E-mail Education

This is not so different from how people conduct their social lives. With time we become discerning in our relationships and maintain a smaller number of close friendships, beyond which others become casual acquaintances we keep in touch with less frequently. The key is email regularity and appropriateness.

What’s email regularity?

The #1 reason that customers lose interest in email is frequency. It is not uncommon today for a customer to receive multiple emails from different departments of a company with no overriding governance coordination. Let’s use the airlines as an example.  A customer might receive a frequent flyer account balance from the loyalty department, a promotional message from a marketing partner, an account transaction confirmation from the service department, and a special offer from the marketing department. The number of different email touch points with the customer is often way more than expected.

Many companies do not have a complete picture of how many emails are being sent to their customer or prospects and when. This leaves the organization exposed to potential customer frequency burnout. An obvious solution is to build a model of all the email touch points. Storing these touch points as part of the CRM customer attributes will allow for an email “holistic” view of the customer ideally. From this it is possible to assess the overall email communication strategy and put in place the appropriate governance to ensure that frequency is managed with the appropriate message.

All too often the frequency of mailings is likely to be too high for many customer segments. Companies should often consider pulling back. While this might seem outrageous to a marketer there are interesting ways to do this while still providing significant value to the customer and the company. For example, customers are increasingly differentiating between service messages that they like, such as account status updates, and promotional messages they dislike. Marketers have the option of combining a main service message with a smaller promotional message into a single message.

To truly assess whether frequency is optimized for different customer segments requires measuring the health of the email relationship. A good proxy for this health is looking at how the customer is engaging with email over time. For example, if the customer is opening and clicking-through on less and less emails with time then their engagement momentum is declining. This is often a good indicator that something in the email program is not working for them. It is often likely to be due to frequency and relevance. By storing this customer engagement momentum score in the CRM database can help dictate what emails will be sent to them in future.  If you outsource your email marketing a good vendor can provide you with a pull rate of not only who opened or clicked on your broadcast, but what time and the when they clicked on it.

To Be Relevant or Not To Be Relevant

Besides frequency, relevance is absolutely critical to engaging the customer in the email channel. All too often companies train their customers to ignore them. Over 93% of customers report that they will delete an email if they are not interested. After a customer receives a pattern of two, five or ten emails that do not add value to their day, the customer will simply hit the delete key as soon as they see the company sender. The key challenge for email marketers is to define relevancy and that is where a CRM can or at least an email marketing vendor that can segment your email list can help.

The best answer to the question of how to offer customer relevance is to leverage knowledge of the existing customer relationship. A strong CRM database will contain all the key attributes that can be used to segment and target email programs to provide that relevancy. Digging into the CRM database to understand what the customer has purchased in the past, what they have expressed interest in, their demographics and psychographics, their desire to receive communication, can all provide key insights into the customer that can help drive more targeted email programs. Many businesses are installing or reviewing these software programs such as Sales Force, Sales Logix and Peoplesoft.

Email is a highly intimate and personalized channel. It is an ideal medium for moving towards that sweet spot of a one to one customer dialogue that really demonstrates to the customer that they are known and valued, but the first step is to segment and target appropriately. Key tactics, as starting points, for email customer segmentation that can be driven from the CRM database include the following. It is amazing how these basic segmentation strategies are often not even implemented.

• Demographic Targeting. Targeting emails based on state and type of business, especially in the property and casualty industry.  If branding your logo and name needs to be segmented by wholesaler, MGA, retailer and or carrier ask trade journal or marketing to cough up some evidence that they can in fact provide this solution.
• Recent Purchase Cross Sell Targeting. A new product purchase, such as insuring a home or auto, could trigger subsequent emails for relevant additional products such as identity theft coverage or life insurance. Or perhaps on a commercial lines note you sold $2,000,000 million in premium volume in a six month period between 50 agencies.  If the coverage sold is for your Convenience Store program and a majority of the policies do not include environmental coverage doesn’t it make sense to customize a marketing ad and brand that product to that same group?  Many products and services follow a life-stage model.
• Implied Interest Targeting. If a customer clicks through on certain links consistently then this can imply certain interests. For example, if a customer consistently clicks through on markets for construction links versus markets for crane operators, then these interests allow for further segmentation.  Almost all banners that are sold allow for a pull rate of who the clicker is and how many times they’re being clicked on.

In short, customers are becoming more sophisticated about email. No longer will the approach of sending the same thing to the same customer work. Emails that come too frequently or are irrelevant not only will see the company booted from their email inner circle but more dramatically customers could stop doing business with a company as a result of their poor email practices. To ensure that companies really leverage the value of the email channel it is critical that companies send emails that are of the right frequency and are relevant. This means building a holistic view of email frequency through out the company and leveraging the CRM knowledge of the customer to ensure customers are segmented and targeted to maximize engagement.

In a survey, conducted by Pitney Bowes it was revealed that Tuesday is the number one day as far as direct mail campaigns are concerned. A representative sample of marketers drawn from a variety of vertical sectors were asked, "Which day of the week they believed to be the best arrival day for direct mail campaigns? Over half of all respondents (51%) nominated Tuesday as the best day."

Monday is a bad day for DM arrival. For those in employment, the 'Monday blues' will be descending and thoughts will be split between the weekend’s activities and the challenges that the week holds in store.

By Tuesday the weekend has quickly become a distant memory and minds are focused. By aiming for Tuesday, marketers can ensure that they are not bombarding people as soon as the week begins, nor are they waiting too late to encourage same week response.

For communications arriving from Wednesday onwards, the mindset may well be - "I’ll deal with it next week". By the time next week arrives, the pitch might well have been forgotten. Indeed, it might well have been buried under next week’s batch of offers!

The low score for Friday as a dynamic delivery day may surprise many. Certainly, in the past, analysts - particularly those in the financial sector - have recommended Friday as the best delivery day. However, these results suggest that rather than mail being opened on Friday and considered over the weekend, Friday mail is dismissed as recipients’ thoughts turn to relaxation.

Jeff Neilson is President and co-founder of National Marketing Services the parent company of programbusiness.com an insurance specific search engine designed for all property and casualty professionals.

For questions or comments you may contact Jeff at:

[email protected]. Or visit www.nationalmarketing.com or www.programbusiness.com