Top 10 Trends in Email Marketing for 2010...The opportunities for retention email marketing are...

Top 10 Trends in Email Marketing for 2010

Lynton House 7‐12 Tavistock Square London, WC1H 9LT www.emailvision.co.uk

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Top 10 Trends in Email Marketing for 2010 2009 Email Marketing – Year in Review ......................................................................... 3 Top 10 Trends for Email Marketing in 2010 .................................................................. 4 Trend #1 - Email is the Centerpiece of the Marketing Plan .......................................... 4 Trend #2 - Email Marketing and Social Media Feed off Each Other ............................ 5 Trend #3 - Rise in Adoption of Mobile Marketing ......................................................... 6 Trend #4 - Growth in Email Integration with Web Analytics ........................................ 7 Trend #5 - Customers Expect Relevant Engagement .................................................. 7 Trend #6 - Growth in Transactional Email ..................................................................... 8 Trend #7 - Globalization of Email Marketing ................................................................. 9 Trend #8 – Emphasis on Strategic Campaign Planning .............................................. 9 Trend #9 – Rise in Integration via APIs ....................................................................... 10 Trend #10 – Testing, Testing and more Testing ......................................................... 11 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 12 References ..................................................................................................................... 12 About Emailvision Founded in 1999, Emailvision has grown to become the global market leader in software as a service for email marketing. The Emailvision mission is to provide excellence in software & service for our clients to reach their email marketing goals. The Emailvision software service, Campaign Commander™, has become the industry standard email marketing tool for eCommerce and publishing. Emailvision has over 4500 users worldwide. Campaign Commander™ is used by marketers worldwide to plan, design, deliver and analyse their email marketing campaigns. This software service allows marketers to execute advanced tactics with minimal technical skills. In 2009, Emailvision delivered over 24 Billion messages on behalf of 2000 clients and achieved a record 96.5% delivery rate. This quality of service is driven by over 10 years of research and development in global email delivery and deliverability. In addition to its pioneering technology platform, Emailvision offers a global network of support and professional services. Passionate account managers provide clients with best practice advice, training and professional services. The company has a growing staff of over 240 and offices in the major international markets including the USA, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain and Italy. Emailvision is listed on the NYSE Alternext stock exchange.



2009 Email Marketing – Year in Review

2009 was another year of strong growth in retention email marketing. We saw an increasing number of companies adopting this exciting new marketing channel and more experienced email marketers step up to advanced tactics. Successful inroads were made in integrating social media and mobile with email marketing. Many of these initial trials will become major trends in 2010. According to a study by MarketingSherpa1 delivering highly relevant email content to recipients was the most important challenge for email marketing in 2009, and will continue to be the top challenge in 2010. Faced with the global economic recession most multi‐channel companies cut their marketing budget aggressively in 2009. Email marketing was an exception. According to MarketingSherpa1 in 2009, between 29 to 51 percent of the companies increased their email marketing budget with only between 6 to 18 percent decreasing the email marketing budget. The superior ROI of email marketing clearly motivated companies to increase their investment in email marketing even in the most challenging economic conditions in decades. Spam continued to be a constant challenge in email. According to McAfee’s quarterly Threats Report2 spam email accounted for 92 percent of all email Q2 2009 beating the previous all time record of 91 percent. Confusion and distraction caused by spam (although most of it is filtered) continues to be a challenge for email marketing.

The opportunities for retention email marketing are bright in 2010. It is important to keep pace with the changing nature of online marketing and sharpen the marketing plan for 2010 by making customers and email marketing the centerpiece.



Top 10 Trends for Email Marketing in 2010

There are a number of trends that will become increasingly important in 2010 that need to be given attention to ensure your continued success of the overall online marketing plan. We will review the top 10 trends for 2010.

