Making Email Work Better for Marketing

MAKING EMAIL WORK BETTER FOR MARKETING. All you need to know to turn email into a powerful marketing tool

A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015 Digital Marketing series

CONTENTS. Standing out in the information flood

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Email! Or something else?

5

Measurement is control

7

Email goes mobile

10

Turn good into great

13

Think integrated

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Key take-outs

15

Get in touch

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Written by Kristian Hlousek kristian.hlousek@sixtydegrees.com Designed by Ayman Khatib

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

STANDING OUT IN THE INFORMATION FLOOD.

“ 54% of marketers view email as the most effective marketing tool. ”

Across the entire world, roughly 200 billion emails are sent every day. Out of those, 116 billion are business emails.(1) But don’t get too excited! About 70 percent of all emails sent fall under the notoriously hated spam category.(2) In this overwhelming flow of communication where relevant and irrelevant messages come together in one inbox, you need to make sure that your marketing email stands out – and inspires action.

But how do you do that? It’s clear that sending out random messages won’t cut it. In this white paper, we’ll briefly review all practical areas that we often discuss with our clients. It’s all the basic knowledge you need to turn email into a powerful marketing tool that helps you acquire new customers, retain and grow existing or win back lost ones.

Whether you are a big corporation or a small business, the benefits of email are clear: it’s a quick, cost-effective, and convenient way how to stay in touch with your target audiences.

And that’s also the reason why email is being evaluated as one of the most effective marketing tools.

(1) Source: Radicati Email Statistics Report, 2014-2018 , http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2014-2018-Executive-Summary.pdf (2) Source: Worldwide spam rate falls 2.5 percent but new tactics emerge, Zdnet, http://www.zdnet.com/article/worldwide-spam-rate-falls-2-5-percent-butnew-tactics-emerge

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

MOST EFFECTIVE & DIFFICULT DIGITAL MARKETING TACTICS.(*)

Among global respondents, indicating the most effective inbound marketing tactics and the most difficult to execute

Email

54%

11%

Website/blogs

48%

23%

Search engine optimization

39%

47%

43%

Social media

49%

38% 42%

Content 24% 23%

Paid search/PPC 09%

Mobile/SMS

08%

E-commerce

34%

19%

MOST EFFECTIVE MOST DIFFICULT

(*) MarketingCharts.com | Data Source: Ascend 2 and Research Partners, September 2014

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

EMAIL! OR SOMETHING ELSE? But before we look into your email strategy, let’s take a step back. We like to pose challenging questions. Do you really need to send that email? Will your recipients appreciate it? Is email the right medium to deliver your message?

Sometimes it may turn out that email shouldn’t be your tool of choice.

With the overall shift of budgets to digital, going for email seems like the natural thing to do. But mind you, there are more criteria to take into consideration.

ENTERPRISE MARKETING BUDGET ALLOCATIONS.(*) Share of total spend, based on a survey decision-makers or influencers in the markting budget process at enterprise organizations

2014–2019 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

25.1%

74.9%

27.6%

72.4%

30.4%

69.6%

33.4%

66.6%

36.4%

63.6%

39.7%

60.3%

TRADITIONAL SPENDING DIGITAL SPENDING

(*) MarketingCharts.com | Data Source: Econsultancy / Teradata

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

YOU SHOULD GO FOR EMAIL IF YOU WANT TO: • Reach your audiences quickly with an urgent message, e.g. highlighting a current time-limited promotion • Lead your target audiences to a landing page where they perform an action, e.g. an online purchase or a registration • Follow-up a certain user action, e.g. the registration of a prospect on your website • Maintain regular contact with the members of your database, e.g. via monthly newsletters

ON THE OTHER HAND, YOU SHOULD GO FOR TRADITIONAL DIRECT MAIL IF YOU WANT TO: • Acquire new customers that you cannot reach due to legal reasons • Support your value proposition by similarly valuable presentation, e.g. when offering a luxury product • Come across as more formal and thus underline the importance and seriousness of your message, e.g. when talking about financial products • Make the recipient feel as he or she is the only one or just one of a few select people receiving your offer

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“ Email is no longer an electronic letter. It has become more informal, also in the B2C context. ” Emails started as electronic letters but are nowadays more informal, also in the businessto-consumer context. With more and more brands attempting to ‘humanise’ their customer experience, this brings about both opportunities and threats.

