Email Marketing: Quality not quantity

Some 1.61 billion emails were sent in this period, compared with 1.18 billion pieces of direct mail. Email marketers might view this as a cause for celebration, but almost half the email campaigns were on a 'one-size-fits-all' basis, with little or no segmentation or targeting. The report also showed that opt-out rates have risen in the past six months, suggesting that while email volumes may be on the rise, quality is not.

The fact that email is such a cheap marketing channel means marketers have little incentive to spend money on address hygiene and targeting, says Guy Hanson, business development director at Database Group Interactive.

"It would be short sighted to underestimate the fact that most email recipients now have a 'mark as junk' or 'this is spam' button. This needs only to be used once and a brand will never get through to them again," he says.

MASS REACH

In a campaign-driven environment, with sales targets to hit, the quickest and simplest thing to do is to get the message out to as many people as possible. Matt Potter, head of client development at Cheetahmail, believes this is a lame excuse.

"If people value email more and spend the same amount of time on email as they do on direct mail, then the argument that it takes too long to target emails will drop out of the window," he says. "But as long as the perception remains that it is just a quick, cheap, also-ran channel, then this argument will persist."

Email authentification systems such as Goodmail and ReturnPath, which identify legitimate emails, have established themselves recently, but not everyone in the sector is convinced they are the solution. "Goodmail and Return Path are not the answer, they are tools," says Matthew Kelleher, head of marketing at Redeye. "They will highlight issues that marketers need to act on, but the key today is reputation. Send good, targeted, quality emails with a relevant message to a clean segmented base and you will get few bounces and no unsubscribes."

As a client-side email marketer, how do you assess whether the emails you send are relevant to each person?

To answer this, email marketing provider E-Dialog has developed the Relevance Trajectory, a standard for measuring and improving the relevance of email campaigns. The framework scores email campaigns on six factors: segmentation, lifecycle management, triggers, personalisation, interactivity, testing and measurement. It enables clients to benchmark their performance and take remedial action to improve it.

"Email marketers have always struggled to measure relevance," says E-Dialog managing director, Simone Barratt. "This offers a tangible key performance indicator that helps them assess where they are now with email and identify what they need to do to improve."

To ensure emails are more relevant and better targeted, there are many challenges to overcome. Profiling information is required to segment databases by factors such as age, gender, click-through and purchase history. Good and interesting content is also a vital part of the mix, an area that is often overlooked.

A report, The Chaos of Content, published by analyst Jupiter in August, outlines the top three production challenges when building targeted emails: having enough staff to develop multiple versions of the email; proofing and approving content and excessive time needed to work with content.

"For companies with lots of products, it's easy to strip the copy out of other material and create dynamic emails, but for others, it is harder," says CheetahMail's Potter.

When it comes to data, marketers face two choices: append lifestyle data from one of the big data suppliers, or build your own customer profiles in-house. Acxiom, CACI, Experian and IPT-owned Holistic Lists all offer email appending services, which work by comparing the client's customer database of postal addresses against the e-append database which contains postal and email data.

Experian's version is for B2B campaigns. It works by matching a client list against Experian's National Business Database, which contains data from Yellow Pages and Thomson, including 500,000 records with opted-in email addresses. CACI holds nine million opted-in UK email records, while Holistic Lists has 7.4m and Acxiom 1.7 million.

Acxiom says until a few months ago, it adopted a three-stage opt-in approach. Matched records would receive an email from Acxiom telling them they had been matched to a firm's database, of whom they were a customer, and that this firm wanted to communicate with them. If an opt-in was received, the customer would receive another email from the brand requesting an opt-in. If no reply was received, they were sent another email, and if that was ignored, the email address was suppressed from the brand's database.

But with other suppliers adopting an opt-out approach, Acxiom account director Hugh Stevens says it has now followed suit. Even with this approach, however, Stevens says the average match rate is only 3-5 per cent. As Database Interactive's Hanson points out, email appending services are a fairly "broad brush" approach.

The preferred approach is to build a profile of customers in-house. Once consumers have opted in to your emails, use their click-through and transactional behaviour to build a better picture of them and feed this into the database for segmentation purposes.

Gary Stevens, managing director of Inbox Digital, says the only details asked for at the point of registration for its client Panasonic is an email address. Then, over time, additional information is added to the consumer's profile.

There's no doubt that segmentation, targeting, testing and tracking response all add to the direct marketer's workload. But those on the email marketing coalface insist they lead to better ROI.

POWER POINTS

- Email volumes are overtaking direct mail.

- Most email campaigns, however, have little or no segmentation or targeting.

- Building a customer profile in-house enriches segmentation.

HEAD TO HEAD

Acquisition: does direct mail or email work best?

- The email supporter

Nick Turner-Samuels Online marketing manager Samsung Mobile

Direct mail is associated more with the tons of junk mail that you have to throw in the bin. If I get emails I haven't subscribed to, at least they get filtered into a junk folder. Direct mail seems to be a tool of the past. If I want to appeal to a younger, tech-savvy market, it doesn't fit the bill compared with email.

Email is simpler to produce and cheaper to send out. You can control when recipients will receive your message, allowing you to target the optimum moment someone is likely to make a purchase or visit your site.

When people receive an email, it is easy for them to click through and browse products, take part in promotions, speak to customer services or make a purchase, and this can be fully tracked.

Customers won't need to take an email from their letterbox to the computer and type in an email address, or take it with them to a shop to redeem a voucher.

- The direct mail supporter

Martin Troughton Marketing director, Anglian Windows

The push-versus-pull debate is never more pertinent than on the internet, where I can find anything I want, but anything I don't want can find me.

With direct mail, we all know the rules and etiquette. With email, he who shouts loudest to the most people, seems to think they can win.

When I worked agency-side at HTW, we used to preach the concept of 'Relevant Abruption'. If it is relevant in the eyes of the consumer and abruptive enough to be noticed, it will stimulate positive brand response. With direct mail, assisted by intelligent targeting to boost relevance and creativity to deliver the message in an interesting way, you will be on to a winner.

If email is produced with the same rigour to cause a relevant abruption it would be welcomed, but those selling the medium are often too interested in the economic short-term gain of how many people they can broadcast too, for such a low cost.