Hints
for Making Your E-Mail Marketing More Effective
15 April 2005
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There is no question that e-mail, when used properly, can revolutionize
your business-to-business sales and marketing effort. No longer
must you fight voice mail loops and struggle to talk to people who
hide behind their voice mail. No longer must you use expensive and
time-consuming “snail mail” and wait for endless deliveries
and responses. Only FAX communications, which is far limited in
its versatility, can compete with e-mail for immediacy and impact.
E-mail breaks through the clutter, has immediacy,
works 24-7 and can provide a response in seconds. Unfortunately,
many business-to-business marketers have not begun to use e-mail
to its fullest potential.
The editors of THE WIGLAF JOURNAL maintain a file
on ways to make e-mail more efficient and effective. Here is some
new information we have gathered over the last two months:
B2B Strategies and Best Practices
In a ClickZ (April 6, 2005) (www.clickz.com) article
by Karen Gedney, the business-to-business strategies used by Jeannley
Mullen, e-mail marketing director of OgilvyOne Worldwide are revealed.
Mullen reports that nearly 70 percent of Ogilvy’s
current e-mail projects are from B2B clients and views e-mail from
three unique perspectives:
- Strategic, top-down approach where
e-mail is used as part of the overall marketing plan for achieving
corporate objectives.
- Tactical, bottom-up approach where
testing is conducted on critical e-mail messages t determine the
best subject lines, use of personalization, times of day to broadcast
and other factors based on audience.
- Technology-based approach where
the focus is on technology and where lead generation is the primary
B2B marketing objective. It requires different technology to bring
the prospect through an often-long cycle of qualifying and nurturing.
Knowledge of the client’s back-end systems to determine
how leads will be handled is crucial to Ogilvy.
Some hints for breaking through: (1) If you are trying
to reach IT people, try e-mailing in the 8 – 11 p.m. and 5
– 7 a.m. time slots. These professionals tend to come in early
and work late; (2) if you’re trying to reach top executives,
try e-mailing on Saturdays and Sundays because these people tend
to check their own messages on the weekends where during the week
you might have to get through administrative assistants and other
gatekeepers. Mullen doesn’t recommend this strategy for the
first message, however.
How Often Should Your E-Mail
Jeanne Jennings in the March 14, 2004 Clickz,
writes: “There is no quick answer to the frequency question.
It depends on the goals for your e-mail and the type of content
you send.” Here are some rough guidelines:
- Mail at least once a month. Mail
less often and you risk losing top-of-mind awareness. Months,
is a bare minimum to guard against being forgotten.
- Let content be your guide. Frequency
is somewhat of a function of what you’re providing for the
readers. “Analyze how often the information changes and
how quickly readers must receive it to act on it,” writes
Jennings.
- Take the lead from you readers. Some
organizations offer daily e-mails; other far less frequently.
Let the readers have the choice. Always tell them how often you
intend to mail when they sign-up so they can determine if that
frequency works well for them.
- Work within your resources. Quality
is better than quantity. A well-done monthly e-mail is far superior
to a shoddy daily or weekly e-mail. Jennings recommends starting
with a monthly frequency and then moving to bi-weekly then weekly.
- Watch for trends. Declining response,
open and click-through rates can be signs of list fatigues, according
to Jennings. Many people prefer for trash their e-mail without
reading it rather than to unsubscribe. If you see a problem, cut
back on frequency and upgrade content.
Testing Rented Lists
Testing, re-testing and rolling out are the prudent
practices for expanding your e-mail program, according to Paul Soltoff
(ClickZ—April 4, 2005). Assuming one has a winning creative
approach, here is how Soltoff recommends developing a winning list:
- Step 1: Track all Lists. Elementary
as it sounds, make sure you can track and source-code all leads
and responses resulting from every list you test. The tracking
code for each list MUST become a permanent part of the customer
record.
- Step 2: Compute Your Key Metric. Determine
your key metric — it may be response rate, acquisition costs,
net present value or others, For each new list, compute how this
metric compares with previously established benchmarks. Be watchful
and compare short-tem initial responses with longer-term retention
rates.
- Step 3: Take Advantage of Modeling Services.
According to Soltoff: “Many list brokers offer
scoring and modeling services you may be able to apply to your
lists. A rented e-mail list could be matched against a known data
base to identify common data, such as household income, or vehicle
home ownership. Combined with you actual results, these models
can point you to the right lists to test. Certain list owners
directly provide response modeling services on their files.”
- Step 4: Step up winners, retest marginal,
analyze losers. For lists that are clear winners, use
a step-up process — go from 50,000 to 250,000. If results
hold, move to 500,000. If results are marginal, re-test as long
as list acquisition costs are below $49 per thousand. For lists
that are clear losers, find out why. Determine if it was a technological
glitch or something to do with the price or message.
“By testing, tweaking and retesting,
you may turn winners into screaming winners and marginal lists into
winners as well,” writes Soltoff.
Content Testing
David Daniels, another ClickZ contributor (February
28, 2005) offers insight into testing the creative content of e-mailings:
- Test only one variable at a time.
Try to determine exactly which element is impacting performance.
- Maintain a control group. To understand
how the segments tested behave, maintain a control group that
doesn’t receive any testing treatments.
- Ensure tests occur on the same day.
This will minimize fluctuations in day-of-week patterns
- Ensure test cells are statically accurate.
Make sure each test cell returns 100 qualified responses.
This may require cells of or 10,000 to 15,000 names.
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