2015 essential guide: email markerting

EMAIL MARKETING

2015E SS E NTI AL GUIDE

n The Complex, Yet Straightforward State of Email Deliverability

n 7 Ways to Use Email to Combat Email Disengagement

n Capitalizing on Email’s Strengths While Overcoming Its Weaknesses

A supplement of

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If you knew your customer had a support issue /

was browsing your website / preferred SMS / was having a birthday /

was happy / ran out of a product / was retiring / was near a store /

was relaxing / was in for some rain / had 10,000 Twitter followers /

was on a mobile device / was in a snow storm / was brand loyal /

abandoned their cart / was getting married / responded well to video /

was about to miss a fl ash sale / was planning a family vacation /

liked your Facebook page / was traveling for business / was busy /

only bought online / bought a house / just reviewed your product

what would you do differently?

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6 HOT LIST7 Ways to Use Email to Combat Email DisengagementEmail is as popular as ever, but so are feelings of email fatigue. Here’s how to bring wayward customers back into the email fold. by Perry Simpson

8 DELIVERABILITYWe’ve Got Our ISPs on YouThe current, complex, yet straightforward state of email deliver-ability. by Eric Krell

14 STRATEGY Email, Like Fine Wine, Gets Better With Age Email continues to be a marketing staple because it works without busting the marketing budget—and marketers continue to reinvent it. by Jason Compton

18 TREND ROUNDUP � e Email Opportunist Email’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Here’s how marketers overcome the latter to capitalize on the former. by Ginger Conlon

Table of Contents

+DATAENTRY

79% Email marketing messages that reach inboxes (a 5% decrease versus 2014) page 10

72% Consumers who value hearing from brands through email page 15

30% Consumers who want to receive shorter emails page 16

56% B2C emails using mobile-friendly design page 16

Justin FosterLiveclicker

20

1014

2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing | TOC

“One of email’s great-est strengths, simply, is that it works. Email has been shown to be a solid source for leads and a strong revenue channel.”

dmnews.com | October 2015 | 3

6

8

03_TOC.indd 3 9/17/15 10:23 AM

How often do you refer to your email campaigns as blasts? My guess is that out of habit you do so not only when campaigns are actually batch-and-blast mailings, but also

when they’re personalized or targeted.Well, it’s time to reframe. Sure, there’s a limited place for batch-and-blast campaigns

where the only personalized component is the greeting. But with persnickety customers expecting relevancy and marketers hav-ing an ever-growing array of personalization tactics, it behooves marketers to reprogram their approaches—from the way they ref-erence campaigns and customers to the way they segment and strategize.

Let’s talk fi rst about reframing how you think about modern email marketing, using professional athletes as an example. Many professional athletes visualize successful outcomes for training and competition; numerous studies have shown that this visualization, as well as positive self-talk, are highly eff ective and

help set professional athletes apart from the rest of us. Now it’s your turn to get in the zone: Hanging onto the langauge of mass marketing when attempting

to transition to a more personalized approach is counterproductive. It’s time to stop saying “blast,” and time to start saying “campaign” or “mailing.” And it’s time to stop talking about personalization, and actually get personal—that is, see customers as individuals, not just as a mass, nameless source of revenue.

Speaking of getting personal: Please stop calling prospects and customers “targets.” I can understand using “target au-dience”—there’s still an element of humanity in this defi nition. But “targets” removes all humanity from the equation. Let’s face it, whether in B2B or B2C, the people you’re marketing to more often buy based on emotion than on rational decisions. So, imagine yourself in your customers’ shoes: Do you want to be someone’s target? It’s time to put a bit more Golden Rule back into email marketing-speak.

In fact, putting customers at the center of your email campaigns is essential today. As contributing writer Eric Krell points out in “We’ve got Our ISPs on You” (page 8), Internet Service Providers are in-creasingly using engagement metrics, such as opens and clicks, to determine which emails get through to users and which ones are redirected to the spam folder.

� e good news is that there are myraid ways to add personal touches to email today—and the options will only continue to increase as new technologies launch that are designed to support them. In “Email, Like Fine Wine, Gets Better With Age” (page 14), contributing writer Jason Compton shares examples of four companies using everything from triggers to video to moment-of-open personalization to refresh their email campaigns and engage their audiences—all to resounding success. As Clark Cummings, se-nior manager of member marketing at Marriott International, says in the article, “� e pendulum has swung, and people are expecting us to use their data. It’s been liberating.”

So, unlike the Golden Oldies that resurface on the radio, it’s time to make email blasts the blast from the past that stays there. It’s time for marketers to use what they know about their customers to get personal with them. As Listrak Chief Brand Strategist Ryan Hofmann points out in “� e Email Opportun-ist” (page 18), “Too many email marketers still deliver the same message to every single subscriber on their list despite having data easily accessible to deliver targeted and personalized messages.”

Don’t be that email marketer. Be the one who puts customers fi rst, and sees a blast of ROI as a result. ■

EDITORIALEditor-in-Chief, Ginger [email protected] 646-638-6184

Senior EditorAl Urbanski

Senior EditorNatasha D. Smith

Associate EditorElyse Dupré

Digital Content CoordinatorPerry Simpson

Contributing WritersJason ComptonEric Krell

ART AND PRODUCTIONArt Director James Jarnot

Associate Managing EditorAndrew Corselli

Senior Production Manager Michelle Zuhlke

ADVERTISING(646) 638-6171VP/PublisherGreg Zalka

Marketing ManagerJackie Amato

Circulation Marketing ManagerTracey Harilall

Account DirectorDeborah Hartley

Account ManagerMatt Lee

Lead Generation Campaign ManagerRene Serulle

Sales/Editorial AssistantBrian Scott Mednick

CORPORATEChairman/CEO Lee Maniscalco

Chief Operations Offi cer John Crewe

EVP/Chief Content Offi cerJulia Hood

SVP/Group Publisher, Business MediaAndrew Amill

VP, Digital – Business GroupKeith O’Brien

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Ginger ConlonEditor-in-ChiefDirect Marketing News

A Blast From Is the Past

Direct Marketing News (ISSN 0194-3588), 114 West 26th St., New York, NY 10001(646) 638-6000

© 2015 Haymarket Media

Direct Marketing News is published monthly, 10 times a year, with combined December/January and July/August issues by Haymarket Media Inc., 114 West 26th St., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Publisher: Haymarket Media, Inc. 114 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. Periodicals postage paid at New York and additional points of entry. Reproduction of any part of Direct Marketing News or its trademarked or copyrighted supplements without express permission of the publisher is prohibited.

