E-Marketing
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by Allen Rabinowitz
If the recipient's anti-spam software hasn't zapped you, then the discerning eye of a savvy cybernaut will dismiss you and quickly hit the delete button.
The rules are still being written in the brave new world of e-commerce, but a wise marketer hears customers complain of inboxes jammed with unbelievable deals or suspicious product offerings from unknown senders and wonders how to succeed in this fresh medium. The cold truth is if careful attention is not paid, their message will be quickly dispatched to the deleted folder along with pitches for weigh loss programs, get rich schemes from Nigeria and ways to enlarge a certain male organ.
Dr. Edward Rigdon, Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgia State University believes that while some advertisers are wary of email, there is a growing willingness to use the medium. But for those looking to get started, he offers a warning: Between the great potential to offend people and the need to differentiate your unexpected email from all the Spam out there, I believe you can expect a really low response rate. Even if the email says it's from Procter&Gamble, you can open it up and who knows what it is.
Although marketers might view email as a tool similar to broadcast, print and direct mail, it's unique in how it relates to intended target audiences. Email is now reaching enough people that it could be considered a mass media, says Richard Warner, President of What’s Up Interactive, a media information disseminator serving news operations and corporations. But mass media has evolved from broad and general into narrow and narrower hyper casting. Email is already there and the control is one to one so it calls for a new way of thinking to make that work.
Email is really hard, and the people who sell email marketing services and software don’t tell you that, ” declares John Picirillo, a Partner in MediaThink, a marketing strategy and implementation firm. “People get stuck because they don’t really know how to start and that there is a process to deploy [an email marketing plan] and do it responsibly. But people shouldn’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy because this is infinitely hard to do right. ” Just as no one 20 years ago could predict the tremendous growth of the Internet and electronic communication, forecasting the future of email marketing is a daunting task. When asked to consult their digital crystal balls, our e-wizards saw a blue sky growth trend for e-marketing, but also storm clouds brewing over the equally huge expansion of spam.
NOT YOUR FATHER'S SPAM
Most observers predicted government involvement on either the federal or state level to eradicate spam. Although he foresees lawmakers passing legislation outlawing spam, Picirillo doubts it will have any great effect. Government policies are not going to stop good spammers, he declares. And if you are good at spam, you are not going to get caught. That's just the way it is. I think it will detour folks and a lot of companies will have to review their practices, especially ones that rent lists, but I don’t think it is going to slow the spam down.
Sami Jajeh, Executive Vice President of the Abovo Group an integrated marketing firm that specializes n helping business to business, technology and services companies launch and bring products to market concurs on the spam issue. It is just a pure volume game of getting out stuff unrelated to people's interests to as many emails addresses as possible, he explains. I think that's going to hit the point of being ineffective. When somebody receives an unsolicited barrage of more than 30 a day, the messages are not going to break through and will just be deleted.
Citing Delta Airlines online campaigns like Weekly Web Fares, sports themed Fan Fares and other successful Internet offerings as evidence, Jajeh sees targeted, responsive email marketing finding greater acceptance. Along with delivering bills, statements and other information via the email channel, he explains, companies can tailor the message to individual customers. This personalization creates an interactive dialogue where the customer is in charge because he or she gets to express their interests. People using email marketing to build such dialogues are going to enjoy the fruits of that in the form of enhanced productivity, cost savings and customer loyalty.
MEASURING RESPONSE
One advantage email provides is an ability to measure what happened to the message upon receipt. The number of people who respond to an email is called the response rate and it can vary from the 1-2 percent range of a business to consumer message to the much higher numbers of business to business. Another mechanism called an open rate measures whether or not the email was opened. However, this can be misleading because if the message is viewed in the preview mode on some email systems, it shows up as opened even though the user didn’t actually open it.
If the email is opened, the click through measures how many people click through to the thing the sender is requesting. In emails, several different calls to action can be offered by clicking on links for more information or viewing a demo, enabling measurement of the percentage of people responding to a particular offer. Although the click through is sometimes the end result, it can also send the recipient to a page which causes them to walk through a process where they provide information about themselves. This yields the transaction rate, a measure of the number of the actual transactions that occurred.
Stating email marketing is most effective when used to manage existing relationships, Picirillo discounts it as way to snare new customers and believes renting lists of email addresses is a waste of money. I hear people saying all the time that they want to use email as an acquisition tool, he explains. Well, it doesn’t work. It's a retention tool you can use on the B to B side. We use it to help sales people become smarter about their customer through a two way dialogue. We'll send an email to our client's customers containing content important to them, but it also asks two or three questions about their company's plans. When it's done right, we see response rates to those questions in the 40-50 percent range. We provide that data to the client's sales force, so they know what their customers care about.
CUTTING THROUGH THE CLUTTER
As with any other media, cutting through the clutter of messages bombarding people is essential for winning their hearts and minds. In email marketing, the critical element is a header or subject line that entices a user to open the message. You have to think like a TV news producer who’s writing teases that run before commercials to get a viewer to stay and watch the next segment, ” says Warner. “It has to hook them into opening it first. Then, still thinking like a news producer, build teases. Put your headlines at the top that relate to what comes later in the email. And make it compelling, not juvenile. You want to put something in there that has some kind of meat and truth to it.
