Image via Shutterstock

Now that email marketing has been around for years, every retailer has an email marketing program. But, each program is at a different level of sophistication.

The Evolution Of An Email Marketing Program

Do you ever wonder where your program ranks compared to others? Need helping mapping out where to go from where you are?

I find the crawl, walk, run metaphor resonates with most marketers; and, I’ve added PR after run. As a runner myself, this is reality. Many times after finishing a race, you will hear a runner say, “I’m never doing that again!” But after just a few days, the runner is already planning her/his next race.

Getting to the finish is hard, and at times may not seem worth it; but in the end, you can recognize your achievements and realize you can push yourself to be better, both as a runner and as an email marketer.

Crawl

If you have just started your email marketing program or haven’t made many innovations to your program since its inception, you may be in the crawl phase. During this iteration of your program, you should at least have a consistent sending schedule and content plan. However, you are sending the same message to everyone on your list, otherwise known as “batch and blast.”

Hopefully, you have tracking reports to view delivered, opens, clicks and conversions. Unfortunately I have seen retailers who still don’t have this information readily available. This data is required to understand the value of your program.

Sometimes, this limitation is created by having your email program sent through a custom in-house tool and servers. If so, it’s time to upgrade to an email service provider (ESP). This can be a chicken and egg scenario where it can be hard to prove the worth of your program without the reports you’d get from an ESP; but, you can’t get an ESP until you can prove the value of the program.

One thing is certain if you are not sending from a reputable ESP: your deliverability is not as good as you think it is.

Walk

At the walk stage, you may not be sending the same email to everyone on your list, but you are creating disparate different emails for different segments. Your segments may be based on profile data you have collected through a subscription center.

In addition to planned promotional emails, you should have several triggers set up, such as a welcome email, a static abandoned shopping cart campaign, and a rating and review request. In addition to a planned content and promotional calendar, you should have an A/B testing plan, which also includes tracking results.

Because acquisition is such a key component of a good email marketing program, at this stage I believe you should be tracking subscriber by source. Through this, you can evaluate your reporting to set benchmarks, determine which subscribers perform better and optimize your existing acquisition points.

Finally, your Web analytics should be integrated with your email program. This means tagging the links in your emails to allow for effective reporting, not only through your ESP, but also through your Web analytics tool, whether that is Google Analytics, Omniture, Core Metrics, or Web Trends, etc.

I’m surprised at how many retailers are still in this stage of the progression of their email program. So, you’re not alone, but it’s time to get serious. Your competition is looking at you in the rear-view mirror.

Run

New runners often start out training with a run-walk method, whereby you run for several minutes for a specified distance and then walk for a shorter period of time, continuing to alternate running with walking. Many marketers find their email programs undergoing this training regimen, as well, exhibiting traits of a program in both the walk and run stages. If you find your program fits these criteria, simply focus on making the full migration to the run stage.

In this stage, ideally, you are leveraging dynamic content in a single email to populate different messages to different subscribers, rather than creating multiple emails. Sometimes, the biggest challenge to achieving this actually lies in the reporting, not the creation of the email. You will need to work with either your ESP or your Web analytics team to gain the insights you need to evaluate the dynamic campaigns.

Segmentation moves beyond profile attributes (gender, state, etc.) to be more behavior-based. For example, this includes messaging differently to subscribers that have just recently signed up, subscribers that have signed up but never purchased, subscribers who have purchased only once, subscribers that have become unengaged, and your best customers.

To know who your best customers are, you will need to perform some analysis, such as RFM scoring. These insights also allow you to refine your acquisition strategies to gain more subscribers that look like your best customers.

Your triggered programs should be expanded. Your welcome program should be a series of emails, your abandoned cart program should dynamically include the products abandoned, and also be multiple emails in a series. You should also have a post-purchase follow up campaign.

Data integrations are critical at this point, both to implement the triggers and to create the behavior-based segmentation. In addition to your Web analytics, your ESP should be integrated with your CRM platform and e-commerce platform, allowing you to deploy all transactional emails from your ESP, including marketing messages alongside the order details.

PR

Once you’ve started running and finished a race, you’ve established a personal record (PR). Beyond running, your goal is to continue to train, to perhaps run a longer distance, or run a faster time (beat your PR). It becomes about optimization, continually challenging yourself and setting new goals, pushing yourself to be better.

At this point, it may mean data modeling for segmentation and scripting in emails to accommodate hundreds of variations. Email doesn’t function alone. Multi-channel integration is key to identifying the single-view of your customer, to know on a subscriber-level basis when an email should be triggered vs. a text message. It also allows you to calculate the value of a subscriber alone, vs. the value of a subscriber also being a Facebook fan and Twitter follower, or engaged in text messages.

Your attribution reporting becomes more than just last click, taking into account retargeting ads, affiliate programs, PPC, in-store experiences and more. You may have email messages integrated with your loyalty program that rewards customers for all of their experiences, or have a dedicated credit card program with triggered email and SMS alerts for payment due notices or credit line increases.

The sophistication of your email marketing program at this point is only limited by the data you have access to. It also  requires working tightly with others in the organization to create a true omni-channel experience for the customer. This means putting the customer first, and being customer-centric in decisions for the marketing program.

A/B testing is the simplest, most straightforward testing method available. Most of you probably understand what A/B testing entails, but for those who don’t: A/B test is a process through which you provide different versions of an email to statistically significant groups of subscribers, and then measure their reactions to those versions in order to understand which is more effective at driving the behavior you prefer.

At minimum, you should be consistently performing A/B testing across your entire program. Each campaign can yield insights from an A/B test that can provide incremental lifts that build on each other to optimize your revenue from email.

What To A/B Test

Almost anything in an email can be A/B tested, but try to focus on the larger aspects to prevent getting caught up on minute details that won’t have a large impact. Try testing around the following aspects:

Timing

Ah, the age-old question, “When is the best time to send an email?” According to a recent Experian study, the answer is 8:00 pm to 12:00 am; however, according to a recent study at DEG (where I work) 8:00 pm was statistically not a great time to send emails. In short, as any marketer will tell you, “It depends.” Each brand’s subscriber list varies, so you should test and see how your subscribers respond.

For testing time of day, I recommend a full 50-50 split test. Send to 50% of your list at your usual time of day, and 50% at a different time. One current theory is that consumers are making more purchases in the evening, when they are engaged with their tablets or mobile devices while watching TV.

