How the Obama campaign succeeded with low open rates

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 18 Mar 2013

There is little doubt in my mind that email was the No.1 non-political contributor to Obama’s win in the 2012 US Presidential race. 75% of the $934 million raised by Obama was attributed to digital and nearly all of that $700 million was raised through email¹. That fact alone is phenomenal.

But it’s not until you start to drill down into the data to find out why Obama’s email campaign was significantly more effective than Romney’s that the exciting insights start to appear.

Marketing pundits from all channels have offered their opinions. Just look at the word cloud based on the top 15 blogs about Obama’s email strategy – targeting, testing, creative, subject lines – everything but the two biggest contributing factors: list size and mailing frequency.

Why have these been missed? Because it is relatively easy to get a sense of a campaign’s creative, subject line strategy, frequency and, to some extent, personalization by simply subscribing to a list. What you can’t find out is how large that list is or how much segmentation is being done. That makes it almost impossible to know how many emails are actually being sent. Enter eDataSource …

Scratching below the surface with eDataSource

So, we recently took out a subscription to eDataSource and let our analytics team loose on their web-based tool that combines active monitoring of over 800,000 consumer inboxes with a library of millions of digital marketing messages from thousands of brands. This impressive breadth and depth of reporting gave us everything we needed to find out what really made Obama’s email strategy so effective.

First up was to prove my prediction back in October that Obama would win because he was sending significantly more email to more people. Using the Federal Election Commission, we were able to attribute all donations over $250 to each campaign for the 79 weeks running up to the election. We then plotted this against the corresponding weekly send volumes taken from eDataSource in graph 1.

Graph1

The trend lines tell the story more succinctly than any blog: the more emails each campaign sent, the more donations each campaign received. If the purpose of each campaign was to generate revenue, then it was frequency and list size that had the biggest impact on performance.

What I couldn’t predict was what we found when we dug deeper into the data – the send volumes for each campaign had a striking correlation with the probability of each campaign winning based on the opinion polls …

Obama – the President who ignored open rates

On graph 2 below, we pulled the send volumes and open rates for both campaigns in the two month run-up to the election and compared these to Nate Silver’s Poll aggregator for the 2012 election. His algorithm has correctly predicted the winner of 99 out of 100 states in the last two elections, so it gave us a highly accurate winning probability at each point during the campaign.

Graph2

As Obama ramps up his send volumes early in the race, his probability of winning increases. Romney also increases his frequency at a similar rate but, because his list size is 15 times smaller, his growth has little effect on the polls. List size matters.

When Obama reduces his send volumes by 38% his probability of winning drops by 42%. By contrast Romney’s campaign grows by 180% and his chances of winning increase by 160%.

In the final push, Romney reduces his send volumes and with it his probability of winning. But his open rates improve by an impressive 14%. Obama takes the opposite approach and aggressively increases his send volumes, which improves his probability of winning.

And Obama’s open rates? They plummet by 14% to a campaign low … and he wins the election.

Obama’s email strategy? Send more, raise more

Had Obama chased open rates would he have lost the election? Well, what we do know is the best way to achieve that goal, as shown by Romney, is to reduce send volumes. Of course, send volumes don’t win elections, donations do. So we set about finding a correlation between send volumes and donations to add weight to our theory.

Graph3

Graph 3 plots annual donations against annual send volumes and open rates for the Obama campaign. The correlation between send volume and donations is undeniable – in fact, they are close to an exact match. The general trend is for a steady increase over the year until a drop off at election time.

But more interestingly – and this may surprise some people – the relationship between open rates and donations is an inverse one! Or, to put it another way, the higher the open rate, the lower the number of donations.

Why?

Because, broadly speaking, there is an inverse relationship between send volumes and open rates. The more email you send, the lower your open rate is likely to be. But if doubling your send volume only results in a 15% fall in your open rates, then you will be significantly better off.

So why is revenue so closely linked to send volumes? Because people cannot engage with an email they do not receive. Replace the word ‘email’ with ‘opportunity to donate’, and “an extra email send to 1 million people” becomes, “let’s send another 1 million opportunities to donate”.

