Let's start with a straw poll. How many of you respond with enthusiasm whenever a message promising cut-price Viagra or instant weight-loss drops into your inbox?
I would imagine there aren't many hands in the air at this point. Mailshots promoting dubious pharmaceuticals are one of the genuine curses of modern times. There are too many of them, deleting them takes time, and they carry viruses. Best not to go there.
But let's try a trickier question. It's a busy morning. You get an email from a well-known brand, albeit one you don't recall having had any personal contact with. Do you: open it; delete it straight away; or report it as spam?
The response to that one is probably more mixed. However, the odds on an apparently unsolicited mailshot being opened are getting longer all the time. For instance, email list management company MailerMailer's report on email trends, published in March, revealed that open rates declined in 2007, with the second half of the year registering a 2 per cent drop.
Open rates are not the only problem. Sending out bulk email may seem like a cost-effective way to broadcast a commercial message to interested parties, but there is no guarantee it will get through. Addresses change, and internet and email providers stand like sentinels between marketers and the consumer. Messages that look like spam are stopped - and that does not just affect the inglorious efforts of Viagra merchants, it can also stop legitimate companies in their digital tracks. Put simply, if an email provider such as Hotmail blocks your mailshots, a whole swathe of your audience disappears.
Faced with such difficulties, you have to ask whether email represents a good use of marketing spend. Yes, you can certainly target a lot of consumers, but is anyone listening?
The email challenge
The first thing that has to be said is that email does work successfully for a lot of companies. According to Ray Howe, communications manager at luxury travel company Bales, the medium is playing an increasingly important sales role. "It is driving traffic to our website and that is certainly increasing our business," he says.
But even advocates of the medium would concede that email marketers face big challenges, not least overcoming the mailshot fatigue that has been pushing down open rates. Matthew Kelleher, commercial director at Redeye, says the reluctance of users to open commercial messages can be traced back to a business model that was based on broadcasting a single message to everyone on a database. "Email is cheap, and when marketers were told they could contact everyone on a database for 1p a time, that was what they tended to do," he explains. "But the truth is that you can't just blanket email people. If you do, you get more and more people complaining." That in turn contributes to the other great issue that afflicts email campaigns: deliverability.
Under UK and European law, all business-to-consumer email messaging should operate on the principle of the recipient opting in and having the option to opt out again by means of a prominent 'unsubscribe' mechanism. All well and good, but a significant number of recipients find it easier to report spam than to unsubscribe, and if this happens enough times, the ISP will block further messages from the sender. Meanwhile, ISPs and email providers are also operating their own spam traps, which can easily catch out the unwary. The content of bulk email is routinely scanned, and certain words, such as Viagra and weight-loss, can result in the message being taken out of circulation. Even something as innocuous as a huge image (which could carry a virus) and very little text can consign certain messages to the spam bin.
This can be a real problem for companies that have little experience of the way ISPs tend to work. As Howe recounts, until it bought an email marketing platform from provider Neolane, Bales was unaware that its messages were being blocked by Hotmail. As it turned out, it was a relatively simple problem to sort out. "Neolane approached Hotmail and explained that we were a legitimate marketer, and our email was unblocked," he says.
To some extent, the problems of falling open rates and deliverability have been mitigated by legislation. The laws that require a consumer to opt in mean that far fewer people receive unsolicited emails than was previously the case and are thus less likely to report commercial messages as spam.
Instead, the market has changed significantly over the past few years. While it is still possible to buy lists of opted-in consumers and use that database to send unsolicited messages with the aim of acquiring customers - and let's face it, many still do - the trend is to manage consumers who already have some kind of relationship with a brand or product. "These days, email marketing tends to be about retention and conversion," says Dela Quist, chief executive of Alchemy Worx.
Quist says that is a situation the majority of big brands are comfortable with. "Good brands want to be seen to be doing good email marketing," he says. "And all the major brands recognise that the real value of email is in reaching the existing customer base and allowing interaction."
Overcoming the hurdles
All well and good, but even when a company is using email as a means to communicate with existing customers, the challenges don't go away. Delivery and open rates are metrics that everyone should be monitoring constantly.
According to Daniel Cross, director of strategy at Lateral Group, the key to a high delivery rate is to ensure that the data is fresh. Out-of-date information will mean more bounces due to address changes, and a greater degree of consumer resistance if emails are sent on the basis of customer data that is no longer relevant. It is equally important to monitor the response of recipients in terms of emails bouncing back and unsubscribes, while being aware of the issues that could cause problems with ISPs. "A lot of it comes down to your IP address being seen as quality," he says. "You have to maintain your spam scores."