Many A/B tests are conducted with a three-way split. For example, 10% for Group A, 10% for Group B, and 80% for the Winning Group. In this scenario, you send to Group A and Group B, determine the winner after a specified period of time, and send the winning version to the remaining Winning Group. With time-of-day however, this is more difficult and becomes influenced by day-of-week, as well, because your test groups would receive the email on one day and the winning deployment would be sent on a different day.

Beyond timing for your promotional emails, A/B testing can be critical for determining when to send a triggered campaign – for example, determining the cadence of the emails in a win-back series, abandoned shopping cart series, or with post-purchase or other lifecycle triggers.

Creative

Creative tests involve more work, because they require the graphic design team to design more than one version and the development team to build more than one version. But, the results of a creative A/B can be very dramatic and impactful.

For example, you can test lifestyle imagery in one version and specific product images in another version. Another popular creative test is to have one one version of an email that is entirely image-based while another includes HTML text that can be viewed before downloading images.

If you are implementing an overall redesign, test the current layout or creative with the new proposed layout. This test, for example, could prove the case for moving to responsive design. But, creative testing can also be as simple as including a button versus text or adjusting the font size of the copy.

Offer

If you are able to offer discounts, then perhaps the most important testing centers on the offer. For example, do your customers respond most favorably to a percentage off, a dollar amount off, free shipping, a tiered discount, a discount limited to specific products, a time sensitive discount, a flash sale, a mystery offer, or some other kind of deal?

When testing offers, a few additional metrics should be considered in your evaluation. In addition to gross revenue, you should also consider Average Order Value (AOV), Units Per Transaction (UPT), and margin.

Subject Line

The simplest and most common item to A/B test is the subject line. If you hadn’t planned to test any of the aspects above in an email campaign, at minimum you can set up a subject line test.

For example, test including the offer in the subject line versus teasing the offer, or a longer subject line versus a shorter subject line. Subject lines are often given the least amount of thought in regard to an email, but they play a very key role. Even if you do not change anything else about your email program, you can improve your reach simply by focusing on better copywriting and testing for optimization.

Determining Results

Interpreting the results from A/B testing is sometimes the hardest part. If you’re lucky, a clear winner will emerge, and your decision will be easy. Often, however, the results for different key metrics can be conflicting.

First, determine the appropriate tagging to effectively track your campaigns outside of your email service provider. Next, determine your metrics for evaluation in advance. Some tests may only have one metric for evaluation — for example, the key measurement for a subject line test is open rate.

In determining the success of a creative A/B test, on the other hand, you’ll want to evaluate several metrics. My favorite key measurement of a creative test is click-to-open rate, but which metrics you look at will be based on the type of creative test you’re running.

For a creative test of image-only versus image and HTML text, your success metrics could be open rate (to determine if HTML text increased the number of subscribers who downloaded images), click-to-open rate, click-through rate and revenue.

For a creative test of a completely new layout (such as traditional desktop versus responsive design) your success metrics may include additional metrics such as read rate and click-through rate by device (desktop, iPad, iPhone, Android, etc.).

Then it comes to A/B testing around offers, your measurements will focus on both email engagement metrics as well as revenue metrics. Some thought leaders will argue the only true measurement of success is revenue. While I agree that conversion is the ultimate goal of the email, different aspects of A/B testing have clear correlations with specific email engagement metrics. I prefer to consider the engagement and revenue metrics together to make an informed decision.

And frequently, the result of a test forms the basis for a new test.

Control Group

Direct mail has long included control groups, which are excluded from receiving mailings to determine the effectiveness of sending a direct mail piece. Email control groups can be more difficult to identify. For example, on a subject line test, what would your control be?

Creating a control for testing an offer is also difficult because including an offer will generally always outperform no offer. And at that point, you have essentially created two tests: offer versus no offer, and offer A versus offer B.

I once encountered a client who had excluded a portion of email subscribers from receiving any email at all, as part of a long-term study to determine the value of sending email. At the end, the test showed the tremendous value of email marketing as well as the loss in revenue from not sending to these subscribers. While it helped justify investments in the email program, it was determined that this test was more of a loss than a gain.

Statistical Significance

One final point in determining results of your A/B tests is statistical significance. Simply basing your test on quantity may not be accurate. If you do not have an analyst on your team to run the numbers, there are plenty of reliable calculators on the Web that can help you do this by evaluating the number of conversions generated from the control and test groups.

Aim for a confidence level of at least 90%, which means you have only a 10% chance of interpreting the result incorrectly. You should only record a final decision for tests that are deemed to be statistically significant. If in doubt, run the test again to validate the results!

Acting On Results

A/B testing is worthless if you do not implement what you learn. Create a spreadsheet where you record the tests performed, results, and confirmed decisions. I also recommend categorizing your tests to make it easy to search or filter by type. Even if you only send one test per week, at the end of a year, you would have 52 tests. By categorizing, you can easily search later when someone asks “What offers have we tested?” or “How do different thresholds for free shipping affect our total revenue?”

A/B testing isn’t the end of the story, of course. Once you’ve mastered A/B testing or are anxious for more than one key finding per test, we can begin to talk about multivariate testing. But for now, A/B will be more than enough to get your testing program off the ground.

Setting The Promotional Calendar

The promotional calendar should be developed with the E-Commerce Manager, Email Marketing Manager, and Product Merchandisers. Any additional, relevant associates should be included, as well. For example, the Mobile Marketing Manager might be a different individual; or, you may have a Brand or Loyalty Manager to include for in-store promotions.

• Events & Offers

Begin by creating a promotional calendar that includes any e-commerce, in-store, or recurring events that email will need to support. For example, it could be a “Friends and Family” event that also has a supporting direct mail piece. From here, plan a mix of emails in support of those efforts, some that include offers and others that don’t.

The next easiest emails to plan are those that support promotions, since a sale will generally increase top line revenue. You may consider sending an email announcing the sale, and then follow it up with additional emails creating a sense of urgency as the end of the sale approaches.

• No Offers

Because of the downturn in the economy over the last several years, many retailers turned to more discounts and promotions to increase sales. However, not every email needs a discount. In fact, some of the emails with the highest open rates are emails that don’t include any offer at all.

Now that discounts and promotions are not a necessity, retailers are finding it hard to break the habit. You might be uncertain of what will happen to sales if a discount isn’t included, but there is only one way to find out – test. Select at least one email per month that promotes your product but doesn’t include an offer. You might find that you don’t have to take money off the table in order to achieve the conversions you’re after.

