Sending relevant but less email costs you

Relevancy
Email marketers, including us, often champion ‘relevancy’ as the most effective way to reach a target audience, after all plenty of studies have shown higher conversions can be achieved by more targeted one-to-one messages. However, this alone does not provide the complete answer to delivering ROI for brands; they should not be doing this in isolation.

Methods and metrics
It was great to see several members of the DMA UK's Email Marketing Council running a panel discussion earlier this month at the Email Experience Council's event in Miami. Here our experts from the UK challenged the US marketers on their methods and the metrics they have been using.

In simple terms the premise under discussion was to consider how and why you can send more email. The reasoning behind this was to challenge the metrics that have traditionally been used to monitor the success of campaigns, looking at engagement over time was central to the argument. You can read more about these metrics in the white paper produced by the council prior to the event.

I’ve found that when brands choose email marketing platforms, they insist that any platform they select must have a vast array of features. Having discussed this with many ESPs we find that brands only use a small percentage of these features once they become clients.

Is this simply because they do not have enough time to carry out proper segmentation, or put all the content and variations together? Or is there a fear that they may be sending too many emails?

Email misconceptions
Many a time I have been introduced to someone at a bar or over dinner and when I say "I’m an email marketer", it’s not uncommon to hear the response "oh, so you’re the spammer". I do at this stage of the conversation point out that spam is an illegal practice often carried out by organised crime, would these people equally describe a chemist as a drug dealer. This helps ease the tension!

Does this possible perception therefore give us marketers an inherent fear of sending too many emails? Our minds start racing, will we find that people unsubscribe and not read our content at all? Or will our recipients see us as an annoyance!?

Is it time to panic? Well the answer is no. As our friend Dela Quist (CEO at Alchemy Worx) will tell us "Don’t do something stupid!" Meaning we should monitor our engagement levels over time, against our overall rates, opens, click rates, ROI and unsubscribes. Adjust your volumes and frequency if you are seeing a negative effect.

Frequency
What we know for sure though is that the best way to maximise the ROI from your email marketing is to get the most out of the platform you are using. The irony here is that you may only do this properly when you start to consider sending more email. You have to think about better segmentation and relevancy if you intend to contact your recipients on a more frequent basis. If you are only sending say once a month is it easier to batch and blast the same thing to everyone? I am sure there are a few people reading this article that are secretly admitting to doing this themselves.

This is not to mean that you stop sending your regular campaigns, but you can look at sending more email by incorporating a lot more marketing automation in the mix.

Marketing automation to the rescue
I believe that for your campaigns to be truly relevant you have to force yourself to think about sending more emails, as this tests your principles on what you believe and know to be truly relevant. This is where marketing automation comes into play, as you can use the information you collect on your recipients' buying patterns to make your campaign more relevant and change the frequency of sending to a recipient.

For example, if they buy a vacuum cleaner there are all sorts of things you can do with that information on top of your regular mailings:

• Move the recipient to a different series of emails that is targeted towards the relevant product area based on their behaviour.
• Send weekly emails rather than monthly. How about some tips on how to use the product? Or information on recommended accompaniments.
• Stay relevant for longer. After a month, slow down but continue to push relevant content such as information on upgrades and customer service reminders.
• If the product has a shelf life of 12 months, make sure you send an email to see if they need a new product or a service on their existing one.

It’s about finding relevant reasons to send more emails. Devise as many ways as possible to contact everyone on your list, in addition to the tailored email you might be sending every week, or month, to proportion of your list. After all every time you send an email to someone you have a chance to make a positive return on your investment.

Tink Taylor, Managing Director, dotMailer and DMA Email Marketing Council member