emflConf 2016 - Email & Automation Trends
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emfluence's Sara Theurer discusses current trends in email and automation and makes her predictions and talks about what's coming next. Sara's presentation was given at the 2016 emfluence Marketing Platform Conference in Kansas City on May 19, 2016. http://www.emarketingplatform.com/
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emflConf 2016 - Email & Automation Trends
- 1. #emflConf2016@emfluence Sara Theurer, emfluence, llc sara@emfluence.com Trends in Email and Automation @saratheu
- 2. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u The State of Email Marketing in 2016 No surprise, Email ROI still tops all other channels. Nearly 1 in 5 companies (18%) report an ROI of more than £70, more than three times last year’s figures. The average ROI across all surveyed was £38, a 53% increase on the £25 reported in 2013.
- 3. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u The State of Email Marketing in 2016 A 2016 Census by Econsultancy found that companies investing at least a fifth of their marketing budgets on email are eight times more likely to see sales attributable to it in excess of 50%.
- 4. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u 2015 Trend Check-in Data informed strategy going strong
- 5. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Advanced Data Segmentation KCDMA sends relevant content to new VS renewing members.
- 6. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Advanced Data Segmentation Ireland Reaching targets time zones using location data.
- 7. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Advanced BIGGER Data Segmentation • Import and append data • Define segments • Create more relevant content • Select target media outside of email based on current subscriber profiles • Develop acquisition strategies
- 10. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Authentication Gains Importance • DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) • SPF (Sender Policy Framework) • SenderID • Add DMARC to the list
- 12. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u The Email Process Revisited
- 13. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Trends in Email Marketing in 2016… and beyond!
- 14. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Ads In Email/List Monetization
- 15. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Ads In Email/List Monetization • Real time in-email offer optimization • Revenue stream for publishers • Technology allows for retargeting of web site visitors
- 16. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Subscriber Acquisition and Onboarding Vendasta increased subscriber rate 406% in three months after implementing a lightbox!
- 17. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Subscriber Acquisition and Onboarding Joe’s KC used a lightbox to ask for email subscribers when website relaunched in April 2016. The results speak for themselves… Lightbox accounts for 15% of current subscriber base.
- 18. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Smarter Email Client Application • Outlook for iOS and Android come with preset filtering for Focused and Other. It learns who users intact with and adds them to a special Focused view. • Alto for AOL – Gives users multiple email accounts in one inbox. You can actually pinch and zoom in the preview (without loading images) to read more of the email text without opening it. • Gmail now has a “Block User” option – never see messages from this user again – doesn’t affect sender’s reputation.
- 19. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Mobile and Webmail Grow, Desktop Declines
- 20. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Trends in Email Client Share TOP 10 EMAIL CLIENTS IN 2014
- 21. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u iPad on the decline Apple experienced a 20% decline in iPad sales from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015. Not surprisingly, iPad opens decreased 5% over the course of the year and now only represent 12% of opens.
- 22. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Apple (and other) Watches • Defaults to the text only view of your email. • There is now a 3rd MIME type to consider “text/watch.html” • Delivers stylized text only • Better get straight to the point in your “text/watch.html” content • No tracking possible
- 23. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u List Cleansing Gains Importance “The job doesn’t end with subscriber acquisition. Data can be flawed to begin with plus it ages over time, so treat every email address like a newly found golden nugget by also investing in email address verification, hygiene and correction services.” Karen Talavera President, Synchronicity Marketing
- 24. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat Not just for big players anymore. Automation makes sense for businesses of all sizes.
- 25. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat The goals of automated emails are typically more revenue and customer engagement-based than purely for brand awareness.
- 26. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat “It is disappointing to see that not even half of the brands send a trigger email to welcome new subscribers. The first three to five emails are fundamental to getting ongoing engagement.” Tim Watson, Zettasphere Automation Triggers
- 27. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat While the simplest metrics like opens and clicks are the easiest to report, the real indicators of success are conversions, revenue, and engagement based.
- 28. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat Though automation can be time-consuming to plan and implement, benefits realization usually happens within 6 months.
- 29. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat
- 30. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u Automation Takes the Driver Seat “[Automating our email marketing programs] is very high on our list of priorities, as we are currently spending even more time sending emails manually, rather than with set triggers.” Econsultancy Survey Respondent
- 33. #emflConf2016@emfluence @sarathe u “The single biggest change would be customer integration across multiple platforms, and allowing email marketers the ability to integrate all known facets of data into generating the best possible tailored emails for customers.” Econsultancy Survey Respondent
Editor's Notes
- Email is, still, not dead. Over the past three years, email marketing and SEO have been sharing the top two positions for return on investment. This year, email marketing is ahead of SEO, with companies being 9% more likely to rate email as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ in terms of ROI than SEO. Through email marketing, companies get the chance to communicate one-to-one with their customers or prospects, meaning that an effective campaign has the potential to lead to high conversion. With around three-quarters of companies reporting ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ ROI, it is clear to see why marketers are focusing on this popular channel.
