Email Personalization Works!

Are You Getting the Most from It?

Email marketing should take its place as an important component of your integrated marketing strategy. It takes work to get it right, though. You have to get permission from your constituents to email them, and then cover all the bases to make sure that your messages are relevant, timely, and deliverable. But that’s just the beginning. Those who really want to see results from their investment of time and money have to use the direct response segmentation skills they’ve been honing in offline marketing efforts and apply them to their online campaigns. What might seem daunting at first is truly enlightening, once you thoroughly test and measure your results.

Email outreach can be very cost-effective, impactful, and fast. Over the last several years, opinions have swung widely on its role in acquiring and retaining donors, members, and customers. But many forward-thinking organizations that have consistently worked with the medium over time have proven that it can produce stellar results. Whether your goal is to gain new members for your organization or renew old ones, raise funds, mount political action campaigns, or sell products, email affords possibilities never before available.

The key is segmentation and relevant personalization. It may be as simple as personalizing your message with the recipient’s name, or as complex as delivering variable content, images, and offers to each and every recipient. Through trial and error, emarketers have learned that segmentation improves results every bit as much as it does other outreach efforts.

What follows are some basic rules of email marketing, including some of the most up-to-date information on what works and why.

Know Before You Go: integrate email with other efforts
Get permission
Personalize, personalize, personalize
Gather email addresses everywhere
Keep your list clean
Know how to get your message delivered
Offer relevant messages
Test multiple variables
Treat design as a test element
Perform good follow-through and measurement

1. Know Before You Go: integrate email with other efforts

Flexible & Affordable

There are many reasons that email marketing is becoming so widespread. Email can be produced without the long lead times and costs of direct mail, so it’s possible for email messages to focus on goals other than solicitation. Likewise, lower development costs let you easily send different messages to different segments of your constituent base, even to very small segments. As a result, email is a valuable tool for developing relationships, as well as for promoting renewals, special appeals, and reactivation of lapsed constituents. Once you obtain permission from a customer, donor, or member to communicate with them electronically, you have a powerful channel that allows you to segment and test your communications on a one-to-one basis.

Testing Speed

Email marketing can also answer your testing questions more quickly and at much less cost than direct mail. The medium enables you to gauge deliverability, open rates, and click-through rates on a moment-by-moment basis, which can help you make better decisions about your campaign and adjust it as you go.

Urgency

Email is also flexible enough to communicate with them quickly when there is an urgent need to reach your constituent base. For-profit companies can promote last-minute sales of excess capacity or products, or make splashy announcements about new capabilities or product offerings. For membership organizations, email can mobilize rapid response, such as mounting a letter-writing campaign about pending legislation or other important news. Email is an excellent medium for handling such time-sensitive communications.

The best overall advice we can offer on placing email into your "go-to-market" strategy is to take the long view. Consider that each and every email is just one contact in a longer-term relationship with each constituent. Plan your timing, frequency, and content accordingly. A poor response to a given communication may be a result of its timing in coordination with other, planned, non-email interactions. And not every email should focus on an ask. Use email strategically, to build relationships and build your brand awareness and loyalty.

Just as email marketing can work successfully and quickly, it is also fraught with opportunities for failure.

All components – email, direct mail, website, print, events, publicity, etc – should be timed and crafted to support each other.

Just as email marketing can work successfully and quickly, it is also fraught with opportunities for failure. Handled badly, it can damage your brand and irreversibly break your constituents’ trust. This is another reason to use email strategically as one medium in an integrated marketing strategy. All components – email, direct mail, website, print, events, publicity, etc – should be timed and crafted to support each other. The email effort should be targeted only to those segments of your constituency whom you know prefer this channel for interaction. This will require doing some up-front work to find those individuals and get their permission.

2. Get permission

Email demands a new kind of contract with your constituents. It is not acceptable – ethically or legally – to blast emails to your constituents without first obtaining their express consent. The best defense is a proactive process of gaining permissions to communicate by email.

The Council for Responsible E-Mail of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) recommends several best practices for obtaining permission:

Invite individuals to join your email mailing list on your website, in a direct mail piece, or over the phone, and be sure to inform them at that time about the nature and frequency of the emails you’ll be sending.

Create a clear privacy policy that is easily accessible to recipients on your website. It should explain what data is collected, how it will be used, and if and how it will be shared.

Track and record customer permission with the date and time received in order to expedite response to inquiries.

Organizations have four basic levels of permission to choose from:

Opt-Out: Most marketers are familiar with opt-out consent. It does not require what the DMA calls “affirmative consent,” in that no action is required on the part of the consumer other than clicking an option to be removed from your email mailing list. The Council for Responsible E-Mail recommends that the opt-out option be included at the point of initial email capture (with a pre-checked box) and in subsequent communications (not pre-checked). This is the least potent permission, as it does not require any action on the part of the recipient and therefore may yield the highest number of inactivate recipients, bounce-backs, and later opt-outs.

Opt-In: Here, the user actively elects to receive email from you. No confirmation email is sent and the user is not required to take further action.

