Email marketing for everyone

Email marketing for everyone

Email is gaining more acceptance as a means of communication, especially among the 'new generation of internet savvy youth' in India. Internet penetration can be as high as 70% among students aged 13-18 in India. Although exact figures are not available, it is estimated that there are 42 million plus active internet users in India. (as of March 2009). As in the rest of the world, search and email are the first two tasks any newcomer to the virtual world will do.

Although the Internet as a marketing medium has evolved greatly in India, especially with the introduction of paid search and online banner and advertising networks and digital agencies, email as a marketing tool has not yet evolved much. Most email marketers who claim to be "serious email spenders" may not yet be in a position to answer simple questions;

1) How good is my email list? (list hygiene)

2) Whether the commercial emails I send are being delivered to the inbox (deliverability)

3) Do I need to pay any attention to the subject line?

4) What kind of reports should the marketer get on his campaign?

5) Is email marketing about direct ROI or does it have an intangible value to the advertiser

Let me share my experience with a leading retail chain in India during one of our marketing discussions. They were running a regular loyalty program for their entire email database; And regular mailers are targeted on a bimonthly basis to these "opted in" users. The moment we talked about list hygiene, the marketing team said they "believe" their database is good. There may still be 5% invalid addresses".

When we finally sent the first mail to the entire database, to our surprise (the client's as well), about 30% of the database contained invalid email addresses; We have started the list cleaning process and even after that the first mail shot result is only 90% deliverable. (Please note that deliverability is not only determined by list hygiene, but by many other factors such as ISP relationship, subject line etc.) Before we go live, we have made sure to conduct various spam compliance checks (for subject line, mail body - content) etc. , text vs. image ratio etc.) which are very important in any good email marketing program. A/B split tests were initiated with different subject lines and content customizations. After 3 months of joint efforts, the client is now seeing up to 99% deliverability and can offer customization to product offers based on historical data (real time tracking and analysis of customer response to various product offers in previous mailers). To reiterate some of the benefits of this approach;

1. Better control and better ROI on your marketing email campaigns

2. More personalized reach to your customer

3. Better knowledge of mail recipients' "desires" and "preferences", based on which the marketer can create new clusters and customized offers as well.

Conclusion:

If you're an email marketer, always know how well your list is doing and offer customized offers by analyzing offline and online purchase behavior as well as 'click through patterns' across categories. Also any realistic marketer knows that all this activity doesn't happen in the flip of a second; Yet a patient, systematic and scientific approach is required. As a marketing tool it's easy to make email highly scalable.