Says Tricia Robinson, Vice President, Marketing Communication, at Socketware, a leading software maker for email communication, A subject line should be one of two things. First, it should be a compelling offer. If I was marketing turkey, I would talk specifically about the product with a line like ‘Spice up your Thanksgiving with our turkey! The second approach is using the headline as the subject line. Many of our customers have found that to be very successful. Robinson adds there are several words to be avoided at all costs. These include: Free, High, Hot, Sexy and Important. She also advises refraining from using all capitalization or employing any type of excessive punctuation, such as a row of exclamation marks.
Once the eye is captured, the written content has to deliver. Though a new medium, email draws on its predecessors when it comes to basic communication. “Body copy should be more direct and to the point than other forms of direct marketing or advertising, Robinson advises. More importantly, whether it s news, information or promotional content, the purpose of the message should appear above the fold, just like a newspaper, so that it s right inside of the preview pane.
Lynnette Kimmel, Marketing Programs Manager for CoreHarbor, a managed service provider which offers clients hosting, procurement management, resourcing, and self side solutions, strongly urges sending short, concise messages. I don t try to put a lot of stuff in my emails, she explains. I try to get enough interest to drive them to our website and capture them there. What you offer is very important. Offering an educational white paper has always worked very well for us.
A different take on old media, Warner feels, provides email with a model to emulate. The reason why USA Today worked is that they play to people s love of factoids, statistics and other little information nuggets and tidbits, he explains. So your email should be sparse on copy, make prominent use of bullet points and not go into too much detail. Very few people will print it out, so you can t think of it as something appearing in a magazine or a newspaper, but rather as being read on a computer screen.
The look of the message is critical as well. Marketers would prefer to use Hyper Text Markup Language (html) the code nearly every web site is written upon for the ability to insert colors, fronts, and graphics into a message. The choice between plain text and html should be an easy one, but the varieties of email technology can limit the selection.
Plain text is boring to me, says Kimmell. When I get plain text email, you lose me. But maybe only 65 to 70 percent of the end users can receive html. So my suggestion is to go to a service provider that has ‘sniffer technology where they know to send html or plain text so that you can create both. The technology sends out an html version, and if that can t be received, they automatically send plain text. One of the keys is to create an html version and get it out to as many people as you can, and have a plain text [version] for those you can t reach.
Though advocating sparseness in copy, Warner believes an email's lack of visuals deters potential users because it looks too sparse. Put something in there, even if it's canned, he urges. Make the graphics decorative as opposed to the focus of it. You want the graphics in an email transmission to total less than 50K, which is tiny. So unless you're selling flowers, use it for accent. Think of sugar and tea: If you put in too much sugar, you can't drink it. But for some folks, there's no taste if there's no sugar in it.
IN THE FRAY, BUT NOT OF IT
Seeking to give their clients added value, traditional ad agencies are jumping on the email bandwagon. But, would these clients be better served by a company that specializes in e-marketing? The jury is still out on that question. Shane King, President of ThreeSquared, a streaming media production company, feels the tech-oriented expertise of his and similar companies is invaluable to marketers eager to reach the online population. While conceding that a traditional ad shop will deliver effective creative, he believes the majority of mainstream agencies are still novices in dealing with the ever changing technical aspects of the media. In the traditional sense, agencies do very little as far as implementation and delivery, King declares. Email needs to be part of almost any campaign, and the agency can certainly provide the creative for it, but it is so technology driven that a lot of them are going to struggle with the technology side. A few years back, agencies were implementing in house new media companies, but perhaps due to market stagnation, there's not many agencies at the moment with a media staff on hand.
With technology seemingly evolving weekly, email messages must be designed for different computer platforms of varying capabilities using an assortment of browsers and email programs. The challenge then becomes devising an email piece that is accessible by all computer users.
There is no such thing unless it's just plain text, claims Warner. There are too many older browsers, and some corporate environments still use Lotus, which can't read it at all.
In order to reach the largest possible target audience, the marketer needs to regress technologically. This is one place where you don't want to be ahead of the curve, says Warner. You have to accept limits in what you can do because many browsers can't handle it. Because of the number of dial-up connections, you need to hold down the size of any graphics. Even with moderately sized files, you'll piss off people while they sit and wait for the thing to download.
CLICK HERE FOR INTIMACY
The relative newness of email marketing often creates misperceptions on
how it differs from more traditional media. The intimacy of the user's involvement with the media is unlike any other. You decide whether or not you want to participate in a radio or TV ad by punching buttons or switching channels, says Picirillo You can throw away junk mail that comes in your mail box, but email is personal and intimate. You are coming to this little corner of the person's world where they do business and other important things. If you play by the right rules, they'll let you have a piece of their inbox.
Problems arise when people who don't understand the email channel fail to comprehend that relationship. Picirillo feels it needs to be a courtship rather than a hard sell sales pitch. We've seen a number of folks literally blow their brand up because they didn't view it as a courtship, he explains. You've got to move slowly, not ask for too much and state your intentions. You almost have to say, ‘You're going to give me your attention Mr. Customer, and in exchange for that I am not going to send you too much mail. What I'll send is going to be really relevant and any information that you tell me is going to be safe and secure. There's ways to do that where people control that relationship. We see email being effective when that is achieved.
And, that little synopsis should leave any e-marketer sweaty with desire .