While relevance, engagement, creative, subject lines, testing and targeting all played a part in Obama’s success, they pale into insignificance when compared to the impact of reach, frequency and list size. And best of all? With email, you can optimize all of these at near-zero marginal cost.

But does it work in retail? Hell yeah!

Obama’s campaign is one of the few examples of a noted sender admitting that increasing frequency works. The data backs it up, too. But does it work outside of the rarefied world of political fundraising? The answer is “hell yeah!”

With the help of EDS Analyst, you too can find out if you are being out-mailed by your competitors. If the answer is “yes”, then they are probably out-selling you as well – and we shall be digging down into the data for that particular topic in next month’s blog. Keep your eyes peeled.

If you’d like to know more about how we use EDS Analyst to optimize email strategy, then get in touch. And if you want to replicate Obama’s success for your own email program, then feel free to use these strategy ideas from this post from our blog: FIVE reasons why open reach will revolutionize your email marketing.

More next month …

Dela Quist
CEO, Alchemy Worx

The truth behind the buzz: what really made the difference in Obama’s re-election

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 19 Dec 2012

Obama campaign team send 6 fundraising emails a day

One of the big stories in digital marketing in recent months has been about a campaign whose results have a major impact on people around the world – the US Presidential Election. Marketing pundits representing all channels have had an opinion on how Obama’s campaign led to his re-election but I would argue none was more significant than the use of email.

Let me start by saying there is no doubt this election was won by email. Here is a direct quote from an article published by Business Week; “Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails”. And by the way, $690 million represents nearly 75% of the $934 million raised in what ended up being the most expensive Presidential election in US history. This makes email, by far and away the No1 non-political contributor to the drubbing of Mitt Romney.

So why has there been so little said about this incredible achievement by email marketing pundits, ESP’s or their PR machines? When you look at the fuss made over the 2008 campaign – allegedly won by social media – the silence from the email industry has been deafening. When anyone does mention it, there has been a tendency to attribute the success of Obama’s email fundraising activities to anything other than email.

Some may suggest that without the “age old lessons [and presumably wisdom]” passed down from wise-old DM to rather awkward, gauche and somewhat unattractive email marketing the story would have been very different.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is what really happened. Obama won because he sent more email to more people more often than Romney period!

According to numbers put out by eDataSource and Return Path, Obama mailed a staggering 40+M subscribers compared with Romney’s 4M, on some days they sent 350M compared with 26M from Romney. So while relevance, engagement, creative – ugly or otherwise, Subject Line testing etc. did play some part in his success, they pale into insignificance compared to the impact reach and frequency had in his success.

What seasoned email marketers might find surprising (I see this as further proof of the fact that frequency drives engagement) is that the Obama database was more engaged and less likely to view the emails they received as spam. The figures below which I extrapolated from numbers published by eDataSource and Return Path illustrate this clearly:

Obama Read	15.85%	Total	6,340,000
Romney Read	7.94%	Total	317,600

Obama Delete Unread	9.01%	Total	3,604,000
Romney Delete Unread	5.11%	Total	204,400

Obama ISP Spam	17.95%	Total	7,180,000
Romney ISP Spam	52.51%	Total	2,100,400

Obama User-Marked Spam	0.02%	Total	800,000
Romney User-Marked Spam	0.03%	Total	120,000

The Obama campaign raised an average of $17.25 per subscriber, if you assume Romney was able to do the same, he would have generated $69M from email compared to Obama’s $690M. So if you were Romney what would you have learned from this, A) Segment and test your way to $172.50 per subscriber or B) Send email to a lot more people more often?

Email delivers something DM cannot. Broadcast reach at near zero marginal cost.

If you don’t want to leverage that, stop sending email!

I have read lots of peoples’ take on the article and what they found most interesting and would like to share mine – something Bloomberg Business Week chose to call a counterintuitive. I don’t and I think it is an awesome admission: “Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent”. Now read the comments made by the very people who made the campaign successful. Note how few said they enjoyed the blitz yet on average they donated $17.25 each.

Now that’s an insight!

I know for certain that they are not the first people to have worked this out, but they are the first significant entity to come out and say it.