Trend #1 ‐ Email is the Centerpiece of the Marketing Plan

There are two aspects to note regarding email as the centerpiece of the marketing plan – email ROI and email driving all aspects of the marketing plan. Email Marketing Remains the King of ROI: According to the DMA economic impact study Power of Direct, commercial email returned a huge $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009, and is projected to dip slightly in 2010 to return $42.08 for every dollar spent. In comparison non‐email Internet marketing only delivers $19.97 for every dollar spent in 2009. Print catalog marketing delivered only $7.25 for every dollar invested in 2009. Email marketing still provides the best ROI by far, making it a focus for marketers for years to come. According to the DMA commercial email drove over $26 billion in sales during 2009 making it an important marketing channel. Email is the Driving Force in Marketing: Search Engine Marketing (SEM), lead generation programs, webinars, podcasts, tradeshows, white paper downloads, etc. are typically part of the marketing plan that generate email address and capability for the customer list opt‐in. Only a small portion of these initial contacts with the potential customers will typically result in immediate sales conversion. Email marketing provides the opportunity to nurture these potential customers with relevant information and engage them actively in increasing awareness of company brand and informing them about company products or services in a cost effective way. An increasing number of these initial contacts who may have faded away without the touch provided by email, can be converted to customers over time in a cost effective manner increasing the overall marketing ROI. With its superior ROI and the ability to integrate and drive all aspects of marketing plan, email is the most prevalent online marketing tool as seen from the Forrester3 study below.



Trend #2 ‐ Email Marketing and Social Media Feed off Each Other

The increasing use of social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter is an important and well established trend worldwide. By integrating email marketing and social media you are able to boost the performance of both mediums. The integration is valuable for spreading the word and growing your list and it helps build the network intelligently and virally. Newsletters and transactional email can have links to the company blog, Facebook or Twitter encouraging users to engage with the company actively. The company blog can have an email capture form to build the lead nurturing list. You can encourage the company fans on Facebook and the followers on Twitter to download white papers or attend webinars, where email address and relevant information about the potential customer can be captured. You can encourage sign up for the newsletter on social media by sharing brief information on an interesting article. For e‐commerce businesses, engaging with clients means more product ratings and reviews, therefore better credibility and up‐sell opportunities. The possibilities and creativity is endless. Marketers will continue to invest in integrating social media and email in 2010 as the integration is producing positive results as seen from the MarketingSherpa1 study.



Trend #3 ‐ Rise in Adoption of Mobile Marketing

With customers increasingly relying on their mobile devices for communication and messaging, mobile marketing is a natural extension of building a multichannel engagement with the customer. Mobile marketing has two primary aspects – email for mobile devices and SMS campaigns. Email for Mobile Devices: Customers are increasingly using their smart phones to check their email. This has tremendous implication for email marketing as messages need to be optimised for potential viewing on mobile devices, which have a much smaller screen than a typical computer screen. Advanced graphics such as Flash animation are not supported on mobile devices and the speed of mobile networks maybe significantly slower than computers. Leading email service providers now provide the capability to preview email message rendering for leading smart phones enabling the marketer to optimise the message for mobile reading. SMS Campaigns: SMS is a natural extension to email. Combining campaign management for email and SMS, the two most popular mobile channels into a single platform enables you to manage mobile customers in an integrated manner. You can send an SMS offer to a customer based on an email message being opened or online browsing to increase the chance of deriving revenue from the customer. In a recent campaign to raise funds for the earthquake in Haiti over $10 million was raised in under a week via SMS in the United States, demonstrating the power of SMS.