Confirmed Opt-In: The user here elects to receive one or more of your communications. You do follow-up with a confirming email, but do not require the user to take any additional action.

Double Opt-In: The highest level of permission. May produce smaller yields on the front end. The constituents who complete the process are highly qualified, and tend to be more responsive to subsequent email campaigns. These users elect to receive your email messages, and then have to confirm that choice upon receiving a confirmation email.

3. Personalize, personalize, personalize

Ann Holland of research publishing firm, MarketingSherpa, writes, “any personalization is good personalization.” Ann Holland of research publishing firm, MarketingSherpa, writes, “any personalization is good personalization.” In her company’s newest report, “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006,” the publisher reports that 70% of marketers are personalizing their email campaigns by using the recipient’s name in the body of the email. Even this simple form of personalization yields higher open rates and click-throughs. Read CBA's review of "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006."

The next most common form of personalization is the delivery of dynamic content, a far more complex process requiring up-front investment in email software systems capable of linking content to your mailing file database. Learn about CBA's trusted email marketing systems providers.

Also prevalent among experienced marketers are campaigns segmented by recipient demographics and by user behavior, such as the age of the record and activity history.

Segmentation is a lot of work. But it’s worth the effort. Segmentation of email lists increases the number of recipients who open your emails, and can double the rate at which recipients click through to your website.

4. Gather email addresses everywhere

Even if you have few email addresses to start with, don’t put off the effort to enter the email marketing world. There are many ways to gather email addresses from your existing constituents. Here are a few offered by email marketing systems vendor, Convio:

Gather addresses through every offline interaction. Add a field for email collection to all response forms in renewal appeals, membership drives, and event invitations. At events, set out a newsletter sign-up sheet or offer a giveaway for attendees who give you their card with their name and email address.

When asking for email addresses offline, emphasize the benefits your constituents will receive by providing this information. Remind them of the money and time your organization can save with email communications, and that it will enable you to provide more timely communications.

Use offline communications to drive people to your website, where you should set up mechanisms for capturing name, address, and email information.

Provide an online registration mechanism that is easy to use. Offer a compelling incentive, such as a newsletter or special notice mailing list, so recipients see a benefit to providing their email information.

Provide clear, easily-seen explanations of how the consumer’s data will be used and protected, and offer easy opt-out choices. Better yet, offer consumers a range of communications, and ask them to select the ones they are most interested in.

Build your list through viral marketing. “Tell-a-friend” email campaigns asking for donations or other actions should include a request to forward the email to friends, family, and colleagues, inviting them to get involved. When a new supporter clicks through to your website to register and take action, you can ask for their permission to include them in future communications.

Consider appending your house file with email names from a third-party email list source. Although this can be expensive and have unpredictable results.

Don’t worry about obtaining extensive profile information at the outset. This can come over time, through follow-up surveys and tracking of behavioral history. The key is to get started and learn what your constituents want in this new medium.

5. Keep your list clean

If more than 4 to 5 percent of your outbound email campaign addresses are undeliverable, you risk more than just the failure of that campaign. ISPs, ever on the alert for spammers, will decrease your rating. Get enough reductions in your rating, and you are likely to get blocked from mailing again.

How do you keep your list clean?

Every time you mail, get your Email Service Provider (ESP) to send all bounce-backs through to you so you can remove them from your list (and try to find a correct address!).

If some of the bounces were “soft,” meaning that they were returned as temporarily undeliverable, you can try to email them once or twice more before you give up and remove them from your list.

Because email addresses deteriorate more rapidly than physical addresses, you should mail every four months to ensure that your names are still good.

Use the appropriate suppression files, including the DMA’s e-Mail Preference Service, Deceased Do-Not-Contact List, wireless blocker, and other sources (see Related Links at the end of this article).

Make the “REMOVE” option in your emails easy to find and easy to read.

Know the Wireless Domain rules. Even if you don’t intentionally engage in messaging to wireless devices, you may inadvertently do so and run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act. To avoid this problem, run your email list against the Federal Communications Commission wireless domains suppression list (see Related Links at the end of this article).

6. Know how to get your message delivered

The essence of deliverability is respect of your audience. The Direct Marketing Association offers valuable guidelines for setting up your electronic communications correctly within the scope of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Deliverability is controlled by three factors:

Content. If your communication is about an existing transaction (e.g., a bill or renewal notice) it does not have to comply with the legislation. But if you want to add a sales pitch to it, be careful that your subject line is not too commercial or you may get blacklisted by the ISPs as spam.

Notice. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 again spells out the requirements for ensuring that email recipients can opt-out:

Provide clear and conspicuous notice that the message is a solicitation.

Be clear and accurate in your Subject line about your content.

Include your physical address and contact information.

Provide an opportunity to opt-out of future mailings through a link to your website to unsubscribe or by sending back an email (you must keep that email address active for at least 30 days).

Participate in any ISP-provided feedback loops and handle any complaints promptly and thoroughly.