Consult with your Product Merchandisers to identify any new products that will be available in store or online. New content is great for an email audience. For example, you can pique their interest with smart subject lines like “Introducing the [product name]” or “Shop new styles just added.” Schedule these emails as appropriate throughout the month, when there is not a sale. You’ll be surprised how effective curiosity is as a driving force for conversion.

• Social Media

Consider at least one email per month dedicated entirely to supporting social marketing. After all, it’s good to return the love for all those email subscribers they have sent your way. If they are hosting a contest, send an email to drive traffic and engagement.

• Something Different

Still have holes left in your email schedule? Fill them by hosting ongoing brainstorming sessions with the entire team to gather new ideas for email content. Include individuals on the front line who are closest to the day-to-day operations, associates from other teams, and customer service representatives. We even include our receptionist sometimes!

Take a cue from Barnett Helzberg, Jr., and ask the group a variation of his “Three Magic Questions:” “What (emails) are we doing right? What (emails) are we doing wrong? What (emails) are we not doing that we should be?” This is where you need to get creative, break the mold, and don’t discard any ideas.

• Email Specific

Review the schedule for any email exclusive content and offers. Remember, your subscribers opted in for extra content, so be sure you are capitalizing on the opportunity by giving it to them. Give some thought to what the benefit of being on your email list might be, and then work to provide that value.

Finally, identify a test for nearly every email. It could be one of many options including images, copy, offers, personalization, etc. It could be as simple as a subject line, or as complicated as multivariate; but, nearly every email should have a test of some sort.

Merchandising For Email

Once you have your calendar drafted, it’s time to select the products to feature. Who picks your products for email? Is it someone who doesn’t know much about email? I sometimes find the products are selected by the buyers, and they consistently choose products that have excess inventory.

Inventory closeout promotions are ok on occasion; but often, there are reasons these products didn’t already sell. Repeatedly promoting undesirable products is not a sustainable long-term strategy; and, it’s not one that is likely to yield a lot of revenue. Unless your brand strategy is flash sales (like steepandcheap.com), save this tactic for items that were recently moved to the clearance section.

• Focus On The WHY

For emails that are showcasing new products or popular products without any supporting offer, focus on education and the product’s benefits. Email can highlight features that a consumer might not be aware of. Call-out the “why” of the product. Why would a consumer want to purchase this particular product?

Write the text and select the images while keeping in mind the simple fact that customers don’t read. No matter how compelling your creative might be, they just don’t. Keep it short and sweet. Use easily digested content — bullet points, highlighted text, images, and simple phrases. Get creative to present the content visually, like in this example from J.Crew Factory showcasing “3 Ways to Wear It.”

• Top Products

Determine the best-selling products on your website. Inquire about the most-searched products on your site. Obtain the top-rated products from your ratings and reviews engine. These would are all be great products for an email. Paired with a compelling subject line, these products are likely to generate click-throughs and revenue. Add an offer, and you have the makings of a high grossing campaign.

• Versions & Segments

You have more than one kind of subscriber, so select different products for different segments. If you are segmenting by gender, for example, select one set of products for women and one set for men. If you are segmenting by size (or in addition to gender), select an additional set of products for petite and big/tall. If you are segmenting by purchase history, dynamically populate a product previously purchased in an additional color, or the next most purchased product based on the last product purchased; then select a set of products for those subscribers that have never purchased.

Dynamically populated products can be pulled from an existing data source (the website) to limit the level of effort required to build the email. If you are segmenting based on loyalty, you may have different products at different price points, based on total lifetime spend or the subscriber’s average order value.

Measurement

How do you determine the success of your product and promotion selection? Specifically, a few key metrics to track include average order value, profit margin, and gross revenue. These metrics allow you to evaluate the result and effectiveness of any promotions.

For example, does a “buy more, save more” campaign result in a higher average order value and overall gross sales? Does a deep percentage off create a lower profit margin but high gross sales? Most email programs strongly support website goals. For this reason you may also include units per transaction (UPT) as another key metric in your weekly and monthly email evaluations.

Increased Email Engagement

By sending a mix of emails with and without offers, you are able to establish revenue benchmarks at the low and high end. Over time, this allows you to create the right cadence of offers and more accurately project email revenue. If you had previously trained your subscribers to expect an offer, you may experience an adjustment period of non-offer emails with low revenue overall, until they identify and take advantage of fewer promotions, generating higher revenue (and appreciation) for those emails.

Through a collaborative effort, you can improve the product and promotion selections of your email marketing campaigns, resulting in increased email engagement metrics and revenue.

So What?

ISPs are monitoring email engagement metrics and making decisions based on this. If your subscribers are less engaged than a competitor’s, then your email may get delivered later.

It is not uncommon to see Gmail “hold” your email for a delayed delivery if your engagement metrics are sub-par. If you are not monitoring sending to live seed email addresses, or using a deliverability monitoring service, you could be missing these warning signs.

Delayed Sending

How can you tell if your sends have been delayed? In Gmail, you can tell from the timestamp difference before and after opening the email. In the Gmail inbox, you will see a timestamp like the following:

After you open the email, you will see the timestamp for when the email was sent. If the times match, like in this case from Bed, Bath & Beyond, the email appears to have been delivered immediately upon arrival:

In the following example from Gymboree, the timestamp in my inbox displayed 12:12 pm:

However, upon click-through, the timestamp displayed is 11:18 am, about an hour earlier:

I suppose an hour’s delay isn’t too unreasonable and could be caused by other factors at Gmail aside from inbox engagement, but I have seen delays for some brands that are much longer.

This can be a real issue, especially if your offer is time sensitive, like a flash sale, or an email sent on Cyber Monday. Furthermore, if your open and click-through rates drop low enough, an ISP may choose to send your message to the junk mail folder, or worse, not accept it at all (aka it goes “missing”).

Blacklist

Black is bad in email. If your unengaged subscriber population continues to grow, then so do your chances of an email address becoming classified as a spamtrap.

A spamtrap is essentially a dead email address that spam software companies monitor for sending. Sending to a spamtrap can land you on a blacklist. This prevents your emails from getting to the inbox by anyone who uses that spam software for filtering.

ISPs and corporations use spam software to keep the junk out of your inbox. Of course, you as a retailer, don’t consider your email junk; and, after all, these subscribers did opt in at one time. But it is your responsibility to periodically cleanse your list of inboxes that subscribers have abandoned.

Re-Engagement

The best way to deal with these issues is to never have them to begin with. You need a re-engagement strategy. At minimum, you need a win-back campaign after subscribers have not opened or clicked in a certain amount of time.