Let’s give credit where credit is due in the 2012 presidential election; segmentation, targeting and testing techniques were the tail, reach and frequency were the DOG!

FIVE reasons why open reach will revolutionise your email marketing

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 19 Nov 2012

Pretty big claim! But we’ve been measuring open reach across a range of clients and industries for seven years and have unearthed a wealth of valuable insights that underline why this metric should become the lynchpin of your marketing strategy.

So what is open reach?
It’s a customer engagement metric that measures the proportion of your base who have opened at least one message over a period of time. You can apply reach to all standard metrics, like click or purchase, but here we are focusing on open reach.

And how do you measure it?
Open reach is calculated by counting the number of subscribers on your list that have opened at least once and dividing that by the number of subscribers that have received at least one email from you over a given time period. This could be a quarter or a year, depending on your send frequency and specific goals.

Now to the juicy bit, those five reasons why open reach will revolutionise your email marketing:

1. Forget “what are my campaigns doing” – learn “what are my customers doing”
How often do you ask “what are my customers doing?” And yet, nearly all email metrics answer something different – “what are my campaigns doing?” So why is this disconnect in our industry? Because conventional email metrics, like open and click, only measure the performance of individual campaigns. They do not give you any insight into customer behaviour. However, open reach doesn’t just assess the value of the content and creative of your individual mailings, it also builds a clear picture of the overall performance of your campaigns and the health of your database.

Consider this example: if your newsletter has an average open rate of 21%, does that mean that after sending out 5 messages, every subscriber has opened at least one message? Maybe, maybe not. It is far more likely that there is a group of subscribers that open every email as well as a group that never open. But that is just an educated guess. There is no way of gaining this valuable learning about your customers by looking at open rate. You have to use open reach to find the answer.

2. Want to improve your revenue? Just improve your open reach
We’ve noticed that a significant chunk of total revenue is generated when customers who have never opened or haven’t opened for ages, open one of your emails for the first time (graph 1). Although multiple openers have a much higher response rate than first time openers, they account for only a small percentage of total revenue over a given period because they are a much smaller group. First time openers generate significantly more total revenue in the same period because they are a much larger group.

Although it’s easy (and common) to focus on the small group with the best response rate because the open and clicks look great, it’s the much larger lower-responding group that will give you the biggest increase in your total revenue. So the short term goal of increasing open and click rates is replaced by the longer term strategy of converting non-openers into first time openers, and then those first time openers into the higher-responding multiple openers group. All you have to do is unearth the different ways to move your customers up the engagement chain. And guess what, open reach shows you the best way to do that …

Graph 1
Graph 1

3. Customers and prospects behave differently – so treat them differently
So, how do you move your customers up the chain? First, you have to understand how first time openers and multiple openers respond to your emails in comparison to each other. Let’s say you send out a free delivery offer to your entire base. Open rates and revenue for that campaign are both above average. You send out a SAVE 20% offer and both metrics are again above average. They are both a success, right? So based on those metrics you would keep sending these two different types of offer to your entire base.

But look at the open reach for these offers and you’d see that the free delivery had very little effect on cumulative first time opens, whereas the discount offer had significantly more. A free delivery offer has less interest to someone who isn’t buying regularly but does appeal to someone who is. Likewise, a juicy discount is far more likely to engage someone who has been inactive for a while. By analysing open reach you can identify what appeals to these different groups and target them with the appropriate offer and message. Your customers are telling you how they want to engage with your brand, so use open reach to listen, learn and lift your response.

4. Isn’t reactivation an expensive chore? Then start doing it with every email you send
Now you’ve identified your different groups in the engagement chain and how to press their buttons, you’ll notice that the first step in the chain – non-opener to first time openers – is actually the same as reactivating inactives. So you can stop thinking of them as inactives and start thinking of them as opted-in prospects (graph 2). You’ll rarely have to bother with a one-off, low-margin reactivation campaign because every email you send will be a reactivation opportunity.

