As I stated in a previous post, almost no one at the cutting edge of the digital marketing industry is taking email seriously. This could just be that it's no longer the 'cool kid' in the class room, it might also be that what most creative agencies did with email was generate viral campaigns which was very easily moved to social once these streams gained traction.
Either way the breakfast panel filled with suppliers to the industry was the only session devoted to email. Here's what I learnt.
STATS
But to do this it means that targeting is important, looking for those trigger points, phases in a customer cycle (ie: Say the 18 month time frame where a performing arts patron might become a lapsed patron). These things are nearly impossible to do manually, so you need systems to help them become if not automated but programmatic and system driven.
It is proven that customer service emails have a high rate of acceptability, moving your email relationship to one where you are seen as a helpful friend can only benefit your business in the long term.
EMAIL MARKETING LIFECYCLE
STATS
- Microsoft Outlook still accounts for 21% of all email traffic.
- iOS accounts for 16% and growing. Think about how your emails look on mobile devices - especially Apple.
- 26% access via Hotmail
- 10% via gmail
- Mobile web traffic will over take desktop traffic in 2014
- 15% of emails are read on mobile – 85% of that via iOS
STRATEGY
Look beyond just push marketing, think about every customer touch point in your customer relationship and whether email can play a role. It may be that this medium in your business needs to shift away from being a core sales tool and more towards being a tool to influence post-purchase behaviour, re-activate lapsed client and the like. But to do this it means that targeting is important, looking for those trigger points, phases in a customer cycle (ie: Say the 18 month time frame where a performing arts patron might become a lapsed patron). These things are nearly impossible to do manually, so you need systems to help them become if not automated but programmatic and system driven.
It is proven that customer service emails have a high rate of acceptability, moving your email relationship to one where you are seen as a helpful friend can only benefit your business in the long term.
EMAIL MARKETING LIFECYCLE
OLD conversations – frequency of contact and design of the email
CURRENT conversations – targeted lists
THE NEXT WAVE – programmatic emails, triggered at key points of customer relationship, integrated with social media.
Some simple ways you can do this in the performing arts are: Don't just target the one broad list or even genre based start to include recency, frequency, click through, open rate, basically whatever you can to talk to your 'active list' rather than wasting money hitting the inactive not-yet-unsubscribed.
CURRENT conversations – targeted lists
THE NEXT WAVE – programmatic emails, triggered at key points of customer relationship, integrated with social media.
Some simple ways you can do this in the performing arts are: Don't just target the one broad list or even genre based start to include recency, frequency, click through, open rate, basically whatever you can to talk to your 'active list' rather than wasting money hitting the inactive not-yet-unsubscribed.
DON'TS
DO's
ALWAYS Make your real world experience meet the demands of your online one – eg: if you have an e-bookers queue in your box office make damn sure that it moves faster than the non-e-bookers one!
The actions we are doing as a result of Ad:tech and these notes are:
- People HATE Bait email – companies like like Wotif – who you might only use once or twice in a period of time for a specific service but you have now being 'tricked' into receiving daily emails from.
- Whatever the rationale never, ever charge more for people to purchase online.
DO's
- Creativity is still really important, good copy, nice design are important regardless of the media
- 35 characters MAX in your subject headers.
- ALWAYS Optimise for Mobile
- Test across different email systems
- Think about “images off” and how your EDM looks.
- Use Facebook to drive email sign ups and vice versa
- Set key long term targets and get the stats to check on it.
- Make sure your call to actions drive engagement such as check the video of this musician rather than just "Buy Tickets".
ALWAYS Make your real world experience meet the demands of your online one – eg: if you have an e-bookers queue in your box office make damn sure that it moves faster than the non-e-bookers one!
The actions we are doing as a result of Ad:tech and these notes are:
- Redesigning InBOX so it reads better for images off.
- Working on better integration with our ticketing database for smarter, more integrated list pulling and better measurement of ROI.
- Putting more pressure on our technology partners about systemising things like "About to lapse" patron campaigns. Currently these would be too driven by manual list pulling and excel spreadsheet manipulation.
Anyhow I promised more detail from my Ad:tech notes. This was the email one look forward to more!
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