The opportunity for brands is to skip all formalities, adopt a conversational tone of voice, and go straight to the point. Most emails nowadays therefore resemble more flyers than letters.

The threat is that the consumer has learnt that attention is a truly valuable currency, and therefore usually decides just within seconds whether a message is relevant or not, whereas with direct mail, the assumption still is ‘If it’s so important it has to be delivered physically, I’ll better read it.’

When planning and designing a campaign, think of the specifics of email. How do you prevent the user from hitting the ‘delete’ key? In other words, how does your message engage the user within a very short attention span?

A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

MEASUREMENT IS CONTROL. Speaking of engagement, it’s important to be clear about what you want to achieve, and what you define as success. Do you want people to click and go to your website? What is next, what about the desired consumer behaviour across the entire customer journey? Do you want them to purchase goods online, register, take part in a larger activation campaign, submit content or download your newest white paper…? You surely agree it’s quite irritating when you receive an email and are uncertain about the intent of the sender.

Now, metrics will not answer all the questions above – the answers depend on your objectives and the corresponding strategy. Nevertheless, metrics do give you the much-needed information whether your email is triggering interest and truly engaging the target audience.

“ On average, 100 emails sent generate 3-4 clicks to your landing page. ”

AMONG THE METRICS YOU ARE LIKELY TO MONITOR AND BENCHMARK ARE: • Bounce rate. This is the percentage of emails that bounced back because the address was not valid, you as a sender were blocked (‘hard bounce’) or the inbox was full (‘soft bounce’). The higher the bounce rate the lower the quality of your database.

• Open rate. The percentage of people that actually opened your email.

• Click-through rate (CTR). The percentage of people that clicked on any link inside your email.

• Unsubscribe rate. The percentage of people that unsubscribed from future communications. If the rate is high, it’s a signal that you should improve your targeting, as people didn’t find your email valuable.

THE BENCHMARKS(3) • Bounce rate –overall average ‘hard’ bounce rate 0.76%, 0.95% EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) • Open rate – overall average 20.2%, 20.4% EMEA • Click-through rate (CTR) – overall average 3.3%, 3.5% EMEA (calculated here from all delivered messages, sometimes the CTR is expressed as a percentage of all opened emails)

(3) Source: 2014 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study

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• Unsubscribe rate – overall average 0.14%, 0.14% EMEA A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN IN PRACTICE? Out of 100 messages sent, 99 are delivered, 20 are opened, and 3-4 users actually click on one of the links in your email.

It’s therefore clear that you will lose users along the funnel but at the same time it’s important to think how to optimise every step – from keeping your database well-maintained to making sure you’re targeting the right people to properly articulating your offer and making the transition to your landing page smooth.

“ The user starts with ‘who’ (sender), looks at ‘what’ (subject line), and asks ‘why’ (CTA). ”

BEST PRACTICES FOR EMAIL In order to keep as many users as possible in your funnel, you should consider all of the points below: • Sender. The sender is the first criterion that the user takes into consideration. Does the email come from a trusted source? Is it an email that he or she has indeed subscribed to? It’s interesting that some firms still keep using unclear aliases such as ‘[company] no reply’ etc. Use a designation the recipient is familiar with. If you have a corporate brand that isn’t consumer facing, why should you use it as the sender name?

• Subject line. If the first question is ‘who’s writing me’, then the second will be ‘why?’.

It has to be clear what’s in the email for the recipient. The subject line should be telling the user what’s inside the email and therefore why it’s worth opening the email.

Trying to be less catchy and more serious usually works better. Avoid phrases written in caps so that your email doesn’t appear spammy.

• Pre-header. The pre-header is the part that is displayed next to the subject line in some email clients, e.g. in Google Mail.

