Your recipient list will be made up of people in very different stages of engagement with you as a brand and with your email programme. Some will be in the first flush of enthusiasm, having just signed up to your newsletter after a recommendation from a friend; some will be loyal supporters who have been enjoying your emails for months. Others will be actively engaged as regular customers who look forward to interacting with your business. You will also have a vital small section of ‘brand advocates’, people who love you more than you can think is possible – they buy a lot from you every month, they forward your email to their friends, you are a part of their life. Should all of these people receive the same broadcast email from you?

You will also find that your list is made up of people in different stages of disengagement from you. Some used to be regular customers and now they see an email from you and it doesn’t move them to any action. Some used to open your emails and click through to see what’s on your site, now they don’t even open your email. Others have relegated you to a part of their inbox that they look at very rarely and then, only for a 20 second subject-line scan. There is also a group that have been forcibly separated from you by their spam filters. Should all of these people receive the same broadcast email from you?

Where are recipients in their engagement cycle with you? What sort of messages should you be sending to which groups? Is it worth putting the effort in to get this right?

Yes! Segmenting by engagement stage gives great results, it also frees you up to do lots of things you have wanted to do, but thought might be too much for your lists to bear.

Have you been discussing mailing frequency in your business? Do you think that you should be mailing three times a week and your Chairman thinks it should be more like once every six weeks? Maybe it’s your MD who thinks that four broadcast emails a week is what his revenue line needs and you are trying to put the reins on to save some of your list for next year? The good news is that, so long as you have relevant content, you can actually satisfy both camps if you segment by engagement. Your brand advocates are genuinely delighted to hear from you as often as you like. If you make it explicit that you have a special relationship with them and that is why you are writing to them they love it even more. On the other hand if you carry on emailing three times a week to people who have stopped opening, your unopened emails start piling up in the inbox and it looks like you don’t care whether they open or not.

Bowers and Wilkins, have seen very good results from emailing their brand advocates and engaging them in a different way to the rest of their list. David Williams, Digital Manager, identified brand advocates as those who had shown good recent open and click through frequency and specifically those who had been reading a new B&W Lab article on the www.bowers-wilkins.com website. The Lab articles go into some technical detail on the key Bowers and Wilkins subject of sound quality. Anyone reading those articles is very closely aligned to the Bowers and Wilkins brand.

Recently David sent the following email to a select group of highly engaged recipients:

It went to the blog post ‘Is there anything you might like us to change’ and has drawn 108 comments to the blog post. Not all are positive, but it’s given Bowers and Wilkins enough fuel to look at their download manager tool and make some valued improvements.

A previous targeted email, asking engaged consumers what they thought of Portico Quartet’s album released on the Bowers and Wilkins music club, drew 52 comments. Bowers and Wilkins have sent these sort of emails but untargeted before, and drawn at most around 25-30 comments. Change in messaging to reflect the closeness of the relationship seems to have made a big difference to response rates.

Bowers and Wilkins have also used triggered emails to improve conversion of those who are trialling a Bowers and Wilkins music club subscription. These triggered emails recognise that triallists have certain questions and provide a gentle approach to converting them into purchasers of a full subscription. Since the introduction of triggered emails, conversion from triallists to subscribers has gone up by more than 50% on a month by month basis.

In both of these examples, Bowers and Wilkins were able to send more emails more frequently. The two mailings above were sent in addition to the normal newsletter. They did not see a decrease in response rates from sending more emails, in fact, because the content was so relevant to the stage of engagement of the recipients, the response rates were way above normal with open rates of over 50%.

We have seen similar positive responses from sending ‘reward’ email content to highly engaged users in many other businesses. Here is an intriguing comparison:

Why does Mailing 1 achieve proportionately way better results?

These are examples from the Celtic FC online store. Mailing 1 is sent to regular purchasers and is rewarding them with a good offer. Mailing 2, sent a week later, is a newsletter to a larger group (including regular purchasers). Sending a more targeted message to a specific group will often achieve more than sending a general message to a broad group; even if that broad group has more than 10 times the number of recipients.

The other side of the engagement coin is reactivation of non-openers. How can you bring back recipients from a position where they are ignoring your email to one where they are back opening, clicking and engaging?

There are many reasons why your open rate goes down over time if you are not adding new members to your lists. The most obvious is that recipients move email accounts. Either they change ISPs or change jobs, or simply change their email account. However, it is not possible to tell from open statistics whether your non-openers are disengaged or whether they have moved on. That being said, it is important to address your non-openers segment as if they have ignored you. One approach that we regularly recommend to customers is to send a follow up text only email to non-openers of an HTML campaign. We recommend that this follow up email be sent 24 hours after the original. We find that this will increase your total clickthroughs by around 20%. The reasons are the change of format; a text-only email looks less like a marketing email and more like a personal or work email. It also has a chance of being read because it is more clearly legible in the preview pane than an html email (however well constructed). There is also the factor of timing. We all change our email reading habits constantly, depending on how busy we are. Yesterday could have been a busy day, today might be the right day. In any case, the follow up email works because it recognises non-engagement. The recipient will not be upset by the follow up because they simply did not engage with the original.

Encouraging recipients to become re-engaged in a major way with your brand and email programme requires a restart of the relationship. You and the recipient have to go back to the beginning, you need to prove that you will send relevant mail and the recipient needs to tell you what they really want to receive. We have found that an ‘update your details’ request with a reward for completion works well. If part of the updating is a refreshing of the interests of the recipient, then you can be back on the road to engagement. We find that these emails also tend to produce good sales volume through the reward offer.

The ‘holy grail’, that we are working on at the moment, is identifying when recipients are about to become disengaged. It is much harder to re-engage them once they are no longer reading your email.

We are approaching the stage where in some cases it is no longer possible to grow business through email by simply adding more recipients to the lists. This means that we need to get better at building relationships with the recipients already on the lists. It is also most expensive to acquire an address again through an incentive, less expensive to reactivate and least expensive to keep recipients engaged once they are already engaged. Email is primarily a retention marketing and relationship building mechanism, rather than an acquisition marketing tool. Retention should be where most of an email marketer’s energy is spent and rewards are gained. This is also a reason why email is in a great place during tough economic times: you can get great results from your existing customer and prospect base, without spending lots of money to get new customers on board.

So, how do we identify when recipients are about to become disengaged?

Andrew Robinson
Lyris UK