And it doesn’t just stop there. The insights you gain from analysing what motivates your non-openers to become first time openers will inform your new reactivation strategy. There’s no need to send pleading “we miss you emails” when your open reach analysis is telling you that a SAVE 20% offer has significantly increased first time openers. That’s a measurable trigger for this group, so use it and all the other customer insights open reach will drop in your lap.

Graph 2
Graph 2

5. Learn what really drives engagement
Open reach will also show you that new subscribers to your list are the most likely to become first time openers. Sounds obvious, so why is it important? Well, in essence this is saying that one of the best ways to increase your revenue is to grow your list. New subscribers = increased first time openers = more revenue. But, while growing your list is an important part of any email strategy, it is an expensive way to increase revenue.

There is a more cost effective way and, you’ve guessed it, it can be identified and optimised using open reach. It’s frequency. Periodically increasing the frequency of your emails increases your first time openers. In graph 3 below, a client who was sending a monthly email changed to a weekly. Result? The monthly had an open rate of 17%, while the weekly emails averaged just 10%. However, when the open reach was measured the weekly emails were found to have significantly increased the number of first time openers. Total opens for monthly = 9,008, total opens for weekly over the same period = 21,006 (unsubscribes were statistically insignificant). Inactives were engaged by extra sends because, to state the obvious, they had three more opportunities to do so. Had only conventional metrics been used to measure this test, then it would have been seen as a failure. Increased frequency = more opportunities to engage = better open reach = more revenue in the long run. And which one of your stakeholders could argue with that?

Graph 3
Graph 3

Your 5-step plan:

1)      Start measuring your open reach and see what your customers are doing
2)      Identify your non-openers, first time openers and multiple openers
3)      Compare the behaviour of each group and use that knowledge to target them
4)      Treat your non-openers as opted in prospects and reactivate them with every email
5)      Increase your revenue by increasing your open reach by increasing your frequency

The myth of inbox overload

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 11 Oct 2012

This is the third instalment of Fear and Self-loathing in Email Marketing, Dela Quist’s iconoclastic take on the industry to which he’s devoted over 20 years of his career.

Read it now: The myth of inbox overload

In the last chapter, Dela lamented the corrosive effect that unfounded fears about being seen as a spammer have had on the legitimate email marketing industry. An excessively cautious attitude has led to unnecessarily stringent self-policing about send frequencies – and many missed opportunities in terms of revenue and campaign development.Hand in hand with spam paranoia goes the myth of inbox overload, subject of this month’s chapter.

Dela argues that those who predict that the world’s citizens are about to riot because they’re being bombarded with too much email, fail to notice that an inbox is made up of many different kinds of mail. Subscribers see these different categories of email very differently, and are remarkably proficient at sorting their electronic mail. Much of that mail is essential to recipients, most of the unwanted stuff never gets seen, and legitimate marketing emails are only a tiny fraction of the whole.

Given all that, why do email marketers feel the need to take the blame for a crisis that isn’t their doing – and isn’t even going to happen?

Also in this chapter:

How marketers don’t send nearly as many emails as people think
The art of email triage
Why ‘inbox overload’ is nothing compared to ‘search overload’

Are your emails s***?

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 24 Aug 2012

Welcome to another chapter of Fear and Self-loathing in Email Marketing, Dela Quist’s iconoclastic take on the industry he’s devoted over 20 years of his career to.

Read it now: Are your emails s***?

Are your emails s***? is likely to ruffle a few feathers. In it, Dela argues that spam is primarily a problem of perception and not reality.

It is time, he says, for legitimate email marketers – who bend over backwards not to be seen as spammers – to stop feeling so guilty about something they don’t even do. And to get on and see what happens if they send an extra email.

No one would send spam if it didn’t get results, after all, and regular marketers can get results using the same techniques that work for spammers.

Also in this chapter:

Why it’s not the end of the world if teenagers don’t open your emails
What to say when someone tells you ‘spam is anything someone thinks is spam’
Why spam wouldn’t have caught on if IT departments weren’t such big Monty Python fans

Read part 1 of Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing now:
Unlocking the brand potential of email marketing

Extra chapter – read about Dela’s journey in email marketing, and why he’s uniquely placed to write this series:
Why should you listen to me?

