Your marketing strategy needs fuel, and this comes in the form of data. Without it, your email campaign engine can’t run. You can craft the most fantastic email in the world or make the most incredible offer, but if no one receives your message, it’s like having a Ferrari but not enough money to buy the gas you need to drive it.
Decide on Your Collection Process
Data needs collection, whether you’re setting up a new email strategy or taking over an existing one. It’s something that requires careful consideration. In certain companies, acquiring new contacts constitutes an important KPI (key performance indicator).
Your Clients Are Your Greatest Asset!
The most valuable data you have is your existing clients. They are already there, they know you, and through their previous purchases, you also know them.
All too often, enhancing your understanding of existing clients is overlooked in favor of acquiring new contacts. We often fail to see what we have in front of us!
Where Can Data Be Acquired?
There are three key opportunities to acquire email addresses:
Ordering: an email address is an essential detail when buying any product or service. New clients will have no qualms about giving you this piece of information.
Creating an account or requesting information: e.g., accessing a free service (temporary or not), downloading a document, or contacting a company. In this case, don’t forget to ask permission to use this email address in the future.
Signing up to a newsletter: promoting your newsletter is a way to naturally collect email addresses on your website. You’ll need to come up with the goods here (high-quality, relevant content) so as not to disappoint contacts once you have their email addresses.
There are other ways to obtain email addresses, but you should approach them with extreme caution, and avoid some altogether:
- Buying email lists: This is illegal In the B2C (business-to-consumer) world. You are simply not allowed to buy email addresses, so avoid this practice.
It may be legal In B2B (business-to-business), but the email addresses may not be of top quality.
- Renting lists: In this case, you don't receive the email addresses directly. A third party will send your campaign out to its database for a fee. The idea being that those who click on it will be taken to your website, become clients, or fill out a form.
- Competitions: To attract new contacts, you could organize a competition, either on your website or that of a specialized partner. Entrants would have to fill out a form allowing you to collect data (including their email address) to enter the competition. You will have to direct traffic towards this competition, either via other channels such as social media or your website or, again, by renting email lists. Under GDPR, you cannot require consent for using personal data as a condition of entry - this will still need to be collected as described in the previous chapter.
- Co-registration: This is similar to competitions, but the form will collect data for several brands participating in the initiative.
Make Signing Up Easy
You need to follow a few ground rules if you want to use a registration form for your mailing list or newsletter:
Be transparent: be honest about the content of the newsletters and how frequently they’re sent out.
Keep your form simple: start by asking for essential information (email, name, etc.). It’s always better to have lots of forms submitted than lots of data collected.
Display a confirmation message and consider an optional form requesting additional information to qualify the contact.
Justify: if you’re asking contacts to give other information, justify why you’re doing it. Cell phone number? To send text updates. Date of birth? To send a birthday surprise.
Examples of Different Sign Up styles
Sign Up to the Sarenza Newsletter
Here is a super-minimalist form. It appears as an overlay on the web page when you first reach it. Visitors are asked to provide only their email address - and tick a box to show they are not a robot.
The box refreshes with a clear tick to show you’ve been successful - and an invitation to keep shopping.
Sign Up for ITV
In this sign-up page for a UK broadcaster, ITV clearly tells you why you should create an account - and goes on to explain why you might want to receive emails as well. They capture your name, date of birth, and gender (via title), email address, and consent for marketing.
Clean Up Your Database
You have your database, but now you need to maintain it. Unfortunately, data is a perishable good, and you must be able to regularly (or even constantly) sort through it.
The importance of structuring and normalization
It’s important to keep your data structured. Over time, you’ll create different activities and new forms. You may add new fields to your database, which poses a serious risk of acquiring the same information making your database unusable.
Similarly, it’s important to always use the same standards for your data. For example, do you separate telephone prefixes with a special character? Do telephone numbers include international dialing codes? You need to consider and review these standards.
Bounces
A bounce is an undelivered and returned email accompanied by an error message. It’s crucial to detect the addresses that generate a bounce and remove them from your list - failure to do so can impact your email reputation. We’ll come back to this later on and look more closely at the different categories of bounces.
Inactive subscribers
When using email, the number of inactive subscribers is often remarkably high. It’s not unusual for over half of subscribers to a mailing list to be inactive - in other words, they have not opened or clicked on an email for over six months. After some time (three to six months of inactivity is a good rule of thumb), you need to deal with these users. You can send an automatic reactivation (or win-back) program. If they remain unresponsive to that program, it’s a good idea to remove them from future email programs - and their personal data from your database.