A year ago, I would have recommended about six months as the maximum period of unengagement before you take action, but with the changes in algorithms from the ISPs in the last six months, I now recommend retargeting subscribers after just three to four months of unengagement.

Open

The primary objective of a win-back campaign is for the subscriber to open. Once a subscriber opens an email they are no longer considered unengaged. For this reason, the subject line is a critical element to the win-back campaign. In this example from Bath & Body Works the subject line reads: We’ve Missed You! $1 Shipping – Today Only! Details Inside.

Click

Once the subscriber has opened the email, your call-to-action should be clear. Ideally, you would receive a click-through confirmation of the subscriber reaffirming their desire to continue to receive emails.

However, even if they are not interested, you would prefer for the subscriber to opt-out to be removed from the list. This prevents you from recycling the subscriber back into the win-back series later, and also prevents the possibility of the subscriber clicking “report spam” in their inbox, which can also lead to deliverability issues.

In this example from Crocs (a client at DEG, where I work), an unsubscribe link is clearly provided in the email.

What About The 95% That Didn’t Open?

Because these subscribers are already unengaged, your open rate on a re-engagement campaign will be low, and the majority of your subscribers will not open your message.

You are then faced with the decision of what to do with these subscribers. I recommend offering up to three direct re-engagement opportunities. You may include more incentives or deeper discounts in each email in the win-back series. If you still have radio silence, then it is time to part ways. This can be really difficult for some retailers, and I’ve heard many rebuttals, including:

“But they might open eventually.”

This is, at best, unlikely. If they haven’t opened in three months they probably aren’t going to open in the next three months. I’ve stopped receiving emails from brands I still love, and it’s probably because I didn’t open for just a few months. That’s why it’s imperative that you offer an option for subscribers to re-opt in on your site.

“Maybe they saw the email and purchased in store.”

This is possible, since an open is not recorded unless the user downloads images. Remember, just because the subscriber is unengaged with email does not mean they are unengaged with your brand. Be sure to collect a valid email address at POS in store and confirm their choice to opt-in.

“My product lifecycle is longer.”

This can be a valid point. After all, how often do you really buy a car? Or jewelry? Or concert tickets? This is where data really matters, to create relevant communications and key inflection points in the consumer lifecycle.

Who Is Worth Saving?

I recommend running your unengaged subscriber list through your data model of profitable customers to identify those worth attempting to save. For these subscribers, you should be able to identify potential triggers so that you may include more relevant content in the win-back emails. You may also choose to send a direct mail campaign with a call-to-action to go to a landing page to opt-in for email.

Only You Can Prevent Unengagement

In all of your email communications, commit to send more relevant emails. Be more strategic about your emails. Email has a high frequency and can be easy to churn through. Rewrite that subject line again. Have a fresh set of eyes review the creative concept. Ask yourself what content in the email should be dynamic based on previous subscriber behavior.

Create a testing plan for each campaign. Document the results. Ask yourself why a subscriber should stay on your email list. What is different now from what you were sending a few months ago? A year ago? Make each email better than the last. Challenge yourself and your team!

Identify behavior patterns from the time a subscriber signs up. Monitor their opens, click-throughs and conversions, altering subsequent email communications based on that data. This can help determine when and what to send as part of your win-back series.

But, integrating social is more than just asking your subscribers to fan you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter or Pinterest. It requires effectively communicating the value proposition and integrating social as part of the shopping experience. Following are four approaches to successfully interweave email, Facebook and e-commerce.

1. Like More, Save More

In this example from Tea Collection, an email was sent driving customers to a landing page where they could like individual products. Tea Collection then placed products that received the most likes on sale at a higher rate (200 likes = $12, 400 likes = $10, etc.).

This campaign is driving Facebook engagement so that product likes appear in customer newsfeeds, increasing exposure and the probability of new Facebook fans. After the company collected likes for a specified period of time, it sent an email announcing the product winners with the most likes and their discounted price. This two-part email campaign increased Facebook engagement in addition to generating revenue.

2. Facebook First

Offering Facebook fans exclusive, or first-rights, access to a sale is another way to tie in all three channels. In this example from LOFT, customers must like the brand on Facebook to receive a sale code that enables them to shop online. This does require additional work on the subscriber’s behalf, so be sure there is a clear communication of value to generate the response.

In this example from Banana Republic, Facebook fans receive first access to shop new arrivals, as well as getting access to the sale one day early. Just as you might promote an email-only offer to your subscribers, Facebook fans can also benefit from content exclusivity.

3. Social Content In Email

Embedding social content within an email is one way to repurpose existing content that gives customers a reason to purchase. In this example from Crate and Barrel, Facebook comments appear as “rating and review” content in the email.

This is a great example of communicating to an email subscriber by using exactly the kind of content they can expect to receive from being a Facebook fan, rather than the standard marketing boilerplate (“Get updates, news, promotions, etc.).

In the following example from Crocs (full disclosure, Crocs is a client), the email serves as the communication piece to showcase the “most talked about” products from its social channels. Unlike the above examples, whose primary call-to-actions involve Facebook first, this email showcases engagement that has already happened in the social channels. This allows the content to be product-centric and the resulting primary call-to-action is focused around driving e-commerce sales.

4. Facebook For Email Acquisition

As discussed in last month’s column, list growth can play a large part in increasing revenue from email. When email subscribers originate from a sign-up form on Facebook that required them to fan your brand, you can flag them in your eCRM system as being engaged in two channels. Because Facebook prevents brands from extracting their fans’ email addresses, it is impossible to know if they continue to remain fans on Facebook over time. However, at the very least you would know for certain that they were Facebook fans at one time.

This allows you to track these subscribers and determine the value of having email subscribers who are also Facebook fans. For example, do these customers spend more with your brand, compared with customers who are only engaged in email? Do your email subscribers sourced from Facebook have a different demographic than your traditional customer?

In this example from AMC (another client), subscribers provide enough information to receive ongoing emails customized with local movies appropriate for their age.

In addition to a simple sign-up form on Facebook, Lee Jeans (a third client) has seen tremendous success with contests on Facebook as acquisition strategies. Having an incentive for your Facebook fans to sign-up for your email program can greatly increase your conversion rates.

Three’s Company

Frequently, social, email and e-commerce managers operate independently of one another within an organization. According to The Social Profile report from ExactTarget, “Some consumers have noticed the lack of coordination across these channels, and have realized that certain brands consistently deliver better content in one channel versus another.”

