Increase Response to Your E-mail Campaigns
By Matt Griffin
Follow these six steps to test along the conversion funnel.
As a cataloger, you spend time testing your circulation strategy, developing creative that will be a hit with your audience and building an image with which your customers can identify. But are you applying the same rigorous work to your e-mail campaigns?
"Merchants test around their catalogs because catalogs are expensive to produce, and they don't want waste," says Eric Kirby, senior vice president and general manager for e-mail solutions at DoubleClick. "But because e-mail always has been cheap, they don't bother to test it as much as they should."
And since e-mail spending will increase by 7 percent this year from 2005, according to a recent forecast by Jupiter Research, it might be time to re-evaluate how you send e-mail to ensure you're getting the most for your money.
Kirby suggests a testing strategy that follows the framework of a customer's interaction with your e-mail program. Here are six steps that can help:
1. Test address acquisition techniques. This is the first time a customer will interact with your e-mail campaign, and you need to make a good impression. Why should the customer give you permission to e-mail her? And more than just seeking permission to e-mail, you need permission to e-mail the correct address, says Rich Fleck, director of strategic services for DoubleClick. Because the average consumer has multiple e-mail addresses, get permission to e-mail the address she most frequently checks.
The best way to get that information is to "clearly state the benefits [customers] receive by providing their primary e-mail addresses," Fleck says. While these benefits should be stated whenever and wherever you collect e-mail addresses — from your site's homepage, to the call center — the benefits themselves can vary.
For example, Zach Zimet, senior marketing analyst with electronics merchant Crutchfield, sends his customers weekly newsletters that are as informational as they are promotional. E-mail subscribers also are first to know when hard-to-find items are back in stock, a big benefit to the core customer base, he says.
Noting that multichannel customers often are more valuable than single-channel customers, Kirby suggests trying to get offline buyers onto your e-mail list.
"Your call center should be the front line of e-mail address acquisition. If you're not getting e-mail addresses from 70 percent of purchasers through the call center, re-evaluate how your reps collect this information," he says.
2. Test subject lines. Forty-three percent of consumers opened e-mails during the 2005 holiday season because the subject line was compelling, according to the Annual Holiday E-mail Consumer Survey, released in January by e-mail marketer Return Path.
While you might spend significant effort crafting your e-mail content, if your customers don't open the message, the content is worthless. Put some thought into whether your subject lines are as attention-grabbing as they can be, Fleck says.
Kirby notes that establishing gender-based segments is an easy way to start testing subject lines.
"Men respond to new products and fresh content, while women often want to hear about special sales and promotions," he says.
Regardless of how you choose to segment your subject line tests, Kirby suggests creating multiple subject lines for each e-mail you plan to send, every time you send. Test these various subject lines on a small portion of your e-mail list, then roll out to your whole e-mail file the subject lines that drove open rates higher than your historic benchmarks. In his experience, optimizing subject lines this way can increase open rates by up to 25 percent.
3. Test your contact strategy. Just as you would alter your mailing strategy for customers who don't respond to catalog mailings, so too should you change the way you e-mail people who haven't opened a message from you in more than six months, Kirby says.
Put these customers into a new segment, and try varying promotional offers and contact frequencies, he suggests. Likewise, a customer who frequently responds to your e-mails deserves to be in a separate segment.
Keep the e-mail relationship and messaging compelling to the individual consumer, rather than blasting the same message out to every address on your list, Kirby says.
He further recommends tweaking your contact strategy based on customers' buying cycles. If a particular group of customers tends to visit your site and purchase every three months, watch for these visits and send e-mails if the three months pass without a visit or a purchase. Or anticipate the visit by dropping an e-mail to remind those customers why it's a great idea to shop with you.
4. Test your brand. All merchants must study the appearance of their brands throughout the structure of their e-mails, Kirby says. While your e-mails clearly should identify you as the sender — Return Path's survey notes that 60 percent of consumers opened holiday e-mails because they recognized and trusted the sender — there are other ways to test your brand's impact.
Zimet last year began including what he calls "did you know?" boxes throughout the body of Crutchfield's e-mails. This text features benefits the customer might not have known about shopping with the Crutchfield brand, such as lifetime technical support.
While he wouldn't share data on how these boxes impacted his e-mail campaigns, Zimet believes including them is the right thing to do. "People have a lot of shopping options. You have to remind them what is unique about shopping with you," he says.
5. Test content. The best content is the message that gets your customer to click through to your Web site. But what that content should be depends on your customers and what they want.
Zimet notes his customers visit his company's Web site not just to purchase, but to get information about the latest electronics and technology. But prior to 2005, Crutchfield's e-mail campaigns always had been promotional, simply letting customers know what products were new or on sale.
Last year, Zimet tested e-mails that delivered the same type of informational content featured on the Crutchfield Web site. And although the e-mails were longer and required the customer to spend more time reading, Crutchfield experienced an 18 percent lift in sales as a result.
"For Crutchfield, our brand has been about presenting the best products and the best information. When we aligned e-mail with that brand image … customers really responded to it," Zimet says. Since that test, all Crutchfield e-mails follow the same balanced format of information and promotion.
Zimet notes that although his cross-departmental e-mail team generates new content weekly, the standardization of the e-mail format actually has reduced his production time. Since Crutchfield handles both creative and delivery of its e-mails in house, being able to cut internal cost via time savings has been a plus, he says.
While testing more informational content worked well for Crutchfield, there are other content tests to try. Barb Grafton-Stoner, vice president of catalog/Internet operations at housewares merchant Pfaltzgraff, found an increased level of promotion was effective.
Following Pfaltzgraff's acquisition by Lifetime Brands last year, Pfaltzgraff found it had more than 1,000 SKUs that needed to be cleared out of inventory. Previous clearance sales conducted via e-mail with 20 or fewer SKUs had been successful, so Grafton-Stoner and her team rolled out a massive promotional e-mail push to drive customers to the company's Web site.
This "Clean Sweep" promotion, which sold excess merchandise at reduced prices during the 2005 holiday season, went out to 700,000 customers on the company's e-mail list.
The result? "It caught on like wildfire to our internal database. … E-mail was incredibly effective at driving that promotion," Grafton-Stoner says. This is reflected by the Return Path survey, which showed half of consumers took advantage of e-mail offers during the holidays.
6. Test landing pages. As the last stage between clickthrough and conversion, where you send those customers who come to your site through e-mail can have a big impact on whether they buy, DoubleClick's Kirby says.
He recommends testing landing pages that relate to the e-mail content, again considering whether your audience is more interested in informational or promotional content. Are you taking your customers to your homepage, category page, product page or straight to checkout? All are viable options. What's left for you is to close the loop and test to which option your customers respond, Kirby says.
