The IDM Email Marketing Buyers’ Guide, Internet World 2009

Internet World is a great place to start to find a partner for your email marketing, to catch up with your current provider, or to review what you are currently doing. Steve Kemish, Chair of the IDM Digital Council, and Strategy Director at Adestra, shares his thoughts on email marketing and keys areas to consider when selecting or reviewing providers.

Email marketing: Making a start or reviewing your current situation
Having managed email programmes, be that client-side, or working with clients at Adestra, over the past 7 years, I wanted to share some thoughts on key areas of email marketing. Hopefully, this will be useful to you if you are just about to start a new email marketing programme, or if you want to review your current provider.

Requirements and objectives
It is important to carry out a number of steps to begin with. Decide on what you are hoping to achieve from your email marketing. The features needed to support a company publishing a blanket monthly newsletter are different to marketers looking to push out regular product promotions to targeted segments.

Things to consider:

Expected volumes: how many emails will you need to send each year?
Expected number of campaigns: how many individual promotions will you send?
Design: do you need fresh creative for every promotion will it be a consistent lay-out?
Decision-makers: who within your company needs to be involved to appoint the correct partner? Do you need to involve your IT teams for example?
Timelines: when would you be looking to deploy the system?
Users: how many members of your team will be using the system?
Budget: realistically, how much can you afford to spend whilst still guaranteeing an ROI?
Justification: what business metrics are needed to evaluate the success of your email marketing program?
Experience: how confident are that you know what you are doing with your email marketing? Remember that writing for the web is a very different discipline than writing for direct mail.
Results: what are the key objectives for your email marketing – do you want to drive sales or brand build, or re-engage lapsed customers? Know what you want to achieve before you start.

Data
Once you have defined your requirements, data has to be the next consideration. Our friends at deliverability partner, ReturnPath, would rightly tell you that 95% of the success of an email campaign is decided before you send – by the data. With that in mind, it is vital that this area is given careful consideration and ongoing focus.

The two main areas for you to consider are your own data and third–party data.

Own data
Quantity: do you have enough data to start your email programme? Quality: are your recipients fully opted-in? Ideally you should have collected ‘confirmed opt-in’ data as best practice.
Age: Is your email data up to date? When was the last time the recipient received an email from you?
Data overlays: do you have additional details in the database to help personalise and segment effectively? For example, title, name, company name, previous purchase history, address and region.
Ongoing collection: aim to exploit every touch point you have. Use email to increase your database – use viral marketing and online competitions, as well as offline data capture (in store, telesales) and events.

Third-party
Cost: is the data competitively priced? Reputation: where has the data come from? Is it fully opted-in? Good versus bad: are there any harvested/farmed addresses in the data? Such as “postmaster@” These are telltale signs of poor data. Accreditation: ensure your data provider is accredited with the DMA. Usage: Will you be using the data once? (single usage) or repeatedly? (multi usage) If repeatedly, how often will the third party refresh and top up the data for you?

Provider – In-house versus ESP (email service provider)
Understand the different types of service provided by email marketing partners and decide which service is most appropriate for your business:

Bureau / managed services
Similar to a marketing agency, these companies manage all aspects of the email production process from campaign creative through to post-broadcast reporting. These companies are best suited to clients without the skills in house, who intend to send a low number of campaigns a year and can afford to pay a premium.

In-house software solutions
This is software that you can install either on your desktop or on your own email server. A cheap option, these packages often have limited reporting but more importantly, require significant maintenance and additional investment to ensure high deliverability rates.

Outsourced self-service ASPs
This is the most popular option. Accessed online from anywhere, users are able to manage all aspects of their campaign through a web interface. Users can also broadcast (send) using the email marketing partner’s servers, allowing a high degree of deliverability with no technical investment by the client. It means that deployment is very quick and easy.

When deciding between the in house and outsourced options, the following points should be considered:

Functionality and Services
It is important that your proposed partner’s product is comparable with those of other providers. Check their promotional literature and see product demonstrations at industry events to build a list of the features most important to you.

Requirements will vary for everyone, but some of the main features to consider include:

Data management: can the partner’s system manage de-duping, suppressions and the import and export of data sets? Ensure that you maintain all ownership rights to the data and that it will never be used by your partner.
Design: how complicated are any editing tools? Can the partner’s system personalise emails with merge fields and conditional content? Can you create messages in different languages?
Broadcast functionality: can the system broadcast multi-part emails (both html and plain text versions?) Do they provide scheduling and immediate broadcasting of mass sending?
Deliverability & Checkers: what pre-send checking functions are included? Spam filter alerts and link checkers? Are there any preview tools to show you what your emails look like in different email systems?
Reporting and testing: are you able to get the information needed to measure your email program and justify the ROI?
Inbound: can the system filter and manage replies?
Roll-out & training: what training is required and are there any technical deployments needed?

Overall, be confident that the partner’s products are user-friendly and intuitive to use, and that you have the support you need from them – be that technical or strategic. You need to be confident in using the system and aim to improve your results.

Resource
Your email marketing will impact on many other departments within your business, not just marketing. Areas of the business that you will rely on include:

Marketing: do they have the skills? – online copy writing, creative, html, design and strategic. Ensure that you have looked at your sign-off process for allowing emails to be deployed. Look to manage frequency of send too, so that you don’t allow others to ‘hammer’ an email address.
Database marketing: can they provide the data you need, when you need it? Will they need to integrate the data into other business systems? Can they give you all the data overlays you need?
Finance: they will pay the bills! Can you provide business metrics that they understand?
Sales: do they see your clients emails? It is possible that they should, especially if you are going to drive recipients to call sales quoting offers.
Legal: you will need expert help on data protection as well as signing the contract with your email provider.

Management
The success of your email marketing programme will be determined by how well it is managed. Although you may be the ‘owner’ of this area, you will be reliant on many other key stakeholders. So getting to understand the input you will need to give and receive early on is key. Be sure to know what it is your management will need to make decisions on whether your email marketing is providing positive results for the business. Measures such as Open Rate and Click Through Rate are meaningless to your Finance Director. They care about ROI and Profit a lot more.

Integration
Probably one of the hardest and scariest of this list is integration. Many companies will have various different applications, systems and databases that ideally need to talk to your email system. I use the word ‘ideally’ - it is a rare company that can ever boast to have all systems fully integrated from day one.

The key is to prioritise the systems that you must have connected, and then those that ideally should be connected. The split is very simple for me – if a company system will positively or negatively affect your overall results with email marketing, then it is on the must list.

Typical business systems for you to consider:

CMS (content management system)
Web analytics
CRM
Stock inventory and purchasing
Events calendar
Telesales
Purchase history (if not part of the CRM)

Continual learning
Once you have started with your email marketing programme, it is important that you and your team keep abreast of emerging trends and techniques, of new features and tools, as well as what your competitors are doing.

Your email service provider should be able to provide you with case studies that you can learn from, and provide strategic support for your team. Do they have training that can help, or any white papers your staff can take examples from?

The web also provides many excellent resources. Sign up to any email marketing newsletters you can find on the subject.

Most Email Service Providers will have a blog that you can learn from too. At Adestra we have one that is regularly updated by our staff. Visit http://blog.adestra.com

Organisations such as the IDM provide comprehensive training and qualifications on digital marketing, which encompasses email as well as other digital disciplines.

Internet World is also the place to go and tread the floor with potential partners and suppliers. You have access to a host of excellent free seminars and presentations. The IDM are scheduled to run their academy at Internet World this year and amongst others, I will be talking on “Profiting from email marketing in an economic downturn” at 3.20pm on 29 April.