When tightly integrated, all three channels benefit, further accelerating each driver for the brand, and generating revenue. Collaboration across the channels also creates a seamless user experience and brand experience for customers. This consistency, or lack thereof, is highly visible to customers.

Like every other department in an organization, as the new year begins (or when your fiscal year ends) marketers are requesting and competing for budget. As you prepare, use the following email revenue metrics to help prove your case.

Campaign Revenue

How much money did you generate on your e-commerce site from a particular email send? Knowing this requires that your emails are appropriately tagged for your online analytics tool (Google Analytics, Omniture, Core Metrics, etc.).

Appropriate tagging is the first step toward accurate reporting of this information, and it can be even better if you can also attribute offline sales. Obviously, some campaigns will have higher revenue than others, depending on their objective and call-to-action. However, spikes in revenue that can be attributed to a particular email and then be viewed over time are an incredibly valuable proof point for your marketing program.

Return On Investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is the classic baseline marketing metric. It’s where the rubber meets the road for your efforts. That doesn’t mean that it’s always a straightforward metric, however. You need to consider all of the relevant factors in the cost of the campaign, typically including services and sends, and are typically reported as a percentage, as follows:

Formula: Campaign revenue generated – cost of campaign / cost of campaign = return * 100 = ROI

For example: $100,000 – $2,500 / $2,500 = 39 * 100 = 3,900% ROI

A 4,000% ROI sounds unreal, but for this approach to capturing ROI, it can even go higher for something like a set-it-and-forget-it triggered campaign. For instance, an abandoned cart email has a moderate initial cost in setup services, but from the point of deployment has only has minimal per-send cost ongoing.

And, abandoned carts have an excellent track record for generating revenue. Measuring ROI like that can generate some garish numbers. You’ll have some doubters when you tell the story of your 60,000% ROI, even though your math checks out.

Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI)

It is for these reasons that I prefer to report on the more appropriately termed “return on marketing investment” (ROMI). It is important to clarify “marketing” in the metric name because it typically does not factor in the cost of making the product or any offer/discount. ROMI can then be reported as a statement, such as “For every marketing dollar spent, we generated $X” defined as follows:

Formula: Revenue generated / cost of the campaign = revenue generated for every dollar spent

For example: $100,000 / $2,500 = $40 generated for every $1 spent

If you are pulling your weight, this metric can be incredibly useful in building a business case for new email integration projects.

The following graphic depicts all three metrics above:

Revenue Per Email (RPE)

Need to make the case that your organization should invest in list growth? Even if you don’t boost your conversion rate, list size can be a significant factor in generating of revenue – if more people see your messaging, more people will convert. RPE is calculated as follows:

Formula: Total revenue generated from a campaign / Total number of delivered emails

For example, for a promotional campaign $20,000 / 1,000,000 = $0.02

For example, for a triggered campaign $11,000 revenue / 4,000 emails sent = $2.75

As straightforward as you can get, this metric tells you how much money you made for every email address you sent to (less bounces), as depicted visually below:

For your budget debate purposes, you can begin to project how an increase in list size might result in an increase in revenue. In the first example, for every email delivered, your brand made 2 cents, regardless of opens or clicks.

In the above example, there are 1,000,000 subscribers on the list. You can then infer that if you had grown your list to 1,500,000 subscribers, the campaign would have generated an additional $10,000 (assuming all engagement metrics remain relatively the same). If the brand typically sends eight promotional campaigns a month, that is an additional $80,000. You can quickly see why list acquisition should always be a strong focus.

On the flip side, RPE is a good indicator of how much you can spend to gain a subscriber. For example, if it costs $1 to obtain a new email address and you know on average you generate $0.02 RPE, then it will take 50 emails to “pay for” the acquisition of that subscriber.

At eight promotional emails a month, you are generating a profit from that subscriber after six months – a generalization that does not consider triggered sends (which have a higher RPE, as shown above) that are a legitimate and important part of the lifecycle of emails sent to a subscriber.

Cost Per Subscriber

For each acquisition tactic, you should calculate cost per subscriber, which is a reflection of the cost of acquisition for each new email address.

While the aggregate cost per subscriber is certainly important, it is just as important to note that this metric can vary greatly by tactic/source, and so close examination of individual results is highly recommended – as is a value threshold for each tactic. For example, organic signups on your website may have a $0 cost; whereas, PPC acquisitions might run into double figures.

Acquisition-focused campaigns can be calculated from their total cost. Take a social media campaign in Facebook, for example. A Facebook page may have run for a month with a contest to enter to win a free item. As part of the contest entry form, users opted in to receive emails. Let’s assume the social media campaign had a fixed cost to design and develop it. Once the contest is over, simply calculate the following:

Formula: Cost of the campaign / the total number of new email subscribers obtained = cost per subscriber

For example: $5000 / 20,000 = $0.25 / subscriber

By knowing cost per subscriber, in addition to revenue per subscriber, you can identify where to best to allocate budgets for acquisition and special projects.

Revenue From Email (Overall)

Finally, I also recommend understanding how revenue from your email program overall compares with revenue from other channels such as PPC, Social, SMS, Display, Affiliate, etc.

As an overall digital marketing manager, knowing the sources of revenue from each channel should also play a part in budget allocation. At the same time, be aware that this can be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, wherein budget allocations can determine the channel’s revenue. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email easily outperforms other channels in generating return:

• Email: $39.40 for every dollar spent
• Search: $22.38 for every dollar spent
• Display: $19.71 for every dollar spent
• Social: $12.90 for every dollar spent

Just as email program recommendations are based on data, I recommend making your case for budget allocation through use of the metrics above.

Confirming an email is accurate before it deploys is more than just proofreading and having a second set of eyes; it’s strictly following a well-defined process to ensure that you’re delivering a message that reflects well on your organization.

On a rare occasion, mistakes will happen, but you need to constantly work and plan to minimize and mitigate your risks.

Here is a smart five-step process that will keep your organization on the straight and narrow with regard to accuracy.

Step 1: Establish An SLA

The first step to an accurate email is a Service Level Agreement (SLA). An SLA establishes deadlines for the campaign’s execution from start to finish. You might ask, what does this have to do with making sure the email is right?

Mistakes are more likely to happen when a campaign is rushed. An SLA gives all of the parties involved sufficient time for each step in the creation process, preventing the errors that are so often the result of someone being in a hurry.

Also, part of having an accurate email is having it deploy on time. An SLA works to meet this requirement of the campaign.

Step 2: Create  Direction Document

Next, you will need a Direction Document, which identifies each component of the email and begins your Quality Assurance checklist.

