E-NEWSLETTERS - DEFINING AND REFINING Part 11

For a great example from IBM of how to explain the proposition, see https://isource.ibm.com/ world.

Finally, remember to try to capture the primary e-mail address. The Doubleclick Sixth Annual Consumer E-mail Survey (Doubleclick, 2005) showed that almost half of all consumers reported maintaining at least three e-mail accounts, an increase from 2004. Nearly 95 per cent considered one of their e-mail addresses to be a 'primary' account, while 72 per cent used a single address specifically for making purchases. This shows the importance of gaining the primary e-mail address for opt-in, particularly of an e-newsletter. To help with this, make sure you explain the proposition in detail and give examples of previous e-newsletters. If the frequency is relatively low, this may also help with obtaining the primary e-mail address.

Decision 19 — tracking and assessing satisfaction

Once we have implemented all the decisions we have reviewed above, how do we decide how well our e-newsletter is working?

If you are relaunching, you will be able to baseline against the previous incarnation of your e-newsletter.

As well as looking at opens and clicks for individual e-newsletters, as explained in Decision 2, it is also worthwhile considering what the overall levels of open rates and click rates are over a longer period — such as a quarter or a year. The e-newsletter will not be doing its job if the majority of recipients aren't interacting with it, so it may be necessary to use offline communications as a supplement for those not involved with it.

You will probably have been tracking the following in each time period, whether a month or a quarter:

• new subscribers — number of opt-ins in the period
• unsubscribes — number of opt-outs in the period

• bounces — hard bounces where the address is invalid should be removed from the list, with a process setup for contacting the subscriber if he or she is a high-value customer

• subscriber change — this is calculated by subtracting the unsubscribes and the bounces from the new subscribers in the time period

• percentage unique click rate - it is useful to know the unique number of individuals who click through, as this gives us a better estimate of our total active audience size; each person may potentially click on several links, but the unique click through rate just records each person who has clicked

• percentage individual content click rate - tracking clickthroughs of individual content links, such as news, articles and offers, shows the most powerful content; it may also be useful to group total clicks from related content, such as news, ads and offers

• percentage outcomes - depending on the type of e-mail, conversion to particular actions

such as sales or subscriptions, or clickthrough to offers, can be monitored

• percentage referrals - perhaps using 'recommend a friend' forms.

While many e-mail broadcast tools will track these variables, it is essential to view how they vary through time as a time-series graph.

What in particular should you watch out for on the time-series? I would say the trends of the key measures, such as open rate, unique click rate and outcomes.

The open rate tells you how effective the subject line is in encouraging opening. If this is low one month relative to other months, there may be a problem with how the e-newsletter is themed, or with the offer or timing.

The unique click rate gives you an overall idea of the value of the content of the newsletter - how many subscribers are actively clicking through.

Outcomes will vary for different types of e-newsletters, but you will want to achieve consistently high numbers of outcomes.

Unsubscribes should be tracked, but are not a reliable indicator of interest. The Quris (2003) survey of US e-mail subscribers showed that 92 per cent of consumers said that they 'just delete e-mails myself by hand without reading them' when they get e-mails that don't interest them. Open rate and unique click rate therefore provide a more reliable method of tracking interest in your e-newsletter.

Assessing response by audience characteristics

It is also useful to assess open and click rates by audience characteristics. That way you may find that, for example, the e-newsletter (or some type of feature) works better for communicating with, for example, the older or younger audience, or a particular type of decision-maker.

E-NEWSLETTERS - DEFINING AND REFINING Part 12

Decision 20 - listening

While the clickthrough and web-site outcome data can be used to second guess how well an e-newsletter is working, and what customers think of the company, there is no substitute for asking the question 'what do you think?', either face to face or through a structured survey, with recruitment of respondents through the e-newsletter or via a separate e-mail.

Since e-newsletters can become a large element of how your brand is perceived, it is important to know what people really think. We can 'See that online brands such as Tesco.com and lastminute.com poll their audiences regularly to find this out. An indication of the health of an e-newsletter can be built up using a mixture of 'watching and asking'. The Tesco.com e-newsletter seems to be in good shape, judging by the 'watching and asking' metrics provided by Kanaiya Parekh, the commercial development manager at Tesco.com, who presented the following at the 2002 Marketing Week Conference on e-mail marketing:

• 80 per cent of customers rated it as excellent
• there was a 65 per cent open rate (against the industry average of <20 href="http://internet2010.blogspot.com/search/label/cent" _fcksavedurl="http://internet2010.blogspot.com/search/label/cent">cent)
• 50 per cent of customers read the entire e-mail
• 20 per cent of customers purchased due to e-mail
• an additional 37 per cent of customers were considering purchase
• 13 per cent of customers forwarded the e-newsletter to friends/family
• there was a 5-10 per cent average clickthrough rate
• there were less than 1 per cent unsubscribes.

E-NEWSLETTERS - DEFINING AND REFINING Part 9

Decision 15 — marketing communications integration

There is a tendency to plan our e-mail newsletters with blinkers on. If this happens, we lose opportunities to leverage the strengths of different media for different purposes. Here are some ideas on how to avoid this:

• Use the e-newsletter to preview future offers and product developments before other media. Highlight unique web offers — this will be an incentive for audiences to open the e-newsletter.
• Use the e-newsletters to reinvigorate recent or current campaigns or promotions that were first highlighted in other media.
• Use the e-newsletter to give more detail than the offline newsletter or house magazine provides — refer visitors to the online version and reduce the size and cost of the offline communication. Alternatively, put the whole magazine online, as with http:// www.easyjetinflight.com.
• Rather than referring the media or other audiences to press releases or a media centre, refer them first to an e-newsletter item. This will give them a more complete picture of what the company stands for, and your current news.

