Build Your Digital Command Canter Part 1

The popularity of Star Trek is based, in part, upon our fascination with advanced technology. We're excited when Captain Picardorders his crew to take The Enterprise to another galaxy with the simple command "Make it so." In the distant future, it seems, we'll be able to entertain our merest whim by pushing a button or by telling a computer what we want done. Powerful machines will do the rest.

To succeed at digital marketing, you need to build your own version of The Starship Enterprise. You need to develop a digital command center in your company to communicate on a day-by-day basis with your customers and prospects. Unlike a traditional marketing department — often far removed from direct contact with customers — a digital marketing department must be hardwired to Customers. E-mail messages, for example, must be read and replied to Within hours, if not minutes, and your Web site content may need to be updated and changed daily. In addition, your customer database should be constantly churning with new information uploaded from your salespeople, your customer service representatives, and your customers.

Integration in the Digital Economy

To gather, store, process, and distribute digital information, you need to integrate your company into the digital economy. In the next three to five years, you will need the following capabilities in your company.

• Every computer is connected over a network using highspeed cable. This network includes an internal e-mail system that allows for the sending and receiving of Internet e-mail messages.
• Everyone involved in your company — employees, customers, and suppliers — are able to communicate by e-mail with everyone else in your company. As bandwidth becomes greater, you can upgrade your e-mail capability to include video-mail and live video-conferencing.
• Employees and contract workers are able to work at home, or at satellite offices, as easily as if they were in the office. Note: In the digital world, you may not have an office; your entire operation may run over a central server that electronically connects your organization.
• Your internal computer network is connected directly to the Internet over high-speed telephone or cable lines. This means every computer on your network is connected to the Internet at all times. In fact, it means your computer network is actually part of the Internet.
• You have security measures in place which restrict access to private corporate information on your network. One solution is to set up an Internet fire wall.
• Your marketing presentations, internal communications, and training courses exist in a multimedia format which combines text, graphics, sound, and video. You have software that allows for the easy development of multimedia content.
• You have one or many different types of online servers running on your network. This includes one or more Web servers, a BBS network server, and online database servers. Each of these servers are available to selected people within your organization over an Intranet, or outside your organization by way of the Internet.
• As an alternative to internal online servers, you can lease space with service bureaus. For example, you can rent space on a Web site that is halfway around the world. You can update its content as if the server was in your office. You may use a service bureau to set up and run your online BBS system. Remember, you don't need to buy expensive digital equipment in order to use it — you can rent it as well.
• Your customers access information about your business using a variety of digital communications tools including the telephone, fax, e-mail, the World Wide Web, interactive kiosks, and CD-ROM, and perhaps also through some sort of virtual reality (VR) device. Ideally, your customers are able to purchase your products and services electronically.
• You have an extensive database on all your customers and prospects. This database is relational in structure. All your digital communications and your digital marketing promotions are aimed at increasing the size, quality, and complexity of this database.
• All your computer systems are compatible. In the computer industry, this is known as "Open Systems Architecture." This means all your corporate information is accessible, no matter what type of computer is used. As well, your information should be accessible through all digital devices, not just computer-related ones.
• Your employees are fully fluent in the ways of basic digital technology. Everyone in your organization knows how to use the three major types of software programs: word processing, spreadsheet, and database. They are comfortable creating _and viewing multimedia content. They understand the basic concepts of the Internet, and can find the information they need on it.

In order to succeed at digital marketing over the long term, you need to set up this type of infrastructure within your company. However, man didn't get to the moon in one day. So take it one step at a time. Here's an explanation of how to take the first steps:

Body copy

The main copy is for those readers who want to know more — those who haven't lost interest, and those that haven't clicked the initial call-to-action already. The person who gets this far likely wants detail and reassurance. Since we have a fair amount of detail here, this is often the place to use bullets with bold headings so that it can be taken in by readers who are scanning. The main copy should therefore include:

• a detailed description of the offer features. If the offer is for a holiday, what is on offer? If the offer is for a seminar, what are the topics and what is the track-record of the speakers?

• a detailed description of the offer benefits. In the case of the seminar, what benefits will those attending the seminar receive? You can combine features and benefits by adding 'which means that ...' after each feature.

• clear instructions about what to do next to receive the offer
• a description of how the process for fulfilling the offer works.

As in a direct mail piece, the main body of the e-mail typically details the features and benefits of the offer in order to encourage a response. With e-mail, you shouldn't use too much detail — the best place for detail is arguably the web site, and you can encourage clickthrough to find out more. A common approach is to use a bulleted list in the main body to describe features and benefits. Some e-mails seem to take this too far, though, with the e-mail becoming little more than a series of such lists. Although most would agree that 'brief is best' when it comes to e-mail, we do need to make the body copy long enough to create engagement, set the tone and explain the offer — and bullets alone are often not the best way to do this.