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EDITOR’S NOTE | 2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing

IT’S TIME TO STOP TALKING ABOUT PERSONALIZATION, AND ACTUALLY GET PERSONAL—THAT IS, SEE CUSTOMERS AS INDIVIDUALS, NOT JUST AS A MASS, NAMELESS SOURCE OF REVENUE.

A Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the PastA Blast From Is the Past

04_EdNote.indd 4 9/17/15 10:23 AM

Designing your cross-channel playbook: Email and social | 3

Methodology

The figures presented in this ebook are pulled from a month-long online assessment

that was taken between May 8 and June 8, 2015. There were 82 marketers who took

the quiz, with the following job title breakdown:

Job title of quiz respondents

21% 49%

15%23%

4%1%

9%

4% CMO/EVP/SVP

1% Vice President

15% Director

49% Manager

9% Analyst/Coordinator

23% Other

* Numbers may not sum to 100% due to rounding.

Curious to see where you fall?

Take our quiz to determine whether

you’re a Monetization MVP,

a Retargeting all-star, a Cross-

promoting captain or just Stepping

up to the plate. And see this

sidebar for insights on your fellow

marketers’ responses!

Take the quiz now

Designing your cross-channel playbook: Email and social | 2

Email and social — sworn rivals or a dynamic duo?

Most marketers realize the importance of a seamless customer experience. But common obstacles — like lack of a single

customer view, having the right technology and organizational structure — make executing a unified marketing strategy a

challenge across channels.

The good news is there are many ways you can begin to integrate your email and social strategies. Some tactics are

easy to implement — they’ll take nothing more than a bit of coordination and cross-promotion. Others require some

additional technology and data linkage. Over the following pages, we’ll outline four levels of integration, along with tips and

recommendations for further integration.

LEVEL 1

Stepping up to the plate

13%Four levels of email and

social integration

LEVEL 2

Cross-promoting captain

39%LEVEL 3

Retargeting all-star

LEVEL 4

Monetization MVP

32%

16%

Designing your

cross-channel playbook

Email and social

An Experian Marketing Services eBook

H0T LIST | Essential Guide to Email Marketing 2015

By Perry Simpson

For many consumers, email is the lifeline through which they main-tain relations with businesses. In fact, seven in 10 adults prefer email as their primary marketing communications channel, with

91% indicating that they like to receive promotional emails from com-panies they do business with, according to survey data from marketing research firm MarketingSherpa.

It’s impossible to deny the potency of email as a marketing channel in the face of such findings. But email’s low cost and effectiveness has, far too often, led to over-emailing that causes email fatigue among recipi-ents. The inevitable outcome of email fatigue? Disengagement.

Surprisingly, however, due to email’s acceptance and proliferation, many marketers actually turn to the channel when seeking ways to

7 Ways to Use Email to Combat Email

Disengagement

EMAIL IS AS POPULAR AS EVER, BUT SO ARE FEELINGS OF EMAIL FATIGUE. HERE’S HOW TO BRING WAYWARD

CUSTOMERS BACK INTO THE EMAIL FOLD.


06_Hot_List_v2.indd 6 9/17/15 10:24 AM

reengage those fatigued customers.“[Email] is not a fleeting moment like some other channels—there’s a

real opportunity to impress value upon customers as email creates an impression on the user in the inbox; but email’s ability to be effective as a reengagement channel is directly tied to what caused disengagement in the first place,” says Kara Trivunovic, VP of digital solutions at Epsilon.

Remedying disengagement is perhaps one of marketing’s toughest challenges, but doing so is a must. If a customer opts in to email com-munication and regularly engages with a brand’s email content, only to gradually (or suddenly) withdraw from communication, this is a signal marketers need to address to ensure that they retain that customer. Just as marketers must apply sophisticated email strategies to acquire new customers, they must use savvy email tactics to reengage customers. Here we explore seven ways marketers can do just that.

Get to the root causeCustomers disengage with emails for myriad reasons. Perhaps their tastes have changed. Maybe their need for a particular product or ser-vice has waned. Or perhaps the emails they’re receiving don’t meet their expectations.

“Go back to the beginning and understand why a customer started engaging with your email program in the first place. Did they subscribe via a purchase cycle? Or perhaps you acquired them through a newslet-ter or promotion?” Trivunovic says. “Going back to the point of acquisi-tion will allow you to understand what your customers expected when they signed up for your program, then [you can] deliver content that is relevant to these expectations.”

Some marketers may assume that customers are disengaging because they feel bombarded; these marketers may respond by curbing the fre-quency of their email campaigns. By scaling back email communications without understanding customers’ motivation for disengaging, market-ers could potentially make the situation worse.

“Scaling back from a frequency perspective may help in the short term but you still need to understand why [customers] aren’t engaging. It’s important to determine the disconnect and adjust your reengagement strategy accordingly,” Trivunovic says. “Consider surveying customers to learn firsthand why they aren’t engaging. Ask them questions such as, ‘Are we getting it right?’ or, ‘What would you like to see from us?’ to better understand their needs and deliver more relevant content.”

PersonalizeSome of the most effective email campaigns are personalized in terms of content or triggers. Indeed, personalization is essential to relevance, which is among the most influential factors in the engagement equation.

“The key to using email effectively is ensuring the right content is de-livered to customers at the right time. The more tailored the interaction, the more likely a customer is to be engaged,” says Gordon Evans, VP of product marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “Marketers should combine email with insights gained from customer data across the busi-ness, as well as with other channels and tools, to achieve this heightened level of personalization.”

Learn and act on customer preferencesIf customers trust that a brand’s emails will help them solve a problem or meet a relevant need—and do so in what they consider to be a timely manner and at a frequency they prefer—their likelihood of disengaging should diminish.

“Be transparent with the consumer. Ask customers what they want to

receive via email and how frequently they want to receive it and then provide it to them,” says David Brown, EVP of customer engagement agency Meredith Xcelerated Marketing. “Earn their trust so they can be-lieve that when they open an email from you it will be relevant to them.”

Enabling customers to dictate the frequency of email via, say, a prefer-ence center can be a highly effective reengagement tool.

“Allow customers to have a hand in controlling the experience. Provide them with more options for timing, number of emails, etc.,” Evans says. “Marketers can do a lot of testing to optimize performance, but sometimes just asking people what they like and want can provide the best results.”

If you wouldn’t mail it, don’t email itAlthough email remains one of the most cost effective and scalable mar-keting channels, marketers should ensure that they’re sending the best content at the best possible time—and not just send campaigns because email is “low cost” or “easy.”