- One in five companies report an ROI of over £70. Email has an average ROI of £38 for each £1 spent. A big increase over the £24.93 reported in 2013. Email’s reputation for generating return on investment remains undiminished in 2016. In this year’s report it comes out top for ROI (ahead of SEO), with three-quarters (73%, up from 66%) of companies agreeing that email offers ‘excellent’ to ‘good’ ROI. However, surprisingly, as a proportion of marketing budgets, investment in email as a channel remains low. On average, organizations are spending 15% of their marketing budgets on email, accounting for 23% of total sales. Clearly, companies are underutilizing email as a driver of revenue. Further analysis revealed that companies investing at least a fifth of their marketing budget in email are 15% more likely to rate the performance of their email campaigns as “excellent” of “good”, than those whose email campaigns constitute less than a fifth of their budget. These heavier investors are also eight times more likely to see the proportion of sales attributable to email exceeding 50%.
- Last year, Jess reminded us that data-driven marketing strategy has a clear foothold in the digital world, particularly in email, which is so easy to personalize. This trend isn’t going anywhere, and in fact, data is the heavy influencer on all the major marketing trends taking hold in 2016 and beyond.
- This year we introduced a query builder tool, which allows marketers to create dynamic groups (or segments) based on any set of criteria that they’ve established are significant for targeting. The Kansas City Data-Driven Marketing Association, for example, has one sign-up form for membership; however, some sign-ups are brand new members to the KCDMA, and some are renewing an existing membership. As good, data-driven, marketers, the obvious thing to do was to set up dynamic groups that segment out the new members from the renewing, so automated welcome or thank you emails could be sent to the appropriate members.
- Ireland Reaching Out is another great example of using the available data collecting during member registration to do some smart segmentation. In this case, registration requires the member select a country of residence, so that data could be used to segment all members into dynamic groups for each continent. This allows the Ireland Reaching Out marketing team to strategically schedule the deployment time of their emails, to make sure they’re reaching every member’s inbox at a convenient time. These are pretty simple examples of basic, data-driven segmentation, using the information collected at the point of sign-up to drive smarter email strategies. But think about what you could do with a LOT more data…
- That’s what’s happening in 2016. In this morning’s session, you heard Dave talk about a new partnership with Ruf Strategic Solutions. Companies like Ruf allow you to export all of your known data, like email and physical address, to gain access to over 5400 potential data points about any single person. The data you get back ranges from demographic and geographic, to online behavior, to spending habits and more. The provided data lets you define segments, create more relevant content, expand strategies outside of email, develop acquisition strategies for prospective customers.
- Consumer profiles – target on channels like facebook to see attributes of a “country comfy livin’” profile.
- Drilldown of lux and leisure profile from Ruf With this kind of profile, use demographic/channel use/lifestyle attributes/digital behaviors to drive market
- For an email to pass the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance), it needs to either pass and align SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or pass and align DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). In addition to contributing to the wider picture of what “good” email looks like (mailbox providers rely on senders to clean up our authentication processes), SPF and DKIM, when both are passing and aligning, back each other up. mailbox providers seem to favor senders who are passing and aligning with both SPF and DKIM, as shown by ReturnPath’s case study. One of Return Path’s clients implemented a DMARC “reject” policy across all their main sending domains, which sent a high volume of emails. For eight domains, they sent a total of 33.2 million messages over a period of seven days. Out of those emails, nearly six million had some sort of authentication failure (~18 percent). These failures, we discovered, were caused by DKIM authentication issues. However, because this client was passing and aligning with SPF, the messages continued to pass DMARC at an acceptable level—they only had 1,800 DMARC failures (0.005%) and of these, only 264 (0.0008%) were blocked by the ISP. If there had been more SPF failures, more emails would have failed DMARC, with no DKIM to provide back-up. After we diagnosed and troubleshot the underlying DKIM issues, and the sender’s emails were protected by both SPF and DKIM again, and we saw a drastic dip in authentication failures. When we looked at the same domains over a seven day period after the intervention, we saw a dramatic drop in authentication issues, likely resulting in higher inbox placement.
- For the rights kinds of lists, this makes good sense. There are more and more companies popping up to provide advertising in marketing You heard this morning about emfluence’s new partnership with AdStation. Publishers like AdSTation serve the right kind of ad (hyper targeted) to your subscribers, like GoogleAdwords than a traditional ad network Publishers paid on cost per click, not cost per sent basis. By utilizing these technologies you can start doing retargeting (see who’s engaging and retarget on other channels)
- A lightbox is essentially a pop-up within your website where visitors download content or subscribe to a mailing list by providing their information. Email sign-ups should be visible on every page of the website, either in the content area or footer (ideally above the scroll). Modals used to be considered a nuisance, now it’s so commonplace that consumers aren’t bothered by them. In fact, if your modal is mobile-friendly, gives a strong, valuable proposition for signing up, and isn’t too long, it can be one of the best email list growth tools at your disposal.
- So far, the lightbox can claim credit for 15% of email subscriptions.
