The Email Practice

Even The Experts Get It Wrong Sometimes

2009-05-01T14:03:00.011+01:00

We have all seen an email, offline DM piece, or other form of marketing that includes an error. In fact, most if not all of us have been responsible for a piece that contains an error at one time or another. So when I opened a piece from the UK DMA last night that was addressed to "Mr. Test TEST" and personalised "Dear Test," I let out that sort of over excited laugh that comes from the joy of knowing that I was not responsible for this offering to the marketing Gods.

This is not meant to name and shame; it is meant to commiserate. It is also meant as a reminder to us all to carefully check every aspect of a piece at least TWICE before hitting the send button.

Places I Will Be

2009-04-17T09:32:00.004+01:00

The spring conference season is upon us but unfortunately, the credit crunch means that I will be staying close to home. No trips to the States or the Continent this season unless someone is looking to sponsor me. I would be happy to wear your logo while I wax lyrical about the email or digital topic of your choice.

As a free trip to Florida seems unlikely, these are the events I will be checking out over the next couple of months.

I will be hanging out on the dotDigital Group stand (E6065) at Internet World. If you find yourself in the lovely confines of Earl's Court in late April, stop by for a chat.

As you know I am not a morning person, so I am not one to usually promote an 8 AM start, especially on a Friday. The DMA Email Marketing Council is holding its first Breakfast Briefing on 12 june and this will be worth getting out of bed early. They have lined up:

James Thurlow, Manager, EU Communication Products, Yahoo!
Ben Isaacson, Privacy & Compliance Leader, CIPP, Experian CheetahMail
George Bilbrey, President, Return Path Inc.

All hosted by Jonathon Burston of CACI. If these guys cannot improve your deliverability - nobody can.

I am also very excited to be working with the DMA and the good folks at Revolution Events on the upcoming Inbox/Outbox. I am back again in the Lunchtime Keynote spot on both days at 2 PM. This is the only event I know of that covers everything email from the latest archival and storage solutions to an update from the Information Commissioner's Office. Please plan to come to the New Connaught Rooms on at least one of the days for my talk. They always put me in a really big room which looks a bit lame if it is not full.

I will try to keep the events section of The Email Practice up to date and if you know of an event worth checking out, drop me a line. In the meantime, I hope to see you on the circuit.

Victorian Technology in the Information Age

2009-04-07T09:29:00.003+01:00

I had one of those moments this morning where the technology from two eras collides with interesting effect. With the rapid development in technology over the past twenty years, eras are typically defined by weeks or months, but in my case it is an example of how a Victorian era figure adopted 'modern' technology to change the world and how a company rooted in its Victorian history just doesn't get the Web 2.0 world.

My father sent me this fantastic book called Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War by Tom Wheeler. The American Civil War has been called the first modern war because of three technological advances that came into play in the years preceding the conflict:

Rifling made the weapons more accurate at long range
The railroad extended the battlefield by facilitating rapid reinforcement from longer distances
The telegraph allowed political leaders to be in near real time contact with the battlefield

The author's basic argument is that whichever side made the best use of these "game changers" would have a hand in the conflict. In fact, you can see this in the early stages of the war when the South made great use of both the railroad and the longer range weapons while the North's generals struggled to cope with these changes. The book then goes on to discuss in detail how Lincoln became an early adopter of the telegraph and used it to be the first political leader to be able to project his leadership onto the battlefield and ultimately change the face of the conflict.

In comparison, National Rail here in the UK is using Victorian thinking the Web 2.0 world. Anybody who has ever read Sherlock Holmes knows that you once could set your watch by the trains in the UK. That may have been true in the Victorian era but it is certainly fiction today.

To their credit, National Rail has embraced modern communications tools and provides a wide array of channels through which I can find out how late my train will be. They have seemed to have lost the plot however, with their decision to eliminated all competition on the iPhone platform by cutting off their live data feeds to both paid for and free apps and replace these with their own app, which costs £4.99.

As you can imagine this has not gone down well with the iPhone community. Most of the comments and feedback have been about monopolies and having to pay for an application that is no better than the popular MyRail Lite, which was free. Whilst I feel their pain, I think this is a great example of a brand that does not get the world in which we all now live.

