Tough Times Ahead? Advice? Stay Calm

By Tink Taylor

As Woollies disappears from our high streets and others look set to follow, it is little surprise that retailers are doing their utmost to salvage as many last minute purchases as possible and capture important revenues in the forthcoming post-Christmas sales.

A quick trip down the high street sees 50% off, BOGOF offers and the promise of bargain basement prices. Online too, retailers are trying to attract punters with all the usual attractions: free postage, discounts…the list goes on.

And inboxes are feeling the strain. If you are anything like me, then you will have seen an increase in marketing messages over the last month or so and particularly last weekend, as retailers looked to cash in on the £320m online bonanza of ‘Mega Monday’.

It seems that at times like these, when the going gets tough, the tough are still falling into that simple trap of bombarding customers and prospects (some of them long-standing) with poorly targeted offers.

Now is the time for a carefully planned and thought-out CRM strategy. Every single piece of data captured throughout the year should be used to maximise returns during the festive season and January sales season.

So with Christmas upon us and those all important sales just about to start, what’s the best thing to do? Stick to your guns. Don’t panic. And continue sending the right message to the customer or prospect that will appreciate it most. Here are my three top tips to remember when sending out those last-minute emails:

• Resist the urge to mass mail. Target every message you send so that yours stands out in a crowded inbox
• With New Year sales likely to be more cut-throat than ever, using a targeted and engaging call to action will help increase click-throughs and conversions
• Finally, don’t forget to customise your landing pages. Highlight particularly important information such as delivery dates and costs, not to mention up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
  

A recession is a scary time, but the bravest thing to do is to keep plugging away at those best practices and maintaining your brand image, respect and trust.

Inside Knowledge Seminar

By Donna McNicholas

Last week dotMailer held our first Inside Knowledge seminar at our Manchester offices. Businesses from far and wide came to learn how they can increase their online presence and effectively target their customers, prospects etc with email and digital marketing. Most of the 60 attendees were from the North West but a few travelled from as far south as Kent - so a big thank you to all who attended.

We kicked off with a demonstration of our dotMailer Enterprise platform. With over 20 new features added in the past month including behavioural segmentation and geo mapping there was lots of new features to interest even our oldest and most email savvy customers.

Our Client Services Director, Tink Taylor did a lively yet informative presentation on our Hitting the Mark report, looking at the email practice of the high street and showing our guests just how they can take lessons from the retailers to change their own email marketing to deliver real and tangible results. The feedback and buzz from this presentation was echoed throughout the festive drinks and mince pies that were served during the networking after the seminar closed.

Simon Bird’s session on driving traffic to your site and then converting the sales completed the day and the cycle that many online visitors experience. Helpful and practical tips were shared on how to quickly increase your Google rankings by following simple SEO tips and tricks.

The event from start to finish was great and I'm looking forward to further events throughout 2009.

20 new features in our email marketing platform

By Cliff Guy

In June this year we launched dotMailer Enterprise - our new feature-rich email marketing platform. Pretty much every week since then we've deployed an upgrade to the system, adding new capabilities and performance for users to benefit from.

In the last month or so we've upgraded the dotMailer platform by adding over 20 new features - quite a feat on the part of our development team. Each feature we add is designed to help save our clients time and enable them to send powerful and effective email campaigns intuitively. Plus we in the marketing department at dotMailer get to take advantage of the new features too!

How clean is your data?

By Peter Simmonds

Last week we launched 'Data Integrity Scoring' for our clients here at dotMailer. It sounds complex but it isn't - it's just very, very useful.

The quality of your data is a critical factor in your deliverability rates and response rates.
The cleanest, most responsive data is that which you've collected yourself from your website or viral promotions, or at any touch point with your prospects and customers.

Sometimes however, buying a quality list of legally opted in prospects is an option marketers choose to pursue, in order to extend the reach of email marketing campaigns.

So to help monitor the quality of our clients' data we've introduced data integrity scoring to dotMailer.
On upload of new data to a client's address books, dotMailer automatically checks the contacts being loaded for 'integrity'.

The system scans the data, looking for email addresses that are not likely to have been opted-in, e.g. 'info@...' 'contactus@...' and 'abuse@...'

dotMailer will also look for email addresses that are flagged as mandatory suppressions on our system. These will be complainants who have requested not to be contacted by any email sender again. We'll look for frankly 'dodgy' email addresses such as the ubiquitous 'Donald Duck' and score your uploaded data on its integrity in terms of containing what is likely to be legitimately opted-in contacts.

If we think there's cause for concern for in the data a client has uploaded then their Account Manager will give a call to let them know what we've found and advise on how they can go back to their data supplier and ensure the data being supplied is what they have paid for.

It's all part of our fight against spam and for the best service for our clients.

Will your emails and websites break in IE8?

By Tink Taylor

I attended the DMA’s conference on Internet and Email Security Measures for Digital marketing at the end of October. With Craig Spiezle, Director of Online Security and Safety from Microsoft Internet Explorer, a main focus of the conference was on the launch of IE8, InPrivate browsing and the implications for online tracking. The news is that there won’t be an issue with IE8 for emails but there will be for websites.

