The Revolution Masterclass on email marketing

targeted fashion. Worse still, they're missing out on a fantastic
opportunity. "Email marketing is DM on steroids," says Gail Dudleston,
managing director of digital agency twentysix. "We work with one retail
client whose email marketing campaign alone generated more than £20 million in revenue over a 20-week period. So the potential for email
marketing is phenomenal."

"Email marketing offers limitless opportunities to engage with a
customer, cross-sell to them, or simply reward them for loyalty," agrees
Nick Christie, UK country manager for Epsilon, an email-marketing
provider. Yet marketers miss too many opportunities when it comes to
email.

For a start, many brands fail to communicate with customers outside a
transaction - even when they have something interesting to tell them,
such as the launch of a new product or service, or the start of their
sale. But as long as the content is relevant, consumers will want to
hear about it, believes Christie. "We did some work with Proctor &
Gamble's Pampers brand, emailing pregnant women and mothers with advice
based on where they were in their pregnancy or how old their baby was."
The returns for such campaigns can be fantastic - the Pampers emails had
open and click-through rates of 60 per cent and 20 per cent
respectively.

This type of campaign is a tremendous way to raise brand awareness and
drive visitors to a brand's site; P&G, for example, saw a 300 per cent
uplift in visits. "For companies that may not be selling something
directly and who may have site advertising as a revenue model, email
marketing provides an opportunity to charge advertisers more because
they have more eyeballs on their site," adds Christie.

In competitive markets, branding via email marketing provides an
opportunity to differentiate a company's products and services. Zavvi,
the UK's largest independent entertainment retailer, not only needed to
raise its profile when it emerged from the management buy-out of Virgin
Megastores but also ensure it stood out in an already competitive
sector. "One thing that's really important to us is to be seen as being
knowledgeable about our area, even if it's not something that will
immediately lead to a direct sale," says Suzanne Jiggens, CRM and
new-media marketing manager at Zavvi. So when the NME award nominations
were announced, the retailer emailed customers who had opted in to
receive marketing communications (and specifically marketing
communications around music) to tell them about it.

Zavvi is able to communicate far more effectively with customers using
email since implementing campaign management software from Neolane,
because it can now track the same customer from in store to online and
vice versa. "Before we were doing very little: every now and again we'd
send a newsletter to our customers through our e-commerce platform
provider, but it was very ad hoc and we didn't really get that many
results from it," says Jiggens. The fact Zavvi is now able to talk to
its customers and build a relationship with them based on their
preferences is one of the main ways in which it is avoiding missed
opportunities.

Brand benefits

Many brands, however, don't even use the opportunity of sending a
confirmation or transaction email to customers to advertise to them.
This is another missed opportunity, because, while there are some
data-protection issues to be aware of - brands can't market to consumers
unless they have opted in to receive marketing communications - it's
also a good time to reiterate the brand benefits, cross- or up-sell.
"Add more branding to transactional emails and try to get a referral out
of them if you can through recommend-a-friend services," suggests
Dudleston.

Likewise, she recommends sending automatic trigger emails throughout the
customer lifecycle, particularly for products or services with long
delivery dates. "It's good because consumers know exactly where their
stock is and when it will arrive. If something relevant to the purchase
comes in - such as the latest accessory - you could also email the
customer to ask if they want it tagged to their order. It's all about
relevancy," she says.

Personalisation - whether through addressing the email to a specific
customer or delivering offers based on their preferences - is another
effective way of increasing the success of email marketing campaigns.
"The benefit of email marketing is that it's easy to make different,
personalised versions of the same email down to the product and call to
action, so it's almost one-to-one marketing," says Dudleston. But too
many brands still use the scattergun approach of sending one mass email
to many people, with limited results.

Zavvi sends more than 400,000 emails a week to interested customers and
around 25 to 30 per cent of respondents have declared their preferences
after logging on to the website. "So if someone has told us he is
specifically interested in buying games and we know he is buying Xbox
360 games, there is no point in telling him about PSP games in the
newsletter," says Jiggens. In some of its best performing campaigns,
this has delivered Zavvi a return on investment of 23:1.

Segmentation works hand in hand with personalisation to make email
campaigns as relevant and targeted as they can be. Many brands have
online 'preference centres' where users can tell them what they want to
hear about and how often. Based on this information, marketers can then
target groups of customers by their preferences and give customers
control of the frequency and types of communication they receive -
thereby minimising the possibility of over-communicating or
communicating the wrong information.

Highest returns

Alongside personalisation, integrated multi-channel campaigns are seen
in the industry as delivering the highest returns. One trend Jiggens has
noticed is that customers often tell Zavvi about their preferences but
their buying behaviour reveals a very different picture. By joining up
different marketing channels, brands should, in theory, be able to gain
a much clearer picture of each customer based on what they say and do.
"Usually, it's because they're buying gifts for someone else - so a
mother might have said she's interested in DVDs but will buy a lot of
games on the site for her son," she explains.

Admittedly, there are challenges around this - integrating data from
multiple sources and ensuring constant compliance with data-protection
legislation is never straightforward - but the benefits it brings are
worth it. For instance, integrating web analytics results with email
marketing campaigns can reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts
and deliver richer insights into customer behaviour.

Integrating email campaigns with offline marketing channels can also be
hugely successful, although it's not used by brands as often as it
should be. "For one of the retail banks, we used a teaser email campaign
to link into a piece of DM pre- and post-campaign," says Dudleston. "To
run a teaser campaign through DM is very difficult because of postage
timings. But, with email campaigns, you know exactly when it will get
there and it can be highly targeted."

Email marketing might be less established than DM, but that's no excuse
for not taking advantage of the opportunities it presents as an
advertising channel for marketers. Given the relatively low investment
required to run an email marketing campaign - or, more importantly, the
return on investment a personalised and targeted email campaign can
deliver - marketers would be foolish not to grab any email marketing
opportunities they can before their competitors beat them to it.