They have approached this from the "information is power" school of thought which is an old and dying paradigm. In the Web 2.0 world, value add is king, so a better approach would have been to come up with a clever way to add more value than the other tools and offer it for free. This could then be monetised by add revenue, a paid for version with advanced features, etc. Alternatively, they could have used this to build some good will with a nation that is sick of its Victorian rail network.

In fact, their current strategy could doubly backfire because this morning I was not able to access the real time departure information that I had paid for, so while my train was unusually on-time, Network Rail still added stress to my morning.

Why Is Everybody Out to Get Email?

2009-03-18T11:15:00.006+00:00

This has been sitting in my "must blog about this folder" (otherwise known as the place where rants go to die) since last week, but Dela Quist's excellent post and its repost stole most of my thunder, but that got me to thinking, "Why is everybody out to kill email?"

I know what your thinking. Oh boy, Skip has gone round the paranoid conspiracy theory bend, but I would argue that just because you are paranoid does not mean that everybody is not out to get you.

In the nine years that I have been in email, we have been bombarded with the "next email killer", which were in order of appearance:

Mobile (SMS)
RSS
Mobile again (WAP)
Social Networking
Mobile yet again (going for third time lucky with 3G devices)
Twitter (really?)

What did email ever do to these guys. I could totally see it if the above the line or direct marketers were gunning for email but you will notice that all of these channels are so called new media.

I am a big fan of the concept that a rising tide lifts all boats. Instead of thinking that we should be stealing usage (read as budget) from each other we should be working together to create marketing programs that deliver messages to consumers that they find relevant using a channel that is both appropriate to the message and convenient for them.

Looking at these key components in a bit more detail:

Relevant - I defy any email marketer to speak about the channel for more than five minutes without using this word. The social network proponents would argue that something posted by one of my friends will be relevant to me. To them I point out that while he was a very charming character, would you pop around to Hannibal Lecter's house for dinner?
Appropriate - Even though it might be legal in some countries. A text message is not the best way to ask your missus for a divorce.
Convenient - My iPhone is always with me and I would be happy to begin a dialogue with a car company where they collect my details using the mobile channel and them move the conversation to a channel where I can get the details on the car more easily (such as email followed by web).

In this economy cooperation will serve us all better then competition. In the immortal but less quoted words of Rodney King, "Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it."

Seeing the C-Level

2009-02-07T10:59:00.003+00:00

In the last week I have read two media post articles which encourage me to get to know the C-level better. The first explained how the CIO would be able to really help me improve my email program. The second encouraged me to get to know the CFO better. The theme that seems to be emerging here is one that has been an issue for basically ever. Marketers need to do a better job of translating their activity and spend into something that the C's understand. We spend a lot of time talking about how to communicate to customers using language that resonates with them - maybe we should apply the same techniques internally.

Oh The Irony

2009-01-22T15:48:00.004+00:00

I received this email today from a PR agency. The email was about how PR and marketing communications need to change away from their traditional channels and embrace new channels like social networks. The email had no links above the fold and read very much like a blog post.

2009 Annual National Client Email Marketing Report

2009-01-19T10:00:00.002+00:00

Denise Cox did such a good job describing this that I thought I would copy her text (below) or you can go to see the original post.

"I love email marketing stats, in particular european and/or UK specific stats - which can be pretty thin on the ground. If you are a UK marketer, please consider participating in the 2009 Annual National Client Email Marketing Report so the results will reflect one of the most up to date resources for UK email marketing research. (Survey link)

About: The National Client Email Marketing Survey is an initiative undertaken by the DMA UK’s Email Marketing Council. It’s designed to complement the National Email Benchmarking Report, which surveys the Email Service Providers (ESPs). The Client Email Marketing Survey asks client marketers to provide their answers to a mixture of response rate data, as well as attitudinal questions. The reports are produced on a quarterly basis. (Executive brief for 2006, Access to all past reports - free for members, fee for non-members.)

Survey guidelines: Where a % is asked for, please enter numeric values only. If you do not know the answer, please leave blank.

Taking the Survey: Participants will receive a complimentary copy of the survey results; insert your email address in the first box to receive the report when it is issued. (Survey link) Survey closes 29 January."

