Permission to land

The old musical number ‘It’s not where you start it’s where you finish’ comes to mind when Denise Cox, email marketing expert and newsletter specialist with Newsweaver, talks about the importance of permission when using email marketing. “It’s not the end, it’s the beginning. Having someone’s permission to send them emails doesn’t mean you can open the floodgates and let it rip. It’s a fragile channel and individual e-mails will be judged each time they’re sent,” she says.

This is particularly true when you consider how people’s impression of spam has changed. “If you talked about spam five years ago it would have meant illicit or unsavoury material. Nowadays consumers call something spam that they have signed up for and no longer want because it’s not what they thought it would be, for example. The new definition of spam is an email that someone doesn’t want to receive for a variety of reasons. You need to understand that this could happen to you with your legitimate and good quality product or service,” notes Cox.

The problem with just doing a ‘send’ and not worrying about permission is that a lot happens behind the scenes that you might not be aware of.

As Cox points out, emails can get blocked and reported as junk; then get blacklisted with internet service providers and stop being delivered. “You don’t know if this happens; it’s silent. Email marketing is easy and can work very well, but equally it can mean someone deciding to never deal with a particular brand again. If you send a blanket email you might see a very small percentage of conversion from it, but I still contend that if bad results continue, it isn’t worth that tiny rate.”

Once you have someone’s permission to send them email updates, Cox advises taking great care in how the communication is set up – it must be relevant and respect that person, their time and intelligence, as well as the existing relationship you have with them.

“I know of one instance where a person who received email regularly from a travel website got one eventually saying ‘Congratulations, you have qualified for receiving extra bonus points for your activity on the website’, which would go towards future purchases. Then another one was sent saying, ‘We apologise, you shouldn’t have received that email’. Another example was a bank sending an offer of a €100 gift if you signed up for a credit card – but the small print stated it wasn’t open to existing customers.”

Frequency of emails is also very important and one of the top reasons why people unsubscribe or describe emails as spam, Cox says.

“I would say email marketing can work for anyone but you have to understand the lifecycle of products and services: how long is your sales warming process? How long is the process before renewal? Where is the opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell [this is more applicable to the business-to-business than business-to-consumer market]?

“You need to craft your email marketing around that cycle, so a short sales cycle will warrant more frequency. Business owners often make the mistake of thinking that because email is immediate it will act differently in the sales cycle. It can help to nurture the relationship and bring it to fruition but it’s not going to make the sale happen any faster.”

The flip side of permission is what Cox calls ‘un-permission’, in other words, every single time you send an email you must give the receiver the ability to unsubscribe. “The ultimate best practice and what you should be striving for is recipients having the option to select what they’d like to get from you. We’ve all felt this way: we enjoy what the company does, but we don’t need to hear about everything they send.”

Email the hero

In mid 2009 Newsweaver conducted a use of email survey with the Marketing Institute of Ireland (MII) which showed the majority of participants thought email was very important or critically important to their business. “We have seen year in, year out that this continues to be the case in the face of budgetary concerns and the economy. Email emerges as a hero with all the fluidity it has to be immediate, measurable and cost efficient. Most email is used for maintaining customer relationships and internal communication, but there has been growth in its use for new customer acquisition. It is starting to be a workhorse for every aspect of business.

“It’s important to remind yourself that every single email you send one-to-one is a marketing opportunity and a way of branding your company.”

Most respondents to the Newsweaver/MII survey have a database of less than 5,000, which Cox finds interesting and notes as important. “Every single email address is gold dust. The more time and energy you spend learning about the addresses you have from the database and from mailings, the better you will get at communicating, cross-selling and up-selling in the long term. That’s where I see the return on investment – not in the size of your database but the quality of the addresses. If you know who’s clicked on what in a mailing, for example, you can use this in a follow-up phone call. This type of information informs you on how to better start or continue that relationship.”

She says Newsweaver is seeing the trend of emailing continuing to grow within the multichannel marketing mix. “The 2009 survey was very encouraging in that people were starting to use the metrics from the email mailings more – looking more into how to improve what they’re sending the next time.”

Attention to detail

The content of your email and how you present it is crucial bearing in mind you might only have a window of a few seconds when someone receives it.

“You should be passionate about what your company does and allow this to inform what you send. If someone has given you permission to send them something, they’re interested in hearing about that passion and you making a business case for it,” says Cox.

“Put together a schedule of what exactly it is each email has to do, whether it’s converting a sale or making people aware of a new product or service. Think about how people will interact with it, who it’s from, what’s in the subject line and what’s inside. Make it easy to figure out what’s in it for the reader. You need clear navigation, bullet points and italics and avoid lots of images. With email marketing you have to ‘sell the sizzle’ – in other words, entice people to click through and want more. If you have a terrific article, for example, don’t just cut and paste the first paragraph into the email, write a paragraph setting up what the reader can get from it.”

If you want to get people’s permission to send them emails from your website, Cox says you should have a really good subscriber box – “not 25 fields with questions that are not relevant and it should be very clear what the person is signing up for”.

“Decide on the minimum fields required for you to create and send your newsletter. Put the subscriber permission request everywhere. I am still surprised that more businesses aren’t doing this. Periodically I look at 100 different websites to see have they anything to sign up for and 50pc still don’t have. Businesses have this idea that running a website is all about the search engine optimisation budget. A huge amount goes into this to attract people to sites, but then they let them go away. You need to make your site sticky. The big thing is to be memorable; bring people back rather than drive them away.”

This article first appeared in Owner Manager magazine