Decision 16 — e-mail integration

Alongside the e-mail newsletter, there will be many other e-mail communications from an organization. This leads to decisions about what is the best way to break major news such as a product launch or upgrade.

I have seen newsletters where a major initiative such as a product launch or an event invitation becomes lost in all the other news items. Many newsletter templates could be improved by avoiding the newsletter being a list of items with similar weightings. This danger can be reduced through themed subject lines, or an e-mail newsletter design that gives precedence to certain items and is not too long. However, the danger of diluting the message still occurs. In the case of the product launch, it is best to use a separate e-mail to give this message. The opt-in form should give this option, so that the e-mail received is in keeping with the subscriber's expectations.

Decision 17 — web-site integration

One of the benefits of e-newsletters, compared with their paper-based equivalents, is the ability to deliver a large amount of valuable information at a low cost. Of course, this is a double-edged sword. Too much information will make the e-newsletter unwieldy, and your message will not get across or the recipients will not be able to locate the information relevant to them. So when you want to convey a lot of information, as is the case with many newsletters, you have to decide on the split of content between the e-mail newsletter and the web site, where more detailed content may be hosted.

To simplify an example, let's say this newsletter contains just three different content areas, or three different articles. The options are:

1. Minimal content in e-mail, full content on web site in multiple pages. Here, the e-newsletter contains the links and a very short summary of the article, linking through to the full article on the web site. This has the benefit that the newsletter can be scanned very rapidly by the recipient for articles of interest. However, there is no indication of the quality or relevance of the content, which is possible with approaches (3) to (5). It also less easy for the other articles to be read than in the next option, (2).

2. Minimal content in e-mail, full content on web site in a single page. As in the previous case, the e-mail has limited information, but on clicking through to the web site a single page newsletter is presented that contains all the articles. This has the benefit that the interested reader can rapidly find the information in all articles.

E-NEWSLETTERS - DEFINING AND REFINING Part 1

Many web sites now have a prominently placed `Sign-up to our newsletter' box. But is this enough?

How many e-mail newsletters do you subscribe to? If you're anything like me, the number is well into double figures — and most weeks I will opt in to yet another. The trouble is, the more I subscribe to, the less likely I am to have time to look at them, so some are never opened. I think we all have a mental list of 'must read', 'maybe read' and 'only if I have time' e-newsletters. Typically, I don't unsubscribe, since I may have a chance one week to look at them.

Thus, for organizations to make their e-newsletters successful, they have to work really hard to get them into the 'must read' category of their subscribers. This is a big challenge because, in any sector, many companies have already seized the opportunity provided by e-mail newsletters to build relationships with potential customers and develop relationships with their existing customers. However, it is certainly possible — in the UK, consumer newsletters from online brands such as lastminute.com, dabs.com and Tesco.com get great open rates and deliver a substantial amount of business. Many business-to-business e-newsletters have also found the secret of success within their niche.

When devising an e-newsletter, there are many decisions that must to be made for it to be effective. This section is about the decisions you take as you plan the launch of an e-newsletter, and also decisions regarding how to gain subscribers and keep them. Use these lists of decisions to plan an e-newsletter or to improve on your current e-newsletter.

Decision 1 — organization objectives

The starting point for planning an e-newsletter has to be to examine (or re-examine) why you are publishing it. You will probably have a primary objective, such as boosting sales on a site through clickthrough, or building a brand by providing value to customers, but what about other objectives? The 5 Ss of Smith and Chaffey (2005), originally applied to a corporate web site, provide a good way to think about e-newsletter objectives:

Sell — grow sales (the e-newsletter often acts as both a customer acquisition tool and a retention tool)

Serve — add value (give customers extra benefits online, such as online exclusive offers or more in-depth information about your products or industry sector)

3. Speak — get closer to customers by creating a dialogue, asking questions through online research surveys, and learning about customers' preferences through tracking (that is, what type of content are people most interested in)

Save — save costs (of print and post); if you have a traditional offline e-newsletter, can you reduce print runs or extend its reach by using e-mail?

5. Sizzle — extend the brand online; a newsletter keeps the brand at 'front-of-mind' and helps reinforce brand values, and added value can also be delivered by the e-newsletter in informing and entertaining customers.

All the newsletter design decisions we discuss below should, of course, also be controlled by the main objectives of the e-newsletter.

Decision 2 — measuring success

When thinking about the objectives, consider how you will judge the success of your newsletter.

The following metrics are commonly used to assess the effectiveness of e-newsletters through time:

• open rates (for HTML e-newsletters)
• clickthroughs to more detailed content or promotions
• number of unsubscribes
• number of new subscribers.

While it is easy to automate collection of these metrics, think about whether they really relate to the goals in Decision 1. Think also about whether the automated measures give you the full story. Some companies also conduct surveys to determine softer measures related to how the customer perceives the newsletter and how it impacts on the brand. This is also covered in Decision 19 — tracking and assessing satisfaction.