Topic: Targeting

Make the most of dynamic content and personalisation

Posted by: | 19 Oct 2009

Tailoring your content according to what you know about subscribers can boost response without the workload of creating numerous versions of each message. Here’s what you need to know…

What’s the difference between dynamic content and personalisation?

The difference lies in how the email is built. Personalisation inserts data that is held in your database directly into the content of your email. Dynamic campaigns, on the other hand, contain blocks of tailored content that are deployed according to rules for particular subscriber groups.

Give me some examples

For a personalised campaign, you might include details such as your subscriber’s name, address, date of birth or any data that you hold, in the format in which it’s stored, so long as it’s relevant or adds value to your message.

Using dynamic content, meanwhile, you might opt to send different content elements to different subscriber groups that meet certain criteria such as:

  • interests: a DIY store might send one content element to subscribers with an expressed interest in gardening, and something different to interior designers
  • geography an international campaign might send content in different languages to users in different countries
  • gender you might send one image to males, and a different image to females
  • customer type for instance, sending high-value offers to big spenders and lower-value deals to lower-spending customers

Personalisation? Don’t people see through that “Dear <First Name>” stuff nowadays?

It’s true that simply personalising a message with a user’s name doesn’t have the impact it once did. Any message that just tops a completely generic message with a user name is likely to disappoint, and consumers are wary of supposedly personalised messages that turn out to be spam.

However, with a little lateral thinking, there are lots of easy ways to use personalisation to improve campaign performance such as:

  • add credibility to welcome messages by including the source of the registration you’re confirming or
  • include the Account Manager’s name or signature in B2B campaigns.

Better still, many platforms also enable you to set up dynamic personalisation, enabling you to build rules around personalisation. This gives you some of the advantages of dynamic content without the complexity, such as a rule like: “if ‘first name’ blank, use ‘customer’”.

Isn’t creating dynamic content very complicated?

If you haven’t created dynamic campaigns before, your first campaign can seem complicated, but the effort is well worth it: dynamic campaigns can save you significant amounts of time and resource in the long run.

Once you have your rules set up, you can often save them for future use, making ongoing dynamic campaigns only slightly more time consuming to set up and test.

To get you started, follow these steps:

  • Create a test list with internal contacts or seed addresses with data that mirrors the data you hold for your subscribers. Then have a play with your platform.
  • Start off simply with live data. Use just one dynamic content segment and a couple of rules, then you can build on your campaign’s complexity from there.
  • Consider outsourcing the set-up and deployment of dynamic campaigns, so freeing you up to spend more time on generating content and strategies for future campaigns.

Checklist for developing campaigns with tailored content

Personalisation and dynamic content can provide a significant uplift to your campaign performance when done well; get it wrong, however, and you can harm your brand and reputation. Here’s what you need to get right:

  • Check the quality of your data – are all fields complete and accurate?
  • Make sure you’ve thought through the logic properly, and specify default values where appropriate.
  • Test your campaigns thoroughly. With some ESPs you can test before deployment using live data; otherwise, create some dummy data and generate a test mailing to that list before your final deployment.
  • Check your hosted version: whether personalisation or dynamic content carry through to your hosted version will depend on your platform.
  • Find out what reporting is available for dynamic/personalised campaigns. Even if your platform cannot report on the performance of different content segments, you should still be able to run reports offline, though this will incur additional time and resource.
  • Don’t personalise for the sake of it: only include information that is relevant and valuable to subscribers.
  • Always test the performance of your personalised campaigns: sometimes broad offerings will generate unexpected sales.

How to reward all your customers – good, bad, old and new

Posted by: | 5 Oct 2009

Hooking new customers into your email marketing activity is the Holy Grail for any business. But what about the loyal customers who’ve been spending and interacting with you for years? Here’s how to keep both sides happy…

Don’t only reward bad behaviour

Many brands today tend to trample on their existing customers in an effort to attract new customers. Nothing is more infuriating for your existing customer base than to see new customers receiving all the benefits of incentivisation through email marketing. This is rewarding bad behaviour. Some classic examples include:

  • Abandoned shopping cart rewards:Giving customers who leave their shopping cart a voucher incentive, while giving regular, frequent customers nothing for their loyalty.
  • Discounts for new customers:Loyal customers can rightly be expected to feel annoyed to see big discounts offered to new customers, and no discounted or similarly priced service for them. Do this once too often and you’ll end up sending them elsewhere.
  • Incentives to encourage reactivation: You can entice people who haven’t purchased, opened or clicked for a long time into becoming active again – but what about your steady, reliable customers? Don’t ignore them.

Keep both sides happy

If you remember to spend as much time cherishing your good customers as you do wooing new and lapsed customers, you’ll keep everyone happy. It’s simple and easy to do and will ensure that as well as growing your customer base you continue to benefit from your loyal customers’ purchasing power.

Here’s how:

  • Don’t stop incentivising new customers or trying to reactivate those that stop interacting or abandon their shopping cards – but do reward loyalty tooby giving the same amount of attention and love to your good customers.
  • Remember everyone: ensure your campaign gives as much value to as many people as possible.
  • Keep offering enticing new offers discounts or vouchers to encourage first purchases.
  • Set up an equivalent incentive offer for existing customers - reward their good behaviour and ongoing subscription.
  • Add more value to all your email marketing programmes. This will result in the likelihood of both sides of the customer coin engaging with you continually over time.