Trend #4 ‐ Growth in Email Integration with Web Analytics

Email, whilst important is one of multiple marketing channels. In order to understand the true end‐to‐end ROI and achieve good multi channel understanding it is important to integrate the email channel with the Web channel. Good analytics bring together interactions across all online channels into a collective space to deliver comprehensive business metrics that can provide consolidated insight into the end customer behaviour. Web site analytics solutions can help marketers quickly identify the most profitable paths through their web site, determine where visitors are navigating away from their site, and identify critical success metrics for online marketing campaigns. This data can be used to trigger an email including information or promotions on product or service information they viewed on the site when a customer navigates away from the web site. It is possible the customer or prospect ran out of time and needed to navigate away from the site. Sending them an email regarding the benefits and notable features of the product or service will encourage them to complete the transaction. Another typical challenge is shopping cart abandonment. For various reasons ranging from credit card problems to distraction, customers on a particular website will abandon a shopping cart. A simple but effective lifecycle email message triggered after an appropriate period of time is to send the customer the list of items in the shopping cart along with a promotion or a limited time discount to complete the purchase. This can be effective in completing the transaction. Careful planning needs to be incorporated in re‐marketing offers to ensure a discount is not being provided on low margin items or a low value transaction. The discount can also be offered on a single item to minimise margin impact. It is also important to test and understand the correct time period after which the promotional offer or discount is sent. This is to make sure the shopping cart is truly abandoned and the customer has not been distracted or ran out of time briefly and intends to return to the purchase.

Trend #5 ‐ Customers Expect Relevant Engagement

We are bombarded with vast amount of marketing messages each day and a large amount is via email. Increasingly customers are tuning out these messages unless they are engaged in an interesting and relevant manner. Customers now expect relevant engagement that is personalised and tells them a story they can relate to. Gone are the days of one size fits all content and engagement models. Marketers consider relevant content to be the most important aspect of email marketing. Relevance in content is the key to building a successful relationship between the customers and prospects and the company, which is the most important factor in driving long term sales for the company.



Relevance in email content can be enhanced by adopting some of the following suggestions:

• Implement a trigger email campaign • Use web analytics to capture information about the customer or prospect • Segment email lists and design campaigns based on customer behaviour • Allow customers to manage preferences in a fine tuned manner via a comprehensive

preference center • Personalise the look and feel of the email communication based on customer

demographics • Creatively balance the urge to drive an immediate sale by providing useful

information and resources that can engage the customer and drive higher revenue over the long term

Trend #6 ‐ Growth in Transactional Email

If used properly transactional email is the most powerful form of email marketing available to the marketer today. Transaction emails have very high open rates in comparison with marketing messages. A customer who ordered their favourite book would like to know when the book will arrive and will open the shipping notification message. The benefit to the marketer is that these messages are not just opened, but also read and saved for future reference. This provides the email marketer the opportunity to intelligently add marketing content to these high open rate messages. Transactional email messages by definition are based on a transaction the consumer has voluntarily initiated with the company. This provides insight into the customer’s behaviour and preferences, which can be used to target the customer with high value and targeted marketing content. If a customer purchased a digital camera, a confirmation message that informs the customer about carrying cases available for the digital camera along with a discount coupon to purchase has a higher probability of success to up‐sell. In the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa1 64 percent of the respondents considered transactional messages worth reading, compared to just 18 percent for promotional offers and 20 percent for newsletters. The high customer preference for transactional email messages provide the email marketer with the opportunity for high rate of ROI. The CAN‐SPAM Act places fewer restrictions on transactional messages than pure commercial/marketing email messages. If the message has mixed transactional and commercial/marketing content provisions of the CAN‐SPAM Act still apply. To ensure compliance transactional email subject line clearly needs to identify the transactional information (should not be marketing content) and the transactional content needs to be at the beginning of the message. A best practice is to use 20% of the email space for marketing messages. Although CAN‐SPAM Act does not require opt‐out in transactional email it is good practice to enable customer to change their preferences even with transactional email.



