renders badly.

Measuring is where the email pigeon comes home to roost. The precision of email statistics, whilst not as absolute as is often believed, is still far greater than with other media. Success in email has been described as marginal incrementations in statistics, so if the ability to measure is not properly utilised, then email just becomes as effective as a magazine advert or TV commercial.

Database Management and Development: Lots of website have pages where you can sign up to email. How often are conversion rates measured? Most forms ask for too much, often superfluous information at the initial sign up stage, leading to low page-visitor to sign up rates. At this stage, only necessary information should be requested. Once the recipient has been engaged by your campaign, then you can interrogate them for more information. What happens when they do sign up? An automatic thank you email should be sent; this can contain more than just a basic message – how about some discrete marketing, or some advance warning on when, and how often they will hear from you?

Obsession with size over quality has led many marketers to mismanage their email databases.

Analysing databases will enable marketers to split them into categories – regular readers, occasional readers and non readers. Campaigns can be tailored and personalised to try and migrate the two latter categories to the former.

This is of course merely scratching the surface – most of the above mentioned factors are email 101. Clever email is at another level, and because email is evolving on so many fronts – deliverability, impact, regulations etc, it requires constant focus and adapting in order to stay ahead of the game.

Unless your company is of sufficient size to employ the experience and expertise required in house, then outsourcing to a full service email agency is a great solution. You will acquire a great deal of knowledge by working with them, and their presence will ensure, at the very least, that your campaign functions properly....which is a good start!

Jerry Flay is the Managing Director of Inbox Ltd – a New Zealand company 100% dedicated to email.
To discuss any of the themes of this article, you can contact him at: jflay@inbox.net.nz