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.

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.