“For every email you’re planning to send to a customer you should be asking yourself, ‘If I had to put a postage stamp on this and mail it, would I think it was worth it to send to my customer? Would they be willing to open it and read it?’ If the answer is no, you shouldn’t be emailing it either,” Brown says.

Ensure that emails are responsive, and visually optimizedDesign and user experience are as important as the message itself in email marketing today. This is especially true for emails opened on a mobile device—especially if those emails have a call-to-action that mar-keters expect recipients to act on via mobile.

“Make sure that all of your email is mobile optimized. Some of your cus-tomers may have stopped engaging simply because they can’t read your email on their phone,” Brown says. “Everything today must not only be readable from a mobile device, it needs to look great on a mobile device.”

Know when to throw in the towelWhile the goal should be to reengage customers, marketers must remem-ber the importance of knowing when it’s time to let a customer go. Keep-ing customer data up-to-date is vital to this because it allows marketers to better understand their customers.

“It’s important that you keep your email list clean and periodically remove those [customers who] have stopped engaging. If you don’t, your overall program results suffer—plus you begin to look more and more like a spammer,” Brown says. “Make sure that you’re working to reen-gage, but also set a timeline for how frequently you will remove custom-ers from your active email list.”

Change channelsDespite email’s effectiveness in reengaging even those customers suffering from email overload, in some cases if customers disengage from a brand explicitly because of the brand’s email practices, the reality is that another channel may prove more effective in bringing those customers back.

“Reengagement might not always happen via the email channel,” Triv-unovic says. “You need to take a step back from your program, under-stand how customers are engaging across all channels and address your reengagement program accordingly.

“Understand what the experience was leading up to disengagement and apply this logic to your reengagement strategy accordingly. If a cus-tomer is showing activity on a mobile text program, but not engaging in email, you have to consider that reality.” n

Essential Guide Essential Guide to Email Marketing 2015 | H0T LIST

Ways to Use Email to Combat Email

Disengagement


06_Hot_List_v2.indd 7 9/17/15 10:24 AM

DELIVERABILITY | 2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing


8. Feature 1_v2.indd 8 9/17/15 10:25 AM


2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing | DELIVERABILITY

THE CURRENT, COMPLEX, YET STRAIGHT-FORWARD STATE OF EMAIL DELIVERABILITY

By Eric Krell

The current state of email deliverability is, well, confusing. On one hand, the way Internet service providers (ISPs) deter-

mine email deliverability has quickly become more automated, more complicated, and less personal. ISPs churn hundreds of factors and signals through complex algorithms to determine if a message should reach its target.

On the other hand, getting email to its destination has never been more straightforward, according to the experts who live and breathe deliverability each day. “The most important factor, hands down, is to send mail that our customers want,” says Paul Rock, AOL’s program-mer/analyst and principle lead for mail abuse. “If our customers don’t want your mail, you’re going to have a bad time…. When our customers want your mail, those of us at the ISPs will make sure it gets to them.”

If you’re pressed for time, stop reading here and go forth equipped with that simple, yet essential guidance. The complete story of email deliverability, however, is far more elaborate.

Rock’s solid advice crystallizes what email marketers should keep in mind at all times—especially when the current state of deliverability happens to be highly fluid, and, by the way, based on a system that was never designed for marketing, let alone for built-in email authentication.

Given this delicate situation, it’s essential to understand and manage the more technically focused deliverability determinants. It may be even more important to make the humans who own email addresses fall in love—to borrow a phrase from Google anti-spam maven Sri Somanchi—with your carefully crafted and incredibly engaging electronic messages.

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Inbox placement rates declineRock, Somanchi, and their counterparts at Comcast and Microsoft spoke on the topic of “deliverability ver-sus engagement” at the Direct Marketing Association’s 2015 Email Evolution Conference. Their message was simple: Engagement matters, so you should track and manage engagement with the latest monitoring tools.

“There really is no excuse for shortcuts today be-cause if you’re using these tools, then you can have a better understanding of what that end user is doing with your emails—and what they’re doing on your web-site once they click a link in your email,” says Return Path Chief Privacy and Security Officer Dennis Day-man, who moderated that panel discussion.

Marketers who know which products and services email users are looking at on their website can apply that knowledge to make subsequent emails more seg-mented and engaging. “Treat the individual with the email address as a person,” Dayman adds. “Don’t sim-ply treat it as an email address.”

This sound advice is getting more challenging to ex-ecute. Return Path’s latest research indicates that inbox placement rates declined 5% from 2014 to 2015. “It’s not getting any easier for marketers to reach the in-box,” Dayman says.

This is due, at least in part, to the intensifying good-

versus-evil battle that pits spammers, phishers, and other bad actors against ISPs, anti-abuse organizations, and se-curity groups. “The bad guys are looking more and more at ways to co-opt or abuse existing relationships between known brands and customers,” Rock explains. “They’re also targeting the trusting relationships that have been built up between the services that companies use, such as the various hosting providers and [email service provid-ers], and the ISPs…. The last thing you want is a phone call from an upset brand owner asking why their latest email campaign was a ‘Canadian Pharmacy’ spam run, or worse, wanting to know why complaints are flooding in only to discover that their domain has been co-opted to send out ‘adult’ dating-site spam.”

Four-factor identificationAs email marketing use has exploded—and, as a result, attracted more spammers, phishers, and criminals—ISPs have fortified their controls, the bulk of which are neces-sarily automated. In the past decade this shift has al-tered the relationship dynamic between ISPs and their marketing counterparts at companies and vendors.

When Spencer Kollas, head of global email deliver-ability for Experian Marketing Services, waded into the deliverability realms a dozen years ago, the rela-tionships between ISPs and email marketers were more



79%➜ Email marketing

messages that reach inboxes (a 5% decrease

versus 2014)

_____________________________________________

7%➜ Email marketing

messages designated as spam (17% increase

versus 2014)

_____________________________________________

15%➜ Email marketing mes-

sages that are missing/unaccounted for (36% increase versus 2014)

Source: Return Path, 2015

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personal. “Today,” Kollas says, “a lot of the filtering systems are automated.”

