As part of our series on email marketing and social media, we’ve been talking to specialists in both areas and inviting them to share their insights. Lee Chadwick is Managing Director at CommuniGator, which offers an automatic service for generating leads through email marketing. We asked him how necessary this is in the age of social media, and what businesses stand to gain from making email part of their marketing strategy.
Q: Hi, Lee. Is email marketing dead?
A: The traditional “send out 10,000 emails with exactly the same content to 10,000 people” is dead and buried, and has been for years, because it doesn’t work. Your click-through rate continues to decline because you’re annoying 99.3 percent of the audience every time you send it out. You know, in your heart of hearts, that the content is not relevant to the majority of them, but because you don’t know who is who in your database, you send it out to everybody.
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What we’ve seen in our world is a massive increment in segmentation. We are seeing an increase of 25 to 50 percent in email volumes, so it’s not dead at all…the concept of emailing people has been around for generations, so that’s never been the good bit. The good bit now is that you can actually see that somebody engaged with the content. Being able to prove that somebody has opened, clicked, downloaded, whatever, is the euphoric thing that everybody has always run to email marketing for - but the irony of it is, very few people do anything about it.
Q: Why do you think people are so reluctant to dig into the valuable data that’s there?
A: A lot of people don’t have the variables in the data to be able to analyse it. If you broadcast to a list of one hundred people, and you see that 10 of them clicked and 90 didn’t, you need additional variables in the data in order to go round and ask, “Right, what made those 10 people click when the other 90 didn’t?”
That’s historically where it has fallen apart because, even with a really strong CRM integration, if there isn’t a job title in the CRM contact record, you can’t then look to see if you’re getting a greater click-through with certain types of content from people with a certain job title. The market has become much more data literate, though, and as the data has become more available through online methodologies, people are starting to take advantage of it.
You’ve got all these things like LinkedIn and data.com, which allow you to see that, actually, last week your nine percent click-throughs all came from the job title of Manager, not the job title of Director. That means you can say that management are more au fait with that type of content than the piece you put out last week, which nobody clicked on because it was much more focused on leadership.
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Now you know your readers’ job titles, their industry sectors and their business sizes. Those are the killer values in your data and if you can see that the people who are clicking on certain types of content match those values, then your audience segments itself. From there, you can say, “I should be mailing out my content mainly to these people”. The clever people are now saying, “actually, the people in my database are interested in these kind of things and, therefore, those should be the focus of my content for the next 12 months.”
Q: You mentioned LinkedIn: how do you see the relationship between email marketing and social media?
A: Social media has a very significant benefit, and it’s a multiplying benefit. Where there is social media activity which supports email programmes, there is a material increase in the benefit of the email programme. We can see that, it’s just difficult to show a tangible link between the two - but where there is no supporting social media, it’s not as successful. So therefore anecdotally, social media has a positive benefit on your email marketing programmes.
Social media can show what people like and what they don’t like. When we see the social streams that people are engaging in, that gives us a very strong indicator as to the types of content that we put in our emails.
Also, you can use it for what we would call the ripple. You can encourage people to share your email content with their social networks, and that obviously multiplies out the reach of an email campaign.
Q: A business owner reading this interview might be thinking, “That sounds fantastic, but my data is all over the place, we don’t have that many customers... how do I even start to find out what content is relevant?” What advice would you provide for somebody who wants to get involved but isn’t sure where to start?
A: Well, like anybody who doesn’t know where to start, you’ve got to start somewhere. You’ve got to recognise that it’s a journey that you’ve got to go on, and that the journey is one of continuous improvement.
If you’ve got no idea of who is in your database or what they like when you send your first email, you have to have progressed as a result of sending that email. You’ve got to have a starting methodology for recording what people like and what they don’t like. Therefore, you’ve got to tag your content - so if you send out a newsletter with three articles in it, you know who clicked each one and who didn’t click any of them.
Q: So a business owner should view the first 3 to 4 months of an email marketing campaign as a data sorting and profiling exercise, as much as anything else?
A: Absolutely. Every time you send out an email, even if the outcome that you are looking for from a marketing point of view is sale or purchase, you should still enrich your knowledge base and your data as a result.
The primary benefit of using email marketing is that you can see what the person at the other end does. You can spot a behaviour, and then do something different next time, and that is the need and use of email marketing. If that’s not your objective, then there are other channels which are better for just broadcasting content without knowing what’s going on: social media being one.
Q: So that’s the start of the journey - where should business owners want to be?
A: The end point to the story, if you like, is what is starting to take place and has been quite prevalent over the sort of last 12 to 18 months. It’s got a label of marketing automation on it, but actually it’s the ability to automatically move somebody through a journey using email. You can do that because you can see what they did and didn’t do in the previous email that you sent, therefore you can automate the next phase and the phase after that and the phase after that.
If I’m trying to achieve an outcome - it might be a form fill, it might be an experience that I want you to have - I then build a series of emails over time to make that outcome take place and then I let it happen automatically. I don’t have to sit down this morning and go, “My God, I’ve got to send an email out today to all the people who didn’t read my email last week”, because the great thing about email is that when you send them out the outcome is fairly well dictated. They’ll either be opened or they won’t, and you have to know what you’re going to do about it.
If you think about it in advance, you can have that journey planned out. You can build the content and the collateral for it, and then you can just let it execute itself. All you do is measure the individual components along the journey and you say, ”Right, not many people are moving from stage four to stage five. Let’s get hold of the email creative and have a look at the subject line and the content of those emails, because that’s the bottleneck.”
That’s the modern world: it’s just workflow. You’re just moving people through a journey and using email as a medium for doing it. Again, to finish on what we started, the reason why you would use email for that is you can see what people do and what they don’t do, and adapt your usage based on that data. If you’re not adapting your usage like that, you’re missing out.
CommuniGator has published a white paper on the top 5 marketing automation workflows you should be using. Click here to download free of charge.
Email marketing may look simple, but are you using it to its full potential? Are you observing receiver behaviour and changing your own in response? If you’re not sure how your emails - or your other marketing efforts - are performing, take our free Marketing 360 Healthcheck to find out.