I recently conducted a webinar on personalisation. I really enjoyed taking everyone through the five steps that will accelerate your email ROI by implementing personalisation. And, as I always try to do, offering easy take aways for marketers, who are always short on time.

 During the presentation we asked attendees* 

"On average, what level of personalisation do you use in your email marketing?"

Here are the results:
35% - Name only      
18% - More than name
22% - Personalise content
12% - Dynamic Content
13% - Dont Know

This is in line with surveys we've conducted ourselves, as well as industry wide results. While using a name only can still be powerful in the right context, there is so much more that can be done to send an email that feels personal to the recipient (A key way to look at personalisation)

In this webinar I go in depth on the following areas: 

Why should you personalise? There's loads of proof, but one example is the Aberdeen Group finding that marketers who personalise campaigns achieved a 57% higher rate of conversion.

What are the benefits of personalising? Personalising acknowledges relationships, which attracts engagement and interaction. All of this generates business intelligence – which helps you achieve better results.

What are the barriers to personalising? Lack of data is the most common reason marketers are not personalising.

So, how do I solve the “lack of data” issue? Individual attributes are generally what we think of regarding data; for example name, company, title, etc. But individual attributes depends on having these attributes for enough of the subscribers to make it worth personalising. The default of “Dear Reader” negates the idea of personalisation, as it implies you don’t know who you are writing to. Also, and this is essential, individual attributes depend on accuracy of data.  

My suggestion to marketers is that they should look at data within “group attributes” specific to a group. Not only is this achievable for marketers, it offers relevance to the reader - which is personal.

I go indepth into these areas and have some beautiful customer examples of personalisation. (You can watch the webinar here)

*NB: Of the 150 attendees, 51% answered the survey

Join me this Wednesday at 3pm GMT as I take you through what you need to know to increase personalisation in your emails (including why it's worth doing!). I have some great examples - you're sure to have take away ideas you can apply to your own email marketing campaigns.

When:  Wednesday, 1st February 2012, 3pm (GMT)
Duration:  45 minutes including Q&A
Host:  denise cox, Lead Email Consultant, Newsweaver

During this informative free webinar, denise cox, lead consultant with Newsweaver will take you through the steps needed to personalise your emails. You will also learn why you should personalise, what data to use and which are the most powerful elements of your email to personalise.

Register now

Are you reviewing how your email marketing campaigns are performing? I call it "doing a CSI" on your email marketing. Instead of just saying that you're not getting the opens and clicks you expected, you actually get stuck into by conducting forensic examinations into every aspect of the campaigns - from template, content, subject line and from field.

This is not a formal list, but just a few top level thoughts so you can get an idea of the process you should go through.

Have you stated what results you want from your mailings? Are you measuring conversions to understand if you are getting these results?

If you feel your results are very low, first take a look at your bounce, complaint and unsubscribe rates. Combined these can give insight into whether your subscribers are pushing back and treating your emails as spam - which in turn impacts delivery.

Are you trending your metrics? Rather than micro-managing your email marketing issue by issue, trend using your metrics reports your open/clicks across more than one issue to get a bigger picture of reader engagement. For example, for a monthly publication look across three issues, for a weekly publication look across two months. You'll most likely find a huge increase in your percentages of engagement - that's because most of subscribers don't open every single one of your emails. But they will have opened at least one of three that you sent.

It's important not to focus only on what people did - but also on what they did NOT do. Keep track to find out how many haven't opened any of your emails over a defined period of time, such as six months. Target this very inactive group with a special offer to see if you can activate their interest.

Are you testing to find out what works best for your audience? Don't assume the day and time you've always been sending is best - test all seven days of the week, and also time of day. Test the subject line, test the offer, etc. You want to keep working on targeting your emails (as in who receives what and when), crafting the offers and working to ensure you use the best subject line to entice and open.