Ready Steady Email Date Announced

2009-01-16T16:09:00.006+00:00

It has just been confirmed that Ready Steady Email will be running at TFM&A. This is a highly interactive half day session where participants work in teams to develop an email marketing strategy for an on-line t-shirt retailer. I encourage everybody to sign up.

What is DM?

2008-12-24T12:23:00.004+00:00

Entire, an agency here in the UK has noticed the blurring of the lines in DM and feels it is time "to establish a fresh, new definition of DM in the digital age ... by inviting those who know the industry intimately - the people who create, craft, strive and succeed for their clients - to explain what DM means to them."

The definition they are proposing is:

"Direct Marketing. Think of it as advertising that targets an identified audience with a specific proposition. This, in turn, harnesses the power of the brand, and product or service. What really sets it apart is the call to action which allows the effectiveness of every communication to be accurately measured, even in multi-channel campaigns. This makes it an ideal vehicle both for customer acquisition and retention, through online and offline channels."

In general I think this is pretty good but I have a few thoughts that may make it better.

Instead of telling people how to think about DM, let's tell them what it is.
The phrase "identified audience" is too general. All marketing is aimed at an identified audience. DM is targeted at an identifiable audience. In other words, it is marketing material that is targeted at a specific individual. This individual could be anonymous like when re-targeting a banner ad but because we are targeting based on a cookie we are targeting a specific individual.
This may be a good opportunity to build some rigour into what a DM call to action must include. A place to start would be to say that a DM call to action is SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timed)

I am really looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and to see what definition emerges.

Congratulations dotMailer

2008-11-21T10:59:00.003+00:00

Congratulations to dotMailer for winning the Croydon Business Best of Burough Award for Best Growing Business. also a big thanks to the team for having me along. Clearly they are rapturous over their win - well Tink is anyway.

Is Spam Really a Big Problem?

2008-11-19T17:20:00.003+00:00

Here is an article on netimperative about some interesting research sponsored by moneysupermarket.com. The key take aways for me are:

The average consumer only receives just over 10 spam messages per day - for some reason this seems low.
90% of consumers do not take active steps to stop spam. I cannot decide if this is good for legitimate marketers or not. On the one hand this increases clutter in the inbox but this also means that we do not have to worry about our opted-in readers accidentally creating false positives. I would be interested to hear your thoughs on this.
Spam still works - 14% of respondents admitted to having clicked on a spam.

One of my concerns however is how they defined spam. As we all know there is the legal definition and the consumer's definition. Consumers think any message that is not relevant is spam. So this begs the question, "how many of the 10 spam messages per day are legitimate emails that the respondents opted-in to receive?"

More Time of Day Stuff

2008-11-13T14:47:00.002+00:00

Apparently, when we send emails is the most important issue in the industry this week. Check out this from MarketingSherpa.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30917&pop=no

New Insights On Time Of Day For Email

2008-11-13T11:27:00.003+00:00

This is a really interesting post on time of day:

http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/email_insider/?p=741

The interesting thing is that we have come full circle. In the early days of email it was a free for all but people quickly realised that email was all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. It was the last part that caused all of the worry.

How would we as marketers know when somebody was likely to be receptive to our message? So, we assumed that all consumers care about is the weekend and applied some "logic" about their behaviour as it related to the weekend and decided Wednesday would be the best day to send.

Some of the more clever email marketers realised that if every body was sending on a Wednesday it would be too hard to achieve cut-through so they overlaid this thought with the previous thinking on the importance of the weekend and said Tuesday was better (although some argued for Thursday).

Throughout the Great Day of the Week Debate, individually we struggled to answer the question, "I have changed to the 'optimal' day and my results have gone down." Luckily as marketers we had a ready made answer to this dilemma. "Maybe our customers are different. We should test it." These individual conversations eventually lead to a groundswell until most everybody was in agreement that we should rigorously test for the optimal day of the week and hey, let's throw in time of day as well.

What we never understood was why. Now the why is not important if your customer base is homogeneous, but it is if you have more than one customer. The why allows us to understand the behaviours of different segments and target them appropriately.

