Individualisation - Beyond Personalisation
By Simon Davis
Actionable points - ( where you see ">" )
There are 23 separate actionable points that will help you drive value through your outbound campaigning in this White Paper)
Over the past 5 years email has established itself as a mainstay of the marketing mix. Search marketing /Pay per click may be coming up on the blind side but only direct Mail exceeds email in spend in the UK. The number of email messages sent already exceeds those by mail. (which tells you something about the cost of emailing against mail!)
While the initial success of email was partly down to cost, its on-going success is in part down to a secular shift from above to below the line. Driven by back & front office system improvements and easily available, low cost database management systems it is no longer the preserve of the very largest companies to have access to segmentable Customer & prospect data systems.
The best of these (not the most expensive) allow the collection of large amounts of information that can be attributed to an individual. This includes
Transactional information
Profile derived from transactions or Marketing activity
Bought in geo-demographics
While these systems are “Channel independent” email is still amongst the most successful media for initiating and then maintaining a two way dialogue. Recent research by Harris Interactive on behalf of Axciom Digital suggests that more than 60% said offers and discounts were a factor in getting them to respond. 94% of 2,541 adults polled in the US had received some sort of email solicitation and 32% had been prompted to make a purchase based upon it. Whether you are generating leads, cross/upselling, establishing a post-purchase warranty or running a Market Research survey email can be used to engender engagement.
So has email matured or has it actually been eclipsed by RSS feeds, blogs & social networking? The answer is a categorical NO but the rules have changed. This paper attempts to give the Marketer some of the new rules in email marketing in 2007.
All of the actionable points in this paper will help you get your email delivered. But this paper is not about deliverability. For a good synopsis that appeared in the January 2007 edition of Database Marketing Magazine click HERE
1. Drive opt-in with motivating value proposition
You can only market to contacts for whom you have a specific opt in. In order to drive opt-in your message must be relevant and clear and your value proposition must be relevant and clear and worth enough to the recipient to call them to action. More about opt-in below but there are some simple rules to follow;
> Don’t over communicate. There is a balance to be struck between regularity of contact, keeping the brand front of mind without teeing your recipients off! Recent research by the UK DMA suggests is a definable relationship between the two when the regularity of communication exceeds once a month and accelerates dramatically on weekly contact.
> Even for an opted in consumer 2 or 3 inappropriate and untargeted emails may persuade a recipient to shift you to Junk
> Establish a ‘Preference Centre’ where your recipients can express their wishes and know that these wishes will be respected.
> Don’t rely on the number of unsubscribes as a means of determining the success of an email broadcast. Some recent ISP figures suggest that for every message that is unsubscribed three are diverted to the recipients spam filter.
Your brand is your reputation and is your license to broadcast. Any action you take in the e-environment to degrade that is at your peril
2. Drive engagement through segmentation.
Permission based Marketing has been around since the 90’s but the acceptance of email as a mass communication medium and the ability to integrate directly with database management systems has opened up the opportunities to establish a genuine two way dialogue.
>The first thing to do is drop the “throw more at the wall and see how much sticks” philosophy. This is a short cut to getting a reputation as a spammer.Today this isn’t just a reputation risk consideration. ISP’s now rank broadcasters for acceptability. While they do not publish this information if one ISP is hacking away at your reputation ‘score’ you can guarantee that the others will be doing the same. Imagine the brand damage if, eventually, you didn’t get any emails through.
>Make sure your database is clean and up to date. Not only is this good practise but a large number of bounce backs make the campaign look like spam to the ISP’s
>Populate your email list only with people who have expressed an explicit and voluntarily given interest in receiving communications from you. If you can, ask your customers if they would like to receive communications from you. Definitely ask your prospects.
>Work with your database provider to establish‘taxonomy’ for your database. This is the classification system that allows large amounts of profile information to be understood, managed and then used for selection and campaigning.
>Take segmentation past lifestyle, life stage, demographics to a deeper level of granularity. You should look to collect any actionable data that your management system will allow you to query on. This might be referred to as ‘micro-segmentation.’
>Ensure that you have all Data Protection permissions up to date and there is a means to keep them updated.
>Always provide an unsubscribe mechanism. In the UK you can only email consumers if you have their explicit permission. But these preferences are not static. Ask recipients to add the company to their ‘Safe Senders’ list.
Case Study
FirstScotrail run 95% of all rail services in Scotland. Although they run a database of 112,000 records it wasn’t focused and the information it held was very basic.
After nearly two years of work on building database knowledge, building straightforward permissions like: what are my interests, how I would like to be communicated with and adding demographics, database segmentation for outbound communication could begin.
The results have been spectacular. From a starting level of 2,8% response 34% is now of 40% as targeting improves One £22,000 campaign returned £105,000 of additional revenue.
>Use what you know to market only to those people who wish to be marketed to about products, services or issues in which they have a stated or implied interest using the medium of their preference and, possibly, at a time they wish to be marketed to.