These components include items such as campaign name, subject line, pre-header content, email asset location, copy, links, and more.

When testing, you will verify each component of the email against the original request in the Direction Document, and changes received after the original request should be logged there, as well.

The Direction Document should also accommodate validating verification at each step in the email creation process, from design to deployment.

Step 3: Build

For an email to be right, it must be appropriately coded. This means only using inline CSS, including appropriate code to accommodate Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo. It also means including a snippet of code to resize accordingly when viewed on a mobile device.

Coding for email is not the same as coding for the Web, and unfortunately there are too few classes geared toward coding for email. Coding for email is almost like reverting to the way the Internet was coded ten years ago, a way that isn’t encouraged in most Web development classes nowadays. (See additional resources below.)

Working from a template can help ensure required elements are included for every campaign, and that re-usable components (logo, navigation, etc.) are not recoded for each campaign. The less that is changed from email to email, the less risk that an error occurs.

Step 4: Test (And Re-Test)

At this point, you are ready for testing. As you can see, much of what ensures an accurate email happens long before a test email is ever sent. You should determine your complete platform testing criteria for all email campaigns and then base your validation checkpoints from here on out on that document (amending it as is necessary).

If you thought testing was complicated for websites (accommodating multiple browsers on multiple platforms), think again. Email spans multiple ISPs (including Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail’s free email services); clients (Outlook, Apple Mail); and browsers – both for desktop (IE, Firefox, Chrome) and mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry). Each email client treats the code a little differently; and, just because an email renders correctly on one device doesn’t mean you’re in the clear with the others.

As a general rule, I recommend testing in the following environments:

• Desktop
  • Apple Mail
  • Outlook 2010
  • Outlook 2000
• Webmail – IE, Chrome & Firefox
  • Gmail
  • Hotmail/Outlook.com
  • Yahoo
• Mobile
  • Android
  • iOS iPhone
  • iOS iPad

You will also want to consider the statistics of your subscribers to determine if you should accommodate additional testing options. It is important to note that you can no longer base this decision off of the domains of your subscribers (i.e., you have a lot of Gmail subscribers, so you can primarily just test in Gmail, etc.). You will need to take the mail environment (Browser or Native Client), as well as the device (Smartphone, Tablet, or Desktop), into account to know the true appropriate environment for testing.

There are tools available to assist in this kind of rendering testing, and I highly recommend leveraging one if you do not already. Return Path’s Inbox Preview and Litmus are two excellent options.

You will find having a tool like this is a great comfort during email building, like chicken noodle soup when you’re sick. You will feel better, trust me. Still, you will want to send a few live tests, because let’s face it; nothing is as good as the real thing.

In addition to just making sure the email displays right, you also need to proof all copy for spelling and grammar — and then proof it again.

This includes the text in your images in addition to your HTML text. While the creative team should have performed quality assurance testing before delivering the design, you are still responsible for all content in the email. I also recommend verifying prices of products featured in the email with the price displayed on the site.

You also need to click every link to confirm that: 1) it is a valid link, and 2) it arrives at the correct location.

Again, there are tools that can assist in the validation process for item 1; but, 2 requires human confirmation. Many times this is the last component for testing, because a link may not be live until the morning before a campaign deploys, when the website is updated. If this is the case, I recommend proceeding with all other elements of testing and completing this verification on the day it is live, prior to deployment if possible.

Again, for each of the components you are testing, you are validating against the content provided in the Direction Document. If at any time an item fails to pass, correct it and begin the entire testing process again from the beginning.

Once you have successfully passed each validation check in your own testing, find a second person and have them repeat the entire process. Two sets of eyes are better than one — always. If the second person fails any item at any given time, the original creator must correct the error, and the entire testing process resets again.

Step 5: Deploy

Hooray! Your email is finally approved for sending — but you are not done yet. Many errors occur during this final stage of an email campaign.

I recommend having a second set of eyes watch you as you schedule the campaign for deployment. This allows you to talk aloud at each step of the deployment, verifying the receiving lists or segments, noting any exclusions, confirming the subject line, date, and time for sending.

I also always recommend scheduling the email for deployment in the future, even if that means in 15 minutes. This gives you just enough time to reflect on the send and second-guess yourself or do a triple check if you want.

Uh Oh

Even with all of the verifications and multiple testers, an error can still occur. After all, while a lot of processes and documentation can be implemented, the promotional campaign still relies on a human.

Unlike a webpage with an error that can be (relatively) easily corrected, deleted, or replaced, once the email deploys, only a few items may be modified if absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, subject lines and any other HTML text (which is not pulling from a webpage) cannot be changed once it is sent. Images and links can be modified on the backend if necessary. If a link is not functioning or an image is not rendering, these URLs can be updated. Due to email caching you may need to allow a few hours for the change to propagate for those who had already opened the email.

And That’s Just The Beginning

While this testing is exhaustive, it essentially only covers a single campaign for large distribution. I did not include testing cases for personalization or dynamic content here.

When a campaign becomes highly dynamic, there are hundreds of versions of your email. These require additional specific test scenarios and failsafes, because sometimes it is not possible to test for every option. Email accuracy is highly dependent on established processes that are documented and adhered to.

In addition, with technology changing so quickly, it is critical to evaluate the testing criteria frequently to accommodate that latest update from an ISP or new mobile device that hits the market. But the secret is to have a plan in place, and then to let that plan grow to accommodate new scenarios as they occur.

Additional Resources

Building a Rock Solid HTML Email | Campaign Monitor

How to Code HTML Email Newsletters | Reach Customers Online

Creating an HTML Email Newsletter | Lynda.com

What that piece missed, however, was the huge value to retailers of emailing a receipt to customers who have made an in-store purchase.  There are many benefits to this triggered email, which, up until now, has not been widely embraced during the in-store checkout experience.

1. Acquisition

If a customer chooses to receive their receipt via an email, your brand gains the opportunity to ask the customer for an opt-in to marketing emails. Due to the higher engagement rates of triggered sends, this strategy makes a great acquisition tactic. While the majority of the email must remain transactional in nature, you do have the opportunity to promote the benefits of opting in (if the subscriber has not already done so).

Sending receipts also gives retailers another reason for collecting an email address, rather than only offering a discount in return. One of the benefits to the customer of receiving and storing the receipt in their email (essentially on a mobile device) is that it makes it easy to locate later if it is necessary for a return. Rather than digging through a handbag or wallet to locate it, or wondering if it was already thrown away in the trash, a customer can simply return to their email for the digital copy.