It mentions the first line of the email.

Unfortunately, what you often get to see is ‘If this email is not displayed properly, click here’ or something similar. This is a missed opportunity. Use the pre-header to include a text that may not be visible after the opening of the email (i.e. written in the same colour as the background) before the actual header. This way, you may reinforce the call to action (CTA) and motivate the recipient to indeed open the email and read on.

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

• Preview. Usually, the recipients of your email will be using a preview function. This means a part of your email will be displayed – either a horizontal or a vertical one, depending on the user preferences. This means that the most probable part that is likely to be previewed (regardless of the preview set-up) is the upper left corner. You should at least start with your key message here in order to make the recipient curious.

• Above the fold. You have successfully convinced the recipient that your subject line, pre-header and key message in the header make the email worth clicking?

That’s great! But now it’s time to make the user perform the action you desire, which usually starts with another click. Place all the important information – and links! – above the fold so that the recipient doesn’t have to scroll down.

• Call to action. Again, don’t assume your customers know what to do. You have to tell them. Also, remember that even though you may include a call to action in your subject line, the recipient will likely not come back to it. Therefore, you have to repeat the call to action in the email itself.

“ Just a glance at your email should give the user a clear idea of what’s in it for him or her. ”

• Quick reading. Digital media have changed the way we consume content. Most of us don’t read from the very beginning to the very end. Eye camera research proves that we tend to get a quick overview of the content first and jump from one element to another before going into details.

Therefore, it doesn’t make much sense to design your emails as formal letters. Use a striking header with your key message, different visuals and text blocks to make the email appear ‘easy to digest’ as well as buttons to motivate recipients to click.

But remember that less is more in this respect as well. Five major elements is the maximum you should stick to. And make sure your images have correct ‘alt’ texts for the case that the user must confirm their loading.

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

EMAIL GOES MOBILE. Smartphones are about to dominate mobile usage, and especially in the Middle East their penetration continues to surge ahead. Ericsson(4) estimates that already by 2020, a vast majority – namely 70 percent – of the world’s population will be using smartphones, which means that the current rate should more than double. And roughly 80 percent of this growth will come from Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa!

SMARTPHONE SUBSCRIPTIONS PER REGION 2014–2020.(*)

Research proves that email is the most frequently used application on smartphones.

What is important to remember is that mobile devices are not only used on the go but at home or at the office as well. Some people will open your email on a mobile device to quickly check whether it’s worth coming back to later from a desktop.

The conclusion is clear. If you don’t regard mobile users as one of your important target audiences, you are missing out on something.

6,100 million

2,600 million

2014 +140

2017 +230

+750

+1,940

2020 +120

+330

TOTAL ADDITIONS +3.5 BILLION

LATIN AMERICA

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

NORTH AMERICA

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

ASIA PACIFIC

WESTERN EUROPE

“ 70% of the global population will be smartphone users. Can you afford to ignore them? ”

(4) Source: Ericsson Mobility Report 2015 (*) Source: Ericsson Mobility Report 2015

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

% OF CONSUMERS DOING ACTIVITES AT LEAST ONCE PER DAY ON SMARTPHONE.(*)

OPENS BY ENVIRONMENT PER QUARTER: Q1’11–Q1’14.(**) About 4 out of 10 emails are being opened on mobile devices nowadays: 100 8

EMAIL

91%

90

TEXT

90%

80

SEARCH

76%

70

SOCIAL

75%

60

NEWS

62%

50

GAMES

57%

VIDEOS

30%

8

7

8

8

7

7

7

8

8

12 21

43

42

40

32 34

38

36

34

32

30

29

27

28

15

29

29

28

26

27

25

23

38

40

21

18 14

33

20 10

31

23

40 30

8

17

21

23

27

31

32

36

43

44

42

0

MOBILE

WEBMAIL

DESKTOP

UNDETECTED

Data based on 4 billion opens across 5 million campaigns during 2011 - March 2014. The red bar at the top represents opens in an undetectable environment. Undetected increased in 2013 Q4 due to introduction of Gmail image caching on proxy servers.