Introducing Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing…

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 25 Jul 2012

A new book by Alchemy Worx CEO Dela Quist – available as a series of essays, free to Email-Worx subscribers every month

Every business – every brand – believes email has a place in its marketing activity. When did you last hear of a company saying, “We’ve decided to stop sending email”? But all the current books on email marketing make the subject seem unnecessarily complex and technical, and they inject a lot of anxiety about inbox overload, over-mailing, wastage and spam.

The inconvenient truth about email marketing, of course, is that spam works: most of the time, nothing is likely to make you more money than sending another email. But legitimate email marketers – who work with permission and are nothing like spammers – fail to maximise the huge commercial opportunities of frequent, branded email contact because they’re terrified of being accused of filling inboxes with junk.

This attitude of fear and self-loathing is holding email marketing back from achieving the profile and share of budget that it so richly deserves.

Unlocking the brand potential of email

In this book published as a series of essays, Dela Quist looks at how to unlock the brand potential of email in terms of the key issues of concern to email marketers, such as spam, deliverability, inbox overload, subject lines, testing and measuring success.

In each essay, the author – founder and CEO of the UK’s only dedicated email agency, with over 20,000 hours devoted to the subject already – shows how much of received industry wisdom about email marketing is motivated by misplaced fear and a misunderstanding of how email works as a marketing medium.

In Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing, Dela proposes a new approach that combines insights gleaned from long experience with practical techniques that any email marketer can start applying to their own campaigns. He offers simple, cost-effective ways that businesses large and small can use email to transform their commercial success.

And he develops a simple but rarely heard argument about how you can use email to boost your bottom line by tapping into its potential as a brand-building broadcast medium.

It’s a message any business can tap into to deliver real returns, from the neighbourhood restaurant to the global insurance provider. The book will appeal to anyone who markets a business, from professional marketers to sole traders to consultants, whether B2B or B2C. And it’s all yours, free.

Read part 1 of Fear and Self-Loathing in Email Marketing now:
Unlocking the brand potential of email marketing

Extra chapter – read about Dela’s journey in email marketing, and why he’s uniquely placed to write this series:
Why should you listen to me?

Industry Update: February 2012

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 13 Feb 2012

2012 is well under way and we’ve been busy spreading fresh ideas and keeping tabs on exciting new developments in email marketing. In this pick of recent web articles, we’ve highlighted news of an important step forward in email security and some new thoughts on A/B split testing. Plus Loren McDonald from Silverpop’s two-part interview with Alchemy Worx CEO Dela Quist sees some typically trenchant opinions expressed on topics such as email frequency, subject line and ‘the nudge effect’.

Joining forces against phishing
An important new working group, DMARC.org, has been set up to further combat phishing by improving methods of blocking bad email. Sam Massiello, General Manager at Email Security Specialists Return Path, expresses his confidence that this coalition of companies, including AOL, Google, Microsoft and PayPal, will make email business more secure than ever.

Alchemy Worx view
It is no surprise to see the banks involved in this new standard. The reduction in phishing messages that this new working group aims to achieve should serve to further increase the confidence in email marketing.
Read the article

To remove or not to remove?
Is your organisation too quick to remove inactives from its database? In the second part of the Silverpop interview, Dela Quist tells Loren McDonald of his dismay at being removed from databases as a consumer himself, and how it highlights the importance of ‘the nudge effect’ in cultivating customers over a long period. He is also typically outspoken on the topic of subject lines, once again going against the accepted wisdom and arguing, “the shorter the subject line, the less likely you are to convey meaning.” He concludes with some strong words regarding marketers’ “visceral fear that the public hates getting email”. “Ecommerce thrives on email,” he says. “If we can get that message out, everyone would love what they do.”
Read the article

Is less really more?
In the first part of this interview with the Silverpop blog, Alchemy Worx CEO Dela Quist tells Loren McDonald why he still feels marketers should be sending more emails, not less. “The challenge is not ‘How do I send less?’,” Quist argues. “It’s ‘How do I get my list to tolerate more?’” He also challenges the trend among marketers towards reducing email volume, arguing that email frequency becomes less of a problem, the better the customer’s perception of the brand.
“How they feel about the email program is actually driven by how they feel about the brand,” he says. “Email is the tail, not the dog.”
Read the article

