Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

A client asked our advice last week about email newsletter sponsorship and the effectiveness of advertising formats to generate click-traffic. They had the opportunity go with three options either individually or together including banner advertising, text advertising (like Google Adsense) or sponsored editorial content. They didn’t know which was likely to return the best response.

Most people’s gut instinct is to be very wary of banner advertising because many businesses have had their fingers burnt by expecting PPC level CTRs and click-throughs from websites where banner advertising is a real-estate filler. However, you need to divorce yourself from this mindset of traditional display advertising because the email newsletter audience is already far more targeted than general website traffic. This particular newsletter was a specialist bulletin that was an opt-in publication to members of an content-rich website. With a significant volume of recipients, the publication looked like a good fit for our client. But what type of advertising should they opt for was the question – banner, text or advertorial?

Unlike many online marketing initiatives, there is surprisingly little information, case-studies or advice on this subject. This is probably because of the individual nature of email newsletters and the composition of their audience profiles. We have worked with clients that send lengthy content-rich newsletters that recipients will print to read whilst commuting, whilst other publications offer 1-line teasers of website-based content that draws the recipient back to the website and further information and associated products/services.

A study carried out by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants found that sponsored content such as case studies or white papers received more reader attention than banner adverts. Having analysed the time readers spent on specific sections of a content-rich email, they found that sponsored editorial content received around 90% of the time that the reader spent on content from the regular authors. They also found that results could be significantly improved when combinations of brand exposure were used such as sponsored editorial content plus graphical advertising or text advertising in the same newsletter. Whilst they acknowledged that using banner and text advertising together was more effective than a single ad channel alone, response rates were eight times higher when graphical/text adverts were used in conjunction with sponsored editorial content. The study’s author Hank Berkowitz said “If you don’t have the sponsored content to reinforce the message in your ads, they are less likely to remember who provided the information.”

Another study carried out using the email publication Hedge Fund Daily looked at the response levels of text and banner advertising formats when driving recipients to download a white paper. Despite an initial hypothesis that the visually appealing graphical banner would be more effective, they actually found that the text ad outperformed the banner ad by a ratio of more than 2:1. They believed that this was due to effective integration of text advertising alongside regular editorial content and the reader’s tendency to ‘tune-out’ graphical advertising. But they did add a caveat that this would be something that should be tested on each publication due to the nature of the audience profile.

We would agree with this note of caution when advising anybody of the choice of ad formats. There is no golden rule for which format to use. The best option would be to run split-tests to determine the effectiveness of each format or combination of formats. However, this might not be possible so a sequence of tests could be carried out to the entire user-base on successive broadcasts using various combinations of advertising.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full display advertising service from creative development to placement and reporting as well as a full email marketing service for both sales broadcasts and newsletter communications. Contact us to discuss your display advertising requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

You might have the best HTML email creative, with great sales copy and full personalisation, but if it doesn’t get past the recipient’s inbox reviewing then the campaign is good as non-existent. There are a number of things you can do to give your email a better chance of being opened and not assigned to the recycle bin or worse…being classified as ‘spam’.

What is the open rate as an e-marketing metric? The open rate is defined as a percentage calculation of the number of recipients from a mailing that opened the email (not necessarily click through). For example, if we mail 1,500 people and 340 people open the email then the open rate for that campaign is 22%. Whilst email broadcasting systems offer a wealth of information about the recipient’s behaviour such as click patterns and even subsequent purchases made from email clicks – the factors affecting open rates all occur prior to the recipient getting as far as reading the email. The vital areas to focus your attention on are therefore:

• > From Name – will the recipient recognise the name of your company? Do they know the company name or a brand of your company or even product? Some companies choose to send email broadcasts using a member of staff’s name. We caution against this unless the member of staff is known to the customer. If you are sending an affiliate marketing update to your affiliate community then it would be appropriate for this to come from the Merchant company or affiliate manager if he/she are known to the affiliates. When you have decided on the ‘from’ name then this should be a constant element and not changed. Recipients may have added that name to their ‘safe’ lists and changing it could assign future messages to the spam folder
• > Subject Line – along with the ‘from’ field name, the subject line could be the only elements on which a recipient can make their ‘open-it/bin-it’ decision. There is a fine line between sounding like spam, but enticing a user to lean more by clicking on the email. Be careful not to use spam filtering trigger words such as ‘free’ or ‘money’ as the email may never even make it to the inbox and if it does will often be tuned out by the recipient. Also avoid using all caps as this is often synonymous with spam email. You should also never mislead recipients as to the content of the message through the subject line
• > Mailing Frequency – how often are you contacting the user and is this on a scheduled basis when they expect to receive an email communication from you? Do they receive several sales emails every week? (there is a particular stationery company that seem to mail us on a daily basis). Or do you not contact them enough risking them forgetting your brand? For periodic broadcasts such as newsletters then this should be scheduled and that schedule kept to, for sales messages you should assess your unsubscribe rates as well as determine what is most essential to send to your recipient with the highest chance of leading to a sale

You should also note that email broadcasting applications rely on image downloads to register an ‘open’ in HTML email creatives, therefore a text email will not provide this data and text recipients could still have opened the creative. Even HTML creatives aren’t safe with email applications such as Outlook and Hotmail blocking image download until the recipient trains them how to handle such broadcasts from the sender.

Another factor that can harm your open rate is the ‘to’ field. Your broadcast is more likely to be opened if you have a recipient’s name rather than a group name. Broadcasting applications handle the 1-to-1 to/from fields ensuring your recipient doesn’t feel like you couldn’t be bothered to address them personally.

Broadcast timing is another critical factor in the survivability of your email, we covered this in an earlier blog entry (Day of the week testing for email marketing)

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email management for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

All email marketing activity in the UK is governed by the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulation 2003 (the UK’s interpretation of the EU’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications – DPEC). The Data Protection Act applies whenever personal data is processed. ‘Processing’ is defined as anything done to personal data, such as when it is used, disclosed, stored, collected, amended or deleted. The act ceases to apply when data has been irretrievably deleted and can no longer be processed.

As an email marketer you have a duty to adhere to the Data Protection Act 1998 and this is underpinned by eight Principles that are stated in Schedule 1 of the Act. Following a summary of the Principles we will look at how they can relate to email marketing and then provide some sources for further reference.

The eight Principles of the Data Protection Act are:

1. Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully and, in particular, shall not be processed unless - at least one of the conditions in Schedule 2 is met, and in the case of sensitive personal data, at least one of the conditions in Schedule 3 is also met.
2. Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes.
3. Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they are processed.
4. Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.
5. Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
6. Personal data shall be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects under this Act.
7. Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

The first Principle of the Act refers to the lawful collection and processing of subject data. For the email marketer this refers to how the data subject’s information has been obtained and the primary reason that information was needed. Just because information has been provided by a customer when they purchased online, this does not automatically provide the marketer with permission to add that data subject to a marketing communications database. The data subject should not be deceived or misled about what their information will be processed for. Any additional use should be clearly stated and opt-in sought if necessary.

The second principle governs the limitations of use on your data subject’s information. In the context of email marketing, this would be the incorrect interpretation of ‘opt-in’ permission and therefore a breach of the act if you send unsolicited communications to the data subject. It also covers the passing, renting or selling of subject data when this wasn’t explicitly consented by the data subject.

The third Principle of the Act can be easily breached if the email marketer is not careful. It is often tempting for the marketer to want to collect as much personal data about the subject as they can at the point of sign-up. In the context of an email newsletter, the only information required is the email address, and the name (for salutation personalisation). For product offerings you could argue that postal address is relevant data because geographic location may be necessary for targeting offers. For example if you have a new retail outlet opening in Surrey then you could segment your database to a realistic radius for visiting Surrey. Customers in Newcastle are unlikely to travel to Surrey for a 10% discount on products purchased in-store. So, whilst it is tempting to try and solicit as much personal information as possible, you should abide by the third Principle and only collect what is actually necessary for fulfilment of the service offered.