A standard day of week test randomly puts your readers into buckets so you end up identifying the optimal day based on the average. This would hide the fact that your most profitable segments might respond better at other times. In fact, the optimum time identified by the test may turn out to be rubbish.

By looking at day of week by segment we can optimise the response across the board. I know you are thinking: "Wait a minute. By looking at this on a segment level the sample sizes would be too small to be statistically significant." This is where I am going to pick up a string of thought proposed by Dela Quist of Alchemyworx. Dela has never been a fan of the organised day of week test. He proposes that if you look back over the past twelve or twenty four months you will have probably sent on each day of the week. There are some hazards to this approach but if you were to structure your testing going forward where launch each segment on the same day over the next seven campaigns you would be able to normalise for any outside influences.

How Do You Know Your Email is Working?

2008-10-16T22:13:00.009+01:00

I recently wrote an article for the DMA's Infobox Email Newsletter in which I suggested that the current credit crunch would help move the email to the channel to the next level. Email really came into its own during the dotcom bust. The dotcoms were early adopters of the email channel but instead of email flaming out with the dotcoms, there was a huge library of case studies that sold the channel to the non-dotcoms.

I then went on to state that this credit crunch will force marketers to better segment their lists because finance directors are going to expect increasingly higher return on investment. In addition, marketers are realising that as email address penetration tops out they are all competing for the same static number of readers. This will result in an increase in the cost of acquisition for opt-ins, so it is important that marketers keep as many of their readers engaged as possible. Better targeting equates to increased relevance which leads to increased engagement.

So today I read an eMarketer article about a MarketingSherpa survey. Not surprisingly, email marketers that think email is becoming more effective will spend more money on it and email marketers that think email is becoming less effective try to keep email as close to free as possible.

The part that bothered me was the group that responded with "e-mail is cheap and still working-why invest more?" Didn't these people read my article? Maybe it didn't get much take-up in the US.

Actually, I think it is down to how these marketers are measuring their email programs. By focusing only on the process metrics of delivery, open, and click rates it is hard to see when large segment of your population becomes disengaged with your email program. By looking however, at the performance metrics like engagement, sales, return on investment, you get a much better picture of whether your email program is working. I have yet to find a client that is in the business of generating clicks. Every client I have ever worked with, was in the business of generating sales. That should be the only indicator of whether an email program is working.

Upcoming DMA Events

2008-10-06T16:52:00.004+01:00

I have posted two new links in the upcoming events section. I am chairing the first and it should be a spirited discussion about changes to internet security and the impact this will have on digital marketing channels.

The second is the Email Marketing Councils second big conference of the year. There is a new format a lot of new content and some great speakers. Unfortunately, I was not able to make the cut and get on the speakers list for this one so I am looking for a guess pass if anybody has an extra.

We Now Resume Normal Service

2008-10-02T07:44:00.001+01:00

Earlier today it was pointed out to me that I have not posted since June. I justified not posting in July and August as it being the summer holidays and nobody would read it anyway. I am not sure how to justify September, but its October now so right back at it.

Also I have started playing around with FeedBurner. To get an enhanced experience start using the URL below to access my blog.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheEmailPractice

Crunch Ends Email 'Batch and Blast'

2008-06-13T21:46:00.000+01:00

Below is an article that was first published in the DMA Email Marketing Council email newsletter called InfoBox and then picked up by Precision Marketing on 19 May.

According to the media, the UK faces the greatest economic correction since The Great Depression. While newspapers tend to exaggerate to sell more copies, it is clear that the economic outlook for 2008 is not rosy. In tough times, marketing is usually the first thing to get cut, so the question is: should email marketers be worried?

I started in the email business at the height of the US dotcom boom. It seemed that there was a lavish launch party almost every night. When the crash came, the launch parties were replaced by pink slip parties. This might not have been the band playing on the deck of the Titanic but we were more than a little nervous.

It turned out to be the best thing for the industry. The dot-coms were early adopters of email marketing and without their largesse we tightened our belts. We also had to start running our businesses.like businesses. When we sifted through the ashes we found a large number of case studies on the effectiveness of the channel, which convinced more "traditional" companies to dive into the email pool.