Testing, testing
How can your email campaigns best benefit from A/B split testing? That’s the question addressed by Alchemy Worx Marketing Director Riaz Kanani in this feature for the DMA website. In particular, he focuses on manual testing, which is often presumed to be costly and complex compared to automatic testing, but which can be far more useful if you have a specific need, or want to test something that is unique to your organisation. Kanani explains how different approaches are better suited to different amounts of data and sample sizes, and stresses the importance of being patient, letting your campaign run its course before you jump to conclusions.
Read the article

Industry Update: November 2011

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 23 Nov 2011

In your festive round-up of the smartest articles online, we learn how too much data can be dangerous. We challenge conventional wisdom about crowded inboxes, and there’s a guide to writing effective email copy.

Chasing the tail that wags the dog
Marketers can access more sophisticated customer data than ever. But if you don’t impose your agenda on it, it’ll lead you on a merry dance, argues David Baker.

Alchemy Worx view
While social media and mobile increase our understanding of consumers, only constructing campaigns to satisfy every nuance of their behaviour is folly.
Read the article

The tranquil inbox
Organisations are scared to send more email because they think the average inbox is already full to bursting. They’re wrong, argues journalist Mark Brownlow.

Alchemy Worx view
As we discovered recently in our joint research with the DMA, the inbox is a more tranquil place than you imagine.
Read the article

Winning words
Why have I been sent this? Who cares? What’s in it for me? Don’t leave your audience guessing with this five-point guide to writing effective sales messages.

Alchemy Worx view
When your head’s in the clouds trying to produce inventive email copy, it’s easy to forget the fundamentals. The AIDCA checklist is a great tool to bring you back down to earth.
Read the article

Frequency in email marketing: can less really be more?!?

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 28 Oct 2010

“Am I mailing my opt-in list enough?”

The great unspoken truth of email marketing is that mailing more makes more money. But email marketers fail to fully exploit this fact because they are afraid of being seen as spammers – a misconception for which we have only ourselves to blame…

In the last twelve months I’ve had over a dozen clients and prospects tell me that they would like to send more email – but they can’t get the budget because their boss thinks consumers hate email and/or get too much email.

Yet every single piece of research confirms that email is the Number One way that consumers would prefer to be contacted by the companies they buy from. It’s unobtrusive, it puts the subscriber in control, and it’s easy to process. In addition, all the people on your list have specifically given you their permission to send them stuff, and they can switch off that supply any time they like at the touch of a button.

Why are we so obsessed with the idea that sending less email is good while sending more email is bad?

Email is RFI, not RFM
The reason is that email marketing continues to be dominated by a DM worldview, with a focus on RFM (reach – frequency – monetary value) and a resulting fixation on relevance, timing and ever tighter targeting. In other words, what we are trying to do is to get our subscribers to open, click and buy from a higher percentage of our emails… by sending fewer and fewer messages! But, can less ever really be more?

Surely not. The great unspoken truth of email marketing is that if you send more email by increasing your reach (growing your opt-in list) and/or increasing your frequency (mailing your list more often) you significantly increase the likelihood of making a sale.

So, given that we know that sending 2 emails will generate a greater return then sending one, why don’t we spend our time working out how to send more email? Answer: Because we’re terrified of being labelled spammers! This attitude of fear and self-loathing among email marketers is the single biggest obstacle facing our industry today. We are, quite simply, our own worst enemy.

Brand marketers use the broadcast RFI model (reach – frequency – impact) all the time, for the simple reason that it has been proven to work, time and again. (And so, of course, do spammers, which may be where some of the fear comes from.) But when was the last time you saw a case study or presentation that focused on the effectiveness of increasing reach or send frequency?

In every other broadcast marketing medium, advertisers always try to push the boundaries of frequency to see how much messaging an audience will tolerate. Listen to a radio chart show with a dozen messages per hour from the same sponsor, and you’ll realise this frequency goes very high indeed. Yet no one accuses Microsoft of spamming the airwaves with Xbox ads.

