Kick Your E-mail Campaigns Into High Gear
Customer segmentation and personalization, along with better vendor selection, can help boost your e-mail marketing results.
January 2005 By Reported by Donna Loyle
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If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to boost response from your opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns, you’re not alone. Many multichannel marketers are chanting the same mantra — and with good reason.
E-mail click-to-purchase conversion rates and number of orders per e-mail delivered by retailers and catalogers continues to increase, according to DoubleClick’s Q3 2004 E-mail Trend Report. But other e-mail marketing statistics are less encouraging.
For instance, revenue per e-mail delivered is declining, as is median order size. Moreover, open rates for offers made by retail and catalog companies were the lowest among those categories tracked by DoubleClick — 30.8 percent in the third quarter.
And clickthrough rates among retailers/catalogers declined from 8.8 percent in the third quarter of 2003, to 5.6 percent in the same quarter in 2004, for a 36.4 percent decline.
DoubleClick officials say the behavior of e-mail recipients appears to be changing, perhaps maturing along with the medium itself. “Recipients seem less likely to always click on a promotional e-mail, but when they do click, they’re demonstrating that they’re more likely to be ‘in market’ for products and services, and have a higher propensity to convert,” said DoubleClick officials in a Dec. 6, 2004, release.
So how can you boost your opt-in e-mail campaigns? Following are some tactics to try.
Segment Your E-mail Housefile
Like any effective direct marketing campaign, the goal is to make offers that are relevant to recipients. One proven tactic: Segment your customer list and deliver offers appropriate to each segment.
That’s what Andrea Vitale, vice president of direct marketing at 1-800-Flowers.com, is doing. Her team devises customer communications based on recency. That is, customers who’ve purchased in the past 12 months get a different message from those who haven’t bought in more than a year. Gift-givers get an altogether different message, one that reminds them of their last purchase and suggests similar merchandise. Vitale says those customers “probably are our highest-responding” group because of the relevancy of the offers being made.
Loren McDonald, vice president of marketing at e-mail service provider EmailLabs in Redwood City, Calif., notes three common ways to segment an e-mail housefile:
Demographics. But look beyond mere gender and geography, he says. Track the ISP the recipient uses. “AOL users will act differently with your e-mails than others,” McDonald explains. You also want to know how each customer came onto your file, whether through your retail channel, catalog, search engine, referral, etc. “Where did your relationship with that customer begin? That information will tell you a lot about the customer,” he notes.
E-mail click-to-purchase conversion rates and number of orders per e-mail delivered by retailers and catalogers continues to increase, according to DoubleClick’s Q3 2004 E-mail Trend Report. But other e-mail marketing statistics are less encouraging.
For instance, revenue per e-mail delivered is declining, as is median order size. Moreover, open rates for offers made by retail and catalog companies were the lowest among those categories tracked by DoubleClick — 30.8 percent in the third quarter.
And clickthrough rates among retailers/catalogers declined from 8.8 percent in the third quarter of 2003, to 5.6 percent in the same quarter in 2004, for a 36.4 percent decline.
DoubleClick officials say the behavior of e-mail recipients appears to be changing, perhaps maturing along with the medium itself. “Recipients seem less likely to always click on a promotional e-mail, but when they do click, they’re demonstrating that they’re more likely to be ‘in market’ for products and services, and have a higher propensity to convert,” said DoubleClick officials in a Dec. 6, 2004, release.
So how can you boost your opt-in e-mail campaigns? Following are some tactics to try.
Segment Your E-mail Housefile
Like any effective direct marketing campaign, the goal is to make offers that are relevant to recipients. One proven tactic: Segment your customer list and deliver offers appropriate to each segment.
That’s what Andrea Vitale, vice president of direct marketing at 1-800-Flowers.com, is doing. Her team devises customer communications based on recency. That is, customers who’ve purchased in the past 12 months get a different message from those who haven’t bought in more than a year. Gift-givers get an altogether different message, one that reminds them of their last purchase and suggests similar merchandise. Vitale says those customers “probably are our highest-responding” group because of the relevancy of the offers being made.
Loren McDonald, vice president of marketing at e-mail service provider EmailLabs in Redwood City, Calif., notes three common ways to segment an e-mail housefile:
Demographics. But look beyond mere gender and geography, he says. Track the ISP the recipient uses. “AOL users will act differently with your e-mails than others,” McDonald explains. You also want to know how each customer came onto your file, whether through your retail channel, catalog, search engine, referral, etc. “Where did your relationship with that customer begin? That information will tell you a lot about the customer,” he notes.
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