Benchmarking your Email marketing strategy

10 email strategy factors to audit your email marketing effectiveness

Despite the growth in popularity of social media marketing, email marketing remains the best customer communications tool for most companies since:

• More personally relevant emails can be delivered as subscribers are targeted by:
  • Demographics like age, gender, geography
  • Previous purchase or download categories
  • Time since previous interaction
  • Position in lifecycle – new customers are sent different messages from old
  • Following up on a website interaction like a search, category browse or an abandoned shopping cart – if your systems are joined up
• Offers and content can be inserted dynamically into the email to target with these techniques
• Cut-through and overall response is greater with response occurring over 12-48 hours rather than 1-2 hours more typical of Twitter and Facebook
• Response measurable at individual level offering better follow-up on customer interest via additional emails or other channels
• It can be integrated with social media activities to increase engagement with customers

But there are many pitfalls with email marketing such as getting emails delivered through spam filters, displaying properly in different browsers. So to get the most from email marketing a strategy is useful to review your existing approach and improve targeting, frequency and delivery.

To improve your email marketing, an audit of existing activity is useful each year and this post highlights the 10 areas reviewed in my Econsultancy Best Practice Guide to Email Marketing:

1. 5 effectiveness and 5 efficiency factors to improve your email marketing
2. 5 stage benchmark to assess your email capabilities
3. My listing of the Top Email marketing resources to learn more
4. The expert review panel – the report was reviewed by several experts to ensure it covers all the bases accurately

The Structure of the Guide

The guide is structured around these 10 critical success factor areas for email marketing.
We find that much that is written about improving results from email marketing focuses on a limited number of efficiency factors, especially creative and copywriting. While discussion of subject lines, template design, layout and the position of the calls-to-action are all important and interesting, this misses the bigger picture, which is relevance and its context – does it arrive at the right time?

The effectiveness factors control the relevance of a message, they are:

• Effectiveness 1: Aims and goal setting.
• Effectiveness 2: Segmentation and targeting.
• Effectiveness 3: Communications strategy.
• Effectiveness 4: Creative and copywriting.
• Effectiveness 5: Testing and optimization.

Efficiency factors are the “hygiene factors” needed to make your email campaigns and enewsletters work well. Improving your capabilities for each of these efficiency factors right will all help improve your results.

• Efficiency 1: List Quality.
• Efficiency 2: Legal compliance.
• Efficiency 3: Email deliverability.
• Efficiency 4: Email Templates and renderability.
• Efficiency 5: Email Management Systems.

I collaborated with many email marketing consultants, agencies and email service providers to make sure the latest thinking and techniques are incorporated, so thanks to everyone in the expert review team – I’ve listed everyone at the end of this post, because they really helped shape it.

Diagnostic tool to assess your email marketing capabilities

A central feature of the guide is this diagnostic tool I developed with the reviewers, my client email projects in 2009 and 2 roundtables with client-side email marketers arranged through Econsultancy.

This chart is a presentation summary of a more detailed table in the guide and a benchmarking spreadsheet you can use to score your email marketing in each of these areas to give an overall score.

We haven’t yet made the benchmarking spreadsheet available on the Econsultancy website yet, so please contact me if you would like a free copy.

In the Econsultancy Best Practice Guides we advocate assessing your current digital marketing capabilities using capability maturity or stage of adoption models. We first used this approach in our Managing Digital Channels Best Practice Guide. You can download the digital strategy benchmarking spreadsheet from my old blog site.  Econsultancy members have told us that they find these useful since they enable organisations:

1. Review current approaches to digital marketing to identify areas for improvement.

2. Benchmark with competitors who are in the same market sector / industry and in different sectors.

3. Identify best practice from more advanced adopters.

4. Set targets and develop strategies for improving capabilities as part of an improvement roadmap.

Top resources for Email Marketing

Even if you don’t download the Email Marketing Guide, I hope you will find these resources, which we list in the Appendix of the Guide useful.

This is our selection, in alpha order of the best blogs and sites to keep up-to-date on Email marketing practice. While many agencies and ESPs have blogs and other resources, these are the personal favourites of Dave Chaffey which he follows via Twitter/RSS.

As always, if you disagree or think I’m missing a great resource, please let me know via the comments.

We recommend these sites as the best blogs to find out more about email marketing:

• Be Relevant Be Relevant (www.b2bemailmarketing.com) The European perspective from Tamara Gielen who is an independent consultant works for eBay in Belgium where she works as an Email Marketing Manager. Tamara also coordinates The Email marketer’s club which has over 2,000 members and active forums: http://b2bemailmarketing.ning.com
• Deliverability.com (http://blog.deliverability.com/) Multi-author blog from ESPs of the latest developments in deliverability
• Direct Marketing Association UK Email blog (http://dmaemailblog.com) Best collection of writing on best practice within UK plus the Email Marketing Council (http://www.dma.org.uk/sectors/emk-introduction.asp) have other essential resources such as the UK National Benchmarking Report and the Best Practice Guide.
• Ecircle email marketing resources(http://www.ecircle.com/en/resource-centre.html) We have partnered with Ecircle for several years sharing their European-wide research and their excellent case studies.
• Edialog resource libarary (http://www.e-dialog.com/index.php/resources/library) – Edialog is a good source for surveys
• Email Experience Council blog (www.emailexperience.org/blog).  The premier resource for US-based Email marketers. Resources (www.emailexperience.org/email-resources) on the main site are, of course, relevant for everyone.
• Email Marketing Reports (www.email-marketing-reports.com) is an extensive collection of articles on all aspects of opt-in email compiled by Mark Brownlow.
• Email Matters Blog (www.newsweaver.co.uk/emailnewsletters) Advice on Enewsletter best practice from Denise Cox.
• Email Monday (http://www.emailmonday.com) Produced by consultant Jordie van Rijn, this blog is full of practical insights on the latest developments such as mobile email marketing for example.
• Retail Email Blog (www.retailemailblog.com) has lots of good examples of creative and merchandising practice.
• Email Vendor Selection (http://www.emailvendorselection.com/email-service-provider-list) Great advice on selecting the right email vendor
• Email Wars (http://theemailwars.com) Active blog with practical tips and examples from US ESP eROI.
• Exact Target Blog (http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/the-exacttarget-blog) An active blog from this US ESP.
• Email Gallery is a great benchmark for email templates in different categories such as enewsletter, 2 column, etc: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery.
• EmailVision (http://www.emailvision.co.uk/resources-email-marketing/white-papers-reports) Best practice summaries
• Inside the Circle (http://ecircleblog.wordpress.com/) Multi-author blog from European ESP eCircle.
• Return Path In the Know Blog (http://www.returnpath.net/blog). Latest developments in deliverability.
• SilverPop Resources (http://www.silverpop.com/marketing-resources/index.html) One of the best collection of reports on best practice and subscriber behaviour, some of which are incorporated into this report.

The Expert Reviewers

Thank you all! Especially those who contributed in-depth reviews that really helped shape The Econsultancy Best Practice Guide to Email Marketing.