The Rise of Email this Holiday Season

Kate Kaye at Protocol discusses how the impact of losing access to third-party company data has made retailers even more incentivized to acquire the email addresses of customers this holiday season. This is hardly surprising, and a logical response of retailers to deal with an impaired ability to target their ideal customer profile through paid advertising channels such as display, search and social.

One wonders whether limiting the effectiveness of marketers in one channel just drives them to others, and whether that ultimately results in a better experience for consumers.

Which is worse - being advertised to with relevant messages, or being advertised to with irrelevant messages?

A push to more email marketing from loosely related retailers may drive customers to explore options to keep their inbox clean.  Email clients have begun to emerge (see Superhuman and Hey) that create a whitelisting process which forces all new email senders to be vetted before they make it to a user's inbox.  A shift to email marketing risks spoilage of that channel in the same way we've seen the rise of ad-blocking software to target display ads.

If marketers see opt-in email as the path forward in an era where targeting through paid channels has become less effective, they need to very careful to make sure that the content they produce is at least as relevant and as targeted as their paid ads, if not more so, otherwise this channel too may cease to bear fruit.

Email Marketing: What Do Your Customers Really Want?

Like it or hate it – email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers in a personalized way. A research conducted by campaign monitor reveals the key insights that can help increase your ROI. Here's a summary:

Consumers Still Prefer Brands to Communicate via Email

Key finding: There is no doubt, consumers still love email. More than half (52.7%) of those surveyed in the U.S. check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their favorite way to receive communication from brands  (compared to direct mail, mobile apps, social media, push notifications, and mobile wallet).

PREFERENCE OF COMMUNICATIONS FROM RETAIL BRANDS

Marketers are Delivering on Personalization

Key finding: 76% of consumers agree that retail brands are sending relevant, accurate emails which reflect their shopping preferences, location or purchase history. Companies across all industries are delivering on the promise of personalized emails. Overall, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to receive personalized emails across verticals.

AGREEMENT THAT BRANDS ARE SENDING RELEVANT EMAILS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Along With Personalized Subject Lines, Discounts Drive the Most Opens!

Key finding: Across verticals, the top reasons consumers will open an email from a brand are personalization and discounts. Consumers are just slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalized subject line (62%).

CONSUMER PREFERENCE BY EMAIL ATTRIBUTE ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Millennials Lead the Way in Making Purchasing Decisions Based on Email

Key finding: Preferences based on personalization and type of content received from brands did not vary widely among age groups. However, when it comes to taking action based on an email, millennials are far more likely to do so. 58% of millennials “always” or “most of the time” donated to a nonprofit while just 18% of respondents 55+ did the same.

PROPENSITY TO TAKE ACTION BY AGE GROUP ACROSS INDUSTRIES

The bottom line? Marketers must know their audience to run a successful campaign. Consumers prefer when brands personalize their email marketing campaigns, across age groups and verticals, and are seeking more of it. Brands must continue to personalize email campaigns to drive even more success and engagement, particularly with millennials. This trend will continue over time, as email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers!

Link: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/insights-research-report/

Will Microsoft’s new email marketing tool kill MailChimp?

Microsoft recently released an email marketing extension of Office 365 Microsoft Connections. Connections allow users to create professional-looking email marketing campaigns on the web, iOS, and Android. It monitors campaign performance, including clicks and open rates, and manages subscribers. In many ways, Microsoft Connection’s value proposition is similar to MailChimp’s! If this was not enough - Microsoft is offering the email tool for free just like MailChimp! Ever heard of anything ‘free’ from Microsoft before?

MailChimp announced in early May that it would give its 15 million customers free access to its email marketing tools, a service previously which came at extra cost. While MailChimp is cheaper than an Office 365 subscription, experts say that's only true to a point. The MailChimp business model has a "free to play" lower tier which spikes upwards as a list of subscribers grow. For example, with MailChimp, you can email to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers a month for free, but if you have 24,000 subscribers, it will cost you $150 a month. However, MailChimp’s model is not sustainable - especially if it were to compete with tech giants! Microsoft on the other hand, has $126 billion in cash on hand, so offering products for free is no big deal for them.  But with Microsoft's offering there is a catch - Connections is not really 'free', you will need to purchase Office Suite to install the email tool!

While leveraging Microsoft's platform may seem tempting to small businesses, they must wait to see if Connections will be like Microsoft Media Player or Microsoft Money! Will it be a huge success or will it just fail like several other Microsoft products?

It is perhaps too soon to say anything, but it will be interesting to see if Microsoft is able to revolutionize email marketing with Connections and if MailChimp will be able to sail through the fierce competition from a tech-giant!

Link: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/10/microsoft-launches-new-email-marketing-and-invoicing-tools-for-small-businesses/?ncid=mobilenavtrend

Email Marketing in the Mobile Age

112 billions business emails are being sent everyday, 93 billion private mails. Even though it is not perceived as a very "hip" channel, after more then a decade of successful usage, email marketing still is tremendously relevant. 

With the mobile internet on the rise, sending and receiving mails brings new challenges but also opportunities. The obvious advantage is the fact that with our mobile devices we are always online and many check their mails even more frequently then on a PC. 
On the other hand, conversion rates of mails being opened on mobile devices are much worse. This is mainly because most people do not make purchasing decisions while they are on the go. Furthermore, many people have a higher feeling of trust when they are online on a home PC. Also, it is still hard to track people's interactions and purchasing behavior across multiple devices. 