- Email Clients and ISPs are getting smarter. Microsoft (and all ISPs) are trying to look out for subscribers, and serve them the best user experience possible. In January 2015, Microsoft launched Outlook for Android and iOS phones and tablets. These apps were created to provide professionals with an email platform while they’re away from their computer. The Outlook app splits messages into two groups: Focused and Other. Over time, Outlook learns who users normally interact with and adds those emails to the Focused group for quick access. Users also have the ability to manually move emails to the Focused or Other group, and choose whether all future mailings from that sender will go into a specific group. The response from email marketers should be to focus on sending relevant, timely, useful messages. In May, Verizon purchased AOL for over $4 billion. In October, AOL reintroduced its former webmail app, Alto, as a mobile one. Alto aims to solve the problem of multiple inboxes. It supports all major free email providers. The pinch and zoom functionality available in the Alto app for Android allows users to expand the emails in their messaging list to include more text, meaning users don’t have to click into an email to view a large portion of the message. The goal here, according to AOL’s SVP of Communications, Dave McDowell, was for users to “not even have to open or click their emails” to see their messages. Marketers will be getting more clever with their preview text, and it’s getting even more real estate than before! In September 2015, Gmail rolled out new “block” functionality to all Gmail webmail and Android Gmail app users, giving consumers yet another option to rid their inboxes of email they don’t want. With this addition, there are now five ways Gmail users can say “I don’t want this email.” In order from least to most severe, they are: “Delete” the message “Unsubscribe” from the sender’s emails through Gmail’s native “unsubscribe” link, when available, which conveys the opt-out request to the sender “Block” the sender so that, in Gmail’s words, you “never see messages from this person again” “Report spam” from the sender, which directs future messages from the sender to your “spam” folder and potentially makes it more difficult for the sender to get email delivered to other Gmail users “Report phishing” by the sender. The upside is that this should reduce spam complaints, the downside is that marketers aren’t removing from their list those who would normally unsubscribe or complain as spam. It will be more important than ever to clean out unengaged Gmail subscribers from your lists.
- Mobile now represents 55% of all opens, webmail 26% and desktop 19% Make sure you are watching your device level reporting and remember that some clients, like iPhones, will always have a lift over others in reporting because they default to images turned on.
- Responsive Design gets more and more important iPhone users have gone up 5%, Android has gone up 3% (although, this number is still probably low because most android apps don’t open images by default), AOL has left the top ten to be replaced by Thunderbird. The shift toward mobile continues!
- While lower-priced tablets from Microsoft and Google may have impacted iPad sales and open figures, it’s possible that other Apple products may be cannibalizing sales. For example, the dimensions of the iPhone 6 Plus may serve as a suitable tablet replacement—providing users with the ultimate “phablet.
- In April 2015, the Apple Watch was launched. Only plain text is displayed, usually after a lengthy warning – IF the email was sent in multi-part MIME. Marketers will need to get creative with alternative success metrics, and encourage other types of interaction. Tallying the number of calls that come from an email is a great example of an alternative success metric.
- If you’ve yet to hear that “the gold is in your list” allow me to introduce you to this long-held maxim from the days of direct mail. It’s no less applicable to email – in fact it’s even truer because of email marketing’s basis in permission (we all know how well those third party rented lists work, right?). All of which translates into the fact that: Are you investing in new subscriber acquisition through a broad spectrum of channels (online and off?) You should be, as well as continuously monitoring and analyzing those sources by both quality and quantity. Indeed, the areas of focus for most marketers are predictable, if not encouraging. The opportunity to make email an even better tool for marketers lies in increased relevance and context, all of which are related to the top six areas selected by company respondents. What is somewhat of a surprise is the reduced focus on list/data quality. Email Marketing Industry Census 2016 Page 66 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. While having resource constraints makes this understandable, historically database quality has been a problem for a large proportion of email marketers. Even effectively segmenting at a basic level requires a clean database. With data passing through many platforms and technologies, it is even more critical that the data being used is of the highest quality possible. However, given this has been on the radar of multiple years, it is very possible organisations have gotten better at complying robust email lists that allow them to carry out more sophisticated tasks. List hygiene plays a role in how mailbox providers filter messages, so consider using a list validation service. While welcome messages often have high open rates, they also tend to have a higher bounce rate and more list hygiene issues. Help keep your messages out of the spam folder by making sure that you’re sending to a clean list.
- 36% of marketers claim an extensive use of marketing automation, while 35% claim a limited use. Only 6% of marketers aren’t using automation, nor are they planning to.
- DMA National Client Email Report
- Lack of an effective strategy is the number one reason marketers don’t pursue marketing automation with email. Some keys areas to examine are Your customer lifecycle (what kind of information should all customers receive during their lifecycle?) How would an immediate or timely piece of content landing in your customer’s inbox affect your brand reputation or sales? What data are we continually collecting via the website, in-store, on social media, or through Data Append services that could be used to trigger targeted messages?
- Whether marketers anticipate relying more on behavioural or automated campaigns, personalised content or approaching email similarly to social media with an ‘always on’ mentality, the common thread running through many theses on the future of email is that it will need data from various sources to remain effective.