| Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions 203-838-8138 | |||||||||||
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| Reggie's articles appearing in Target Marketing Magazine Profitable EmailFine-tune your targeting to move your program to the next level April 2007 Do you want to move the needle up a tick on your email response rates? It takes time and effort, but it’s more than possible. Good email marketing focuses on sending the right message to the right group of customers at the right time. This is standard direct marketing, so it stands to reason that the more you can customize and personalize your email program to your recipients, the more effective your program will be. In fact, JupiterResearch reports that marketers may see response rates increase by as much as nine times when personalization and segmentation are appropriately used. With this statistic in mind, here are some practical ideas and real-world examples that should help you move your email programs to the next level. Consider Geographic Targeting Weather, climate and regional location may be important to your constituent base or to your product and service mix. For example, if you market apparel during the winter, you’d want your recipients in warm weather states to learn about your offerings of lightweight clothes, while in northern states you would want to promote products that keep people warm. The Scotts Company, a provider of plant, lawn, gardening For example, a city dweller, who may not have a lawn, gets advice and tips on the care and feeding of houseplants and terrace shrubs, whereas a homeowner in the northeast receives information pertinent to maintaining a lawn or garden in his or her particular region. To deliver this level of customization, Scotts has developed an email template that allows appropriate, personal content to be easily incorporated into a mass mailing. Another example of a marketer using geography to customize its subscribers’ email is Design Within Reach. This purveyor of modern furniture occasionally embeds information about in-store events at local locations in its emails. It also sends solo emails promoting its stores based upon the recipient’s geographic proximity to its local stores. Take a Look at Recency New subscribers to your email program are much more likely to open and interact with your emails than long-term subscribers. A recent survey conducted by email marketing company Informz finds there is a marked drop-off in open and click-through rates during the first 90 days of a recipient’s tenure. Open rates plummeted from 58 percent to 37 percent and click-throughs dropped from 30 percent to 19 percent. After this crucial introductory period these rates stabilized. Anything you can do to stimulate opens and click-throughs during this vulnerable time frame will help you counteract any precipitous fall off in response. You might consider a custom welcome series to new registrants that contains your most popular content or offers. If you can resonate with new customers through targeting, you may still see results decline within the first 90 days, but not to the same degree as the averages reported. Identify Your Inactives If an email subscriber has not opened or clicked through on an email within four to six months, malaise has set in. You need to re-engage these subscribers with either a subtle or an “in your face” approach. One of my favorite examples of an “in your face” Dell took a more subtle approach with its Dell Small Business newsletter. While its regular email program is sent in HTML, it sent a text email to its inactives. This was a smart tactic because, due to current filtering issues, text is much more likely to get delivered. Its subject line really caught my eye: “Dell sends its apologies. There’s still time on $599 desktop savings.” The email then got to the point with an opening sentence that read: “If you no longer wish to receive these communications, please unsubscribe by clicking here.” This was followed by a link to change frequency preferences, a request to add Dell to the address book, a link to their privacy policy, and a promotion for the special offer for the week. Take Advantage of Profile Data If you have collected basic demographic information about your email subscribers, find ways to use it. And, if you have not, you may want to think about revising your sign-up registration process to capture additional information. The more you know about your prospects and customers, the more laser-focused your communications can be. Brooks Brothers often promotes gender-specific offers. No surprise here, women who received female apparel offers outperformed those who received the men’s suit offer by 30 percent. Doctors Foster and Smith, the pet supplies cataloger, sends promotions based on the type of pet owned. They have ten different email programs ranging from dogs to cats to their newest edition for those interested in horses. B-to-B firm Accenture has a broad consulting practice in five major business categories and 17 sub-vertical markets. Prospects and customers who subscribe to its My Outlook email program are offered the ability to customize the content they receive based on industry, country or world region, topics of interest and more. I hope some of these ideas resonate with you. The more you deliver relevant, targeted messages to your audience, the better your results will be. Regina Brady is president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions, a direct and e-mail marketing consultancy. She can be reached at (203) 838-8138 or reginabrady@att.net. | |||||||||||
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