Email Marketing, Shared

Non Responders

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:14:44 +0000

These are perhaps the second most important audience after sales people and marketeers. You need to understand why they didn’t respond, enquire or order. In marketing terms, these non responders have brought down your response rates and significantly reduced your profits. Before you start your next campaign you need to investigate who they are, find out why they didn’t respond. If you establish that the communication you sent needs to be tweaked for them to respond then do so. If there is no hope that they will ever buy from you then use them to suppress others who look or behave like them.

It could be that the prospects targeted simply have no requirement, perhaps it was the price, perhaps they do not respond to email offers. However, we need to understand the exact reasons and identify if there’s a common trend. For example, if we note that ‘Plumbers’ will never need a “Widget” then we learn from this and exclude plumbers from future campaigns that promote that product. Via intelligence, we will reduce data & broadcasting costs whilst increase your next email campaign conversion ratio to better your ROI.

Typically we target 15% of the non responders to analyse why they haven’t purchased – if you’re doing this then it should be a good cross section of the non responders, not just the top of the list.

Each campaign you send out will be more targeted based on your understanding of the non responders. The response rate will therefore increase every time you run a campaign as the list provider you use for your emails will be suppressing people that look like your non responders.

Wasted Sales vs Fulfilment

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:07:58 +0000

It is imperative that you communicate with email responders within the first 24 hours, whilst your product is fresh in the enquirers mind. This will maximise your chances of a sale. Sounds obvious but if you operate a one man band and send out 5,000 emails its likely your going to get a few enquirers and a few sales. Often we concentrate on the sales first and then when we have time we move to the enquiries… Of course the sales are in the bad so you should go for the enquiries to convert more but even better than that you should have emailed fewer people in the first place so that you can manage both types of response without upsetting anyone. This would also give you more time to focus on closing the enquirers!

Thanks to the power of the internet, the method of communication can be instant through on-line enquiries. Product information instantly displayed when they click through from the initial email. However, often, this is not enough. You may need to send the enquirer brochures, samples or a free offer in order to generate a sale. In many cases, you may not have the infrastructure or support to manage this in-house. Perhaps you just want the entire process managed and are only interested in order taking. Under these circumstances, we strongly suggest you use response fulfilment services to shorten the gap between the enquiry and order cycle. Need help, post it here or ask us.

Response Analysis

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:01:15 +0000

Success, you have orders and you have enquirers! The email campaign has been a success (especially if the response rate was guaranteed! – this is covered elsewhere if your wondering).  Now we look at significantly increasing the response rate for your next campaign. Let’s start by looking at the organisations that responded and then compare those to the non responders.

Why? Well to increase the number of orders you get with each subsequent campaign you run. Through analysis, we can better the last campaign’s results!

How? You have a great deal of data on the businesses that you selected, you know there name, sex, job title, location, the business type that they work from, the number of employees located there, their turnover. Okay, so you probably do not have this level of information just yet but it’s easy to acquire. The data manager that provided the list will have this level of content or should do, so ask them to append it to your records or ask them to run two profiles. The first profile is base don customers and the second based on non responders. By analysing and understanding more about each camp you can restrict future prospecting by supplying the data broadcasting agency or email list provider with suppressions (a profile of people that do not buy your products) and selections (a profile of people that do buy your product).

By profiling each camps industry type, their size, the contact’s position, their turnover, their office type, address, how many offices they represent in the UK, etc. We analyse & segment using this information to identify patterns. We can use this to improve the next response rate, by adjusting your selection profile; excluding businesses with a low probability to respond whilst selecting high probability prospects.

Sounds simple! Well, if you need us to analyse by product and then segment this profile based on high profitability, look at life time value of a customer and then work out allowable cost to acquire a customer…… Lets just say it takes a little experience. Experience we are happy to offer to you if it will increase your response rate and help us retain you as a longer term satisfied customer. Through analysis and profiling we have lifted response rates from 0.05% to 74%!

Targeting

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:51:44 +0000

Profiling & Targeting
A good profile will dramatically increase your success – no surprise there then! So work with you to identify the businesses you should target to obtain the highest response rate possible. You would be amazed at how many novice marketeers still believe that you achieve a return on your marketing costs by marketing to just about anyone and everyone. So many businesses go pop by using this approach.