As a result, Kollas advises email marketers to focus on four primary factors that influence deliverability: unknown users, spam traps, complaints, and customer engagement. This entails removing outdated and in-valid email addresses from lists, avoiding spam traps, and applying marketing skills to limit complaints and increase the likelihood that recipients will click on links or, even better, move mail labeled as promotional into their primary inbox tab. “Now,” Kollas continues, “you’ll hear people in the industry say, ‘Well, ISPs don’t really look at engagement.’ They may call it dif-ferent things, but it’s all around engagement. They want to know: Do people want your mail? That’s the most important factor. If they don’t believe the majority of people want your mail, they’re probably going to block it or put it in the spam folder.”

Rock has said exactly that, as well. He also runs through a list of other deliverability factors that are im-portant to AOL, including the use of feedback loops to track deliverability information; the authentication and protection of domains—preferably using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC), a technical specification created by a group of organizations to reduce email-based abuse; exhibiting respect for complaints and unsubscribe requests; and the removal of dead addresses from email marketing lists.

According to Rock, it’s helpful for marketers to seg-regate promotional and other bulk email from trans-actional or notification traffic. Finally, he points to a factor that most ISP experts also emphasize: histori-cal consistency. “New is usually bad in the anti-abuse world, so having a good reputation with history is what you’re after,” he says.

Return Path’s Dayman agrees that reputation is a crucial deliverability factor. Recipients of email cam-paigns help build or break that reputation with each email-link click and spam button impression.

So-called best practicesGiven that the majority of factors ISPs use to determine deliverability are tactical, marketers should consider some leading deliverability practices—a phrase that Kol-las treats delicately. “I usually talk about best practices with air quotes around them,” he says. “Something that is a best practice for one [company] might not be a best practice for another. It really comes down to their busi-ness model, their business goals, and what they’re trying to get out of the email communications channel.”

A consumer packaged goods company probably should not send a message to an email address that hasn’t opened any of the company’s emails in the past four or five months, for example. But a tax software

firm maker may not expect its targets to crack emails for more than six months, until April 15 approaches.

Consider the following practices in terms of how they apply, and can be adapted, to different companies’ unique needs:

Validate email addresses: It’s a simple and frequent-ly overlooked step that can cause major problems. “Get the right information at the point of collection, whatever that point of collection may be,” Kollas asserts. “When people think about deliverability they often think: OK, I have an email address; how do I get it in the inbox? What they neglect to think about is: Do I have the right email address?”

Listen and respond to ISP customers: Rock exhorts email marketers to respect—and quickly respond to—un-subscribe requests and complaints. “Complaints about your mail are a big deal,” he explains. “Someone didn’t want it, so it’s probably a good idea to try to figure out why people are complaining, and adapt…. The worst thing that can happen is for our customers to repeatedly complain about the mail you’re sending, especially if they escalate their complaints via customer service or take their grievances into the public domain.”

Be proactive: Rock encourages email marketers to let ISPs know in advance if a change or a new campaign may impact the normal email flow, or potentially cause a complaint volume to spike. He also advises market-ers to track their deliverability metrics in as close to real time as possible. “Watching what’s happening as your mailings go out can give you valuable feedback to improve deliverability,” he explains. Are complaints spiking? Are bounces higher than normal? “Seeing this early can help avoid problems,” Rock says. Addition-ally, knowing typical deliverability statistics for their company can help marketers have the conversation with an ISP counterpart if a need for that discussion arises. Being proactive also means pulling the plug on a campaign if it begins sparking too many complaints.

Don’t forget to market: The ease and success of email marketing can cause marketers to focus too much on the technology and too little on their core skill. Kollas believes there is ample room to inject more marketing strategy and precision into email messages. By way of example, he says that many email market-ing programs neglect opportunities to upsell customers (e.g., “free shipping on any item you order”) when they email them a sales receipt for an online purchase.

Perhaps the most valuable best practice—no air quotes necessary—concerns treating recipients of email marketing messages as humanly as possible, despite the increasingly technical and automated nature of the activity. Dayman suggests applying the “grandmother test” to guide deliverability decision-making: How would your grandmother feel if she received this email marketing message from you? n

4 ISP RELATION-SHIP MANAGE-

MENT TIPSWhen it comes to working

with ISP on deliverability, “there’s no magic button

they can push to just let your mail through because they

like you,” Spencer Kollas says with a laugh. But the

head of global email deliver-ability for Experian Market-

ing Services and other deliv-erability experts are serious about the practices required

to build a strong reputation with ISPs over time.

Paul Rock, AOL’s program-mer/analyst and principle

lead for mail abuse, identifies four ways marketers can

strengthen their relationships, and reputations, with ISPs:

1. Be honest and up-front about your email perfor-

mance: “Be aware of possible complaint spikes and sources

and reach out to us about that if possible,” says Rock,

noting by way of example that a reengagement campaign is

likely to get a higher complaint rate than normal mailings.

Glossing over details like this raises red flags for anti-abuse

and compliance teams.

2. Don’t wait until you’re blocked to reach out: At that

point, quick fixes are more difficult. Many ISP systems

are designed to interdict bad behavior quickly, Rock

explains, and they are slow to be trusting.

3. When you reach out to us, know your own information: What domains are involved?

What IPs, dates, times, vol-umes, etc.? “Opening a trouble ticket without useful informa-

tion just slows down problem resolution,” Rock explains.

4. Don’t try to explain away or excuse bad mailing

performance: Instead, work to understand the problem.

Complaints are feedback, Rock says; learn what you can

from them.



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STRATEGY | Essential Guide to Email Marketing 2015

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EMAIL CONTINUES TO BE A MARKETING STAPLE BECAUSE IT WORKS WITHOUT BUSTING THE MARKETING BUDGET—AND MARKETERS CONTINUE TO REINVENT IT.

Essential Guide to Email Marketing 2015 | STRATEGY


Email, Like Fine Wine, Gets Better With Age

By Jason Compton

Wine has been produced and enjoyed for millennia. In digital marketing years, email is just as old. It is at once a stable, ma-ture technology built on underlying tech principles that haven’t

changed much since being codified in the 1980s, and a moving target of evolving devices, deliverability standards, and communication strategies.

With traffic up 16% year-over-year, according to Experian Marketing Ser-vices, email continues to be a staple of ongoing customer communications. It is universally understood, cost-effective at scale, and can be made relevant at any stage of the customer journey. “Email remains one of the primary, foundational channels to walk the customer down the path to purchase and repeat purchase,” says Ryan Hofmann, chief brand strategist at Listrak.

When email marketing was first finding its legs in the early 2000s, there were justified fears that customers would tune out. But the industry responded and made necessary course corrections, and today email is more popular than ever. Consumer survey data from MECLABS Insti-tute shows that 72% of consumers value hearing from brands through email. The next highest channel, postal mail, couldn’t muster a simple majority at 48%. The strong affinity for email was consistent across de-mographic groups in the survey, where email is in first place or tied for first in every age and gender category.