The fourth Principle is fairly self-explanatory. Information you hold on your data subjects should be accurate and correct. It is your duty to ensure these records remain up-to-date. Email marketing is particularly susceptible to this because of the frequency that data subjects change email addresses. Moving to a new ISP, changing jobs or just choosing a new address can all render your data out-of-date and inaccurate. Many commercial broadcasting tools have build-in functionality to automatically suppress an email address after a defined period of inactivity. For example this could be after five emails were sent but not opened. Automated suppression is common where bounced responses are received several times.

The fifth Principle refers to how long you will retain the information collected on your data subjects. This could include enquiry form information for prospects that never became customers or entrants to a competition that didn’t require a purchase or lawfully acquired opt-in consent for further marketing related communication. If a subject has opted out of an email broadcasting list then it could be argued that there were grounds to retain this information so it could be part of a suppression file to ensure that the subject didn’t receive further broadcasts.

The sixth Principle states the right of the data subject to have access to any and all information you hold about them as well as the right to prevent processing likely to cause damage or distress to the data subject. This includes raw data as well as notes and comments made about them. The data controller has 40-days to collect and retrieve the information their organisation holds on the data subject and can charge a small administrative fee for this task (no more than £10).

The seventh Principle refers to data security and safety. Data should be securely protected and inaccessible. This includes suitable encryption and restricted access for non-authorised individuals as well as management limitation to access of personal data.

The eighth Principle relates to the physical location of your data. Whilst this might be a locally held database of customer contact details at your office, for email marketers things become less certain. If you use a bulk email broadcasting tool such as an ASP solution, you should check where your data is held. If your data is located outside the EU then your supplier must have a safe harbour agreement.

Useful sites:

• The Data Protection Act 1998 – full text of the Act
• Out-law - Information from Pinsent Masons, a specialist IT and e-commerce law firm

Please note that the information provided in this blog does not constitute legal advice. For legal advice you should contact a solicitor.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email management for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

One of the most debated issues in email marketing is the most effective day of the week to despatch your email broadcast for maximum effect with recipients. Should Monday’s always be avoided? When is the recipient most likely to devote some quality time to their inbox? There have been many studies carried out to address this question. The general agreement is that you should carry out extensive testing on your own email database to determine their preferences from open to click to purchase or sign-up.

A study by Email Centre UK looked at sector differences and for B2B markets found that Wednesday was the best day for both opening emails and clicking on links within emails. Those receiving business emails displayed a number of characteristic behaviours. Early in the week, they believed recipients would be in a ‘delete mode’ when they return to the office after the weekend. They would be more ruthless in clearing their inbox and harsher when deciding what to read or not. Later in the week they were in a ‘wind-down’ mindset as the weekend approached. However, they claimed that content-rich emails such as best-practice documents and insight papers might be treated more favourably later in the week. This was also true for publishing and media broadcasts that featured quality content. They found an almost opposite set of behaviours when analysing broadcasts sent to consumer email accounts. For retail broadcasts, sending email marketing communications later in the week was more effective. Friday was an especially effective day so consumers could make purchases over the weekend.

Omnistar conducted research and believed that Monday to Wednesday were the most effective days for opening emails, but Friday through Sunday were the peak for click-through activity from email. However, they also acknowledge the early week inbox clearing behaviour. Both recommend testing days of the week using your own email database and tracking the open and click-through metrics. It is very difficult to predict a generic day of the week that will be effective to all sectors.

Alchemy Worx conducted their own research and found that just 9% of consumers believed they were influenced by either time-of-day or day-of-week. They believe that week-of-month is a far more effective metric for revenue generating email marketing. In their study they determined that week #5 was the optimal time of the month for revenue generation because this coincided with the majority of UK company pay-days and customers and prospects felt most affluent after being paid. A study into optimum week of the month found that the following week order was most effective: 5, 1, 4, 3, 2. They believed that consumers feel ‘richest’ during weeks 5 and 1, therefore discounting during these months wouldn’t be so necessary. If you needed a revenue generation push in weeks 2 and 3 then discounting would be more effective during that period of the month.