The ideal campaign targets prospects that “look” like recent customers who have bought the product you intend selling. By look we of course mean that they have a similar employee size, location, business activity and turnover etc. Or if they are consumers, then have a similar lifestyle, income, location, family size, sex, age etc.

To put profiling into context in terms of the price vs. return on investment – after all its all about making a profit! Profiling will not only increase the chances of success (often between 2 and 76%) but will also reduce waste in terms of trying to sell to organisations that will never have an interest in your product.

The Correct Process
- identify the product you wish to market
- look at the data you have on your customers (who have purchased / used you in the last year)
- ask you data provider to add more information to this list of names and addresses (employee size and business type etc)
- analyse the file to look for common trends and characteristics
- look for prospects who have very close characteristics to your customers

If you don’t want to do this yourself then ask a data house or even ask one of our guys who will recommend you on to someone who does profiling for a living. In return they will tell you who to target, why and even know how many prospects there are in the UK that look like and behave like your existing customers. Marketing to these “look alikes” will increase your chances of selling product to them compared to trying to sell products to just about anyone regardless of if they can afford your products, have a need for it…

Pay for Performance

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:40:26 +0000

Guaranteed Email Response Rates
One of the most critical issues concerning any marketing campaign is calculating if you’re going to achieve a Return On Investment. The catch 22 is that you will not know what your response rate will be and therefore if it’s going to be cost effective. You could of course run several small tests but still this is money being spent and delays due to set ups for the tests and then analysing the responses, tweaking the message, testing the tweaked message and so on…

Getting one element wrong can send your response rates plummeting and your cost per lead soaring!

There are several companies that offer a guaranteed number of leads for your marketing investment, ensuring that your expectations and targets for the campaign are met and, in most cases, exceeded. The organisations that we use will work with you to identify the number of email responses you need in order to gain a Return on Investment and then we guarantee that response rate!

How can they guarantee the response rate?

What if you could get a guaranteed response rate for your email campaign? How about you only pay if people respond to your email or just paid for real leads generated?

The impact of this approach on your campaign performance are obvious! For the first time, you’re now able to manage your marketing budget based entirely around a known Return On Investment! You’ll know exactly what return you’re going to receive for every £1 you spend. We’ve stopped the gambling on whether you can achieve a set response rate to cover your email marketing costs; our unique new service means. No response – No fee!

So how does it work?
- Select your prospect pool based on organisations most likely to want your product
- Agree the number of responses / leads you can manage (minimum 200)
- Create your email message (or ask the supplier to do this) to promote your product
- Decide on a ‘pay per lead’ or ‘pay per click’ contract
- Have the supplier dedupe your clients from the prospect data (Optional Service)
- Have the supplier broadcast the email message on your behalf

The supplier will even deliver a real-time & online “response tracker tool” so you can monitor how the campaigns progressing. The leads / enquiries are diverted to your web site or the suppliers offices or directly to you and you only pay for the responses.
All rates are pre-agreed and there are no hidden surprises and start to finish the campaign will take approximately two working days. Sounds to good to be true I know but it really isn’t. This solution or service isn’t open to anyone. You see the supplier has a great deal of information about all of the products that their clients have been selling over the years and they know with a certain degree of accuracy what response rate you are going to achieve. This allows them to negotiate a specific share of the profits. You still get your response rate and sales but you also know your going to make a profit too with very little risk. Of course it could all go wrong but that is the supplier problem as they continue to send out your emails until the number of sales / responses that they promised to deliver has been delivered.

If your interested in knowing more, please type away and we will do our best to get back to you as soon as we can.

Direct Mail vs eMail

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:22:18 +0000

To give you an idea as to what type of medium to use in your marketing we have below compared typical statistics for Direct Mail vs Email Broadcasting. Hope it helps!