Fast forward to 2008. Should we be worried? No, because just like the dotcom bust, this will force email to grow up. We have spent the intervening years talking about targeting and relevance but have not done much about it. This has been driven in large part by the low cost of each incremental email. Unlike other channels, there is no disincentive to over-target. On top of this, email continues t o be one of the most effective direct marketing channels, which creates tremendous internal pressures to email more people more often.

The email industry has proven that targeted, relevant emails deliver better initial response and engagement over the long term. At the same time, consumers have little patience with irrelevant emails and will quickly become disengaged. This emerging economic environment will give email marketers the incentive to stop the "batch and blast" approach and start leveraging the level of micro-targeting that email allows. The efficacy of the channel will allow us to keep or grow our budgets and the tough times will force us to become a much stronger channel.

UK Digital Penetation Index

2008-06-06T14:32:00.001+01:00

Here are some good stats on the state of the UK market.

http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/leadership/0,1045,sid%253D176972,00.html

The Rich fail To Get Richer

2008-06-03T21:48:00.000+01:00

Here is an interesting article that appeared in last week's Precision Marketing. I disagree with the premise that email is "if it is not already dead, is certainly struggling for breath." As you can see from my quote, email marketing should be about targeting and the clever use of data. This is not to say that the creative idea, design, and copywriting are not important but their limitations do not mean the death of email is imminent.

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The IDM Business Performance Awards

2008-05-30T17:45:00.000+01:00

Yay Team!

Yesterday the BT Business and Ogilvy team won the IDM Business Performance Bronze Award for the BT Business Total Broadband campaign. You can see the work and other winners here:

http://www.theidm.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=contentDisplay.&chn=1&tpc=5&stp=624

And here is a photo of the group that picked up the award.

http://www.theidm.com/download/img/bpa08_bronzewinner.jpg

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Habeus: Email Remains Primo Communication Method

2008-05-27T10:48:00.000+01:00

The comments from the current students in this article are interesting. The burning question on everyone's mind is whether email will be killed by social networks. The big hurtle to social networks displacing email is interoperability. Until I can send messages from my FaceBook account to friends on MySpace we will see social networks develop along a similar path to instant messaging. With the advent of each new IM tool, I ended up with friends at Yahoo! and Hotmail, while my colleagues at the time in Digital Impact relied on AIM. Third party tools like Meebo have resolved this problem but it has been years in the making.

Email is a Two Way Street

2008-05-27T10:21:00.001+01:00

Giles Rhys-Jones who is a colleague here at OgilvyOne sent me a piece about Frank Eliason, who under the name comcastcares, is Comcast's (a US Broadband provider) "Twitter Guy."

Essentially he monitors Twitter for any activity related to Comcast . While this is not the only example of this concept, it makes me wonder if Comcast is this proactive in its replies to email.

Living in the UK, I have no need to be on the Comcast list so do not make this comment specifically about them, but nothing says "We as an organisation are not interested in a relationship with you Mr. Customer," like a please do not reply note on marketing emails.

Email is a two way channel and companies need to be able to respond to all inbound email in a timely fashion.

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Skip Fidura to speak at The Email Marketing Conference

2008-05-17T14:59:00.000+01:00

I will be speaking at the next DMA Email Conference on frequency and timing of email.

"How often should I communicate with my customers and when is the best time to reach them?" This has been the "Holy Grail" of marketing since before there was . . . well . . . a Holy Grail. Gone are the days when frequency and timing were dictated by the marketer. Today's consumer wants messages that are relevant, personal, and timely. I will go into the challenges of this new environment and discuss practical solutions for how to solve them.

Some more details on the conference can be found below.

The Email Marketing Conference
Customer focused email - marketing to people not lists

In 2007 email marketing volumes overtook traditional print direct marketing for the first time. Whatever sector you work in email marketing is a powerful tool to reach your customers and promote your message and brand. But are you maximising the advantage email can give you?

With volumes set to continue rising how can you ensure your email achieves its aims? At this conference you will gain essential knowledge on the latest trends and practices on identifying your customer, delivering your message, maximising click through and measuring the response.

http://www.dma.org.uk/content/Evt-Article.asp?id=4300