Ultimately, you will have to decide from your own knowledge of your customer base what is the most appropriate day to communicate with your audience by email. This will be based on day sales figures, the latency period between first exposure to the product/offer and decision making to purchase etc. Talk to your sales staff as they will have a wealth of this information. As stated by all the studies reviewed, continual testing is the key to optimising your broadcast effectiveness and giving the recipient what they want when they want it.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email marketing for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

Whilst email marketing is cost-effective and relatively quick to deploy, there are a number of common mistakes that can be made if you don’t plan your campaigns properly. Some are legal requirements that must be adhered to and others are good email etiquette. These mistakes include:

• > Ignoring opt-in permission - violating data protection and PECR legislation by emailing a recipient that hasn’t given explicit opt-in consent to receive marketing communications as defined by the legislative guidelines
• > Confusing transaction & marcomms permission – a client that makes an online purchase will expect transaction emails from you as part of the purchase process. For example this could be an order confirmation or form data supplied for account set-up etc. This is not automatic consent to receive marcomms communications
• > Rushing campaign creative – leading to poorly written copy and poor quality HTML coding that doesn’t render correctly on recipient’s email client
• > No usability testing – failing to assess the integrity of the email creative by not checking how it looks on several email applications and webmail browser clients. For example, do images appear or are blocked, is ALT tag data present on images, are table structures maintained, do colours appear properly or is the email blocked by an ISP spam filter?
• > Content errors – failing to thoroughly check the email copy for errors such as spelling and grammatical mistakes and broken links. This shows a lack of professionalism in your organisation and could raise doubts about your attention to detail with your products
• > Poorly chosen From name – for commercial email communications this should be the name of the company/organisation promoting the product or the name of the brand/publication. It should not be from a named individual unless this is a recognised figure within your market sector that recipients will know
• > Badly chosen subject line – poorly chosen subject lines risk automated deletion by spam filtering software with your recipients ISP or email application or risks deletion by the recipient because of unfamiliarity with your product, brand or
• > Frequency – sending too many marketing emails to the recipient causing them to become overwhelmed/annoyed with your regular presence in their inbox. How often is the customer likely to purchase your product? Is there a seasonal pattern to purchase habits? Try and learn from your customer behaviour as to how and when they choose to purchase your products then aid this behaviour with useful and helpful email communication
• > One size fits all – adopting a ‘mud thrown at the wall’ approach to database segmentation and sending an untargeted communication to every contact on the broadcast list. Segmenting your database will almost certainly return higher click-through and conversion rates, again, learn from customer/prospect behaviour to focus your email marketing
• > Ignoring campaign response data – your previous campaign data will be invaluable in helping you learn from your email marketing and targeting future broadcasts for better responses. This includes open rates, subject line tests, click-through figures, landing page tests and creative variations
• > No clear call-to-action – sending a sales email with no obvious call-to-action such as buy a product or learn more about the product on your website. The recipient reads your email but doesn’t know what you want them to do next and therefore fails to respond how you intended them to
• > No specific landing pages – forcing the recipient to search for how you want the call-to-action to be completed. For example sending the email recipient to your website homepage, then expecting them to navigate or search for the product or service promoted in the email. If you have a specific information page clearly explaining the products USPs or the start of your transaction process this will cut out unnecessary pages that risk purchase abandonment
• > Complex unsubscribe process – forcing the recipient to jump through hoops to stop receiving further marketing communication emails from you (which is a PECR compliance requirement) and will lead to complaints about your customer service
• > Lack of personalisation – whilst email marketing is a mass communication channel, you should still aspire to talk to each recipient on a 1-to-1 basis. At the most basic level, this can be achieved through  email personalisation such as named salutation, through to complex personalisation referencing purchase history, spend level and geographic location

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email management for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

Dear valued-customer…certainly makes you feel ‘valued’ doesn’t it! Whilst we all know the marketer hasn’t sat there individually writing to each name on their database, some familiarity and recognition wouldn’t go a miss, especially when you’re about to ask the recipient to buy, read or sign-up to something.