	Email	Direct Mail
Target Size	25,000	25,000
Typical Response Rate	1.4%	0.6%
Leads Generated	350	150
Reaction Time to Promotion	Instant	2-6 days
Typical Goneaways	1.7%	6%
Mail / HTML Creative Design & Production	£150	£300
Stationery Cost	£0	£2,500
Print & Mail-Merge	£0	£2,500
Enclosing & Fulfilment	£0	£1,000
Postage	£0	£7,500
Est. Price for responders / pre-paid response	£5,500	£60
Prospect Data List	£7,000	£3,000
Response Data Capture	£150	£200
Totals	£12,800	£18,560
Cost per Lead	£36	£124

Business Email List Profiles

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:47:36 +0000

There are circa 500,000 contact and job title personalised email addresses available for you to select from. These emails have been verified. Outside of the following broad profiles there are dozens of other fields that you can use to select specific lists that will be suitable for your targeting purposes including around 3,000 business types.

The following figures are based on a business universe of 2.2 million site based organisations.

Premise Type, Emails Available
Business At Home, 64,934
Factories & Manufacturing, 32,608
Head Office, 83,841
Hospitals & Medical Establishments, 10,670
Office & Administration, 158,749
Places of Worship, 2,942
Police, Fire, Ambulance etc, 1,060
Schools & Education, 15,926
Shops & Other Retail, 77,571
Sport, Leisure, Entertainment, 7,845
Transport, 295
Warehouse & Wholesalers, 14,481
Workshops & Repair Centres, 19,588

Region, Emails Available
Eastern, 36,985
Midlands, 70,150
North, 36,397
North East, 14,492
North West, 49,735
Northern Ireland, 8,981
Scotland, 37,143
South East, 162,424
South West, 50,048
Wales, 18,770

Employee Size, Emails Available
1 (79,298)
2 – 5 (157,101)
6 – 9 (95,613)
10 – 19 (66,929)
20 – 49 (54,259)
50 – 99 (17,684)
100 – 199 (8,134)
200 – 499 (3,791)
500 – 1,000 (1,042)
1,000+ (325)

Please note that these figures will be out of date no sooner than they have been published as the file is constantly managed and updated; but hopefully they provide you with a starting point.

Email Response Rates

Milton — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:34:25 +0000

Email Broadcasting Response Rates

Of course the response rate you will receive from an email broadcast will very much depend upon what your trying to sell and how your marketing. Other factors include the list you use, how tightly you research the prospects you will be targeting and how personalised your email content will be. Other factors such as will you be following the email campaign up will help with sales but are not relevant to response rates for the email broadcast.

The following response rates are based on an average of what clients receive from their vampaigns. Some campaigns in my opinion are better constructed than others, likewise some products are more in demand than others. The stats are broken down by sector to give you an idea of a typical response rate based on the products being sold by that sector:

Industry Sector
Average Response Rate
Advertising 2.65%
Charity   1.58%
Design   1.30%
Commerce   1.81%
Finance   2.33%
Human Resources 1.08%
IT   1.49%
Leisure/Entertainment 1.82%
Marketing Services 1.84%
Medical   1.79%
Public Sector   1.96%
Publishing   7.28%
Telecoms    1.28%
Overall Average 1.58%

The response rate is measured as an immediate response (within 5 days of a campaign being sent), naturally responses increase a little (but not much) if the window was extended to say 2 weeks.

Dedupe

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:12:33 +0000

Client Dedupe
One guaranteed way of losing customers and diminishing brand value is to communicate with a customer as if they were a prospect – inadvertently telling them you do not remember nor value them!

The importance of removing customers from e-mail distribution lists cannot be underestimated and should be high on you list of actions for any planned campaign. With email-logic’s deduplication services you can be assured that your promotion, communication or offer will only reach the people you need it to hit. In addition to preserving your brand perception with your customers, you will also make real cost savings on list rental, marketing collateral, fulfilment and postage.

The Deduplication
- Removal of customer records from the prospect pool you plan on targeting
- Removal of customer record duplications present within your own customer file

Why?

Emailing the same contact more than once with the same message:
- damages your brand
- duplicates your costs
- makes it hard to measure the true response rate
- could adversely impact any chance of a response from that prospect
- is against Anti Spam policy
- goes against the Institute of Direct Marketing’s best practices
- could loose you a customer

Through InfoLogic, Email-Logic offer a free health check, and if required will confidently identify the duplicates within your file.