Segment Your Emails
Relevance is the key to a successful email program. Your best customers will expect it from you and reward you with a better return on your investment. Consider this before collecting your data: which data can you use to personalize your email content, making it relevant?
Here are a few examples:
Customer status (e.g., prospective, current, or lapsed)
Location (country or region within a country)
Interests (perhaps gathered from a survey)
Consumers (B2C) or business (B2B) customers?
If it is B2B, you should ask yourself: what is the department and the level of seniority?
What Is the Difference Between Segmentation and Personalization?
Create Segments in Your Contact List
Segmentation is the process of identifying and categorizing a group of your contacts by interest. These segments are used to send your contacts customized emails based on their content expectations. Going back to the example of the sports store, you could create a segment for each sport and send each of these a specific message.
The advantage of segmentation is that it is technically simple to implement and easy to understand: one target, one email.
Personalize Your Emails
Personalization involves customizing the contents of your email depending on the recipient's profile.
Basic personalization consists of getting information in the recipient profile to appear in the email. An example of this would be a personalized greeting: Hello $firstname (where the recipient's first name will automatically replace $ firstname).
Modifying whole sections of the message, often referred to as conditional (or dynamic) content is a more advanced personalization and is closer to your goal of relevance. For the sports store, you could change areas of the email depending on the recipient's interests.
Here you have three conditional content blocks:
The first, At the top of the email, changes the promotion based on the recipient’s preferred sport.
In the second, you personalize according to their local store.
In the third, you link to the preferred sport.
To get the same result with segmentation, you would need 30 segments and 30 different messages (three sports multiplied by ten stores). It is easy to see the advantage of conditional content and we’ll go back to it in part three of this course.
Understand Emailing Frequency
Frequency refers to the average number of marketing messages sent out over a given period. For certain activities, you’ll send three to four emails a year. For others, it’ll be more like 6-12 per week.
It’s essential to understand how often your recipients want to or are prepared to hear from you. Above a certain threshold, they might get irritated, feeling bombarded, and then hit unsubscribe, or (worse!) hit the spam button. If you send too few emails, you risk falling out of touch and being forgotten.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find the right frequency, which is linked to different criteria specific to your business - and the recipient:
Frequency of purchase.
Commitments made when signing up.
Recipient engagement with the brand.
Make Unsubscribing Easy For Your Clients
At first glance, it may not seem like you want to encourage unsubscribing among your email recipients. Often, unsubscribe links are hard to find in newsletters and other marketing emails.
Tiny, dark-grey text at the very bottom of an extremely long email with only the word “here” clickable? Due to the long length of the email, this part of the content was cut off which results in the recipient searching for the link. This is a good example of what not to do.
Think for a second. How will your recipient react to a message where it takes more than a few moments to find the unsubscribe link? Spam complaint! As you’ll see in the course section dedicated to email deliverability, spam complaints can have disastrous consequences for your emails.
Thinking about this in more detail, why should you stand in the way of someone who wants to unsubscribe? If this person has no further interest in your brand, your products, or commercial activities, if they are no longer engaged, attempting to hold them against their will never work out well for you.
Here's some valuable advice:
Have a clearly visible and identifiable unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails.
If you have a high level of spam complaints, consider putting an unsubscribe button at the top of your emails.
Two clicks maximum for unsubscribing. One in the email, one on the unsubscribe page.
A password should never be required for unsubscribing (imagine your frustration if you’ve forgotten it!).
Examples of Good and Bad Practices
Needs work
Once again, only the words "click here" are clickable. The text is also tiny in comparison to the rest of the email.
After clicking on the unsubscribe link in the email, you’re taken to a form where you have to enter your email address to complete the action. On the plus side, it then offers you the choice to opt-out just from the specific email program you clicked from or from all marketing emails from the larger company.
A button that said "unsubscribe from all communications" would be better.
On the Right Track
Here the word unsubscribe is clickable and underlined. It clearly stands out from the rest of the email footer, making it easy to spot.
The confirmation page is clear and requires no further action: the unsubscribe is confirmed. As a nice final touch, it asks the recipient to give a reason - but this doesn’t affect the opt-out.
Let’s Recap!
Your existing clients are your greatest asset.
Focus on more organic contact sources.
Stick to the strictly necessary information and be reassuring on registration forms.
Make sure you store data in a clean and structured way.
Segment and personalize to ensure relevant messaging.
Find a happy medium in your marketing pressure.
Make unsubscribing simple and accessible.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at how to prepare your email strategy, how to measure achieving your goals, and how to plan your campaign.