The body should also Explain and Instruct. It should explain because you may have developed a great offer and method of redemption, but it may be too complex for the embattled e-mail recipient as they wade through hundreds of e-mails. Explain clearly how the offer works. Instruct is related to Explain — most of us seem conditioned to follow instructions, as they make our lives easier — so the main body copy can instruct the recipient what to do next to receive the offer.

The close

The main aim of the final part of the text should be to achieve action, so the close should always include a link to execute the action. The section on achieving the call-to-action (see below) explains the best form for this. The reader will often have had to scroll down to get to this point, and it may be worth briefly repeating what has been said so far — in particular, the offer.

Sign-off

The sign-off can be personal or impersonal. Personal — from a named person — is best if the recipient knows an individual in your organization, such as an account manager or a customer service representative. Alternatively, if the company has a well-known figurehead the e-mail could be from this person, but many may think that this is false familiarity unless the copy is written to avoid this. An impersonal sign-off is often more appropriate for rented lists.

The postscript

The postscript is a device, often used in direct mail, which is known to capture attention and will encourage action. The PS is not seen that often in e-mails, perhaps because e-mail is seen as more of a conversational communication and the PS adds an element of formality, or perhaps because it is too overt a sign of selling. My view is that it can be used to good effect, since our eyes are drawn to the PS — so it is a good mechanism for getting a key message across to the reader.

Mandatory inclusions

These are what must be included to be legally compliant. Currently, this implies an unsubscribe mechanism, a privacy statement and a contact point (name and company address) that the recipient can contact if required. It is also good practice to include a 'statement of origination' - a short piece of text explaining why the recipient has received the e-mail — because some recipients may have forgotten signing up to your e-communications and will consider your e-mail to be spam unless you include this.

The unsubscribe is simply an instruction. It should be reasonably prominent and straightforward if you believe in permission marketing. The instruction will usually take the form of typing Unsubscribe into the subject line of the reply, or clicking on a link. You don't have to be formal here; Kangol uses this 'cool' approach for the unsubscribe to their newsletter:

PS think your life is so complete you don't need to hear from us again? Click here and kiss the cool times goodbye.

A privacy statement or link must be included, but since it is not desirable to have a full privacy statement in the e-mail body, this is usually a link back to the privacy statement on the web site. Related to the privacy statement is the 'statement of origination', which explains who has sent the e-mail and why.

To wrap up this section on structure, let's look at an example that puts it all together. It is kept succinct, and has a clear headline and header image plus a clear call-to-action at the beginning. It then uses bullets and panels to indicate other stories. The only thing it is really missing is a close, which would help make it more personal.

E-NEWSLETTERS - DEFINING AND REFINING Part 10

3. Some content in e-mail, full content on web site (multiple pages). This is similar to approach (1), but here the e-mail newsletter is longer since it contains a short extract from each article. Typically a more >> option link will be available to take the user through to the web site. This makes it easier for the reader to decide whether the content is relevant to them. This is a common approach; Figure 5.14 is an example.

4. Some content in e-mail, full content on web site (single pages). This is similar to option (2), but again has the advantage that an idea of the relevance of the content is given in the e-mail, and also it is easier to find other content from the same newsletter on the web site.

5. All content in e-mail. This approach is being used by Freepint (www.freepint.com) at the time of writing. A lot of detailed content about web searching is provided in two detailed text e-mails, sent each month. Here, a clickthrough is not required to the site at all(although some longer articles may require this). It is typically used by professional or technical plain-text newsletters. This approach is arguably the best method of communicating information to the recipient. However, for the marketer, calls-to-action encouraging further participation are more difficult to achieve from the newsletter than from the web site.

This decision is difficult, since the preference on length varies according to the individual. For many, including this author, part of the power of e-mail newsletters is to be able to get a rapid briefing on developments about a particular topic. If you have to clickthrough to a web site and then understand the structure of the web site, as is the case with the What's New in Marketing web site (www.wnim.com), this slows down the experience.

A related question is, should we archive? For a B2B newsletter, the question is perhaps not should we archive, but how? Archiving a B2B newsletter, provided it has quality content, provides an excellent resource for your customers. They will return to the resource as they face particular issues. As mentioned above, this can also assist in generating new subscribers, since specialist articles indexed by search engines will gain new visitors who may look to tap into your expertise. For a B2C newsletter, the issue is not that clear cut. If the e-newsletter is providing news or interesting content, then similar arguments apply — it is a resource that will encourage repeat visits and can also, via search engines, act as an acquisitions tool. For B2C newsletters from an e-tail site it is inappropriate to archive the content, since product information and offers will quickly date.

When an archive is content-rich, which is typically the case with a media or news site, the utility for the user can be improved by developing 'related article' features. ClickZ (www.clickz.com) has a good related-articles feature. This lists items related to the current article according to which category they fall into, or according to similarity in key words in title or body.

Decision 18 — how do we gain subscribers?