If you research for the best practices of email marketing, most tips have been around for quite some time:

1. Relevant content: Here it will be exciting to see, if automized content can be increasingly contextualized to address people individually in their (mobile) environment

2. Intelligent Personalization (see 1.)

3. Holistic and integral communication across all channels

4. Modern email marketing tool-architecture that allows a data-driven and comprehensive CRM.

5. Staying creative in the way you approach customers or leads (despite automatization and data-drivenness) 

6. One last important point is the format of the mobile screen. Thorsten Blöcker, head of consulting at the marketing agency Netnomics, says in a blog post: marketeers should try to make their mobile mails as interactive and compact as an app. 

This video shows an example how mobile mails can be optimized for the channel and how content can be adapted to a small screen.

It will be exciting how email as a channel will evolve in the mobile age. If email marketeers make their content adaptive to the mobile screen and if data-driven personalization is used more and more for a creative address, its relevance could further increase. 

Email vs. Direct Mail

The other day, I was talking with somebody that asked the question of whether email would overtake direct mail as an acquisition engine for retail banks. In order to help answer this question, I looked at a number of sources, including:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2015/02/successful-email-marketing.html

The largest difference between email and direct mail is the cost and response rate. One study I read quotes the average response rate of email at less than 0.1% while direct mail is typically quoted at about 2%. That said, the average cost for direct is significantly higher because of postage and paper costs. Therefore, banks need to make a trade-off of these costs and the management of email campaigns in order to make decisions between these two channels.

There were a number of findings that I felt were very relevant, including that 81% of online shoppers are more likely to make both online and in-store purchases due to emails based on previous shopping preferences and behaviors. This is a critical element because it does suggest that you need to have "permission" from the customer in order to present them with the offers. Across all forms of direct response marketing, there is a large jump in response rates when the customers have given you permission (implicitly or explicitly) to market to them.

As banks building email strategies, this would suggest that creating relevant content that could drive potential customers to sign up for alerts and provide you with permission to email them, could be a really effective approach to email campaigns.

One bank that I believe has done this well is Chase with their home mortgage app (https://www.chase.com/mortgage/mynewhome-app). They provide a service (free) that walks potential home buyers through the whole home buying process. As part of the process, they are getting all of your relevant information and painting themselves as partners in the process.

When to send marketing emails to Norwegian bartenders in their 70s

Mailchimp came up with a couple of interesting findings from analyzing the data of over 10 billion email they send out every month. In particular, the looked at the timing when people open their emails. The graphs below show their analyses for age groups, geographies and professions:

College aged recipients have an optimal time of 1 p.m. versus 10 a.m. for the older two categories. College students during the summer likely drag themselves out of bed later and check their email later than older folks.

During the summer months, Norway has a very long day, so the distribution of the optimal send times for Norwegian addresses plateaus out from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. while a country like Egypt experiences a more pronounced fall after typical business hours.

Lawyers have a well-defined workday in which they optimally engage with email marketing at 9 am. Bartenders roll out of bed later and aren’t fully engaging until noon. Neonatal nurses on the other hand have little of a pronounced optimum. Rather, they work night and day and their distribution of optimal send times blurs into a plateau all the way past 10 p.m.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/07/17/when-to-send-marketing-email-data/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss

How to send sensitive information via email

Following our discussion in our last class about email security, here is an easy way how to protect your data when you send it:

1. You put the confidential information into a document (e.g., a spreadsheet, a zip file, ...)
2. You encrypt the document so that it cannot be viewed without a password (Excel spreadsheets or zip files can be password protected when saved)
3. You email the encrypted document to the recipient as an attachment
4. You communicate the password to the recipient by some other means, preferably not by email, and certainly not by the email to which you attached the encrypted document
5. The recipient uses the password to decrypt the document

An alternative to this is sending the sensitive through a secure send service like OneShar.es that lets you create a secure, self-destructing message.

Lifehacker put together a few idea how to send data more securely from A to B: http://lifehacker.com/5910408/from-saucy-pics-to-passwords-how-to-share-sensitive-information-over-the-internet

Spam lives on through our best intentions...

The basics of email spam and what you can do to prevent it

Spam, also known as "Unsolicited Bulk Email" (UBE), consists of the unwanted email that we all receive in our inbox daily. It typically is promoting products or websites and sometimes even tries to trick unsuspecting recipients into passing along personal information.

While individually, spam may only impact each of us at a very minor level, collectively it becomes a major concern. Below are several statistics that help us understand the true scale of spam throughout the United States:

• As of June 2007, it is estimated that there are over 100 billion spam messages sent daily.
• According to Spamhaus, 90% of incoming email traffic in North America, Europe and Australasia is estimated to be spam.
• A survey conducted in 2004 estimated that lost productivity from spam costs Internet users in the United States $21.58 billion annually.
• The United States is the highest producer of spam (19.8% according to Sophos).
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them spam.

What can we do about all of this spam? For those that want to go above and beyond the Microsoft Outlook junk mail folder, there are several premium solutions available to help deter the amount of spam we receive in our inboxes.

For those with a larger budget, there is Cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com). This software has been around since 1998 and is one of the largest antispam firms in the world.

For those with no budget, there is a free antispam solution called MailWasher Pro (http://www.mailwasher.net/). According to the MailWasher website, the software is used by 8 million people.

No matter how much spam is traveling around the internet these days, it is important to note that with just a few preventative steps, we can drastically reduce the amount of spam we receive.

1. When registering for sites, don’t use your home or business email. Instead, set up a free email address on Yahoo or Hotmail.
2. Never click on the links in any spam messages
3. Never reply to any spam messages
4. Don’t forward chain mail messages
5. Keep your junk mail folder activated