With many email broadcasting systems offering functionality for personalisation, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is a poor excuse when planning your e-communications strategy. Whether you’re developing a sales campaign or a regular newsletter, try speaking to each recipient individually, if only to call them by their name.

All too often marketers adopts a ‘carpet-bombing’ approach by throwing an identical (impersonal) creative at as many people as possible in the vague hope that some of it will stick to their untargeted list. However, as times become tougher, consumers become ever more discerning and selective when policing their inbox – the email marketers job has never been tougher!

Personalisation in email communication should be at the heart of your campaign planning, not an afterthought. With only seconds to achieve recognition, trust, interest and action – you need to use every tool in the box to outperform your peers – all vying for those precious moments of attention from your prospect, before having their hard-work assigned to the ‘deleted items’ folder.

In the quest for 1-to-1 marketing, there are several areas of personalisation that you should focus on to develop the most targeted communication you can. The most popular type of personalisation is the salutation. Most email broadcasting systems will allow you to merge the ‘first name’ field into your email template and often provide a ‘fall-back’ option should the first name not be present (such as ‘customer’). This does rely on you having first name data to begin with. For customer records you will most likely have full name and address data (including county and post/zip code data) but for quick sign-up newsletter subscriptions you may have only collected the email address. You might want to consider enriching your data by incentivising prospects to provide additional information in return for entry into a competition, a free download or a product discount for example.

Subject line personalisation is another great way of grabbing your recipients attention, but not all broadcasting solutions can offer this functionality. The subject line is a vitally important piece of email real-estate. According to Jupiter research, over 30% of email subscribers take their decision to open an email based on the content of the subject line. Whilst use of the recipient’s name can often look tacky, geographically relevant keywords or prior product prompting will focus the mind of the recipient and improve your chances of the email being opened.

The email body content should also be assessed for personalisation potential. If your database contains purchase history information, monetary value of the customer, geographic location, gender or age – these can all be used to segment your recipient list and create well targeted segments. Lapsed customers can be re-incentivised with better offers and bigger discounts. High-value customers can be rewarded with VIP programmes, pre-launch offers etc.

Most decent email broadcasting systems will collect and display behavioural metrics such as receive, open, click and actions taken (e.g. purchases, downloads, sign-ups etc.) that will allow you to further segment your email database for better targeting.

As ever, personalisation isn’t a checkbox to be crossed-off and forgotten about, but a continually developing process of test, refine and re-test to optimise your email effectiveness.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic consultancy for email marketing as well as full outsourced email management for b2b and b2c campaigns. Contact us to discuss your email marketing requirements.

We’re often asked about the current legislative position on opt-in/opt-out permission for email marketing in the UK when approached to manage email communication projects, so we thought we’d try and explain it today in the blog.

For a start, it should be clarified that the rules governing b2b email communications differ from b2c marketing communication by email. Business to business email communication is still governed on an opt-out basis (i.e. you are allowed to email a business even if you don’t have explicit consent from the business to send promotional email communications). However, it is still considered best-practice to seek permission from business users before sending marketing communications to them.

Since 2003, email marketing communication was governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) which is the UKs legislative interpretation of the EU’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (DPEC). At the heart of the PECR document are two fundamental rules concerning email marketing aimed at protecting the individual:

• > non-concealment of the sender’s identity and provision of a valid opt-out email address
• > user’s prior consent to be contacted for marketing communications (opting-in).

If three exemption criteria are met these rules can be relaxed:

• > email address was collected in the course of a sale or negotiation for a sale
• > sender only emails marketing communications relating to similar products/services
• > when you provided your address you were given the chance to opt-out but didn’t

The Information Commissioners office have produced a concise PDF document on the matter and this can be downloaded by clicking here

The Information Commissioner’s website contains comprehensive documentation about all aspects of data protection and full copies of the legislative documents. The ICO website can be found at: www.ico.gov.uk

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a range of email marketing services and capabilities to help you make the most of your email data. From campaign advice and planning to full outsourced email marketing management, we can help you realise your business potential through effective email communication. Contact us to discuss your requirements.