Spurs 5 - Arsenal 1. Get in!

My school years are long behind me now, but I still have one or two memories of those days that I recall with fondness, now and again.  Bunking off double geography with Sarah Kirsopp when I was 16 is one. The other is a conversation I had with the 6^th Form’s Career Officer, Mr Kennedy.

The conversation started with a question we’ve all probably been asked.

“What do you want to do when you leave school?”

My enthusiastic response wasn’t greeted with the warmth or indeed excitement that I anticipated.

“Don’t be ridiculous White!  How on earth do you expect to be centre forward for Tottenham Hotspur?”

I left that meeting thinking to myself, “I’ll prove Mr Kennedy wrong, I’ll show you.  Mark my words”.

To be fair, whilst I haven’t completely given up on the dream, I have to admit it looks like Mr Kennedy was right.  But it’s not all doom and gloom.  Today I have actually found something I genuinely like doing.

One of the many emails designed, built and analysed by Red C

There are several reasons why I enjoy working with this electronic format of response driven marketing. Over the next few months I’m going to outline exactly what those reasons are.  However, I’m going kick things off with what I believe is the key reason why I’ve seen such positive commercial improvement across the email programmes I have managed over the last 3 years.

I’m going to tell you about heat map analysis.

When I first discovered heat map analysis I was amazed such a tool existed.  Even Adrian, my Managing Director, was genuinely excited by this discovery. We quickly realised how useful this tool would be when developing and evolving strategies.

So what is heat map analysis?

In basic terms, heat map analysis is a web analytical tool that enables you to understand exactly how a customer or prospect interacts with your email creative.  It tells you exactly what areas of an email are stimulating click-through, and which areas are not.  This in itself is pretty amazing, but we also discovered relatively recently that you can track sales back to the individual creative elements of an email as well.

To put this in context, can you imagine if you could translate this over to the offline world?  Just imagine the innovations you’d make to your direct mail packs if you knew the second paragraph of your covering letter didn’t stimulate any direct response or if the second product on the left hand panel outperformed the hero product by 2 to 1?

Well, I’m making exactly those types of innovations to email creative right now. It’s contributing enormously to improved click-through rates and ultimately improving return on investment.

We’ve been using this tool for the best part of three years and even with such dramatically improved results, we’re not resting on our laurels.  We discover new things each and every time we conduct an analysis.

A controversial statement about copy

Obviously, I can’t go into too much detail about what we’ve discovered, but I will say this.  The first key learning was quite controversial. Indeed it went against much of what you tend to hear from so-called email marketing experts.

If you’ve ever visited an email marketing conference, you’ve probably heard people tell you to keep copy to the bare minimum.  Certainly, on more than one occasion, I’ve been told “people don’t read the copy”.  Thanks to heat map analysis, we’ve discovered this just isn’t the case.  In fact, the reverse is true. We’ve seen copy generating better click-through results than a product showcase, a price point or even a call to action.  Now, I’m not suggesting that every email you distribute should be copy heavy. But if the copy is relevant and interesting you shouldn’t shy away from treating it as an integral part of your email creative.

Navigation sweeps up lost customers

Another discovery we’ve unearthed is probably less of a shock. However I believe this key learning has contributed to a large number of incremental click-throughs and therefore improved ROI.  It concerns navigation. We’ve seen large proportions of our email database interacting positively with our email’s navigation bar.  On occasions it’s been as much as 40% of total click-throughs.  Consequently, we’ve made several innovations to our client’s email creative.  We’ve introduced a secondary navigation bar at the base of the email.  The rationale being that if we repeat the navigation at the base of the email, it should sweep up any customers who have failed to find anything in the rest of the email that interests them. The result: incremental click-throughs.

What’s more, as a significant proportion of our response audience interacts with the navigation, we’ve also tried introducing a secondary layer of navigation.  After all, if an email’s key objective is to drive customers through to a website, surely we must do all we can to make that as easy as possible.

The fight for email marketing real estate

With every one of the email programmes I’ve managed I’ve always worked with one key objective in mind; make it as profitable as possible.  Like any marketing communication there is always debate around which key messages should be displayed and which should be consigned to the cutting room floor. Email is no different.  Due to the immediacy and relative ease of implementation the fight for email marketing real estate is often the fiercest fight of them all.  The decisions around email content have always been made on what “feels right” rather than on any form of statistics.

Now however, by using heat map analysis, we make decisions based on fact rather than assumption.  At Red C we use this tool to prove to clients that it’s not always essential to fill your email creative with a multitude of product and sales messages.  We’ve even used it to prove how it’s often the non-sales focused content that triggers the majority of responses.   In the past for example, we’ve seen a whole variety of value added content – from recipes to fashion advice – working hard to generate response.

That’s probably enough for now.  I may have said too much already!  Next time, I’ll be looking at what I’m referring to as “the next big thing” in email marketing; triggered emails.

Ok, so it’s not quite scoring an acrobatic volley in the last minute of a North London derby, but all in all it is a pretty interesting and enjoyable job that I’ve found myself in.  And it could be worse of course. I could be centre forward for the dirty Gooners!

Tags: Copywriting, Creativity, Direct Marketing, Effective Marketing Strategy, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Agency, Heat Map Analysis, Incremental Click-throughs, Marketing Innovations, Online Marketing Agency, ROI, Spurs, Steve White, Strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Advertising, Blog, Business Improvement, Direct Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Email, General Interest, Influences, Inside Information, Marketing, Marketing Innovations, Online Marketing, ecommerce. 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.