Don't Wail about Email - Effective Email Campaigns, Part one
This month's kinda follows on from February '06 and March '06 newsletters that looked at making your direct mail [DM] deliver a better return on investment. This month I attended a seminar hosted by the same company who did the DM survey, but this time it was about Business to Business [B2B] email marketing campaigns and how to make them more effective.
As I could prattle on for ages about the findings I am going to split the newsletter over two months (there is soooo much good info you can use). So July's newsletter will be about current attitudes and trends to do with email marketing' and believe me, they are very surprising, and then August's will be looking at the things you can implement now to make your campaigns more successful.
Just to set the background and get over how comprehensive the email marketing survey was, here is how and why it was carried out.
The research company is the largest of its kind in the UK and a group of 22 of the UK's most well known corporate B2B businesses got together to anonymously fund the research that was carried out over a period of a year.
The 22 companies wanted answers to the following email marketing questions:
What works and what doesn't work when communicating various message types?
What works best in terms of frequency, timing, content, fit of media to the message and cosmetics?
What is the nature, range and relative importance of email marketing to the recipient companies?
Who are the exemplars and what is current best practice?
In total the research company worked with 9700 individuals from various small to medium to large sized companies to come to the conclusions I will outline.
This is the largest sample of its kind and when you think that they spent days with the majority of these people to see how they responded to marketing emails, you become glad that you were not paying for it :-)
So here is the summary of the trends identified as a result of monitoring the action taken by recipients of email marketing:
The age range of 36-55 is most likely to act or respond to email marketing campaigns with 30% taking action. This surprised me a lot, and even more so when I saw that less than 5% of email marketing is responded to by the under 25 category, the group you would consider to be most tech savvy. The 55 - 65 age group were the second highest group to respond or take action.
With regards to preference for email marketing, 50% of participants said that they would rather send or receive email than post and would only write if email was not an option. 38% said email is ok for business communication, but they can take it or leave it.
Over the period of the year the recipients received on average 6,800 credible marketing emails from, on average, 547 organisations. The split between posted DM and Email is on average 67% in favour of email.
Only 39% of people taking part in the research said they felt that email marketing volume is too high. Interestingly, nearly all (over 90%) respondents said that they were not concerned with email marketing volume. The most common phrases were, 'it is easily manageable', 'you can just click to delete it' and most notably, 'it's more about quality and relevance than volume'.
79% of participants said that they strongly agreed that they would rather have new product or service information via email than post. Again, interestingly, a large number saw junk mail as more time consuming for their business as someone had to deliver it to the site, sort in the post room, deliver internally, open and then scan' whereas with email they can see if it is relevant automatically and action with one click.
As the research went on, it was discovered that there are two main categories of email recipient:
The 'I only want it when I want it' category:
Will tend to delete promotional email communications that are not relevant to their current work.
Will only keep industry educational email communications that come from trusted or preferred suppliers.
More likely to act on emails if they are relevant to the work being done at the time they are received. If not, they are deleted.
The 'I need it to stay current' category:
Will only tend to delete email communications that are not relevant to their role/industry.
Will immediately read emails from preferred suppliers.
Will use the information to demonstrate market understand to peers and clients.
These are some of the areas that recipients cite as having an influence on their decision to delete and email:
How long the recipient has worked at the company::: How busy the recipient is at the time the email is received::: If they have subscribed to the sender's email::: Current market conditions::: Is it information about competitors:::
Just before I wrap up this newsletter I thought I would end by highlighting the similarities between one key area falling out of this survey and one key factor that came out of the DM survey.
Once again a massive amount of recipients (nearly 80%) said that they strongly agreed that marketing emails that came from preferred suppliers stood a greater chance of being read.
This reinforces the widely held view that before your campaign goes for the hard sell or the aggressive call to action you must first warm up the sales lead by trying to plant positive messages about your brand in their head' and this is one of the things that we can help with :-). Well, I had to say that didn't I.
So, next months newsletter will focus on what works and what doesn't work for email marketing campaigns. As always we can help with email campaigns, so don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.
A few quick plugs:
A number of our clients have been working with marketing and data for their telemarketing campaigns and raving about the real successes they have had at truly affordable prices. So, if you are thinking about using telemarketing as part of a wider marketing campaign then ask them to give you a quote. Visit www.marketinganddata.co.uk or call David on 01344 707355.
Don't forget, you can get a 60 day free trial of the book-keeping software that has helped thousands of SME's (including us), keep a better track of their money by visiting www.kashflow.co.uk. It has a number of groovy features and the one we most enjoy is the marketing return on investment measurement reports. Really really handy if you are on a tight budget and need to make sure your campaigns are working effectively.