Give your incentives a reality check

Posted by: | 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.

Making the most of triggered emails

Posted by: | 23 Aug 2009

Setting up triggered emails is an easy way to ensure your communications are relevant and timely as they’re based on your subscriber’s recent interactions with your brand, product or service. For instance, there may be simple actions or changes in customer behaviour that you can use as the basis for new triggered activity that complements your existing messaging.

But you can also work outside the box for an even greater sense of the personal touch. Here we show you how…

Are you making the most of triggered emails?

Have you thoroughly explored all your potential email trigger programmes? Bear these points in mind:

  • triggers can be very effective just because of their impeccable timing, and don’t always need to include an offer
  • test different creative ideas before you set up your trigger campaign, timings and approaches to determine the most effective approach for your own list
  • refresh your creativeregularly
  • check your triggers are still functioning properly every month or so

Basic types of triggered emails

Triggered emails offer endless possibilities. They can be fashioned to suit any type of customer behaviour criteria. Typically, triggered emails take advantage of moments in the customer lifecycle. Here are the most common and effective triggered messages:

Confirmation messages
Immediately confirm any changes subscribers make, including subscription initialisation (welcome email), unsubscription (farewell email), first purchase, future purchases etc
Follow up messages
Additional messages based on particular content you have sent – such as a targeted offer to subscribers who opened a particular message, or clicked on an offer
Purchase / conversion based
Cross-sell and /or up-sell complementary products
Send reminders for past customers to renew products that have a certain life eg annual purchases, a contract ending soon, a product with a short life span like a cosmetic product
Abandoned shopping cart -remind someone they still have items in their cart and encourage them to purchase these items plus others offered at a discount
Send frequent purchaser messages to your most important/valuable subscribers
Personal Messages
Birthday offers- send to customers on or just before their birthday
Anniversary of customer / membership of loyalty programme – thank people for their membership / purchase history
Reactivation
To reduce the number of your subscribers becoming inactive, make a decision about when your subscribers are likely to become unengaged: you can do this by calculating your frequency and recencyof opened messages.
Set up an incentivised, triggered message just before your estimated engagement cut-off

Get creative with your triggered emails

Once you’ve covered the basic triggered options, start thinking outside the box for even better returns:

  • consider developing a full Welcome email programmewith a series of messages that build on each other
  • remind past customers to make their regular purchase based on their individual historic purchasing frequency and timing- eg an insurance renewal
  • send offers to generate additional salesfrom certain subscribers, eg to turn subscribers who usually buy once a year, to twice-a-year buyers
  • send a survey message to subscribers who have recently purchased or unsubscribed to find out their opinions and make sure they know you’re listening
  • update your purchasers on the progress of their order

The possibilities are endless…

Developing a Content Strategy

Posted by: | 4 Jun 2009

One of the most challenging aspects of developing an email programme that delivers results is having valuable content for every message you send. Developing content that delivers value to your subscribers will ensure the long term success of your email marketing activity. Here are some tips for developing your content:

  • Provide value – There is huge value in being able to contact your subscriber base regularly by email, so acknowledging this by giving something to your subscribers in return for their permission. ‘Value’ can be anything from special discounts only available to email subscribers, to useful information about topics related to your product offering. Sticky content like competitions, puzzles or quizzes are also a great way to generate interaction and open a two-way dialog with your subscribers. Time can also be a very valuable characteristic – make sure your email subscribers are the first to know about new product releases or upcoming events or sales.

Make the Value exclusive to email (at least for some period of time) and you will be delivering true value to your subscribers which will ensure they stay engaged for longer, and ensure your subscriber list grows by giving subscribers, and potential subscribers, a reason for being on your list.

  • Plan ahead – For newsletter programmes, and even ad-hoc mailings, having a plan for 6 or 12 months will ensure that you always have relevant content, and deliver regular messages to your subscriber base. Without regular contact, your database will very quickly lose value. If a subscriber receives a message from you but doesn’t remember giving you permission, they will be much less likely to respond, and may also report your message as spam.

Having a plan will also make it possible to serialize content and include teasers about upcoming content, which improve your open frequency.

  • Analyze – Look to your historic campaigns to find out what content is most popular, and effective in meeting your campaign objectives. One of email marketing’s greatest virtues is the knowledge you can build on your subscribers. Design your content to use landing pages, and build up significant behavioural data on your subscriber’s preferences and interests.

Categorize your links in different ways to gain a better understanding of the different groups of subscribers within your database. Including codes in your link tracking will make your analysis easier, and be sure to include revenue data and interaction over time in your analysis to get the complete picture of the impact of different content.

  • Segment – Use the knowledge you have built up in your click analysis to segment your database and target groups of subscribers with content that is specific to their interests. Theoretically, the only limit to the number of versions of a campaign is when the cost of producing the incremental version outweighs the additional revenue generated by that version, but be sure that you are maintaining regular contact with all your subscribers before you start developing additional versions.