There are two aspects to gaining subscribers: first, there are various sources where e-mail addresses can be collected; secondly, there is selling the benefits of the newsletter so that potential subscribers are happy to give up their e-mail address. You may want to refer back to Chapter 4, where approaches to gain customer e-mail addresses were covered in more detail. This explains maximizing our use of online and offline touchpoints with our audiences to explain the proposition, and offer the opportunity to opt-in without building too many barriers.

On the web site, we need to ask these three questions to maximize sign-up:

1. Is our opt-in given enough prominence? Is it on the home page? Is it 'above the fold'? Is there enough screen real-estate devoted to it? Is our archive and proposition indexed by search engines? Is it prominent throughout the site?

2. Is our proposition clear? Does the messaging say more than 'opt-in to our e-newsletter'? Does the sign-up page highlight the benefits? Are the benefits for different audiences clearly described? Is the quality of content demonstrated through an archive or example newsletter?

3. Can we overcome barriers to subscription? Reassure potential subscribers that you will not be overloading them with e-mail. Show how the newsletter will be relevant and targeted. Reassure them that details will not be passtd on to third parties by using those six magic words: 'we will not share your information'.

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.

Rich Media E-mails

Rich media e-mails go one step beyond the use of static or animated graphics in HTML e-mails, and give a richer experience through more complex animation, video and/or sound. Some refer to HTML as rich media, but more commonly the term is used to refer to e-mails with more dynamic or interactive content. A video can be streamed when the user opens the e-mail, or the message displayed in the preview pane and the video downloaded and displayed in real time — for example, Trailermail (www.trailermail.co.uk) is used to provide video trailers for movie companies. Alternatively, Flash animations can be integrated into the e-mail.

Many brands have experimented with rich media e-mail, but they don't seem to be increasing in popularity. There are several potential reasons why they have not been used more widely:

• E-mail, as with other digital media, tends to support impulsive behaviour — we don't want to wait for downloads unless the download is compelling
• Many corporate firewalls can block streaming media and, because of the high at work usage of e-mail, companies cannot risk reducing the visibility of their message
• Again in the corporate setting, e-mail recipients often won't want to be seen listening to or viewing a video clip by their boss, unless they control the media and turn on audio
• There is not a clear relationship between the incremental cost of rich media and the
  returns generated either through response or uplifts in brand awareness and favourability.

Owing to the technical issues of delivering rich media within the e-mail, increasingly companies are using an approach where the message directs the viewer to a web site to download or stream a clip. Of course, this means that the e-mail has less impact itself. If rich media is used in e-mail, it is more likely to be relatively simple — perhaps a flash animation — and is used to complement a text or static image-based message which will be effective even if the rich media element doesn't download.

Managing Inbound E-mail House List

There will be a high turnover of your e-mail addresses or 'gone-aways' (in traditional direct mail speak). Research by MercerMC (2001) showed that, on average, 20 per cent of customers in a typical database will change their contact information over the course of a year. Changes vary from 16 per cent for the address and 17 per cent for the job to 25 per cent for the e-mail address and 33 per cent for a cell-phone number. Furthermore, they estimate that the cost of updating or reconsenting these databases can run into tens of millions of dollars for a large database — not to mention the opportunity costs from lost customers. These figures highlight the importance of creating measures to capture these changes. Worse still, the permission provided for contact may change through time, since you will have asked different questions about how personal data will be used to market to the customer. Options for managing this change include:

• periodic checks by call centre staff and at other touchpoints
• a 'change personal details' option on the web site (this is required by data protection laws in some countries)
• e-mail or telesales campaigns aimed at updating data (Case study 4.1 shows how this process works).

Software designed specifically for cleaning a list is Winpure (www.winpure.com), although many ESPs also contain this capability.

Note though, that changing e-mail address seems to have stabilized more recently. The

Doubleclick Sixth Annual Consumer E-mail Survey(Doubleclick, 2005) showed that, when asked how long they had maintained their e-mail addresses, most consumers had kept the same address for four to six years. Nearly two-thirds of consumers had never changed their e-mail address.

The survey (Doubleclick, 2005) also 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; 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 for 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 gaining the primary e-mail address.

Inbound e-mail is all incoming e-mail to the organization. This includes bounces but also managing e-mail enquiries from customers. There are two conflicting concerns in managing inbound enquiry or support e-mails that will of effectively answering queries from customers whose support query may refer to a combination of online or offline activities. Multi-skilling also reduces hand-offs, and can increase variety for contact-centre staff.

Balance between automation and manual processes.Automated responses, intelligent routing and autosuggestion are all techniques, described in the next section, which can be used to reduce the number of queries handled by human operators. If the automated approach fails, however, then inappropriate responses may be received by customers.

Insourcing or outsourcing. Software, hardware and staff can be deployed internally or outsourced to an application service provider, who will work according to a service-level agreement to achieve quality standards.