Blog: email marketing

In my previous blog I wrote about the growth in mobile channels and content challenges that organizations are facing. In this blog I will focus on the two other major challenges for mobile marketers ---- Preference Management and Measurement.

One of the most annoying aspects of the customer experience does not have to do with the shopping experience but with the communication experience.    A constant refrain we hear from customers across the board (whether in B2B or B2C situations) is that they get too many calls or emails but often do not hear when there is relevant news that they are truly interested in.  On the other hand, a surprising (and dismaying) number of marketers still measure their productivity by the sheer volume of outbound communications (email, direct mail, calls, touches, etc.) rather than by the quality or even the relevance. 

Have you ever tried to get a Unica V75 mail list file to print out even when there is no data to print out (i.e. no records selected for the mail list)? If you said "Yes" to this question, what did you see in the output on the Unica Campaign server folder? We will come back to this question in a minute.

A favorite client of mine asked if I knew how to print out a "Dummy" row of data in a Unica Campaign mail list file when there were no actual records selected for the mail list. My response was based upon my understanding of Unica Campaign's functionality regarding empty mail list files. I told my client that you would have to use a shell script to perform this feat because I thought Unica Campaign didn't generate a mail list file if there are no records selected by the mail list process box. Boy, was I wrong! For this edition of tricks of the trade we are going to find out how to trick Unica Campaign into creating a dummy list pull file even when there are no records selected by the Unica mail list process!

Research shows that people spend more time reading their emails than they do surfing the web. Email is one of the most powerful mediums that you can use to talk to customers and prospects and is an extremely cost effective channel and once the initial investment in infrastructure set up is complete.

In order to maximize the use of email marketing here are some best practices for marketers.

Is it worth the effort?

Do you think that building re-usability into your eMessage deployment is worth the additional effort? While working at a client site, we debated this same question. The question is whether or not one should implement re-usable eMessage document components in Unica's V75 eMessage application.

Unica's eMessage application enables the design of unique personalized email messages for each recipient in a campaign. The design of eMessage email messages may be done quite rapidly as the application allows for the direct pasting of HTML-rendered creative content into the application. Unica's eMessage application also supports the use of previously created eMessage components in a document. Thus, the concept of re-usability applies to Unica's eMessage application.

Many times when sending out bulk emails we all might have noticed that the appearance of email creative is not consistent across email clients. Some emails may look good in Yahoo or AOL whereas the same email content may not appear properly in Outlook or Gmail. The reason is different email programs render HTML differently. They may display table, style, background formatting and other HTML elements in slightly divergent ways. Hence it becomes quite challenging to prepare email creative in such a way that it holds visual exactness across email clients. 

In the following sections we discuss several critical best practices that address this challenge in email design. 

Email marketing is fast becoming one of most favored marketing channels due to its cost effectiveness and efficiency to reach customers at a much quicker timelines. Email marketing has become increasingly sophisticated and strong marketing organizations understand the power of email marketing and the commitment that is needed to adhere to the privacy guidelines ensuring relevance and promoting the brand equity. A big portion of the email marketing in today's environment is transactional emails, which relates directly to something the recipient did either in the form of request for content or purchase or confirmation of a transaction.  The CAN-SPAM definition of a "transactional or relationship message" is any email "facilitating, completing or confirming a previously agreed upon transaction" between the customer and the organization.

MarketingSherpa recently posted an online article that is related to a previous blog about recently gathered research on what drives people to unsubscribe from email communications.  The premise of that article was that the top reason was identified as 'Inbox clutter' and its effect on all email communications. 

MarketingSherpa recently posted an article presenting research they've gathered on what drives people to unsubscribe from email communications.  Year after year, their email benchmark survey states that the top reason was identified as 'Inbox clutter' and its effect on all email communications.  'Delivering on the promise of relevance' comes in a distant second. 

The findings in this article were based upon feedback at the MarketingSherpa's email summit in Miami where people at that conference painted a different picture.  The top two answers both speak to the important of the individual relationship between emailer and recipient.   They identify relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender's email. 

In reflecting upon this finding, I would have to agree. 

In these economic times, marketing budgets are tight and email provides a lower cost medium and applied with segmentation and personalization techniques could be a high ROI medium. More and more marketers are looking towards to email to engage customers and have relevant messaging but also monetize ad revenues by targeted advertising.

It seems that every time I log into my Comcast email account, I have a million new emails to go through (o.k., I'm exaggerating), and I wonder, for the majority of them, how the sender even got my email address.

I'm sure there are better ways dissect emails that should be important to me, but I generally scan the sender name (and immediately delete those that I don't recognize) and then delete any email that doesn't have a subject line that is appealing.  My guess is that you have a similar method to the INBOX madness.

The online advertising business is in for a rough patch, especially for display advertising. The signs are everywhere. Yahoo, the biggest publisher of display ads on the Web, reported a 2 percent decline in display ad revenues in the fourth quarter, and the New York Times is seeing even steeper declines.

There is just way too much advertising inventory out there, and Websites are actually trying to show fewer ads per page to reduce ad clutter and keep advertising rates from cratering.

Most email marketing programs are less effective as marketers often tend to treat this as mass marketing outbound medium rather than true interaction channel.  Most email programs are tailored towards relevance but not necessarily relevance tied to timeliness. With the advancement of technology to be able to trigger campaigns based on events and scheduling features, timeliness in conjunction with relevance is becoming the essence of email marketing.