Trend #7 ‐ Globalisation of Email Marketing

Business today and online businesses in particular are global in nature. Traditional country boundaries are fading away quickly and finding new customers for a business requires expanding into new areas of the world. Email is the perfect marketing tool to reach customers globally. There are two key aspects of global email marketing – global deliverability and global training and support. Global Deliverability: If your business has customers worldwide then you need to be able to ensure the email is successfully delivered into their inbox globally. In order to keep up with the changing nature of threats, the ISPs are also constantly changing their recipes for filtering email messages. Each ISP has their own set of evolving rules that relies heavily on end‐user feedback and their internal security threat assessment. ISPs managing incoming email use blacklists based on their user feedback to quickly identify potential spam and treat those messages accordingly. Successfully delivering email globally requires the email service provider have long standing relationships and experience working with ISP’s worldwide. Global Training and Support: Teams and companies today are often spread across multiple countries. The email service provider cannot reside in one central location and serve customers worldwide. Email service providers need to have local presence around the globe to support customers locally. The technology and platform while important and a key aspect of the solution from the email service provider need to be supported by a quality global service, support and training services. Email service providers that are close to their customers across the globe with local offices for training, support and service will lead the market.

Trend #8 – Emphasis on Strategic Campaign Planning

With the high profitability of email marketing, is becoming increasingly important to strategically plan your campaigns to ensure you leverage every opportunity to e‐mail your list. Too many campaigns can annoy certain customer segments, and too few at the same time may not keep the consumer engaged. The day of the week and time of the campaign all have a significant impact. It is important to align and create a strategic plan of the various email campaigns planned. This will also help plan surrounding marketing activities in social media or offline channels. Email service providers are adding features to their solutions that provide holistic view of campaigns past, current and future to simplify strategic planning and also help dive into past campaigns. These views visually represent the type of campaign and provide the capability to jump into past campaign results and check in on future campaigns.



Trend #9 – Rise in Integration via APIs

As the sophistication of email marketing grows, companies are increasingly developing integration of their email marketing software with other business applications to get a “360 degree view” of their customers and improve personalisation, relevancy and workflow. The most common way of accomplishing this is via an Application Programming Interface (API) based on the Web Services model. With comprehensive APIs being made available by leading email service providers, marketers are now creating highly customised integrations. Applications are increasingly moving to the Web and being delivered on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. New applications that encapsulate social media features are being developed by companies to reach targeted customers. With the increasing adoption of smart phones, customers are expressing increasing interest in receiving transactional communication from the companies they do business with via email as opposed to other means of communication. Using APIs software developers can automate, trigger and report on campaigns via custom or third party applications delivering the ultimate flexibility and customization.



Trend #10 – Testing, Testing and more Testing

Online consumers today have complex and rapidly evolving needs. Consumers react better to personalised content and solutions based on multiple sources and variables. To optimise an effective email campaign it is essential for the marketer to quickly and accurately identify the right combination of offers, creative and messaging that works. To find the right combination companies are increasingly testing all aspects of the campaign before launching it. A simple A/B test can be used to test simple aspects such as subject lines or creative, but an A/B test does not provide the capability to solve multidimensional problems quickly. Increasingly marketers are adopting multivariate testing (MVT), which can quickly help hone in on the right combination of variables for each target segment, improving campaign response and conversion rates. Adaptable MVT testing capabilities enable you to measure the effectiveness and relevance across multiple variables in offers, creative and messaging based on segments. This enables you to send each segment highly targeted email messages that are relevant and appealing, resulting in increased conversion from the campaign and superior ROI.



Conclusion

2010 is poised to be another exciting year in email marketing. Marketing budgets, particularly for email and online marketing are expected to increase for the year. The marketer needs to be more creative and flexible in engaging the customer. Relevance, targeting, social media and analytics will play an important role in companies differentiating their marketing from their competition. It is important for the marketer to pay attention to the consumer and technology email marketing trends for 2010 and build a marketing plan that is fresh and relevant to the evolving needs of the customer and the market. Email marketing continues to be the king of ROI and will play the central role in integrating various marketing channels. The universal ubiquity and flexibility of email will continue to drive marketing and profitability in 2010 worldwide.

References

1. MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, July‐August 2009. 2. MacAfee Threats Report: Second Quarter 2009, July 2009 3. Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2009, Forrester June 2009.

Emailvision – 2010 – All rights reserved

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