That attitude is just a moment in time, however. Brands must find new ways to stay focused and relevant, with new media and more detailed insights. Here are several campaigns that produce results by taking a fresh approach, not by simply blasting customers with more messaging.

Inbox video (kind of)As video surges in popularity among consumers online, it remains a tricky challenge for email marketers. Although officially supported in modern email standards, most mobile email readers, as well as some prominent desktop clients such as Outlook, will not display embedded video content, so a click-to-view approach is still necessary for most audi-ences. “There’s no disadvantage to using it,” says Justin Foster, VP of market development at Liveclicker. “It doesn’t deliver a broken email, but

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16.1%➜ Increase in email volume year-over-year, Q2 2014 – Q2 2015-Experian Marketing Services

30%➜ Consumers who want to receive shorter emails-MECLABS

$0.08➜ Revenue per email, Q2 2015-Experian Marketing Services

56%➜ B2C emails using mobile-friendly design-Litmus

38%➜ Consumers who think cart abandonment reminder emails are annoying-MECLABS

THE NUMBERS


STRATEGY | Essential Guide to Email Marketing 2015

the recipient just doesn’t see the video.” Marriott International found great success with video by making it

personal and enticing. The hotel brand is always looking for new ways to engage members of its Marriott Rewards loyalty program, and email is an important centerpiece. The organization wanted to find new ways to apply consumer data and insights without incurring a privacy backlash. “Marriott being a slightly conservative organization, we have worried in the past about people getting freaked out,” says Clark Cummings, senior manager of member marketing at Marriott International. “But the pen-dulum has swung, and people are expecting us to use their data. It’s been liberating.”

The month of December is a persistently low-water mark for hotel bookings, so it was chosen as the testing grounds for a new concept. Work-ing with Yes Lifecycle Marketing, Marriott de-vised a month-long campaign for December 2014 designed around highly personalized messages, including custom video content. “We wanted to offer something that would use what we knew about their stays in a way that would be fun and interesting, not just look like a chart,” Cum-mings says.

As the month advanced, Marriott included in-creasingly personalized content in the body of the email, alongside standard newsletter items and other loyalty offers. The campaign culminated in an end-of-year report on December 30 with bright graphics showing personalized details for each member, including the number of nights stayed, free nights redeemed, and different hotel brands visited. These figures were put in perspective against the aggregate global points earnings and redemptions for all members, including their most popular destinations and cocktail choices.

The capstone of the email was a personalized video with a click-to-view link, which put an animated spin on these insights. To drive home the individual touch, the subject line put it sim-ply: “We Made This Video Just For You.”

Customers responded strongly. The innova-tive campaign produced 86% more revenue than December campaigns of the two previous years. Open rates were up 20% and conver-sions nearly 10% higher. It didn’t take the “conservative organiza-tion” long to recognize that it needed to quickly double down on its success. “By January 5, we decided we were going to do it again this December. Everybody was excited about the execution and the results,” Cummings says.

Moment-of-open elements earn engagementHowever pretty its design may be, email is traditionally a static medi-um—just a new spin on an old message in a bottle. Spicing it up with elements generated at the moment the email is opened, rather than the moment it was written and placed in a campaign queue, creates a sense of urgency that can produce rousing results.

Since creating a formal email program 14 years ago, AAA Ohio has gradually moved from generic newsletters to targeted, triggered cam-paigns. Newsletters were popular in terms of open rate, but rarely inspired

action. “We prefer things that are more action-able—not necessarily sales, but we want to drive the member to engage with us in some form,” says Nancy Weaver, senior manager, e-Business, at AAA Ohio.

The service club holds a travel expo in Colum-bus every January, when the weather in Ohio strongly favors an island getaway. Working with Liveclicker, AAA Ohio added a real-time weather comparison between Columbus and featured va-cation destination Punta Cana, where tempera-tures were about 50 degrees warmer during the promotional period.

With no other substantial change in artwork or content year-over-year apart from the weather information block, the 2015 emails produced a 22% gain in click-through rates. That doubled Weaver’s expectations and earned the compari-son tool another engagement during the spring vacation sales campaign. With weather compari-sons to warm locations such as Orlando, click-through rates improved more than 75%.

Pulling the triggerTargeted, segmented campaigns offer a significant improvement over generic messages. But when constructed manually, they create a labor burden on the marketing organization that hurts efficiency and turnaround time. “You may have the resourc-es to get batch-and-blast emails out seven times per week, but often those resources spend 90% of their time getting the emails out the door,” Listrak’s Hofmann says. “If you don’t invest in the right hu-man capital, agency, or provider to automate some

behavior-based emails, you will forever spin your wheels on them.”Today it’s possible to define automated trigger campaigns on a variety of

consumer actions, including search-and-abandon, browse-and-abandon, and cart abandonment. Plus, some platforms can integrate with site data and gen-erate automatic email campaigns based on events such as in/out-of-stock, new

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Essential Guide to Email Marketing 2015 | STRATEGY

4 Ways to Uncork EmailPerformance

1. Use softer calls-to-action, such as clickable ratings and reviews, to drive long-term engage-ment—instead of relying solely on email conver-sion to purchase.

2. Move from manually segmented campaigns to automated, audience-of-one triggered emails.

3. Incorporate real-time elements that make the email seem immediate and urgent.

4. Experiment with video delivery, understanding that embedded video is not yet a universal feature.


reviews, and significant price changes.Sporting goods vendor evo has an extremely large catalog

and a heavily seasonal business. During peak ski season, consumer interest and product availability fluctuates rap-idly, and evo has a narrow window in which to earn most of its annual revenue.

Since opening in 2001 the company has gathered a great deal of consumer behavior data, but had limited ability to convert those insights into action. “We could easily pull reporting to show how many people were interested in a ski in a given week, or how many added skis to a cart,” says Na-than Decker, evo’s director of e-commerce. “But we had a difficult time marrying that up to actionable messages. The timing wasn’t very close to the action, and performance was poor, both in terms of the number of messages sent and the revenue [generated].”

Working with Bluecore, evo created a series of automated email trigger campaigns. A price drop of $20 or more au-tomatically sends an email alert to customers who have expressed interest in that item, without manual intervention. Cart and search abandonment emails are automatically sent one hour after a session ends. To keep the emails from seem-ing too omniscient, evo deliber-ately salts the abandon emails with items related to the search, as well, so consumers are not confronted solely with the spe-cific item browsed.

