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Email Relevance More Than Creative Drives Sales

Marketers using email do not focus enough on relevance, although relevant email messages can lead to sales nearly as often as free, or discounted, shipping offers, according to Jupiter Research.

Roughly one in four marketers launch email campaigns without any targeting or differentiation, and 65 percent use limited personalization and limited segmentation, Jupiter Research VP and research director David Daniels told marketers at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing conference in New York last week, writes ClickZ. Only 11 percent send targeted campaigns using a customer's purchase history, click-stream activity, or other data to send relevant, targeted offers, Daniels is quoted as saying.

The greater the degree of personalization or targeting, the greater the average open, click-through and conversion rates. At the low end of the spectrum, untargeted broadcast emails have, on average, open rates of 20 percent, click-through of 9.5 percent, and conversion of 1.1 percent - compared with, on the opposite end of the spectrum, email campaigns that integrate website click-stream data for targeting, with a 33 percent average open rate, 14 percent click-through rate, and 3.9 percent conversion rate.

Furthermore, a Jupiter survey found that 54 percent of respondents say they have clicked on a link in an email because the product or service interested them; 40 percent, because of the email copy; 35 percent, the subject line; 12 percent, a single large image; and 9 percent, because of several smaller images.

Unsubscribe Link Only Universally Adopted Email Best Practice

Email marketers have yet to adopt widely accepted best practices -except those required by the CAN-SPAM Act, according to an EmailLabs study (PDF). Inclusion of a working unsubscribe link, required by the CAN-SPAM Act, was the only best practice to be universally adopted.

The company analyzed whether emails incorporated best practices, such as a design that takes into account the preview pane and blocked images, and whether or not they included a link to a profile update, a link to a privacy policy and a forward-to-a-friend button, among others. The top three most widely ignored practices involved including a subscription or administration center, providing a site-search function in the email itself, and including a forward-to-a-friend link.

By industry, travel companies - including airlines, hotels and booking agents - had the highest adoption rates of the 18 best practices considered in the audit, scoring six top ratings and none of the lowest ratings. Financial marketers like credit card companies, mortgage brokers and banks - who rely on trustworthy emails to be delivered to the recipient's inbox - performed the worst of all market segments.

Other adoption trends among the market segments:

-- Travel marketers are increasingly using the subscription link function, allowing customers to easily update their email and personal information.

-- Publishers increasingly optimize their messages for preview panes and blocked images, and incorporate a subscribe link in the email to make it easy for people who've received the original email from a friend to subscribe.

-- The financial services market adopted the least best practices of all the industry segments audited.

Email Summit Wrap-up

Marketing Sherpa's Email Summit in Chicago just wrapped up and the company posted an interesting article on the latest trends marketers were discussing. "After three years of non-stop 'search marketing rocks' focus, seems like the marketing world is taking a second look at its old pal email. And in 2006 email response rates are looking darned good," according to the article.

Email Disaster Recovery

Have you ever sent out an email that you wish you could pull back from your customers' inboxes? Unfortunately, you can't. But there are steps you can take to mitigate problems that arise from problems like misspellings or promotional errors in emails. Here are a few tips from a Mediapost article.

1. Assign a disaster team. Convene immediately to discuss the error and outline potential courses of action. Don't wait until your vice president, who is seeded on the list, sends a note down the chain.

2. Minimize impact. If you see that there is an error and all the e-mails have NOT been sent, many ESPs have the ability to cancel the e-mails in the queue.

3. Why did it happen? 99 percent of the errors we see are due to teams sacrificing good process for urgency. Was it a system error? A human error? Did you sacrifice what you know is right to get it out quickly?

4. An error doesn't always justify a response. Spare your customers from a slew of meaningless apology e-mails. Discuss what constitutes an apology and who should receive it, and if you should reward the consumer.

5. Develop a protocol for apology e-mails. Use them for marketing and loyalty purposes. You'll get a higher response, so use this as an opportunity to let them know how important they are to your business.

Of course, the first step is to always proof your emails by as many people on your in-house and outsourced teams possible. Most errors come about because people didn't look closely at the email before hitting send.

Don't Spam your House List

Here's an interesting article about abusing the relationship with your customers who opt-in to receive email marketing. Just because people opt-in doesn't mean they want to receive messages every day - or every week for that matter. How to avoid this? When people opt-in give them a choice about how often they want to be contacted by you. Also ask what kind of messages they want to get. Newsletters? Promotions?  Press releases?

You've worked hard to build up an in-house list - don't blow it by abusing the relationship.