Welcome to the Escape Blog

I took part in this e-mail marketing report from E-Consultancy recently and am not surprised about the findings. The highlights of which are:

1. Companies are spending 20% of their marketing budget on e-mail marketing.
2. 4 out of 5 e-mail marketers admit that they are not using it as effectively as they could.
3. Almost 50% of email marketers do not know their companies Return on Investment from e-mail marketing.

The thing is, in my little opinion, that people are still thinking quick and easy wins. They want to buy a database, send a loose generic e-shot that just ‘gets there’. They will no doubt have some results but imagine how successful your campaign could be.

We recently did an e-mail campaign (business to consumer), based on segmented data to a specific target base of 361 people that yielded:

• 70.18% unique HTML opens
• 34.58% click through rate
• 60% sale of limited (but specific) inventory

Wow! we wish every one was like that. They’re not, I can admit to that but why was this one so successful?

The secret is this:

• The database is permission-based. ie. People have opted into receiving the marketing information. It has taken three years to build the whole database but wonder about that asset of willing potential customers and ongoing marketing opportunities.
• When they subscribed, they were given the choice to check a box against specific selections: In this case it was artists that they are specifically interested in buying pieces of work from.
• The e-mail messages that they receive are regular and welcome and the recipient is always given the option to unsubscribe. This has built trust over time, which gets stronger, leaving the interested people and allowing other to leave.
• This specific e-mail message (as reported on above) was therefore for them; personalised and about something (a specific artist) that they have a great interest in, from someone they know and trust. Therefore, the penetration is that much more effective.

What Should You Not Do?

• Assume that people (your customers and prospects) give a damn about you.
• Lazily send an e-shot, either BCC’ing or sending graphics - it is very invasive of someone’s privacy.
• Buy an e-mail list in (my explicit beliefs - not The Escapes as a whole). I personally think this is not a quality way to build a list. I have seen a bought in list get results and I don’t see them as getting quality results.
• Don’t allow people to un-subscribe from your e-mail list AND following this up by actually doing it. Most systems allow for this automatically as a matter of course (see footer).

It’s not really a secret!

Read (and digest) this book "Permission Marketing" first and then start using this product - Campaign Monitor).

If you don’t fancy doing it yourself, give us a shout if you are UK based.

We love Campaign Monitor - best e-mail marketing software out there.

This graph is theirs and goes with an article about open rates for e-mail marketing campaigns.

They even give you some tips on how you could increase them.

Spam levels in the first week of January have taken a sudden jerk, falling by 30%. It is believed that this was caused by spammers losing control of one of their ‘botnets’ - networks of infected PCs used to churn out spam.

Don’t get too excited though, it is merely a blip with e-mail security firm Postini reporting that spam continues to grow at record rates, accounting for 94% of all email traffic in December.

Ref. E-Consultancy

This could make things tricky for you if you use e-mail marketing with compliant layout of your HTML e-shots.

Dave Greiner at Campaign Monitor explains how Outlook 2007 is one massive step backwards for e-mail marketing.

Apparently, One in three UK companies flout spam laws, reports E-Consultancy, based on a study by CDMS claiming that 31% of the UK’s top companies are failing to comply with EU directives on Privacy and Electronic Communications.

Under the terms of the directive, companies must only send emails to non-customers if they have actively opted in to receive them.

This amounts to an increase of only 3% additional companies complying compared to the same study in 2005.

That said, if you are doing it all Permission-based, E-Mail seems to be a great way to market, as this article on Retail Bulletin testifies: E-mail marketing delivers the goods for leading organisations in December.

I haven’t fully digested this article yet and I think it’s one for the legal team to organise but through the Campaign Monitor Blog, I was pointed to this article about UK legal requirements for websites which in turn sent me to this more comprehensive article: "The UK’s E-commerce Regulations" on out-law.com:

The Register states:

Companies in the UK must include certain regulatory information on
their websites and in their email footers before 1 January 2007 or they
will breach the Companies Act and risk a fine.

I know that with e-mails, these are regarded as business communications so have the same stipulation as a company letterhead and for limited companies must include your registered address and company registration number, ie:

The Escape Design Co. Ltd registered in England No. 3523822. Reg. Address: Loddon Business Centre, Roentgen Road, Basingstoke RG24 8NG, UK

As for websites it is worth bearing the following next post in mind.

According to new figures, the number of ‘spam’ messages has tripled since June and now accounts for as many as nine out of ten emails sent worldwide, reports E-Consultancy.

In Britain spam has risen by 50% in the last two months alone.

It’s great to look at pages on your website, with increased knowledge and awareness, knowing you can make them better.

You don’t get better by not improving and every word and every graphic on every page is up for grabs.

So, we re-worded our old and boring newsletter signup page. We should have done it before but being tucked away it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.

During a sales meeting, it was brought up, and it started the ball rolling.

• We moved it as a call to action on every page
• We reworded it and jazzed it up.
• We included reasons for subscribing

Implemented during mid-October, it had the desired effect.

Go have a look - maybe even subscribe.

Nice set of tips published on the e-consultancy about subject lines for E-Mail Marketing with Christmas coming.

Maybe the next big thing in marketing - Self-destructing e-mails.

Lawyers are using Echoworx Corp.’s "secure send" option to remove
time-sensitive emails from a recipient’s inbox and to confirm that the
right person opens a letter, DMNews reports. Some marketers apparently think it could prove useful for EDM (Electronic direct marketing) campaigns, too.

For example, a message for 15 percent off within the next week could
disappear at the sale’s end, when the content is no longer relevant.
Rather than having an inbox full of messages from one retailer,
consumers would see only the latest one, giving the impression that the
retailer isn’t bombarding them.

From Marketing Vox