(*) Source: ExactTarget – Mobile Behaviour 2014 (**) Source: Campaign Monitor

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

What does that mean to your email strategy?

• The email should be designed in a responsive way that can be easily read on mobile devices. The design should be simple with large buttons.

• You surely agree it’s quite frustrating to click on a clear link in a well-designed and mobile-optimised email only to find out that you have landed on a website that lacks responsiveness and where you easily get lost using your mobile device. Therefore, as a marketer, you need to make sure that links are directed to a responsive or adaptive website to offer a seamless user experience.

“ Mobile-optimised email leading to a non-responsive website? Fail! ”

• Your analytics should be working also on mobile devices. This way, you’ll be able to get insights on the smartphones used by your audiences and optimise your emails to the most preferred platforms.

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

TURN GOOD INTO GREAT. So you followed all the best practices, and your email has achieved good results. That’s great!

But there’s actually no reason why you should stop here. What we recommend to do is to A/B test and optimise your email based on the obtained test results on a continuous basis.

You may want to test virtually every part of your email strategy:

“ Testing means improving your return on investment. ”

• Different subject lines • Different pre-headers • Different calls to action, and corresponding incentives • Different layouts To ensure relevant results, you should divide the same target group into two, and approach every half of the group with a different strategy. Other email attributes such as time of delivery should stay the same in order to isolate the elements you really want to test.

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

THINK INTEGRATED. With all the above-mentioned points on our mind, we still shouldn’t forget why we are planning, designing, and sending out an email at all. The ultimate objective is not just to get the perfect email to the user. It may be to sell more through your website (if you’re in e-commerce), introduce a new product, support your cross-selling activities, engage more people in your new digital campaign or to make your customers join a live event at your premises. You should therefore think about the entire customer journey, and the role you want email to play.

Clicks through to our website, learns more about our current promotion

“ How does email fit into the entire customer journey? ”

Talks about the purchase to friends (word of mouth)

Shares experience on social media

Contacts our call centre to clarify questions

Sees our TV ad

Downloads our mobile app

Receives and opens our email newsletter

Visits our store, talks to sta Browses our website, selects a reward from our loyalty scheme

Performs a mobile search for products Sees our display ad

Receives and opens a follow-up email

The customer journey usually involves a multitude of touch-points, from traditional media communications to paid and organic search to digital display and more. Your email shouldn’t be regarded as a discreet action but in the context of the entire customer journey.

It’s important to make sure that the visual language used in your emails corresponds with imagery used across other touch-points, and that your tone-of-voice remains consistent as well.

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

KEY TAKE-OUTS. 1. Make sure email is the right medium for your marketing objective 2. Deploy analytics to monitor metrics such as bounce rate, open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate 3. Use a sender name that the user will be familiar with 4. Use descriptive subject lines – motivate to open the email 5. Don’t forget about the pre-header – reinforce your call to action 6. Design for the preview function – the most visible part is the upper left corner 7. Place important information and links above the fold 8. Break down text into blocks, allow for quick reading 9. Don’t assume the recipient knows what to do – use a strong call to action 10. Take into consideration mobile users –not only responsive email but also responsive or adaptive landing pages 11. Test, test, test – different subject lines, pre-headers, calls to action, incentives, and layouts 12. Make sure email fits perfectly into the entire customer journey

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015

GET IN TOUCH. No matter if your email strategy is already successfully implemented or if you’ve just started thinking about using email as a marketing tool – if you are looking for a strategic partner that might help you in every stage, get in touch!

Using our proprietary C-Ring Model, we will review your current communications, extract valuable insights, and uncover market realities to subsequently design and implement a custommade strategy that will help you reach your business and marketing objectives. And just a small remark: as an integrated agency, we don’t ‘do’ just email!

SIXTY DEGREES www.sixtydegrees.com 60degreesagency @60degreesagency sixty-degrees +974 4434 0354 | +974 4434 0356

BUSINESS ENQUIRIES: youssef.ghabour@sixtydegrees.com

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A Sixty Degrees white paper | 2015