Email Marketing Talk in Manchester

Following the yesterday announcement, this is an update about a talk on Email Marketing at Interactive Marketing 2008, presented by Lee Chadwick of CommuniGator. I wrote an article (below), and if you want to see some pictures from the event, visit Interactive Marketing photoset on Flickr.

GlamOnWeb Email Newsletter with Disabled Images

GlamOnWeb Email Newsletter with Enabled Images

How often do you get marketing emails into your mailbox? One of my mailboxes is regularly suffocating not only with spam, but with some good emails from trustworthy organisations. Unfortunately, they often use images in the template. Fortunately for me, I’m interested in their content (La Perla lingerie, for instance, or Victoria and Albert Museum newsletters), so I click on “allow images” to read that particular email. The biggest problem is that the image usually contains not just an illustration of the product, but the details of the offer, as well. So, had I not been interested and deleted the email without opening or clicking through to the website, the success of the Email Marketing campaign of that particular organisation would instantly decrease.

Lee Chadwick of CommuniGator Talking Email Marketing at GMex in Manchester

This point was precisely among those that Lee Chadwick of Communigator touched upon during his talk on Email Marketing at Interactive Marketing 2008 in Manchester. As one of the leaders in Email Marketing, Communigator has developed a successful business strategy to help brands and businesses to get the top results from their marketing campaign. And what one needs to bear in mind – especially at the unstable time of financial crisis – is that a marketing campaign has to be successful, regardless of its budget.

To achieve that, Email Marketing campaign should be automatic by at least 80% and must be an integral part of a business’s general marketing campaign. I must admit that each and every time I hear speakers reiterate this point about integration of different kinds of marketing into one campaign I cannot stop wondering how well they are actually being heard by businesses. What looks and sounds like common sense in theory is, in fact, not when it comes down to practice.

Further to the automatic and dynamic creation of content, a successful Email Marketing campaign has to be relevant to its end user. Since recipient is interested in content (and to read it, he or she will spend some minutes of precious time and a certain amount of bandwidth), it is vital that this content is right and engaging.

Say, you are writing a copy for your newsletter’s headline. How to know if it is engaging? In some companies, apparently, they write the copies on the board, turn off the light in the room, close the door, and then storm back in the room, and turn on the light. The most engaging is the headline that instantly catches the attention of the majority. There may be other ways of testing the headline text, and you can always rely on Google’s format of 25 characters for the ad title copy, to get the idea of how short and attention-grabbing your message should be. Ultimately, though, your task is to reach out to the existing or potential customer.

This means, in turn, that the right headline and no broken images or text are only the beginning. To reach out to the customer we need to speak to him or her, and this affects not only the style of speech, but also the content of the newsletter. In terms of style, you can use a newsletter template to dynamically generate the welcome phrase, say: “Dear Jim, here is your November newsletter”. Most crucially, though – and this was the most important part of Lee’s talk as far as I am concerned – if you have a website and have access to the data about your visitors (which you should have), you must use the data to generate highly personalised newsletters.

Why is this a must? A woman who is also curious enough, I often grim upon hearing the word “personalised”. Instead of making me feel like my wishes are being catered for, the word “personalised” secretly implies to me that my choice is actually narrowed down to the point of being restricted. But no, in this case (especially when we have access to the sophisticated tools that allow you to see the clusters of visitors’ activity on your website) what we have is simply a situation when a visitor’s movement across the site is being analysed and used to supply the visitor with information and news about products the visitor is most likely to buy. If Figleaves analyses my activity on their website, they will see that as a customer I am particularly interested in print and lacy tights and stockings. Thus, ideally they should be sending me an email newsletter focusing precisely on my website browsing history, as well as on my previous purchases. There may be other ways in which you can use your website’s data, but the bottom line is – if you have the data, don’t take it for granted. Analyse it, make the most of it.

Unfortunately, many businesses still do not see the potential of Email Marketing, and because a marketing campaign entails a certain amount of spend, the money is channelled into the well-tested, well-known outlets. As I further spoke to Lee about the potential of Email Marketing for fashion and art organisations, it became clear that these two consistently fail to address their existing or prospective customers in the way that would allow to build not only a brand awareness, but a brand following, which is far more important in terms of the results and the impact of a marketing campaign.