Delivery is just the first hurdle. Even if your emails reach every mailbox listed in your database, the exercise will be of little value unless sufficient numbers of recipients open them and act on the content by visiting your website.
In this respect, the twin mantras of the email marketing industry are relevancy and timeliness. "You must ensure that the right email message is sent to the right audience at a time when they will be receptive," says Pete Anderson, planning director at Underwired.
That is potentially a tall order. Let's say you have 30,000 people on your database. Not all of them will be interested in everything you have to say about all your products and services, so it makes sense to segment according to their preferences. The question is, how do you do that effectively? "Often the best way to start is by asking the consumer," says Anderson. "We run consumer surveys in which we ask people about the products they would most like to hear about."
You can segment the database further by analysing website data. When a customer visits a site and registers, it is a fairly simple matter to record their behaviour and feed that back to the email database. It is a technique that has been used effectively by Bales and, as Howe explains, email newsletters can be used to gather even more behavioural information. "When customers click through from one of our emails, we track what they do and use that information to personalise the next email we send," he says.
Martin Allen, head of customer marketing at Hotels.com, a division of Expedia, is also a proponent of careful targeting, but argues that behavioural information is just part of the mix. "We also segment according to geography," he says. "At the moment, we send emails to nine countries, and what we have to ensure is that the destinations we're offering are popular in these countries."
Timeliness is important, too. Hotels.com regularly tests the frequency of mailshots against open rates and changes its timetable according to the findings. There is further time-focused segmentation, with regular travellers being contacted more often than those who book hotels less often. However, as Allen points out, if your intention is to encourage customers to buy more products, relevancy and timeliness must be matched with an attractive price point. "We always ensure that we couple relevant offers with good deals."
Which brings us to the subject line. Email recipients decide in a fraction of a second whether to open or bin a mailshot, and unless they know the brand well and are loyal to it, the subject line can be the make or break factor. "It has to entice the recipient to open the email, " says Cross. "But it should also be a true reflection of the content." So, while incentives to open, such as offers of cheap deals, certainly work, the expectation raised by the subject line should always be matched by the content.
For those that get the formula right, it is possible to buck the trend of falling open rates in impressive style. For instance, when Bales revamped its email marketing strategy, the result was a jump in the rate of mail opened from 24 to 49 per cent. The secret is to master the art of targeting through personalisation and segmentation, while ensuring that the mailshot provides something of genuine value to the recipient.
SMART THINK!NG EMAIL
1. Think carefully about subject lines, they can be a make or break factor when recipients decide whether or not to open an email message.
2. Ensure the email is relevant. A mailshot that resonates with carefully targeted subsets of your customer base is more likely to be opened.
3. Segment your audience. Build profiles of your customers and use these to target emails.
4. Ensure your email is timely. Think carefully about frequency of newsletters. Too few and you may miss out on opportunities to engage. Too many, and you run the risk of consumer fatigue.
5. Ensure the creative is compelling and in line with the image of the company as presented via other channels.
CASEBOOK - How McCain used email to engage consumers
Known for is chips, potato wedges and micro-pizzas, McCain Foods has been using email to reinforce a campaign aimed at changing consumer perceptions of its products. "We started the campaign about two years ago," says communications development manager Nicola Ech-Channa. "It's about getting the message across that McCain food is good food.
Ech-Channa acknowledges that it was difficult for the FMCG company, whose customers buy indirectly through retailers, to build an email list. "A lot of the people on the list came from loyalty schemes and our online activities," she says. "We also purchased names, although we ensured there was some connection with McCain.
McCain avoided the mass mailshot. Instead, people were targeted according to their relationship with the brand. "Initially, we categorised people as either brand engagers or resistors," says Ech-Channa. From there, the aim was to turn as many people as possible into loyal consumers. "We focused on segments. That meant sending the right message to the right person."
So, emails providing information on the brand were tailored to each segment, and included, say, a link to product updates, or a link to a film on the company's relationship with farmers. "We had a lot of good stories to tell," adds Ech-Channa.
Open rates and click-through were boosted by techniques such as competitions and special offers. "As we've improved our segmentation, the click-through rates have improved," says Ech-Channa.