Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Email: The power and the glory
Last week Adestra sponsored the 2012 Figaro Email Seminar. The agenda focused on how email is the ultimate outbound channel, and set out with a team of industry experts to instil the lesson that marketers need to ensure their messages are timely and relevant.
We had our own Adestra industry expert, Account Director, Kate Gowers present on; Email: The power and the glory. Below she gives a brief synopsis of what she covered:
30 years ago (way back when the Dead Sea was still only sick), we had one commercial television station, one commercial radio station in London, and we got our news from newspapers and television. Fast forward to 2012 – the consumer of today gets his information from a myriad of sources. He reads his email, watches one of over 500 channels, surfs the net and opens his post. Media has truly fragmented, so the savvy marketer needs to adopt a truly multi-channel approach to keep our consumer’s (limited and transient) attention.
Email marketing is probably the only channel that allows for dialogue – it has the potential to be a true two way conversation. You have the opportunity to reinforce your brand, to educate your customers (or readers) about your offering or industry, to chase that elusive sale, to keep your customers happy and to create advocates amongst your customers (allowing them to do some of your work for you). To achieve all these things, though, you need to talk not SHOUT and ensure that when your programme does initiate response that you LISTEN to what your recipients have to say. Your customers are speaking to you – by opening, or failing to open a message; by clicking (or failing to click) a link and by purchasing (or, you guessed it, failing to purchase) your product or service.
I discuss how best to deliver interesting and relevant (two very important words) content and how best to listen and take note of the response you get.
If you would like to view my presentation, click here.
Adestra Think Series Webinar Synopsis – Email data security
Thank you for joining us for our January webinar and bearing with us through the first few minutes while we sorted the sound!
Email data security, and data security more generally is certainly a hot topic at present, but also sometimes a tough one to get your head around. My webinar attempted to break this down into the essentials and the most common routes to a breach of some sort.
The fact too, that a breach can occur from such a seemingly innocent looking source – albeit, of course malicious in intent – can be quite frightening. When you then think about the potential consequences…
That said, there are relatively simple steps you can take to minimise your risk of a breach occurring in the short term. And although a longer term objective, starting out on a cultural shift towards all professionals being more aware of the issue. Prioritising of security and a shift in mind sets that security within an organisation is everyone’s concern has to be a key objective.
As I mentioned in the webinar, I realise that it’s not a catchy name, but if 2011 was The Year Of The Breach, then 2012 needs to be The Year of Security Awareness.
If you’d like to learn more I would suggest having a look at the Online Trust Alliance and DMA websites and others that I used as sources available here. If you would like to know how we at Adestra can help you with your data security please do get in touch or you can find more information on our data security features here and data security audits here.
If you would like to view the recorded webinar you can do so here.
Have you registered for our next webinar?
The power of SMS as a marketing channel
Date: Wednesday 22 February 2012
Time: 12:30pm GMT
Duration: 30 minutes
Right now how far away from you is your mobile? How many times have you looked at your mobile in the past hour? And lastly when you receive a message do you open it there and then? My guess as to your answer to each of these questions is: within a metre, at least once and you usually open any text messages as soon as you hear it come through.
The point to be made here is that SMS is a very powerful tool where brand and message visibility is concerned. Marketers everywhere need to be aware of how they can utilise SMS to their advantage.
What you will learn:
1. The different types of SMS Marketing – It is not only an outbound channel.
2. How to ensure the visibility rate matches the response rate.
3. The benefit of SMS as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign
The webinar will be led by one of Adestra’s Account Managers, Jenna Lovell:
A simple yet effective way to increase opens and clicks on your email
The dilemma many companies face is how to optimise the number of opens and clicks. When a retailer focuses on their bricks rather than their clicks, it is easy for them to alter their POS displays based on customer interactions on an ongoing basis to draw more people into their store, but how would they go about this when embarking on an email campaign? The easiest and most effective way is to test. Email marketing follows a simple path: a company sends out a campaign, a percentage of recipients open the campaign, a percentage click through and a percentage convert to a sale. Therefore, by maximising the amount of opens and clicks, you will in turn maximise the amount of sales that are achieved.
So below is a simple but effective way to increase both:
1. Increase open rate
Imagine the scenario: ABC wishes to send out an offer of 25 per cent off its Christmas collection to a database of 100,000. The marketing team has suggested a couple of subject lines for the email: “Take advantage of our online Christmas reductions” or “Christmas sale now on”. However, they are unsure as to which would garner the most opens.
The prudent option would be to send each subject line to a small sample of their data and roll out the most successful; commonly known as A/B testing. They could send subject line A to 5,000 recipients, subject line B to 5,000 recipients and then, whichever has received the most opens after, say four hours, is used to send to the final 90,000 recipients.
2. Increase click through rate
So ABC is now achieving higher open rates. The next stage is to increase the number of clicks they receive. They need to make sure the email creative continues the same message as the subject line. Two options would be to have one creative stating “25% off our Christmas range available in our online store now”, with the alternative being “Christmas range available in our online store now at 75% of RRP”. By again sending to a small sample of data and rolling out the successful campaign to the remaining recipients, ABC is able to achieve higher click throughs and increased online sales based on consumer engagement.
The above strategies are incredibly simple yet more effective than basing your targeting purely on assumptions, and can be worked alongside each other in a solitary campaign. Within Adestra’s MessageFocus we have an A/B split testing feature that rolls this out automatically – you just set the variants, the sample data size and the timeline for the results. For more information click here or contact us on moreinfo@adestra.com.
