What is DM?

Entire, an agency here in the UK has noticed the blurring of the lines in DM and feels it is time "to establish a fresh, new definition of DM in the digital age ... by inviting those who know the industry intimately - the people who create, craft, strive and succeed for their clients - to explain what DM means to them."

The definition they are proposing is:

"Direct Marketing. Think of it as advertising that targets an identified audience with a specific proposition. This, in turn, harnesses the power of the brand, and product or service. What really sets it apart is the call to action which allows the effectiveness of every communication to be accurately measured, even in multi-channel campaigns. This makes it an ideal vehicle both for customer acquisition and retention, through online and offline channels."

In general I think this is pretty good but I have a few thoughts that may make it better.

• Instead of telling people how to think about DM, let's tell them what it is.
• The phrase "identified audience" is too general. All marketing is aimed at an identified audience. DM is targeted at an identifiable audience. In other words, it is marketing material that is targeted at a specific individual. This individual could be anonymous like when re-targeting a banner ad but because we are targeting based on a cookie we are targeting a specific individual.
• This may be a good opportunity to build some rigour into what a DM call to action must include. A place to start would be to say that a DM call to action is SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timed)
  

I am really looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and to see what definition emerges.

Congratulations dotMailer

Congratulations to dotMailer for winning the Croydon Business Best of Burough Award for Best Growing Business. also a big thanks to the team for having me along. Clearly they are rapturous over their win - well Tink is anyway.

Is Spam Really a Big Problem?

Here is an article on netimperative about some interesting research sponsored by moneysupermarket.com. The key take aways for me are:

• The average consumer only receives just over 10 spam messages per day - for some reason this seems low.
• 90% of consumers do not take active steps to stop spam. I cannot decide if this is good for legitimate marketers or not. On the one hand this increases clutter in the inbox but this also means that we do not have to worry about our opted-in readers accidentally creating false positives. I would be interested to hear your thoughs on this.
• Spam still works - 14% of respondents admitted to having clicked on a spam.

One of my concerns however is how they defined spam. As we all know there is the legal definition and the consumer's definition. Consumers think any message that is not relevant is spam. So this begs the question, "how many of the 10 spam messages per day are legitimate emails that the respondents opted-in to receive?"

More Time of Day Stuff

Apparently, when we send emails is the most important issue in the industry this week. Check out this from MarketingSherpa.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30917&pop=no

New Insights On Time Of Day For Email

This is a really interesting post on time of day:

http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/email_insider/?p=741

The interesting thing is that we have come full circle. In the early days of email it was a free for all but people quickly realised that email was all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. It was the last part that caused all of the worry.

How would we as marketers know when somebody was likely to be receptive to our message? So, we assumed that all consumers care about is the weekend and applied some "logic" about their behaviour as it related to the weekend and decided Wednesday would be the best day to send.

Some of the more clever email marketers realised that if every body was sending on a Wednesday it would be too hard to achieve cut-through so they overlaid this thought with the previous thinking on the importance of the weekend and said Tuesday was better (although some argued for Thursday).

Throughout the Great Day of the Week Debate, individually we struggled to answer the question, "I have changed to the 'optimal' day and my results have gone down." Luckily as marketers we had a ready made answer to this dilemma. "Maybe our customers are different. We should test it." These individual conversations eventually lead to a groundswell until most everybody was in agreement that we should rigorously test for the optimal day of the week and hey, let's throw in time of day as well.

What we never understood was why. Now the why is not important if your customer base is homogeneous, but it is if you have more than one customer. The why allows us to understand the behaviours of different segments and target them appropriately.

A standard day of week test randomly puts your readers into buckets so you end up identifying the optimal day based on the average. This would hide the fact that your most profitable segments might respond better at other times. In fact, the optimum time identified by the test may turn out to be rubbish.

By looking at day of week by segment we can optimise the response across the board. I know you are thinking: "Wait a minute. By looking at this on a segment level the sample sizes would be too small to be statistically significant." This is where I am going to pick up a string of thought proposed by Dela Quist of Alchemyworx. Dela has never been a fan of the organised day of week test. He proposes that if you look back over the past twelve or twenty four months you will have probably sent on each day of the week. There are some hazards to this approach but if you were to structure your testing going forward where launch each segment on the same day over the next seven campaigns you would be able to normalise for any outside influences.

How Do You Know Your Email is Working?

I recently wrote an article for the DMA's Infobox Email Newsletter in which I suggested that the current credit crunch would help move the email to the channel to the next level. Email really came into its own during the dotcom bust. The dotcoms were early adopters of the email channel but instead of email flaming out with the dotcoms, there was a huge library of case studies that sold the channel to the non-dotcoms.

I then went on to state that this credit crunch will force marketers to better segment their lists because finance directors are going to expect increasingly higher return on investment. In addition, marketers are realising that as email address penetration tops out they are all competing for the same static number of readers. This will result in an increase in the cost of acquisition for opt-ins, so it is important that marketers keep as many of their readers engaged as possible. Better targeting equates to increased relevance which leads to increased engagement.

So today I read an eMarketer article about a MarketingSherpa survey. Not surprisingly, email marketers that think email is becoming more effective will spend more money on it and email marketers that think email is becoming less effective try to keep email as close to free as possible.

The part that bothered me was the group that responded with "e-mail is cheap and still working-why invest more?" Didn't these people read my article? Maybe it didn't get much take-up in the US.

Actually, I think it is down to how these marketers are measuring their email programs. By focusing only on the process metrics of delivery, open, and click rates it is hard to see when large segment of your population becomes disengaged with your email program. By looking however, at the performance metrics like engagement, sales, return on investment, you get a much better picture of whether your email program is working. I have yet to find a client that is in the business of generating clicks. Every client I have ever worked with, was in the business of generating sales. That should be the only indicator of whether an email program is working.

