EMAIL AGENCIES

Sector overview

Last November, when new media age published the latest national client email marketing survey from the DMA, prospects were good for email marketing. Seven out of ten marketers expected more budget to flow into the channel over the coming year. But there were also signs that, despite being arguably the oldest digital marketing discipline, email still wasn't properly understood or being executed effectively.

For example, over three-quarters of marketers were using regular e-newsletters as their preferred form of contact. A recent example is Mothercare's offering pregnant women advice via content-rich newsletters (nma 18 March 2010). Growing numbers were using first level automated emails, such as purchase confirmations. However, less than half of marketers have any kind of strategy on maximum email contact, with 12% ignorant of how many emails an address could potentially receive every month.

As the report's authors noted, with consumers seeing "too many emails" as spam, this is a problem. Brands were also tripping up on basic list management, such as failing to remove hard or soft bounces from lists; a quarter didn't suppress unsubscribe requests. In fact, more than three-quarters of marketers couldn't calculate the value of an email address. Commenting on this finding, Richard Gibson, chair of the DMA Email Council Benchmarking Hub and channel relationship manager at Return Path, said he hoped to see a change in attitudes in 2010.

This may happen. For a start, the Information Commission has published a code for personal data online under the Data Protection Act. As Information Commissioner Christopher Graham explained in an interview with new media age, this code carries sanctions of civil monetary penalties of up to £500,000 (nma 1 April 2010). This could focus minds on the benefits of looking after customer data properly.

This comes at a time when marketers are planning more contact with customers than ever. A 'batch and blast' approach looks increasingly out of place at a time when the emphasis is on cultivating existing customers through careful segmentation and personalisation. As our Special on segmentation (nma 6 August 2009) found, brands like McCain have achieved way above-average response rates simply by carefully cultivating four distinct segments. A law of diminishing returns applies, but increasingly marketers are looking at ways of segmenting in real time, in line with customers' expectations.

At the same time, email is increasingly embedded within an integrated contact strategy, and the DMA reports this has increased massively in terms of use and success since 2007. Now the challenge is to work out how to best to use email as one of the spokes coming off the hub of a social media strategy.

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