> Provide a mechanism for two way dialogue through feedback loops. Not only does this provide you positive feedback from those who liked it but slightly different feedback that should be used equally from those who didn’t. (See below)
3.Drive opt-in with motivating value proposition- Individualise
The extension of the digital media and the emergence of genuinely usable data management systems places genuine individualisation within our grasp. Individualisation goes well past the personalisation that we have come to take for granted over the past 15 years. Personalisation implies that a generic message is being addressed to a specific individual. Individualisation means that a specific message is being addressed to a specific individual. That message is tailored to the desires and preferences of the target recipient.
This is using what we know of Permission Based Marketing and taking it to a logical conclusion not just focussing on those clusters, however small with the highest propensity to respond to a particular offer, but focussing the actual message on these people. So if Permission Based Marketing is marketing only to those people who wish to be marketed to about products, services or issues in which they have in interest, individualisation is about delivery of that through the medium of an individually tailored message.
Segmentation has already delivered a 16x increase in response rates in the Case Study above. Peppers & Roger have suggested 20x as a reasonable target rate for micro-segmentation. 23% of a Harris Interactive survey suggested that the personalised elements of the email were important to them.
>Get your database up to scratch!
>Micro segment
>Tailor your outbound content to reflect the micro-segmentation &
increase the relevancy of your message.
>Use digital print technology if you are using Direct Mail in the mix
>Pick your email service provider well. Shoddy or incorrect html and unconnected links not only damage your brand but also give possible spammers away to ISP’s.
Case Study
Government agencies do not have, in general, a great reputation in generating huge response to any of their campaigning. Figures under 1% are not at all unusual.
By getting to know their database and by implementing individualisation in a campaign run at the end of 2006, a Government agency emailing to employers returned a worst rate of click through at 31.4% and median rates in the high 30’s. Best click throughs were 66% and click rates consistently exceeded 2 per email.
4. Harvest
We already know about the steady decline click-through rates for unsolicited emails – even if you do manage to get through the ISP’s Spam filters. If you are not making full use of every means to harvest both customer & prospect information then you are a well behind the curve in this marketplace.
Knowledge is power. Use every opportunity to collect as much information from contacts as you possibly can. The mechanism for harvesting actionable information can be broken down into passive & active and companies should be doing both. A few action points in both areas are:
> Passive – Web. If you have a web-site and you are not harvesting interest then you should be! A simple click through under the tag “would you like to hear about Special Offers & Developments?” With a question like “would you like to receive information by email √ mail √ “, coming after a positive response to the first question, is sufficient as opt in for the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998 (& the Privacy in Electronic Communications Directive 2003).
>Segment. Add short questions which add to the richness of your data. “Which area of product are you interested in?” “Where would you like to travel to?” These all help you tailor your outbound message.
> Never stop asking. Before your visitor leaves the site provide a pop-up asking 3 or 4 simple questions under the strap “To help us tailor our offer to you….”
> You’ve harvested – now feed. Ensure that this information is fed to your centralised database.
> Assign ownership to all campaign response to one functional area of your business. If you don’t you will present a disjointed experience to your customers and leads will get lost.
And this process can be replicated in other touch points. For example if you have a transactional facility ask the individual to provide information on why they made the purchase, would they like to be informed of any special offers, would they like to receive £10 off their next transaction by referring a friend or relation? Maybe you don’t have the resources to make your site as responsive as Amazon but there are ways and ways.
Whenever you do outbound always provide a response mechanic. Never let marketing stop at the creative! Assign the ownership of the response so that it gets actioned. A recent study by Sirius Research concluded that 80% of all leads generated by Marketing died before any action was taken.
Of that 20% that was actioned 70% were actioned only once and then dropped, of the remaining 30% another 80% just simply withered on the vine unactioned. That means that a staggering 1.2% of leads generated are used to generate business. So out of that come some very important action points.
>Get action – always provide a mechanic
>Take action – assign ownership of the leads
>Get your systems in order; don’t waste 98.8% of all of your generated leads.
5. Feedback
We alluded earlier to ‘not stopping at the creative.’ Taking that forward how can you turn the non-responses into a business benefit? Feedback forms allow you to do just that.
Feedback forms, linked to the outbound email give both responders and non-responders an opportunity to convent on the physical email you sent. These questions may relate to the product or service covered “I’m not interested now √ not interested ever √” or refer to the email itself - “The graphic was a complete turn off” or “I’d prefer you to send these to my home/office email address
Feedback forms should be easy to access, short and easy to complete. Because of that they should be straightforward to analyse and reporting lines should be very short and on-line. It’s a simple adage “learn from what you do well and learn even faster from what you don’t”.
If you want to use focus groups to analyse your Marketing what better way than inviting your recipients to participate? You can even use the sophistication of your database segmentation to ensure you select entirely the right people.
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