The triggered emails have shown substantial improvement over evo’s conventional campaigns. Standard evo email out-reach generates between 10 and 30% open rates, with click-through rates of 1 to 3%. The triggered emails have a 60% open rate and 10% a click-through rate. Most important, evo customers reached with trigger emails consistently generate 20% more revenue against control groups who do not.

Softer calls-to-actionWine merchant Naked Wines operates a hybrid sub-scription model, built around a platform that resembles a mainstream social media site. Member accounts are au-tomatically funded with a minimum of $40 per month, but the company does not automatically ship wines. Instead, members are encouraged to socially follow the independent winemakers featured on the site, and order

when the mood strikes or their cellars run low. Inviting engagement for every order helps Naked Wines promote more up-and-coming winemakers, and keeps consumers invested in the process.

Email would seem to be a natural channel to nudge members to return to the site and place an order, and Naked Wines makes frequent use of its relationship with Adestra to stay in touch with customers. When Naked Wines grew large enough to do detailed segmentation

on its audience, it learned that strong sales messages produced only short-term benefits. “We found that by talking about ‘discounts’ or ‘free,’ we would get the order, but we wouldn’t drive loy-alty,” says Julia Fox, Naked Wines marketing manager.

Instead of pushing for sales, Naked Wines now asks mem-bers to rate a recently received wine. The thumbs up-or-down interface is shown in the email body, which then redirects members to a landing page where they can rate more se-lections. The real payoff isn’t just site engagement, but ongo-ing loyalty. Shifting away from sales email to ratings emails increased the likelihood of customer ratings five-fold. And the segment of Naked Wines customers who rate wines is 2.4 times more loyal to the ser-vice than those who don’t.

Stay alertRegardless of technology or campaign tactics, the most im-

portant thing to remember about email strategy is that it’s constantly vulnerable to disruption. Automatic filtering of social and promotional notices into separate inboxes by Gmail, and comparable features in Outlook, have substan-tially altered the way email is delivered and read. More changes are inevitable.

“As the technology companies behind email readers improve machine learning, they will be able to better pre-dict what customers want to see, and customers will trust them and not be satisfied with inboxes that show email sorted simply by the most recent,” says Daniel Burstein, director of editorial content at MECLABS Institute. “That will make it all the more important and vital to deliver what customers actually value by learning about their preferences, diving into analytics, and, heck, even talking to them and asking.” ■

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By Ginger Conlon Direct mail is marketing’s stallion: a consistent winner, but costly. Social and mobile are the show horses: full of tricks, but sometimes get tripped up. But email…. Email is marketing’s workhorse—always dependable, sup-ports and connects other channels, cost effective, and continually evolving. All of these positive attributes, however, don’t guarantee that email marketing will get the job done. The fact is, email’s greatest strengths often double as its greatest weaknesses. Fortunately, savvy marketers can overcome the latter to capitalize on the former. Here, 16 marketing experts provide advice on how.

TRENDS | 2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing


The Email OpportunistEmail’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Here’s how marketers overcome the latter to capitalize on the former.

GORDON EVANSVP OF PRODUCT MARKETING, SALESFORCE MARKETING CLOUDCustomers today expect a seamless and personalized experience from the companies and brands they do busi-ness with, through every stage of their journey with a business. Email is the connective tissue of this customer jour-ney—a connecting fiber between the multitude of digital channels that helps to keep customers satisfied on every front. A MarketingSherpa survey reveals that a vast majority (91%) of U.S. adults say they like getting promotional emails from companies they do business with. Of those, 86% would like monthly emails and 61% would like them at least weekly.

Email is a great standalone channel of engagement, but its real strength lies in the fact that it can be combined with other channels to achieve a heightened level of personalization for consumers. For example, email can be combined with predictive intelligence to let marketers create personalized messages that re-sult in more clicks and conversions by design, driving net-new revenue.

The problem arises when marketers use email to blast content to customers without taking their specific needs and preferences into consideration; this only serves to create disengagement. The key to using email effectively is ensur-ing that the outreach is as tailored and personalized as possible, driving true relevance for customers.

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2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing | TRENDS

MALINDA WILKINSON, CMO, SALESFUSIONFrom messaging to design, advancements in email marketing technology provide marketers with greater insights into customer and prospect be-havior. Reporting has become much more intuitive. With a click of a but-ton, for example, marketers can quickly and easily identify what resonates best with their target audiences. They can leverage that information to create even more of what they know works best.

Email’s biggest weakness is its ubiquity. There’s just so much. Market-ers can separate their messages from other inbox clutter by writing more compelling subject lines and providing more engaging content to differenti-ate their offerings from the crowd. Most email marketing platforms have testing capabilities, so start by crafting two unique subject lines, then A/B test them to find which is most effective. To take things further, also use those testing capabilities to measure the performance of your email de-sign and content.

DANIEL BURSTEIN, DIRECTOR OF EDITORIAL CONTENT, MECLABS INSTITUTE Customers value email. In fact, according to 2015 MarketingSherpa research surveying 2,057 U.S. adults, every age group prefers companies to communicate with them through email. And customers value email for the same reason marketers should. As long as you have deliverability figured out, in a hectic world, email stops customers and forces them to take action.

Unlike social media, pre-roll online videos, even TV advertising, email cannot be simply ignored. That action may be a “delete” or an “unsub-scribe,” but action equals opportunity for your business. Those moments of interaction with customers have value, and to get the most from them, you must deliver expected value: a relevant discount or offer, helpful con-tent, the utility of transactional email.

However, these interactions happen in a noisy world. To stick out, you must deliver that value with a painless customer experience. Test to discover what your customers want so you can deliver value while also removing friction and anxiety in the process of taking them from a value-focused email to an optimized website.

JOSE CEBRIAN, VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, EMAIL AND MOBILEMESSAGING, MERKLEEmail remains the preferred channel for consumer communications, according to a recent Merkle survey. In fact, email’s greatest strength is that it can be used to rapidly drive specific actions; it’s fast, cost-effective, and scalable. Marketers can capitalize on this for both one-time and automated campaigns to cost-effectively drive sales, registrations, app downloads, etc. Merkle re-search has also found that, when combined with other channels such as social and direct mail, email can generate response rates 1.5 to 3.8 times higher than one channel alone.