The end of 2011 is in sight, and a fresh year looms large. I've pulled five posts from over the last twelve months that highlight what is essential to an email marketing campaigns' success:

1. Streamline your process Online newsletters banish the long lead times of print publications. But you should take advantage of the approach print editors developed over the centuries to make your own regularly published email newsletter fairly pain free. (read the article)
2. Optimise engagement in your layout Is your email newsletter template reader friendly? Here's a 5-point checklist to use when reviewing your finished design, and include image tips. (read the article)
3. Think beyond the written word In today's online world, content is your digital currency. When your content gets shared you are reaching beyond the inbox. You are now reaching new readers - and possible subscribers. We live in a digital age and expect to select not only where we want to get content, but how we want to absorb it. When creating content, think beyond the written word.  While the 'traditional' written article still has a firm place in your online newsletter, you need to think about offering your content in other forms to increase your chances of engagement. (read the article)
4. The house list is at the core of your success  A recently published MarketingSherpa chart offer interesting insight into what your peers in the industry are saying about various aspects of their email marketing efforts. This new chart shows what B2B Marketers are finding to be most effective tactics: Emailing to house lists is by far the most commonly used email marketing tactic, as nearly ALL of the B2B organisations participating in this year’s study indicated that they currently practice it. Past surveys have indicated that marketing to house lists get the best results.  (read the article)
5. Use your metrics reports for business intelligence Marketers are beginning to look to click through rates as a more significant indicator of engagement than the 'open' rate. While the open rate on its own has never given the complete picture of engagement, it has up to now been the most popular benchmark of the success of a campaign. In the last several years, opens have become a less accurate measurement. If a reader opens the email, with images turned off, it doesn't get counted as an open. But it will register as an open if the recipient goes on to click on a link in the email - or turns on images. (read the article) 

Social networks have put ‘social’ and 'sharing' into every aspect of business. This includes sharing content from your emails. 

You should have a content sharing strategy in place because it will extend the reach of your message beyond your own subscribers. There are two aspects of this: 1) to share your email content within your own social networks, as well as 2) give your readers the ability to share your email content within their social networks.

Here’s another ‘shareworthy’ idea for you ... share your email content within your own organisation. Since sourcing content remains a top challenge for marketers (68% according to a recent MarketingSherpa survey) the side benefit of doing this means you’ll be helping your co-workers source relevant content. First, conduct an audit within your organisation amongst those who are creating and sending email marketing campaigns. This will identify who might benefit from sharing content. Articles might need to be tweaked with personalisation or a different call to action to make it relevant to their audience, but that’s easily done. Don’t forget to review both written and all rich media content sources - such as videos, podcasts or images. 

To aid this idea of “sharing”, we’ve just introduced a feature called LibraryLink. This function makes it easy to implement content sharing within your organisation.  LibraryLink enables Newsweaver clients with multiple accounts to share content such as articles, images, videos, logos and podcasts etc. across the entire organisation’s account. The built-in Monitoring Dashboard provides shared content activity metrics, helping stakeholders determine the most popular and effective content to share going forward.

Template design and delivery into the inbox certainly play a role in the success of your email marketing campaigns, but it’s your content that will engage your readers.

Content is a company's digital currency and can play a huge role in customer retention. Content is how a potential customer evaluates a company. It is essential to have a well thought-out content strategy that engages your readers and is considered valuable enough to be shared - giving you a reach far beyond the inbox.

I’ll be conducting a webinar giving you tips and insight into how to create and implement a successful content strategy ... hope you’ll join me

Creating a successful content strategy for email marketing: 8 Easy Steps

Time and Date:  Tuesday, 22nd November 2011, 3pm (GMT)
Duration:  45 minutes plus Q&A
Presented by:  denise cox, Lead consultant, Newsweaver

During this webinar, denise will take you through 8 easy steps on how to create a successful content strategy.  Learn about where to source content, how best to use it and various types of content.

What you will learn:

•  Setting goals for your content and creating schedules for your content strategy
•  How to identify great sources of content within your organisation
•  How to distinguish the most compelling types of content to get shared and engage audiences
•  Engaging ways to present your content
•  What are the benefits and business intelligence achieved from a great content strategy which can be used to increase opens and clicks

To view the Webinar, Click Here

 

I've just published the latest issue of the business of email - and it's all about content. I’ve chosen that topic because great content is an essential ingredient in successful email marketing.

What makes great content? In the most recent Email Newsletter Usability report by Nielsen Norman Group, the following content types were identified as of most value to a subscriber (both B2B/B2C):

• Informative and keep users up-to-date (mentioned by 63% of respondents).
• Offers timely information
• Provides work-related news or company actions (mentioned by 63% of respondents)
• Offers reports, prices, sales
• Gives interesting content relating to their personal interests, hobbies
• Gives details and easy-to-do action points on events, deadlines, important dates
• Requires no further action beyond a simple click

This is not a huge revelation - people receiving information they have requested by subscribing are going to be interested in your products and/or services to begin with... BUT what you provide about the products and/or services will be essential.

