We love our lunchtime training sessions here at Red C. Every few weeks, a feast of sandwiches, cakes and pastries is laid out in the boardroom and we’re invited to gorge ourselves, whilst picking up new skills and knowledge from guest speakers or colleagues.

It was at one such day earlier this month that our Managing Director, Adrian Rowe, shared a presentation that he’d previously been invited to give at a conference in Amsterdam. It was an online masterclass, detailing some of the key learnings Red C have picked up during our time creating and implementing web strategy for our clients.

Part of this presentation included 7 ‘killer’ email tips Red C have found to be very effective. I thought it would be a good idea to share them with you here.

1. Fake it!

Whilst email allows you to create marketing communications that can do much more than DM, we can’t do everything we’d like. Embedded video, drop-down menus, product zoom, we’d love to be able to integrate them all but the limitations of HTML and email service providers don’t allow it.

What we do have however, is a huge amount of content and functionality stored on our clients’ web servers – just a click away. Simply telling people about it is often not good enough to generate enough interest to click through. But show them and it’s a different story.

If you’ve got some video content you want to promote then show it within the email, as if it’s ready to play. The customer clicks on it to take a look and are taken through to watch the video on the website. Once on the website of course, they have access to all the products you’re trying to sell and who knows what can happen then? Red C do the same thing with product zooms. If product zoom is available on a product, we make sure we put an icon to say so. If a customer clicks on it, they have the option to take a closer look at the product on the website then add it to their basket.

Red C has found this technique to be exceptionally effective at driving traffic onto our clients’ websites. And just think, the more people that click through to your site, the more opportunity you have of generating a sale.

2. Sequential emails

If there’s an offer to promote, it doesn’t make sense to only tell your customers about it once. The huge benefit of email over DM is that it is much, much cheaper and the bulk of the cost is tied up in the generation of the creative and set-up charges. Once this is in place it is a fairly simple matter to tweak the creative slightly and turn the email into an urgent reminder, urging the customer not to miss out on the offer. This can then be sent out with minimal effort.

This allows you to send out reminders that create urgency and most importantly drive demand at very little cost. They can be sent out throughout the campaign or as the offer is ending. Typically, Red C has found that these reminder emails perform as well as the initial email, doubling the campaign profit for only a small extra cost. They can even be used subsequently to extend the offer ‘by popular demand’ to extract even more value.

3. Secondary navigation

The 2 key customer benefits of internet shopping are speed and convenience. The internet shopper has neither the time nor the patience to browse in the same way as their high street equivalent. As such, smart navigation is essential in guiding your customers effortlessly to the product they wish to purchase.

All your emails should offer category or department navigation as standard. But when talking about specific products, ‘party shoes’ for example, why not give your customer the opportunity drill down further? The product we’re showcasing won’t be perfect for everyone but if your customer is in the market for a pair of shoes and there’s a secondary navigation allowing her to shop by price or by size, you encourage her curiosity. “I don’t like those shoes” becomes “I’ll just see what they have in my size” or “I wonder what they’ve got for less than £30”. They have managed to go directly from the email to a tailored search in one step, cutting out the hassle for them and creating a situation more likely to result in an order.

By analysing the click through behaviour on this type of navigation, you can also track customer trends and use this to inform future email content.

4. Added value content

These day’s customers are bombarded with a staggering amount of email communications. There is a seemingly limitless supply of retailers just itching to get consumers to sign up to their email programmes. But why should they? What’s in it for them? Of course it can be argued that being first to see sale items or newly added products is a benefit. But don’t retailers also have a duty to give something else back to the consumer in return for their email data?

By including added value content to emails or, even better, by sending out a regular email composed almost entirely of added value content you can demonstrate customer empathy, strengthening the bond between sender and recipient.

Some fashion retailers make good use of AVC, using their emails to offer style tips and advice and linking through to blogs and video content on their website. In Red C’s experience these emails regularly outperform standard emails in driving sales too, as consumers take on board the advice and take the short step to making a purchase.

5. Tailored content

Red C tailors content in DM all the time. We know that personalised content works, so we include variable text and variable imagery in our packs, maximising the chances of resonating with a customer and increasing the chance success.

With email you can often be guilty of carpet bombing your customer and prospect base with 1000s of emails, all with the same content. Because email is so cheap, you can do this, still cover costs and generate a profit. But how much greater the rewards if you make the content bespoke?

You’ve probably go the data. For your best customers, you know what they buy and how they browse and for your prospects you know their sex and (if you’ve tailored the registration correctly) what they’re interested in. By using this information to inform your email creative, you increase the potential for success.

It costs more of course, it takes more effort too. But by reducing the number of irrelevant emails reaching customers, we increase the potential for generating click-through traffic and ultimately sales.

6. Telepathic emails

Big brother is watching you! Scary but it’s true. If you’re on the internet, someone, somewhere knows it. This presents an unrivalled opportunity for marketers to segment customers and prospects much more efficiently, enabling them to telepathically send customers relevant messages at a relevant time.

Picture the scene. You’re in the market for a new TV although you haven’t told anyone yet. You receive an email from a retailer that, amongst other imagery, includes a shiny new flat-screen.  You click on it, take a look, then get back to work. The very next day you receive an email all about TVs, showing the latest offers and inviting you to browse the buying guide. “How timely” you think as you click through to the site to take advantage of the offer.

As you can imagine, this type of email can achieve fantastic results, plus you don’t even need customers to interact with an initial email first. You can recognise them as they browse the website. If they look at a particular section for more than a few minutes, you can assume they are in the market to make a purchase, so you send them a relevant email right there and then.

Unsurprisingly, Red C has seen this kind of strategy achieve outstanding results for our clients.

7. Triggered emails

Triggered emails are an email ‘no-brainer’. Email sign-up confirmation, order confirmation, reactivation. These emails are low in cost but high in potential. They have the ability to catch your customer in the warmest frames of mind – after they’ve made a successful purchase or after they’ve signed up for an email programme.  They can also reignite old flames, encouraging lapsed customers to order again. These customers all have much more potential than a cold prospect and an automated email programme that targets them successfully will reap the rewards.

The most crucial weapon in the triggered email arsenal though is the abandoned basket email. Millions of items are sat in online shopping baskets right now, never to be visited again. For whatever reason their owner decided not to buy at that time, intending to complete the purchase at a later date. An abandoned basket email, generating just the right level of urgency, greatly increases the chance of the purchase being completed.

Red C recently looked at an abandoned basket email strategy for one of our clients and estimated (based on quite conservative conversion rates) that a simple triggered email could generate £3 million in increased revenue. That’s got to be worth a couple of grand of any company’s marketing budget!

As our MD Adrian Rowe often says, the key to successful email marketing is creating “a rich and varied inbox”. The ideas above will certainly go a long way to achieving that.

If you’d like to have an effective email marketing campaign created for you, call 0161 872 1361 or click here to contact us.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Blog, E-mail Marketing, ecommerce, Email, General Interest, Inside Information, Marketing, Marketing Innovations, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.