Email’s weakness is the various intermediaries—such as Internet Service Providers and Realtime Blackhole lists—that stand between marketers and their customers. These intermediaries are important because they provide the mailboxes (ISPs) and protect us from the spam epidemic (RBLs). They have a vested interest in protecting their customers, but their presence impacts marketer’s behavior in the channel. Marketers should challenge so-called best practices to find their own set of segmentation and sending protocol that maximizes results while respecting consumer preferences and known ISP rules. Additionally, email marketers should create extra reach and frequency in other addressable channels in a privacy policy-compliant way.

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CHAD WHITE, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, LITMUSEmail’s greatest strength is that it’s the most used one-to-one marketing channel. While other channels struggle to move be-yond broadcast messaging, email allows marketers to deliver relevant content at scale to subscribers based on who they are, what they’re trying to do, timing, location, the device and email cli-ent they’re using, and other contextual factors. Marketers should use tools and tactics such as segmentation, personalization, trig-gers, testing, and analytics to capitalize on the channel and deliver engaging and highly profitable subscriber experiences.

Email’s greatest weakness is that it’s an open platform con-trolled by many companies. As a result, the deliverability and ren-dering of emails will vary from one email client to another. Unlike in the Web world, there are no accepted email coding standards, so coding an email is a combination of playing to the lowest common denominator and including hacks that target particular email clients. The Internet of Things and wearables—such as the Apple Watch, which recognizes a brand new flavor of HTML: watch-HTML—will further complicate rendering and deliverability in the future. The increasingly complex email landscape means it’s more important than ever to test before sending, track performance, and always look for opportunities to improve the subscriber experience.

ANDREA GOHR, PRODUCT MANAGER OF EMAIL SOLUTIONS, BLUESOHO Email’s greatest strength is its reach. As one of the most highly traf-ficked channels, email can be used to easily grab subscribers’ atten-tion, directing them to a strong call-to-action for increased engagement, brand awareness, and ROI. Marketers should target messages based on individual demograph-ic and behavioral data to leverage this reach and capitalize on content that’s shared.

Email’s greatest weak-ness involves the inconsis-tencies in appearance due to the wide array of appli-cations, email clients, and varying computer settings. A misconstrued tem-plate can negatively affect brands and, ultimately, the user experience. To avoid any inconsistencies, marketers must make sure to code templates responsively, account-ing for the most common processing systems and email applications. The design should be tested on multiple devices or an accountable simulator.

BLAISE LUCEY, SENIOR CONTENT STRATEGIST, BITLYDespite the ever-growing number of fac-tors that comprise a successful digital cam-paign, email has proven itself as one of the most reliable channels for digital ROI. Why? Because its path-to-conversion is far more obvious than others in the omnichannel mix: Marketers send a sales or promotional email and the action occurs right after. Met-rics for success are fairly easy to identify—as long as customers are clicking through to a product page, it’s usually a good sign.

One of email’s biggest challenges is that optimizing and A/B testing has be-come quite challenging in the mobile era, but it’s completely necessary for impactful campaigns. For example, marketers need to test frequency, subject lines, and seg-mentation across all devices to determine what’s working and what’s not (especially if open rates are low). Luckily, tools exist that can help alleviate this challenge and allow marketers to render emails in every possible format to test user experience across devices and channels.

JUSTIN FOSTER, COFOUNDER AND VP OF MARKET DEVELOPMENT, LIVECLICKEROne of email’s greatest strengths, simply, is that it works. Email has been shown to be a solid source for leads and a strong revenue channel. For example, 15 to 20% or more of retailers’ revenue is attributed to the email channel. Look at B2B companies: Many see greater return on their email campaigns than on tradeshows and events that they spend 10 to 20 times more on than email. From an ROI point of view, email is a no-brainer.

Another email strength is that it’s universal. Almost everyone has an email address, and it functions as the digital connector between other channels. We read a lot of “death of

email” articles, but I think that’s the furthest thing from the truth.Despite email’s strengths, many perceive a weakness of email to be the 80/20 problem. For 80% of email re-

cipients, marketers have limited customer data available—maybe just a name or details on something someone may have purchased a long time ago—so they have traditionally been unable to personalize emails to those cus-tomers and prospects. Personalization has been shown to increase email’s effectiveness. With new technologies, there’s a huge opportunity to now personalize emails for everyone in a marketer’s database, whether or not they have customer data. Marketers can achieve this through using real-time functionality to customize emails based on attributes such as a customer’s language or device, for example.

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2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing | TRENDS

E.J. MCGOWAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR AND GM, CAMPAIGNEREmail marketing is the grand-daddy of digital marketing. It’s a tried and true method, but not one without flaws.

The greatest strength of email marketing is sim-ply that it works; the ROI is tremendous. Marketers looking to make the most of their budget should use an email marketing platform to ensure that they’re being efficient in their messaging efforts. Tools such as seg-mentation can help mar-keters make sure they’re targeting the right contacts with the right kind of content to promote opens and clicks.

The challenge is that email users receive more mes-sages than they need, and marketing emails are not immune to getting lost in the shuffle. To ensure that messages rise to the top of the email stream, use a compelling subject line. A/B split testing can help iden-tify phrases that jump out at contacts and are more likely to result in opens. Addition-ally, the timing of the emails matters tremendously. The best time to send will depend on your audience; again, A/B split testing can aid in find-ing when your contacts are most likely to interact.

RYAN PHELAN, VP OF MARKETING INSIGHTS, ADESTRAWith the increase of big data concepts and strategies, much more focus has been put on email marketing, and rightly so. But there are limits to what it can do. Moving into the holiday season and 2016, it’s vital for all marketers to realize the limits of what we have at our fingertips.

Email’s greatest strength is that can be a direct connection to the consumer at a very personal level. How many times do you check your email…even the promotional ones? It’s a gateway into someone’s life, comingling with messages from friends and family.

That real connection is the greatest advantage of email marketing. From that con-nection stems everything from response, to the extension of the relationship in oth-er channels, through to the addressability of the consumer. Marketers are starting to

realize that email is at the very center of the digital conversation—and that’s because of its ability to be proactive in a communication into a personal environment, as well as the identification that it provides outside of the medium. Marketers have untapped resources at their fingertips, and the faster they actualize the data they have and the customer relationships they hold, the faster that email continues to “win.”

On the other hand, email’s greatest weakness—in the words of a good friend of mine—is that sometimes email just does not work.

It’s hard for many marketers to accept that. With such a vast and inexpensive resource, and with marketers’ reliance on it, many marketers struggle with how it cannot work. It’s not until you dig deep into the data at an indi-vidual level, do you find that there are groups of people where email is ineffective and that other channels—such as social media or even (gulp) direct mail—are more effective. Yet, email’s greatest weakness is also its strength because even in a case where a cluster of people won’t respond to email, the identification of the consumer for those other channels is its saving grace.

