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