Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

A new edition into the Maxemail reporting suite is our “Email Engagement Report”.

One of the questions marketers often ask is; if I get 20% open rates for each email campaign, is it the same 20% or a different 20% each time? And how many subscribers never open an email?

The engagement report answers all of these questions by providing an open and click rate for each individual recipient based upon the emails you select. For example if a recipient has received 5 emails, but only opened one and not clicked on any, the report will show their open rate as 20% and click rate as 0%.

The report also shows the last time that someone opened and clicked on an email. This means you can either target those who have not opened in the last 90 days with a different message or even simply create a segment to suppress those that have not opened or clicked in the last 365 days.

Of course you don’t want to suppress those who have only recently signed up, so the report also outputs their first email and a count of how many emails they have received.

Additional data fields can also be added to the report to show how different segments are more or less engaged with your email marketing.

Revolution, the champions for innovation in the digital marketing sector have Highly Commended Emailcenter for our expert use of email as a marketing channel.

This welcome commendation comes on the back of our endorsement from The Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM), who gave Emailcenter an award for being the email service provider that offers the “best use of email marketing”.

Emailcenter received the commendation from Revolution for the work conducted for toptable.com, the restaurant booking service. toptable.com tasked Emailcenter to create an email programme that would stop customers from defecting and turn them into loyal, regular users of the toptable.com website.  A year on from the start of the new eCRM programme bookings from defectors increased by 1,600%, proving that when customers are communicated with in a way that suits them, great results follow.

We took a few snaps of the event. Head on over to the facebook page to take a look.

At a recent event the question was raised how does social networking fit in with your email marketing strategy?
There were some obvious things – many pointed to putting links to their Facebook or Twitter page in their email newsletters. On the whole most people still don’t understand how to use the social networks and are finding their way. Indeed it reminds me of 6 years ago when everyone knew they “should be doing email marketing” but had no idea why, they just heard it was the thing to do and there was lots of money in it!

If I had £10 for every time I heard someone say that back then, I could be having a very early and luxurious retirement.

Nowadays all it takes is an MD to hear something about Twitter being “really big”  and then they want a piece of it, whatever that piece is.

Anyway here are some interesting points people raised about using email and social networking together:

Consistent personality across channels

Social networking has encouraged brands to find a personality to communicate with their customers. Each brand usually has a particular tone and style that they use on these sites. Yet how many emails do we still see where they are sent from newsletter@thecompany.com?

I like using the example of toptable who have developed a cult and mysterious character out of “Alex” the person who sends their newsletter. Alex is the most well known person at toptable and is most sought after at any events. Staff who travel the world for their holidays will get asked by people they meet, who is this Alex character? This is clearly a sign that recipients have engaged with this character, and while many brands are doing this through their social channels they should also be doing this in email as well.

Use social pages to drive email subscribers

Most email newsletters will link to the brands social page – many brands may link to the email from their Twitter page. But why link to the whole thing? Why not simply add a teaser and link to a sign-up page? So your tweet could be “25% off in this weeks email newsletter” and  once they had signed up the email is sent to them straight away.

One thing that was universally agreed upon was social networking is not the new email marketing – email is not dead. After all what do all these social networking sites have in common? Thats right, you need an email address to join.

Have you ever looked into how many of your email list ‘never’ open your emails? From our experience it can be anything from 40% to 70% of your list that do not open any of your emails, in many cases for 6 months.
So what can you do with this massive potential goldmine? Here are the options:

Do nothing

It takes time and effort to alter your strategy so even if these people are inactive and costing you money it might cost you more money to change your strategy.

And what if they come back to you in the future? Perhaps now is just not the right time for them.

Bin them

An alternative approach is to take them out of your list. It costs money to send to these people and out of all of your subscribers these are the most likely to report your email as spam.

There is a chance that these inactive subscribers will start responding, so it might be appropriate to keep them on the list, and perhaps just send to them less frequently.

My rule of thumb is this – if your emails are for frequent purchases, take the subscriber out – they are clearly not engaged. If however your offering is a seasonal purchase (Holidays, insurance or even tied to annual events such as Christmas or Valentines) then it is a different scenario, so keep sending but introduce triggered messages around key dates associated with the purchase (anniversary of purchase, renewal, welcome home from holiday) rather than focussing on generic one size fits all newsletters every week of the year.

Change approach

Just changing your style will reactivate people.

Instead of sending a long newsletter, try a simple ‘sorry we missed you’ message, discount voucher or even just change the ‘from’ name.

No matter what you change only a small amount of inactive subscribers will open your message – it’s always difficult to get subscribers back once they have disengaged from your email.

But if disengaged subscribers make up 50% of your list then the numbers should stack up to make your efforts worthwhile.

Of course prevention is better than cure. Perhaps a more important question should be what do we do to stop subscribers disengaging in the first place, but that is a topic for a different blog post.