Email: The power and the glory
Last week Adestra sponsored the 2012 Figaro Email Seminar. The agenda focused on how email is the ultimate outbound channel, and set out with a team of industry experts to instil the lesson that marketers need to ensure their messages are timely and relevant.
We had our own Adestra industry expert, Account Director, Kate Gowers present on; Email: The power and the glory. Below she gives a brief synopsis of what she covered:
30 years ago (way back when the Dead Sea was still only sick), we had one commercial television station, one commercial radio station in London, and we got our news from newspapers and television. Fast forward to 2012 – the consumer of today gets his information from a myriad of sources. He reads his email, watches one of over 500 channels, surfs the net and opens his post. Media has truly fragmented, so the savvy marketer needs to adopt a truly multi-channel approach to keep our consumer’s (limited and transient) attention.
Email marketing is probably the only channel that allows for dialogue – it has the potential to be a true two way conversation. You have the opportunity to reinforce your brand, to educate your customers (or readers) about your offering or industry, to chase that elusive sale, to keep your customers happy and to create advocates amongst your customers (allowing them to do some of your work for you). To achieve all these things, though, you need to talk not SHOUT and ensure that when your programme does initiate response that you LISTEN to what your recipients have to say. Your customers are speaking to you – by opening, or failing to open a message; by clicking (or failing to click) a link and by purchasing (or, you guessed it, failing to purchase) your product or service.
I discuss how best to deliver interesting and relevant (two very important words) content and how best to listen and take note of the response you get.
If you would like to view my presentation, click here.
Adestra Think Series Webinar Synopsis – Email data security
Thank you for joining us for our January webinar and bearing with us through the first few minutes while we sorted the sound!
Email data security, and data security more generally is certainly a hot topic at present, but also sometimes a tough one to get your head around. My webinar attempted to break this down into the essentials and the most common routes to a breach of some sort.
The fact too, that a breach can occur from such a seemingly innocent looking source – albeit, of course malicious in intent – can be quite frightening. When you then think about the potential consequences…
That said, there are relatively simple steps you can take to minimise your risk of a breach occurring in the short term. And although a longer term objective, starting out on a cultural shift towards all professionals being more aware of the issue. Prioritising of security and a shift in mind sets that security within an organisation is everyone’s concern has to be a key objective.
As I mentioned in the webinar, I realise that it’s not a catchy name, but if 2011 was The Year Of The Breach, then 2012 needs to be The Year of Security Awareness.
If you’d like to learn more I would suggest having a look at the Online Trust Alliance and DMA websites and others that I used as sources available here. If you would like to know how we at Adestra can help you with your data security please do get in touch or you can find more information on our data security features here and data security audits here.
If you would like to view the recorded webinar you can do so here.
Have you registered for our next webinar?
The power of SMS as a marketing channel
Date: Wednesday 22 February 2012
Time: 12:30pm GMT
Duration: 30 minutes
Right now how far away from you is your mobile? How many times have you looked at your mobile in the past hour? And lastly when you receive a message do you open it there and then? My guess as to your answer to each of these questions is: within a metre, at least once and you usually open any text messages as soon as you hear it come through.
The point to be made here is that SMS is a very powerful tool where brand and message visibility is concerned. Marketers everywhere need to be aware of how they can utilise SMS to their advantage.
What you will learn:
1. The different types of SMS Marketing – It is not only an outbound channel.
2. How to ensure the visibility rate matches the response rate.
3. The benefit of SMS as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign
The webinar will be led by one of Adestra’s Account Managers, Jenna Lovell:
A simple yet effective way to increase opens and clicks on your email
The dilemma many companies face is how to optimise the number of opens and clicks. When a retailer focuses on their bricks rather than their clicks, it is easy for them to alter their POS displays based on customer interactions on an ongoing basis to draw more people into their store, but how would they go about this when embarking on an email campaign? The easiest and most effective way is to test. Email marketing follows a simple path: a company sends out a campaign, a percentage of recipients open the campaign, a percentage click through and a percentage convert to a sale. Therefore, by maximising the amount of opens and clicks, you will in turn maximise the amount of sales that are achieved.
So below is a simple but effective way to increase both:
1. Increase open rate
Imagine the scenario: ABC wishes to send out an offer of 25 per cent off its Christmas collection to a database of 100,000. The marketing team has suggested a couple of subject lines for the email: “Take advantage of our online Christmas reductions” or “Christmas sale now on”. However, they are unsure as to which would garner the most opens.
The prudent option would be to send each subject line to a small sample of their data and roll out the most successful; commonly known as A/B testing. They could send subject line A to 5,000 recipients, subject line B to 5,000 recipients and then, whichever has received the most opens after, say four hours, is used to send to the final 90,000 recipients.
2. Increase click through rate
So ABC is now achieving higher open rates. The next stage is to increase the number of clicks they receive. They need to make sure the email creative continues the same message as the subject line. Two options would be to have one creative stating “25% off our Christmas range available in our online store now”, with the alternative being “Christmas range available in our online store now at 75% of RRP”. By again sending to a small sample of data and rolling out the successful campaign to the remaining recipients, ABC is able to achieve higher click throughs and increased online sales based on consumer engagement.
The above strategies are incredibly simple yet more effective than basing your targeting purely on assumptions, and can be worked alongside each other in a solitary campaign. Within Adestra’s MessageFocus we have an A/B split testing feature that rolls this out automatically – you just set the variants, the sample data size and the timeline for the results. For more information click here or contact us on moreinfo@adestra.com.