Editor: Batch and blast marketing is still very common in email. How can you convince marketers to move beyond it?

Stefan: This type of email programme often stems from several key challenges. First, it is easy to send one general message to everybody, and it takes more work to send personalised relevant messaging driven by consumer behavior. Marketers with high frequency programmes often don’t feel they have the time available to properly design and execute more challenging segmented campaigns. They fall victim to the calendar and send messaging simply because it is Wednesday, and we have to send our emails out on Wednesday.

Automation is the first step to digging out from this trap. Take a step back and review actions your consumers take with you, and how you can use email to drive increased activity, as well as see the consumer lifecycle events that take place. Automate messaging around these events and you begin to reduce the need to manually execute 'one size fits all' messaging. This won’t completely replace your standard promotional messaging strategy, but the goal should be to shift the balance to more automation and less manual execution.

Next up, the lack of relevance is usually driven by the lack of data used to version content to the recipient. Most senders have far more data available for segmentation than they realise. While you may not always have web analytics incorporated into your email application, you do have click through data. Simple strategies like observing category navigation click throughs can yield the ability to adjust your offer messaging and increase relevance.

When the marketer has the data, they often try to send multiple campaigns using a static template to create relevant messaging instead of using a modular template and good dynamic content to achieve the same results. By attempting to create five versions of one message, highly relevant and tailored to the needs of each recipient, the marketer has increased their workload five times. Instead, remain consistent with the majority of the message and focus on the key offers, create content modules that match with the profile data you have, and use dynamic replacement to personalise. Start simple and change only one or two elements of the message, then gradually expand.

Editor: Last month I highlighted a study by the EEC where it was noted “retailers are focusing on making subscribing easier - often asking only for the most basic details at the initial registration page”. With minimal information collected at sign up, how can a typical retailer increase relevance for the recipient?

Stefan: Easy subscription processes do have a disadvantage when it comes to personalisation and relevance. This is where having a good profile center becomes important. The marketer needs to promote the profile center early in the relationship when the subscriber is most likely to be curious about the types of messaging available. Use your welcome messaging to request that profile pages be updated.

If you offer more than one email programme, avoid default opting-in to all types of programmes. Instead, if you have an easy join subscription form, only allow the recipient to be added to one programme, and during the welcome messaging encourage subscription to the other types of programmes available. Lets use the popular birthday club email as an example. If you didn’t request a birth date during the subscription process, you could use your welcome email to promote the 'birthday club discounts' and drive the consumer to the profile center. Once in the profile center, they are exposed to other data choices and email programmes they can opt-in to receive.

Progressive profiling is another tactic marketers can use to build out profile data. The idea is to ask one question about the recipient, and capture the response in their profile. Regularly, you change the questions, and once answered, you don’t ask the same question of the recipient again. Short survey questions, where the recipient is telling you something about them, is a great way to expand their profile and increase personalisation in messaging.

Editor: Earlier you mentioned increasing automated messaging as a way to decrease the marketer’s workload and improve the time they have to do more advanced messaging. Which programmes typically lend themselves best to being placed on auto-pilot?

Stefan: Besides transactional messages (receipt of purchase, shipping notification, cart abandonment or incomplete application emails), the first message that most marketers consider automating is the welcome email, a one time message that is sent directly after subscribing. Unfortunately, most senders automate only the first message. A good welcome program should be a series of messages that help educate the recipient about your products and services, and drive them to provide you the data you need to do more advanced lifecycle messaging techniques.

If you have a seasonal buying pattern, you can also automate programmes around this time pattern and allow consumer control of frequency during this period. For example, retailers often want to increase frequency during the holiday season. They can use automation to create a series of messages promoting special deals that are relevant to their subscribers. By inviting subscribers to opt-in to special high frequency campaigns, you can develop, test and schedule well ahead of the busy season, reducing the time crunch and errors that can occur from rushed execution. One of my favorite examples is The Food Network’s '12 days of cookies' campaign they run during Christmas.

A 'win back' campaign is another example of a campaign that should be automated. If you are monitoring your subscribers for open and click behavior, you should be watching for signs of fatigue too. By identifying when opens and clicks fall off, the marketer can develop a series of messages with specialised incentives to try and salvage the relationship.

Many companies automate customer satisfaction surveys several days after purchase, and sometimes after failure to purchase.

Editor: All of these programmes sound great, but they also sound like a lot of work. Do you have any tips for what should be done first?

Stefan: I recently attended our Responsys Leaders Forum and heard Heather Blank do a presentation on 'Segmentation Day'. The goal of segmentation day is to 'do incrementally better email' without trying to be everything to everybody all at once. The key takeaway from her presentation was that marketers need to set time aside, and make small changes. Identify a subset of your list and tell an incrementally better story to them. This shouldn’t require complex data integrations. It can be as simple as dynamically changing a graphic or offer based on a profile field or click behavior.

By setting aside a couple of hours per week, or two days per month, and devoting that time to increasing relevance for some portion of your subscriber base, you begin to move the needle. As you increase the automated segmented programmes and shift away from batch and blast manual messaging, you’ll actually find you have more time and resources available. There will always be an effort vs. reward balance each marketer will have to deal with, and the key is to place your efforts where you receive the highest rewards. Until you try something, you won’t know where those rewards lay hidden in your current programme.

Stefan Pollard
Responsys