These types of content listed above should prompt you to dig deeper into your content war chest to ensure you are pulling in and generating content from all the sources of information available to you. For example: internally generated, on your website or on your blog. Don't forget to use written content AND visual content (eg video, pictures) and audio content (eg podcasts, webinars).

I'd also like to point out that people want things to be easy - so make sure you provide simple action points in your newsletter, and that the design of your newsletter makes it easy to navigate.

If you'd like to read more about this topic, here's an article to read before you assemble your next email newsletter to ensure you are providing the most valuable newsletter possible to your readers:

Four steps to follow when creating written content for your newsletter

If your challenge is to engage with internal audiences across your organisation - both locally and globablly - then you'll want to join me next Tuesday. I'll be leaving plenty of time for questions ...

What: Engaging internal audiences using email: 7 strategies that work
Time and Date: Tuesday, 11th October, 3pm BST
Duration: 45 minutes, including Q&A session

Register Now For Webinar

During this 45-minute webinar, denise cox, lead consultant at Newsweaver, will focus on how you can engage internal stakeholders with email using 7 strategies that work.

Why is email an essential tool for Internal Communications?

• Streamline communications
• Get the right information to the right employee at the right time
• Decrease print costs, drive traffic to the intranet
• Incorporate  two-way communications for editorial guidance
• Reach employees' inbox – desktop, laptop or smartphone

I'll be speaking at the B2B marketing magazine's popular Email Marketing Training Workshop. It takes place Wednesday the 28th of September, 9 - 5 at the ETC Venues in London. 

"This advance email marketing training workshop will look at your own email marketing campaigns and give you ideas on how you can increase your response rates and ultimately your return on investment (ROI).  The training is full of practical advice and real life examples of how simple changes can have a big impact."

My session takes place at 2.30 - 3:30pm

My session title: Successful B2B Email Newsletters (7 things you must do)

My session will cover: Email newsletters are a powerful tool that B2B marketers should have at the centre of all their marketing efforts. They excel at customer retention - and provide valuable engagement insight into new subscribers that can help generate sales. Learn the seven things you must do to ensure your email newsletters provide the right content, are getting opened and read - and clicked on - and play a key role in keeping customers as well as generating new business. The seven areas I'll cover include content, newsletter design templates and frequency.

Full workshop details and registration info

I'm very excited about the Click Map feature just launched here at Newsweaver. This post-send report provides a visual 'big picture' of all click activity within a specific edition of your newsletter. You'll see how many clicks each link received - and on every single page of that edition. Plus, each click tab is colour-coded so you can assess where your hottest performers happened in the publication (red, most popular, yellow and then blue for least active. (Click on image for a full-size view)

This is something I've been doing manually as part of my consultation with clients. I printed out an edition of a publication and wrote the number of clicks next to each link. It always brings the raw metrics of a mailing to life.

So, how can a Click Map help you improve your results going forward?

First, it's 'big picture' easy to see:

• What content didn't get responses
• What links got the most attention
• Over a series of mailings it may help you spot parts of your design that are causing content blind spots

What to do with this information? Here are just a few possibilities:

• Repeat content that didn't get the clicks. There are a number of reasons a link didn't get clicked, such as text too long and they didn't bother reading, text didn't compel them to click. Rewrite your synopsis and run the article again.
• Check your calls to action - should 'read more' be changed to 'register now' or something more active and relevant to that content?
• If areas of your newsletter never get clicks, tease the content in that section higher up in the newsletter - such as the pre-text area or the preview pane.
• Another solution to getting better clicks involves your newsletter template design: if you don't have a permanent area of your template that serves as a table of contents area, consider adding one. It should be viewable in the preview pane. This helps readers scan to find what they want. And, because this table of contents appears on every page of your newsletter's template (home page and article back pages), it encourages multiple clicks by each subscriber.
• It's possible you have too much content, or more likely it may FEEL like too much content to your reader. Review your layout.  If you are putting a series of articles onto one long page it will be difficult for people to scroll through this dense mass of text to find what they want to click on. A series of snopsysis and calls to action, each leading to their own back page or landing page, makes for a more scannable - and more clicked - newsletter. And, it gives you better engagement metrics for each piece of content.

Use all reports to choose what to test. Use your Click Maps, along with all your other reports available to you, to make decisions on what to test. Testing ideas are endless, but here are a few: Test where you place content. Test your calls to action. Test repeating articles. Test less content. Test smaller synopsis, but same amount of content in your newsletter. Test segmenting your audience and sending them more tailored content.