Upcoming DMA Events

I have posted two new links in the upcoming events section. I am chairing the first and it should be a spirited discussion about changes to internet security and the impact this will have on digital marketing channels.

The second is the Email Marketing Councils second big conference of the year. There is a new format a lot of new content and some great speakers. Unfortunately, I was not able to make the cut and get on the speakers list for this one so I am looking for a guess pass if anybody has an extra.

We Now Resume Normal Service

Earlier today it was pointed out to me that I have not posted since June. I justified not posting in July and August as it being the summer holidays and nobody would read it anyway. I am not sure how to justify September, but its October now so right back at it.

Also I have started playing around with FeedBurner. To get an enhanced experience start using the URL below to access my blog.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheEmailPractice

Crunch Ends Email 'Batch and Blast'

Below is an article that was first published in the DMA Email Marketing Council email newsletter called InfoBox and then picked up by Precision Marketing on 19 May.

According to the media, the UK faces the greatest economic correction since The Great Depression. While newspapers tend to exaggerate to sell more copies, it is clear that the economic outlook for 2008 is not rosy. In tough times, marketing is usually the first thing to get cut, so the question is: should email marketers be worried?

I started in the email business at the height of the US dotcom boom. It seemed that there was a lavish launch party almost every night. When the crash came, the launch parties were replaced by pink slip parties. This might not have been the band playing on the deck of the Titanic but we were more than a little nervous.

It turned out to be the best thing for the industry. The dot-coms were early adopters of email marketing and without their largesse we tightened our belts. We also had to start running our businesses.like businesses. When we sifted through the ashes we found a large number of case studies on the effectiveness of the channel, which convinced more "traditional" companies to dive into the email pool.

Fast forward to 2008. Should we be worried? No, because just like the dotcom bust, this will force email to grow up. We have spent the intervening years talking about targeting and relevance but have not done much about it. This has been driven in large part by the low cost of each incremental email. Unlike other channels, there is no disincentive to over-target. On top of this, email continues t o be one of the most effective direct marketing channels, which creates tremendous internal pressures to email more people more often.

The email industry has proven that targeted, relevant emails deliver better initial response and engagement over the long term. At the same time, consumers have little patience with irrelevant emails and will quickly become disengaged. This emerging economic environment will give email marketers the incentive to stop the "batch and blast" approach and start leveraging the level of micro-targeting that email allows. The efficacy of the channel will allow us to keep or grow our budgets and the tough times will force us to become a much stronger channel.

UK Digital Penetation Index

Here are some good stats on the state of the UK market.

http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/leadership/0,1045,sid%253D176972,00.html

The Rich fail To Get Richer

Here is an interesting article that appeared in last week's Precision Marketing. I disagree with the premise that email is "if it is not already dead, is certainly struggling for breath." As you can see from my quote, email marketing should be about targeting and the clever use of data. This is not to say that the creative idea, design, and copywriting are not important but their limitations do not mean the death of email is imminent.

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The IDM Business Performance Awards

Yay Team!

Yesterday the BT Business and Ogilvy team won the IDM Business Performance Bronze Award for the BT Business Total Broadband campaign. You can see the work and other winners here:

http://www.theidm.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=contentDisplay.&chn=1&tpc=5&stp=624

And here is a photo of the group that picked up the award.

http://www.theidm.com/download/img/bpa08_bronzewinner.jpg

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Habeus: Email Remains Primo Communication Method

The comments from the current students in this article are interesting. The burning question on everyone's mind is whether email will be killed by social networks. The big hurtle to social networks displacing email is interoperability. Until I can send messages from my FaceBook account to friends on MySpace we will see social networks develop along a similar path to instant messaging. With the advent of each new IM tool, I ended up with friends at Yahoo! and Hotmail, while my colleagues at the time in Digital Impact relied on AIM. Third party tools like Meebo have resolved this problem but it has been years in the making.

Email is a Two Way Street

Giles Rhys-Jones who is a colleague here at OgilvyOne sent me a piece about Frank Eliason, who under the name comcastcares, is Comcast's (a US Broadband provider) "Twitter Guy."



Essentially he monitors Twitter for any activity related to Comcast . While this is not the only example of this concept, it makes me wonder if Comcast is this proactive in its replies to email.



Living in the UK, I have no need to be on the Comcast list so do not make this comment specifically about them, but nothing says "We as an organisation are not interested in a relationship with you Mr. Customer," like a please do not reply note on marketing emails.



Email is a two way channel and companies need to be able to respond to all inbound email in a timely fashion.

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Skip Fidura to speak at The Email Marketing Conference

I will be speaking at the next DMA Email Conference on frequency and timing of email.

"How often should I communicate with my customers and when is the best time to reach them?" This has been the "Holy Grail" of marketing since before there was . . . well . . . a Holy Grail. Gone are the days when frequency and timing were dictated by the marketer. Today's consumer wants messages that are relevant, personal, and timely. I will go into the challenges of this new environment and discuss practical solutions for how to solve them.

Some more details on the conference can be found below.

The Email Marketing Conference
Customer focused email - marketing to people not lists

In 2007 email marketing volumes overtook traditional print direct marketing for the first time. Whatever sector you work in email marketing is a powerful tool to reach your customers and promote your message and brand. But are you maximising the advantage email can give you?

With volumes set to continue rising how can you ensure your email achieves its aims? At this conference you will gain essential knowledge on the latest trends and practices on identifying your customer, delivering your message, maximising click through and measuring the response.

http://www.dma.org.uk/content/Evt-Article.asp?id=4300