Online Marketing Stuff – internet marketing – online strategy – websites

If you are planning an email marketing campaign, you may be interested in estimating your potential results and ROI. This will allow you to identify if the proposed activity is likely to meet your targets and objectives whilst also allowing you to calculate the impact on your website traffic, product sales or broader campaign.

Firstly, email marketing is a fairly broad term so let me be more specific with my terminology. I call emails which are sent to your own database “House Emails” and emails that are sent to a third party or rented database an “eDM campaign” (Email Direct Marketing campaign). Both of these allow some response estimation based on industry standards.

When looking at email marketing, there are freely available reports online which will give you some indication about industry standards. I recommend looking for a report in your geographical area and industry and make sure you note what type of organisation has published the report. For the purpose of this article Im referring to Vision 6’s “Australian Email Marketing Metrics Report“. This has been written by Vision 6 who is a provider of email broadcasting and management tools. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that this report will largely consist of data and reporting on House Email broadcasts….

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Marketing Sherpa is a great resource for tips, stats and case studies – if you haven’t checked them out before, I strongly recommend that you visit their website and also look at their newsletter subscriptions available.

Today I downloaded a great free report on email marketing. It is called “2008 Dirty Dozen Email Newsletter Mistakes”. The report covers a range of elements including opt in, frequency and segmentation and is worth a read, even if just for a refresh. You can access Marketing Sherpa’s free reports here.

In the world of online we are used to seeing companies progress with their websites and communication as more advanced technology become available and as companies become more confident in utilising them. However unfortunately one of my favourite daily email newsletters has just taken what I consider to be a big backwards step.

I have been receiving the B&T print magazine and daily email for a few years now as it provides a good overview of what is happening in the world of advertising and marketing and usually includes a good mix of online related stories too. In the past the B&T daily email newsletter was sent as an HTML email that linked through to individual articles on the B&T website (good practice!). However this year, B&T have decided that rather than link to their website, they will link to a PDF of the stories online.

There are several negatives associated with this:

• Poor email experience – B&T have kept their email looking fairly similar to how it did previously where it shows summaries of news articles and a “more…” link to read the full article. The key problem with this is that each link in the email goes through to the same page – being the PDF. There is actually no benefit to the end user in finding the article they want to read and clicking on the more link as once they open the PDF they will have to scroll again to find the same full article.
• Poor user experience – it’s most unusual for a news article in an email to link through to a PDF so not only is the user not expecting it, however it also typically will take longer to load the PDF than it would for a html website page.
• Poor readability – it is well accepted that PDF documents were typically made for print related purposes and therefore it is not as easy to read these on screen. It is even more so if columns are used as the user is forced to scroll up and down just to read one column (instead of reading horizontally as websites are designed).
• Lack of tracking – one of the key benefits in sending HTML emails is being able to track clicks on links so that a company can see what readers are interested in reading and thus tailor future content to this demand. When linking from an email to a PDF (and particularly when all links go to the same place) B&T will lose this valuable reader information about their preferences. Not only that but their website statistics will similarly become less valuable as some of the granularity is removed.

So why would a company move to start linking to a PDF file in this day and age? I’m struggling to come up with a reason that can be justified. A new marketing manager perhaps?If you have any ideas, let me know. Check out the associated graphics below:

Current email newsletter:

PDF of articles which is linked to:

If you’re one of the many companies going through the process of selecting a system to manage your outbound email communications, this article is written for you. There are several factors involved in selecting an email system – here are some of the key things to consider:

• Do you want to use your internal resources to manage your email campaigns or do you want to have this managed for you?
• If you are using your resources, who will be using the system (what skill sets do they have)?
• What quantity of emails will you send?
• What is the nature and frequency of the emails (eg newsletters, ad hoc emails, email campaigns etc)?
• What future uses or applications may you have for email marketing?

I have met many companies who have looked at a number of email systems and are trying to make a decision on which to use. My recommendation is to bring it back to YOUR requirements. Start by defining what you need from the email system and then use this information to match the solutions you are considering back to your specific situation. There are many different systems on the market and they all have subtle differences in their setup, how they need to be used and what they can deliver for you. When considering your requirements, it’s useful to consider them in the following categories:

1. Setup requirements (account access, interface, overall requirements)
2. Database requirements (where does your data sit, integration requirements, managing bounces and unsubscribes, segmentation and targeting)
3. Email setup requirements (creative requirements, email templates, subject lines, sender details, personalisation and features such as dynamic content, RSS feeds etc)
4. Email Broadcasting (scheduling in advance, selecting databases to send to, approval processes etc)
5. Reporting (What is included, how is the report presented, what can you do with this information)

After considering all of the elements in these 5 steps you should find yourself with a reasonably comprehensive list of requirements and you can even prioritise this list by selecting a mandatory or desired status. Once you have a strong framework and criteria in place it makes it a lot easier to select a suitable vendor and to be sure you are getting the best solution for you.

Of course if you don’t feel comfortable about making the right decisions to define your requirements, you can always bring on an objective consultant to document these for you (this is one of the things I often help companies with!)

Checkout some of my favourite email and communication management systems:
Traction
Campaign Master
Vision6

The Email Experience Council recently held a poll asking “Is email marketing is an art or a science? The results are in today with 65% voting for science.

I was one of the 65% and chose this response because I believe that you can take the creative out of an email, but you can’t take away the science behind running the campaign.

Yes it’s possible to have a successful text based email campaign (at one extreme) but if you aren’t talking to the right people at the right time, then there is no point.

Of course, the ultimate answer is that for a successful email marketing campaign, you need the creative to be spot on and the database to be not only accurate, but ideally warmed up and ready to respond too.