Can you imagine any other industry – TV, Radio, Press, Search, Banner or even Billboards – suggesting that the way to stand out from the competition is by doing less??

At AlchemyWorx we strongly believe that email is under-exploited by marketers because of a conditioned – but entirely misplaced – fear of over-mailing. Whilst we certainly agree that there is a maximum threshold for email communications, most people are far too fearful to get anywhere near it by testing higher frequencies.

Instead, every best-practice document published preaches about the alleged Holy Trinity of segmentation/targeting, timeliness and relevance (or non-spammy behaviour). Email is the only channel where lower frequency is seen as good, and higher frequency is bad. The challenge is that it’s not consumers who have this view – it’s email marketers. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas!

Of course, timing, targeting and relevance are important and should be done whenever and wherever possible. But see them as the means by which we get our subscribers to tolerate a greater frequency of contact – NOT as a reason to send less and less email.

More email works. Fact.

Give your incentives a reality check

Posted by: Alchemy Worx | 31 Aug 2009

Everyone wants a reason to purchase or interact with your brand online, so give them a little incentive…

Whether you choose to send specific and triggered messages within your email activity, or use them in your regular communications, incentives are a powerful tool to convince people to open your emails, click through from them, and ultimately make a purchase.

What can incentives do for you?

Done right, incentives offer true value and so are likely to increase response. And you can develop and measure specific incentive programmes designed to achieve specific goals:

increase open rates by working the incentive into the subject line
boost clickthrough rates by working the incentive into the subject line AND hosting all the details of the entry / redemption on a landing page
develop incentives that drive sales- typically through offers with a shelflife (“buy before August 31 and get £50 off”) or discounts on volume (eg “3 nights for 2″)
grow your list - incentivise your subscribers to forward your emails, and encourage new recipients to register
keep subscribers engagedwith an incentive as part of your welcome and/or regular incentives in your communications (all promoted as part of your subscription process, of course)
cut down on unsubscribes with regular incentives in your email programme

How NOT to incentivise

When developing your incentives programme, remember not to fall foul of these common pitfalls, any of which can quickly devalue what you’re offering:

DON’T offer too many incentives: This can adversely influence your subscriber’s purchase patterns. Once you stop incentivising them to purchase, they may not purchase at all. And you run the risk of incentivising purchases they would have made anyway.

DON’T attract too many price shoppers: If your whole subscription process is too heavily focused on incentives, you may end up with a subscriber base that’s very price focused. Subscribers attracted via incentives tend to be less profitable as they may be less likely to engage with your emails when there is no incentive, so lowering your open, click and purchase metrics in the longer term.

DON’T only reward bad behavior: Many consumers know that they can sometimes get offered a discount just by only partially completing an order or abandoning a shopping cart. But active, loyal subscribers can get annoyed when they see incentives aimed only at new or lazy subscribers, so make sure that you have incentives to reward your best customers too.

Top tips for developing an incentive programme

Check if you really need to offer incentives
There are other ways to add value to your subscribers that may do the job just as well, such as a poll or survey, which are cheaper but also protect your brand. Before rolling an incentivised campaign out, test the impact of the incentive against alternatives. In your analysis make sure you include your profit, and leave enough time for all subscribers to respond – the results after a few hours can be very different from those after a few days.

Make sure your incentives are appropriate
If you’re incentivizing to grow your email list, make sure you offer relevant products or discounts. If you sell sportswear, a competition to win football tickets will generate more relevant subscribers than one providing tickets to a cookery class…

Make sure your incentives are unique to your email
Customers will appreciate the value of an incentive – and the value of subscribing – more if they understand that the incentive is available via you, and your email programme, alone.

Be prepared if your incentive goes viral
Make sure to develop terms and conditions protect you, and that you have the capability to honor your incentive. If your incentive is tailored or specific, you don’t want to take the risk of having special codes or offers posted on voucher websites. Build a mechanism that collects user data and permissions before the discount can be used, or alternatively create a special personalised codes or vouchers to avoid duplication purchases.