Filters and Authentication. According to MarketingSherpa’s new research study, reviewed by CBA, many marketers still don’t realize how big a problem spam filters are. Spam filters are built into popular email managers to enable recipients to screen out unwanted mail. Filters use multiple criteria for this screening, most of which are controllable by the marketer. Using concise, substantive subject lines, identify your organization in the “from” line, and always advise anyone joining your email list how to add you to their filter’s white list (specific instructions work best). Convio also suggests that your email marketing software should offer a spam checker so you can identify any potential spam violaions and correct them before sending your email out. (See Link for The Basics of Email Marketing for Nonprofits at the end of this article.)

The new emerging standards for deliverability, however, go much further. Because spammers so easily can get around filters and spam blockers, ISPs like America Online, Yahoo, and MSN/Hotmail are developing Authentication, Accreditation, and Reputation solutions to better protect their customers. The Direct Marketing Association now requires all members to employ one of these standards in mailings after February 1st. See the links at the end of this article for more information.

For more information on Deliverability, be sure to check out the two DMA reports listed at the end of this article.

7. Offer relevant messages

According to Bigfoot Interactive, 57% of consumers polled last spring felt that email from businesses they transact with are more relevant now than they were a year ago. Marketers have been paying attention, and learning to use in-house data to personalize messages. Unfortunately only 4 out of 10 marketing emails get opened, and of those, only a small percentage (6% to 8%) result in click-throughs to a website. Combine this with the growing challenge of successfully getting the messages into your customers’ inbox, and you realize that there is a lot to learn to make email work well for your organization.

Focus your communication on one message, one offer, and one simple action. And don’t ever stoop to what long-time direct-response guru Herschell Gordon Lewis calls “white –collar bandit” emailing (Direct, July 2004). This is where a come-on such as a “free trial” or bogus “order confirmation” lures readers into a complex set of on-line forms that, once completed, finally deliver the news that the “free item” will actually cost them $6.95 for shipping and a credit card charge 10 days later if they don’t cancel the deal before then.

8. Test Multiple Variables

Email affords the speed and flexibility for aggressive, inexpensive testing and fast results. You can start with simple A/B splits on a 5% sample of your mailing list to gauge open and click-through rates using different FROM and SUBJECT lines. But to really take advantage of the medium, more and more marketers perform multivariate testing of a whole range of elements, including copy, graphics, offers, day of week and time of day sent, copy length, links, etc.

Veteran copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis suggested in a column last summer that all email marketers should test the “ask” against a website click. You should also test frequency of communications, and the day of the week and time of day that your message goes out.

..organizations that take the time to segment their e-mailings and test different offers and creative, consistently get much better results than organizations that don’t.According to research publisher Marketing Sherpa, organizations that take the time to segment their e-mailings and test different offers and creative, consistently get much better results than organizations that don’t. Their 2006 Email Usage Benchmark Study reports that segmented promotional campaigns average email open rates of 30% and click-throughs of almost 7%. Compare this with non-segmented email campaigns, which average only 4.4% open rates and less than 0.5% click-throughs.

Marketing Sherpa also reports proof that email hotlist marketing can yield far better results because of name recency, and that the correct combination of copy and graphics can yield higher responses.

Consider tracking response history by customer for each test element, as well, to get a sense of how best to personalize each communication to each individual.

Said Matthew Seeley, chief operating officer at CheetahMail, in a recent article from DMA Insider, “Testing is a necessity, not an option.”

9. Treat design as a test element

Email recipients who actually open your email will give your content at most, a 20-second scan to determine whether to read further. So it’s critical to test different layouts and wording to determine your control. It is difficult to come up with hard and fast rules on this, because there are so many different types of email pages to evaluate. Single-focus pages, for example, may have a single block of text. Multi-product pages may offer text-only or text and images. In general, current research indicates that readers typically read only part of a headline, and can be directed away from the typical left-side-of-the page orientation by the placement of good text blocks or graphics. It also appears that graphics are important in increasing readership, but should never overpower the text.

10. Perform good follow-through and measurement

Just as you would in postal mail, set up response tracking devices for each mailing. Quality Email Service Providers (ESP) are able to monitor and report back the number of recipients who opened the email. They’re also able to track how many recipients clicked through to your website.

But you also should do the groundwork at your end to be ready to measure click-throughs and conversions. Create individualized landing pages for each version of your email, and test them. The landing pages must be relevant to the offer you make in the email and must allow the individual to easily complete the action step requested.

Also plan in advance to have an immediate follow-up confirmation go to the individual’s email after they have completed the registration, purchase, donation, or whatever other step was required of them at the website. And before you mail, create a plan for the frequency and content of subsequent conversion and retention messages.

Conclusion

If it all sounds overwhelming, don’t despair. Start small and grow your effort as you master more and more of the techniques described in this article. Work with an experienced direct-response agency that can integrate the time-proven skills of direct-response and database marketing into all of your communications channels. Over time, consider investing in a more sophisticated email management system that can enable you to dynamically deliver segmented content to different segments of your database. Every campaign is different. Even the failures may not be true failures in the overall relationships you’re trying to build with your marketplace.