So the message I send to you all this Christmas (apart from the usual Christmas cheer and greetings) is: YOUR WEBSITE WILL MORE THAN LIKELY BREAK IN IE8 and in the best boy scout fashion, please please please be prepared

• Evaluate the third party content on your site
• Evaluate your privacy policy
• Identify your partner data and privacy policies
• Investigate InPrivate Feeds - Contract TRUSTe
• Publish a thirdparty.html page

Download a beta version of IE8 and test your website. Read the advice on what to do if it breaks your site and fix it before the major release of IE8.

If you have 3rd party content on your site, make sure you link to who provides the content and continually build trust throughout your site. IE8 will make the world wide web a safer place to do legitimate business, we all just need to be ready.

After the conference the speakers and I went for dinner. As I was taking photos of the dinner I noticed how well dressed several of my companions were.

Denny Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer, Eloqua who spoke on email authentication, in his green shirt, Craig Spiezle, Microsoft, in his salmon pink shirt and Dela Quist, CEO, Alchemy Worx who talked on the changing rules of deliverability and the importance of data mining and hygiene in purple. How splendid it was that my email marketing colleagues chose to wear dotMailer's 3 corporate colours, including Dela's purple - the colour our new dotCommerce product is branded with!

Its always a pleasure spending time with my fellow Email Marketing Council members at the DMA. At the council we put a lot of hard work into providing thought leadership through such events. Watch this space as I will be posting the details of all the up coming events I recommend you attend. Whilst you wait why not also check out our Email Marketing Council blog which is full of practical advice.

Putting your best offer forward

By Tink Taylor

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is what’s the best offer to make in my emails? What will make my email recipients click?

And the answer to that is I don’t know, BUT – I do know how to find out!

At the Deloitte Fast Track 500 awards that I attended the other week at Lords Cricket Ground I was talking to a guy who’s company was in the top 10 Fast Growing Technology Companies and we were talking about the offers that he puts in his email campaigns.

His company sells fairly small value items, around the €30 mark and he was testing what type of offer worked best, either a hard cash money off offer, or a percentage discount. His test showed that one was 8-1 times more effective but which one he asked us all. We went round the table and all put in our guess. We all went for the hard cash option, but we were wrong.

On the other hand I remember reading about a promotion that I think was Dodge auto. They ran a 50% off promotion which didn’t generate any orders. They changed the order to BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) which is financially the same offer and were inundated with orders.

The point is you don’t know what offer will be most successful until you try and test it yourself with your own markets. What works for one business does not always work for another and my answer to anyone who asks is TEST TEST TEST. We’ve made it easy to test in dotMailer to encourage our customers to find out what does work best.

I suggest you do the same.

dotMailer is growing... and fast!

By Tink Taylor

Myself and the rest of the dotMailer board were very happy to be present at last week's Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA awards ceremony, held at Lords Cricket Ground in London. The reason we were so happy is because dotMailer was one of the 500 winners.

We were one of only 69 UK companies to make the list, so we really were chuffed with the award. Deloittes base the ranking on percentage revenue growth over the last 5 years which is figure we've been watching very closely ourselves.

But I'm also proud to say that we have grown in so many other ways over the last few years. In the last year and a half alone dotMailer's headcount has increased from 16 to over 50 and we now have a Manchester office as well as our East Croydon headquarters.

We have lots more feature-rich and user-friendly products to offer our clients that integrate or fit perfectly with our email marketing solution. We have increasingly deeper relationships with our clients, helping them with more aspects of their marketing. And I guess we have a few more laughter lines and even the odd grey hair. A small price to pay for a great award - now sat proudly on our reception desk!

The Attack of the Killer Shoes

By Cliff Guy

On a seemingly normal day in November, one of dotMailer's email marketing clients sent an email campaign through dotMailer to an email list of 88 opted-in contacts which then showed a staggering 9,000 number of opens.

How can they have done such a thing?

Well mentioning no names, our client - a much admired designer shoe label - followed one of the number 1 golden rules of marketing - make them an offer they can't resist. Who could resist? No-one, it seemed. And the power of email marketing meant one click of the forward button sent this offer truly viral.

Our viral specialists leapt into action. What had caused the spectacular success of this tiny campaign? How could we help all our clients' emails do the same?

The diagnosis was clear:

1. The offer was so great that everyone who saw it wanted to tell other people. (the chance to get first dibs at this prestigious designer shoe sample sale).
2. The offer was presented as an invitation to a private event - so the recipients wanted to share it because it made them look 'in the know'.
3. By offering them something to sign up to, they collected the viral recipients' data and grew their databases, closing the loop.

This wasn't the first time a dotMailer email had gone viral - but it is our most instantly contagious so far. If there's a cure for this, I don't need it!

H@rDCorE MedS 4 U!

by Dave Ivy

Hard to believe in this day and age that spam can still work, isn't it? But that's the conclusion Metro magazine came to a few weeks ago when they worked out that if just 0.00000008 per cent of people respond then spammers can make up to 2.2 million pounds. Well at least we know why they're still doing it.

But who responds to these emails?? Surely the type of people that click on these links should have removed themselves from the gene pool long ago and appear prominently in the Darwin awards. I imagine they're the same people that think they've genuinely won top prizes when their newspaper scratchcards all reveal winning symbols. Or perhaps they're the ones that feed sharks off the coast of Florida wearing nothing but scuba suits and smelling of fish blood.

It gives me a headache just thinking about it - must dig out one of those cut-price meds emails and order some paracetamols...