It’s vital that marketers learn that sometimes email does not work and they have to focus on the customers and prospects who do want email and embrace (at even a subconscious level) the channel and the communica-tion. Sure, give the ones that don’t a try; but the ones who do truly care, those are the ones you can win with.

ANTHONY MARNELL, VP, NORTH AMERICA, MAILJETEmail’s greatest strength is that everyone has an inbox. Consumers are ready to pur-chase, engage, respond, or share when they’re checking their inbox. They read with the mind-set of finding valuable content—whether it’s a promotion, a receipt, or edu-cational content. This is why every company should be using email to communicate with their customers. For optimal engagement, companies should respect recipients’ inboxes by sending highly relevant email customers can’t ignore.

On the flip side, email’s greatest strength contributes to its greatest weakness. Its high ROI and ease of use create a low barrier; this means many companies are mes-saging too frequently. Another reason it can be tempting to email too often: It can be hard to stand out in a crowded inbox. Since the best email frequency will vary by industry, companies should listen intently to their customers and experiment to find the perfect content and cadence to engage them.

GILLIAN AHOUANVOHEKE, VP OF STRATEGY, ANALYTICS, AND CREATIVE, ZETA INTERACTIVEEmail continues to evolve and reinvent itself as marketers become more and more savvy.

Email’s ability to target individuals based on their specific interests makes it the most relevant marketing vehicle when used effectively. Smart mar-keters wield customer insight to craft a conversation that takes its cues from past interactions. While more timely to set up, these types of responsive, personal, automated communications can be much more effective.

But consumers get too many emails to possibly consume. Marketers are competing against the personal and marketing communications inundating inboxes. Emails only have a few seconds to catch a person’s attention and convince him to respond. The more that emails can be predictive based on a person’s behaviors, the better chance they have to communicate at a time, and with the content that, an individual is most interested in.

18_Trends_v2.indd 21 9/17/15 10:26 AM

KAREN BLANCHARDVP OF MARKETING AND PRODUCT MANAGE-MENT, ACCUDATAEmail provides relevant, person-alized messaging to a targeted audience quickly. Marketers can effectively capitalize on the strength of email by understand-ing their customers’ needs and buying habits. This knowledge helps marketers drive engage-ment with customers and iden-tify messages that work with their ideal prospects. Casual website visitors, mobile sub-scribers, social media connec-tions, and customers should receive unique email messaging based on their behaviors and displayed preferences.

Because email addresses change so frequently, ensuring that messages are hitting the intended audience can be chal-lenging. Marketers must validate their email database to reduce bounce rate, protect their send-ing domain’s reputation, and maximize a campaign’s ROI. Using a list hygiene service to cleanse and append with newer email addresses should improve the percentage of emails that make it to the inbox and reduce the risk of being blocked by In-ternet Service Providers.



LOREN MCDONALDVP OF INDUSTRY RELATIONS, SILVERPOP, AN IBM COMPANYEmail marketing has entered a new age of personal-ization. Today’s connected consumers demand rele-vant and personalized communications across their preferred channels—and marketers are constantly challenged to meet this growing expectation.

Based on a foundation of permission, email marketing helps companies better engage throughout the customer journey by allowing marketers to provide behavior-driven content and gather deeper insights to improve fu-ture engagement and increase value to subscribers. A growing number of touchpoints across the Web, mobile and social, and offline sources such as point-of-sale and call centers provide marketers with more data, enabling them to build stronger customer relationships. Data-driven email content leaves customers feeling connected and satisfied with brands—and market-ers who use this strategy can expect to see greater customer engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, sales.

Email marketing’s biggest weakness is also one of its strengths: Its high ROI means it’s relatively easy to have success using the channel, even with mediocre implementation. As a result, many marketers aren’t moving beyond traditional batch-and-blast methods. According to IBM’s 2015 Email Market-ing Metrics Benchmark Study, retail/e-commerce brands saw some of the lowest customer engagement rates—due to over-reliance on increased frequency rather than personalization and relevance. Transforming an email marketing program can’t happen overnight, but brands can take a “crawl, walk, run” approach by starting with high ROI, behavior-driven programs such as cart abandonment remarketing, and then make the case for adding more data and behavior-driven programs.

BEN ARDITO, VP AND GM OF CLIENT SERVICES, DIGI-TAL SOLUTIONS, EPSILONToday’s email marketing platforms al-low marketers to create and execute personalized messages quicker and sometimes easier than other chan-nels that also have a unique set of strengths and weaknesses as a cus-tomer engagement tool.

One of email’s greatest strengths is the level of personalization mar-keters can achieve to deliver relevant messages. Personalization tactics like time-of-open content bring real-time engagement to the email chan-nel and are easier to execute on due to the advancement of marketing platforms. These efforts are more measurable in tracking lift and conver-sion than other channels offering marketers the insight they need to ad-just campaigns and enhance message relevance.

Conversely, marketers still struggle to determine how much they should invest in email to give their messages more depth versus executing at the simplest level. One of email’s biggest weaknesses is its ability to drive short-term sales with a lack of sophistication. This masks the long-term negative impact on customer engagement. Marketers who adopt these short-term-focused tactics often experience a leaky bucket of subscrib-ers because their campaigns don’t hold the sophistication necessary to continually engage consumers.

RYAN HOFMANN, CHIEF BRAND STRATEGIST, LISTRAKEmail’s greatest strength lies in its ability to generate the highest ROI of any digi-tal marketing channel. Email is the best channel to con-nect directly with customers to deliver the most relevant message at the right time at every touchpoint across the customer journey. Using tar-geted promotional commu-nications to drive awareness, and personalized behavioral messages to walk custom-ers from consideration down the path to purchase (and ideally, repeat purchase), drive loyalty, and, when nec-essary, reactivate lapsing and inactive customers.

And therein lies also its greatest weakness: the ten-dency for many marketers to treat the channel lazily or nonchalantly because of its high ROI. Too many email marketers still deliver the same message to every single subscriber on their list despite having data easily accessible to deliver target-ed and personalized mes-sages. And too few market-ers are automating lifecycle messages; the biggest op-portunity email marketers have today is to deliver rel-evant messages that will in turn deliver the highest ROI that companies are in need of in today’s ultra-competi-tive environment.

18_Trends_v2.indd 22 9/17/15 10:26 AM

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