2. Tracking

One of the biggest advantages of email is the ability to track the customer’s actions. Many receipts include a bounce-back offer for completing a survey online. If this call-to-action was included in the receipt email, I strongly believe the conversion rates would be higher.

When a customer checks email, they are already in a digital experience, making the conversion action nearly seamless. It is far less work to click a link, than to pull out a paper receipt and type in a URL.

3. Re-Marketing

Sending the receipt via email offers the retailer the opportunity to showcase additional information about the product(s) purchased, showcase accessories, or market other items purchased by customers with similar profiles.

Furthermore, it can establish the trigger to send an email to request a rating and review of the product. That email will drive traffic to your website, increasing brand awareness and creating a multichannel customer experience. The customer may also be more amenable to liking the brand on Facebook now that they have made a purchase.

4. Data Profiles

Besides allowing you to send re-marketing emails, acquiring an email address can allow a brand to expand the customer’s profile in their data warehouse. A reverse append can identify a physical address. With these pieces of information, a match can sometimes be created in the warehouse. Add to this the purchase details, and a retailer can build out a customer profile and determine propensities of future purchases.

If a customer consistently provides their email address for purchase receipts, this piece of information becomes a unique identifier, like a loyalty rewards card. But better, because instead of asking customers to fill out a lengthy loyalty club enrollment card by hand, they participate by simply providing their email address.

Warning: Speedbumps Ahead

Granted, there are a few drawbacks. In these use cases we are assuming a customer provides the same email address at each purchase point, and consistently asks for receipts to be emailed. The retailer will need to set up an integration with their ESP to trigger the emails in near real-time. In instances where I have seen this integration completed, the content appears less-than-seamless within the email, like in this example below from Macy’s:

However, the benefits of these extra actions are numerous: so much more of the customer relationship can be tracked, the trigger campaign’s ROI specifically calculated, and the associated programs quantitatively analyzed and adjusted.

I don’t believe you can abandon all printed receipts today, but very soon offline-to-online transactional email will become more widely adopted as customers become more comfortable receiving receipts in this manner. Similar to Passbook, we’ll even soon have apps that create and store e-receipts, causing it to be the norm and not the exception.

Following are five keys to a successful holiday email strategy for you to focus on — it’ll distract you from the impending family invasion about to ensue.

1. Draft Your Schedule

Increasing your frequency during holiday is a given. Many retailers will be sending every single day. Some retailers will be sending multiple times a day. Simply put, those who do not change their frequency at all are leaving money on the table.

While we could debate the ideal number of times to send between now and the end of the year, at minimum you will want to focus on certain key dates.

The two important, and well-known, high-volume email days are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but there are quite a few others that are just as critical to holiday revenue. The first two Mondays in December are typically high volume email days, with the second being Green Monday when the majority of retailers offer discounts on shipping when it still falls within standard delivery times for Christmas.

It is smart to target emails for your each of your shipping cut-offs to remind customers of their last chance to take advantage of standard, 2-day and overnight shipping deals.

According to Bronto, in 2011, Friday December 16th marked the highest volume email day of the entire season. And, while Christmas always falls on December 25, keep in mind that Hanukkah dates change each year. This year Hanukkah is December 8 – 16th.

2. Update Your Acquisition Tactics

Hopefully you’ve been busy growing your list throughout the year, scoring subscribers and identifying segments. If you plan to significantly increase frequency, like sending multiple times a day or sending a “daily deal” type of campaign, then I highly recommend asking subscribers to opt-in to a separate list, specific to receiving additional emails during holiday.

This can be as simple as offering two check boxes for opt-in during sign-up; one for the promotional sends and one for exclusive, additional holiday emails. For existing subscribers you can include a call-out in ongoing emails between now and your holiday campaigns.

Here is an example of a supporting promotional section from a Crocs (a client at the company where I work, Digital Evolution Group) email asking subscribers to sign up for specific Black Friday deals.

These subscribers who opt-into greater frequency will be more engaged and less likely to unsubscribe or report the emails as spam. If you can’t logistically accommodate a separate opt-in request, then at least let subscribers know they will be seeing more of you in their inbox, like in this example from Zappos.

Holiday is also a time when many new visitors are coming to your site or store for the first time. Work with the web team to ensure the email sign-up is prominently located on the home page (preferably at the top), and during check out on the site (preferably early to allow for abandoned cart emails). Incentivize and train sales associates to ask for email addresses during checkout in-store.

Review the welcome series content, creative and cadence and update to be appropriate for holiday. For example, the sign-up offer should be just as, if not more, compelling than the current offer promoted on your site. In the welcome content, ask who the subscriber is shopping for and tailor subsequent messages with appropriate products.

3. Begin Product Selection

Determining what products and promotions are featured in the emails begins now. Take note of top products and promotions clicked in emails from previous years. Identify your best sellers online and in-store last year. Create a segment of the subscribers that purchased during holiday last year, noting when and what they purchased.

Meet with merchandising to create a plan that includes products that generate click-throughs via email. Gift guides generate response by making shopping easier for the customer (Gifts for Him, Gifts for Tweens, Gifts under $100, and so on), like in this example from J.Crew.

Identify inventory minimums required for promoting a product through email based on sales from previous years, to limit sell-outs. Create a back-up inventory plan, so in the event that a product does sell out you can offer the customer an alternative similar product.

4. Design For Winter

Part of your schedule should include when to change the look and feel of your emails from your traditional look-and-feel to a holiday theme. This generally includes updating the header of your emails to include holiday colors and gift-focused navigation, like in these Helzberg Diamonds examples from previous years (Helzberg Diamonds is a client where I work, Digital Evolution Group).

Before the holiday madness you can also design and build the banners or pods to call out shipping date cut-offs, typically displayed in the header or towards the bottom of the email, like in this example from Crate and Barrel.

You will also want to consider building a few additional templates now to leverage during the holiday season. One template should be designed so it is easy to change a product image or description, in case inventory is not available at the last minute, or if a price changes.

Another template may be designed for a simple but powerful message, allowing you to quickly send out a last-minute email campaign when necessary. All emails should be designed to render appropriately on mobile devices, which may warrant recoding a template to employ responsive design.

Don’t forget to optimize the creative in transactional and triggered emails as well. If a transaction was selected to be a gift, update the order confirmation with an upsell to “get something for yourself.” Evaluate the copy in the rating and review triggered email, keeping in mind that the product purchased could have been a gift, and not used by the purchaser himself.

