Inside the Institute of Physics publishing

This article is the first in a series that sees the Email Marketing Council’s client outreach working group speaking to actual email program owners

We’re keen to learn more about their day to day challenges, showcase their successes, and hear how they are thinking about the future.

In this month’s edition we speak to Johanna Green, Senior Marketing Executive at Institute of Physics (IoP) Publishing, and find out how her program services some (very) niche interest groups such as “Nanoscale Physics and Technology” and “Ion and Plasma Surface Interactions”.

Business Objectives

1. How much value is placed on email within your brand? How is it perceived internally, and by your customers?

Email is a really important touch-point between IOP and our multiple customer groups.

Ultimately, our goal is to encourage as much readership of our content as possible, but it’s also as much about sharing the successes of our authors and referees as well as making them aware of our journals. It’s a great way for us to help authors get as many people seeing their research as possible.

For our librarians, it’s an important way for them to keep updated on our products, services and pricing. We can also conveniently keep librarians updated on the publishing landscape and share understanding about industry changes like open access and copyright policies.

Campaign Management

2. What job function is involved in the planning and creation of IOPP’s email campaigns?

We rely on close work with publishing staff who are at the front end of everything that we do. As scientists, they are key in helping us to better understand our community, as well as recognising trends in research and the next key scientific breakthrough that may go on to trigger a campaign.

Each marketer in the librarian relationship marketing team is partnered with an individual sales rep to get a deeper understanding of what’s happening in each of our target regions. As marketers, we rely on our understanding of data and analytics – major drivers for every campaign.

3. How far in advance does the planning process start?

We work to anything from a day’s notice to a year’s notice! There are some dates in the STM publishing calendar that are a regular consideration – key conferences as well as celebrating international and regional events like UNESCO’s International Year of Light. Breakthroughs in research can happen suddenly, though, and we need to be able to react to industry news and important research quickly.

4. What level of targeting is used?

We’re always looking to build on our knowledge of our customers and good data collection is really pivotal to that. The challenge is getting a balance between giving users a way to tell us about their niche research interests, while not overloading them with barriers and huge registration forms. What’s particularly useful is that often our customers will have more than one touch-point with us and we’re able to build up a good overall picture of our relationship with them.

More and more, we’re trying to minimise the number of assumptions we make about our customers and let them tell and show us what’s important to them. Where data is incomplete, we’re doing this through behaviour-based targeting – using click reports to gain insight into interest areas and following-up with more specific content.

5. What are the main challenges you encounter running IOPP’s email program?

Like many companies, we’re looking ahead to tougher data protection legislation. We need to look now at how we’re recording customer relationships and preferences and get ready for some bigger changes further down the line.

A big chunk of our marketing activity involves email in some form – from automated and transactional alerting to bespoke readership, article submissions and sales campaigns. The challenge is to keep surprising our recipients to make sure the campaigns aren’t stale and to make sure that customers don’t feel bombarded. We know that inboxes fill quickly and that timing is key, so we rely on testing and good data to keep things as relevant and timely as possible.

6. Is there a change that you have made to IOPP’s email program recently that has been particularly successful? If so, what did you do and what impact did it have?

We’ve shifted the tone of our emails over recent years as in the past we were communicating with the academic community in a much more formal way. We’ve found that focusing on quality content is still the key but delivering that content in a more conversational way is generally better received. We’ve also been running more lifecycle campaigns to make the conversations with our contacts more cohesive over a longer term. As it’s based on engagement, we can automate many of the follow-up campaigns and tailor the content to areas recipients have demonstrated interest in. This means that content is relevant to their relationship with us, relevant to their interest areas and saves the marketing team running more ad-hoc and manual campaigns.

7. Do you make use of any 3^rd-party technologies as part of IOPP’s email program? If so – who/what are they, and describe how they add value to the program.

We use a data mining tool to build our campaign contact lists. The tool gives us a more holistic view of each contact and customer, merging data from multiple sources across the business into single records which can be queried. It means that we have a more complete picture of each person that we’re communicating with, without spending hours de-duping various lists – a pretty powerful time-saver!

8. How do you measure the effectiveness of your email program? Is it a function of ROI, or do you have other non-financial KPI metrics?

Directly attributing ROI to our campaigns can sometimes be a challenge for us as some of our activity is aimed at increasing awareness, and it is difficult to assign metrics to this category of campaign. Other campaigns have non-marketing elements involved which are a contributory factor, and which can also impact on the results. What we’re doing better now is gaining visibility of all of these contributing factors and starting to understand email’s place within all the ways we communicate and work with our customers. We can also get some more immediate measures by tracking usage stemming from campaign traffic.

General

9. What key lessons have you learnt about email, and what advice would you have for brands looking to step up their email program?

We know that a campaign is only as good as your data. Use that data to challenge your assumptions about your customers and give as many opportunities to give your customers as much control as possible.

10. What are IOPP’s future plans and vision for use of email? What would you like to be doing that you are not already?

We have a lot of different potential touch points with customers because of the range of our services and websites and it means that we have a lot of preferences to manage. We’d like to move to a full preference centre, where users can centrally and more easily tell us exactly what they’d like to receive and when.

11. Does your email program benefit in any way from IOPP’s DMA membership? If so, in what way?

The DMA recently came to us to talk about the current data climate, focusing on data protection legislation in particular – something that we know we need to re-evaluate strongly in the coming months and years. It’s really useful for us to be able to draw on that additional resource when thinking about how to implement those changes. It’s also nice to have that community as another line of support and I know that members of the team have found the legal advice a speedy and useful resource.