5. Be Different

How are you planning to be different? Because holiday is a time of very high volume, the inbox is very competitive. Subject lines are critical during this time of year. Which of your emails had the highest open rates last year? Which subject lines have been your best performers to date this year?

It may seem like your subject line is great, until it sits next to 10 others in the inbox. This screen shot taken from a peak period last year, shows how similar many subject lines can be, and one retailer even appears to have accidentally included me on both versions of an A/B test.

Furthermore, without the context of the from name, many of these subject lines could be from any retailer.

Why should a subscriber open your email first? Start writing creative copy now.

Once your email is opened, what will entice the user to click instead of closing the email and opening the next? Offering free shipping is no longer unique.  What makes your email more compelling?

This is not meant to imply that every email should have an offer or promotion. What is the value of your content to the subscriber? Challenge your strategy and creative team to be better this year. Be different. Stand out.

Ready. Set. Go.

Both the positive and negative side of email is its ability to be last minute. It’s never too early to start planning. Evaluate and adjust as the season progresses and make changes as necessary if the original plan isn’t generating the intended results. Cheers to a successful holiday email season, and surviving the family gatherings!

It’s a balancing act, though, because marketers also know that the more demographic data they can collect at that point, the easier it will be to deliver relevant, timely emails throughout the span of the relationship. Lack of relevancy will result in unengaged subscribers, poor engagement metrics, junk-mail placement and, ultimately, unsubscribes.

Building a smarter sign-up form goes a long way toward providing you with the information you need to honor your commitment to relevancy. Even incremental improvements to your existing intake forms are valuable steps forward.

By intelligently incorporating both explicit preferences and implied preferences in your build, you can better engage and retain your subscriber base.

In The Beginning

Keeping in mind that you want to keep information requests to a minimum at sign-up, limiting the number of questions to three or less, one of which is email address.

From there, ZIP code, gender and birthday are likely the next most important pieces of data to collect, depending on what is most relevant to your objectives and strategy. With each additional question over three, you’ll begin to introduce an additional percentage of breakage into the process, so there is a definite incentive to keep your request as narrow as possible.

Obviously, if you channel customers through a checkout process, you are also collecting far more valuable information such as physical address (through the user’s shipping information) and product purchase history, in addition to email address.

Checkout is your best opportunity to collect a significant amount of information. If the subscriber did not sign up as part of checkout, then your confirmation/thank-you page is the next best opportunity to ask for additional information. Still, it is important that you keep your request to a minimum to give yourself the best shot at a response.

Perhaps your initial signup simply asks for email address and ZIP code. On the confirmation screen, thank the user for signing up and ask for one or two additional pieces of information — such as gender and birthday — and offer to send a reward for that information.

Following is an example of this best practice from Piperlime:

Immediately after collecting the initial sign-up information, send the first welcome email of a series to the subscriber.

Here, deliver the offer promised upon sign-up and ask the user to update their preferences to ensure he/she receives the most from their email relationship with your brand. This directs the user to your preference center.

As discussed in a previous post about triggered emails, the welcome email has one of the highest open rates of any email — this is one of your best chances to ask the subscriber for preference information.

Depending on your brand, these questions can range from favorite color, to children’s names and birthday, to a preferred style or product line.

While your preference center can be more thorough in the number of questions, it still needs to be aesthetically pleasing and should leverage your brand’s voice to increase the success rate of completion.

Take a look at this example from Ikea, which only prompts for additional information after the user clicks Yes, No, etc.

Behavioral

As soon as you are sending emails to your subscriber, you are collecting data on their email behavior, including, of course, opens and click-throughs.

These behaviors create implied preferences which are established through a subscriber’s interactions with the emails they receive. Open and click-through data can be incorporated into RFM/eRF scoring, which can identify segments and opportunities for targeted messaging.

Acting on these implied preferences can also be as simple as highlighting a section of navigation which appears to be more relevant to a subscriber, based on previous click-through behavior.

In this example from Old Navy, Baby Boys is targeted for one subscriber (in the navigation highlighting and call out by the logo), and Girls is targeted for another subscriber.

Conversions are the most valuable behavioral data. Purchases allow you to match an email address with a physical address.

Furthermore, tracking products purchased establishes additional preferential data and allows you to customize future email content. Purchase tracking also generates a series of additional triggered emails destined for higher engagement rates — and another golden opportunity to collect additional data from the customer.

However, relying on purchase data can backfire if not correctly done. Take Amazon for example. I am still receiving recommendations for products that I already purchased.

Not only are they annoying me with duplicate suggestions, but they’re missing the opportunity to show me something that I might be genuinely interested in spending money on. Amazon needs to update their recommendation logic to exclude products previously purchased, as I do not need two of any of these items.

Appended Data

Whether your subscribers willingly provide additional preferences or not, you can seek out additional preferences via third-party data.

This can range from demographic data like birthday and gender, to psychographic insights like hobbies and interests. You can also append phone number to email address records, in addition to physical address.

Keep in mind that data sourced from third parties will never be as accurate as preferences directly updated by the subscriber. However, it can be a step in the right direction by increasing email engagement.

Creating data models of your best subscribers that help you gain insight as to their behaviors can then allow you to identify which unengaged subscribers are worth targeting for re-engagement, and which subscribers you can comfortably part ways with.

eCRM

When a user provides their email address to sign up, he or she may not be new to your brand. The person might already be a customer. If so, the email address they’ve been convinced to provide could be appended to their existing customer record.

Data cannot be effective in silos and must be integrated across channels and sources. Enter the concept of eCRM — the need to establish a single view of a customer record. Your data warehouse will need to be able to “hold” single records which may only contain an email address and then potentially merge it with an existing record once you recognize it belongs to the same individual.

Finally, while customers who provide their email addresses have been shown to have a higher value to the brand, remember that the individual can be disengaged with a single channel, like email, and still be considered engaged.

Look at an individual’s overall engagement with your brand, i.e. their in-store purchase history, in addition to which marketing channels are most effective with them, i.e. their response to direct mail marketing, to create the optimal 1-1 communication strategy.

The Chicken And The Egg

As stated above, email is seemingly tailor-made for data collection. Used intelligently, it can not only drive revenue, but can also be something of a self-perpetuating process.

You use the data you collect to drive better engagement, leading to more sales. Those sales lead to better opportunities for data collection — data that you’ll use, in turn, to make your emails more relevant, again driving sales.

Getting the ball rolling from the outset makes it all the more valuable for you.