Email Marketing Tips: David Chaffey Reveals Three Fresh Strategies
What three things are crucial for any company to know before embarking on an email marketing initiative? To help provide this answer, to email marketing beginners and veterans alike, our Email Marketing Thought Leader interview series turns to London-based Dave Chaffey.
Chaffey is an Email marketing consultant and author of “Total Email Marketing.” Chaffey also posts regular insight to Dave Chaffey’s Right Touching Blog.
In our interview below, Chaffey reveals three email marketing tips most crucial for you company to know about email marketing and the single most important component of any email marketing campaign:
iPost:
What are three things most companies do not know about email marketing, that they should, before embarking on any initiative?
Dave Chaffey:
I’ve talked to thousands of email marketers over the past 10 years about their email practices and many certainly miss out on the unique opportunities available by email – most simply treat it as a different form of direct mail.
Three of the biggest opportunities they miss out on are:
-
You can track individual response and so follow-up with an email, phone call or direct mail to move the customer along to the next step
-
You can trigger emails individually personalized through dynamic content insertion. For example welcome emails, birthday emails and shopping cart abandons.
-
Developing an email strategy so that its email activity has clear outcomes and integrates with other direct communications
iPost:
When first launching an email marketing initiative, what should companies be prepared for in terms of initial ROI?
Dave Chaffey:
When launching a programme for maximum ROI you should aim to get it right from the start, not a “let’s dip our toe in the water” experiment.
You will almost always get your highest responses from new people on your list, before they “emotionally unsubscribe.” So you should make those first emails count, maybe through a powerful, focused sales promotion rather than an enewsletter. Many companies are now moving away from enewsletters since they don’t have the cut-through they used to.
Alternatively, starting by a research survey email of customers you already have addresses for, can work best for some businesses.
iPost:
In your experience, how many companies realize the importance of a strong email list when launching their first email marketing campaign?
Dave Chaffey:
In my training workshops I always start by stressing the importance of data quality as the foundation for email marketing before going on to the sexier creative stuff.
Many companies don’t have a strategy to grow their in-house list and improve its quality. I know some companies who have tens of thousands of emails, but they’re not qualified or profiled to know how to target.
In my book I briefly review the type of measures that companies should be reviewing and improving for example:
-
Email list coverage of database %
-
Permission %
-
Profile-depth (which fields available to target)
-
180 day subscriber activity % (best measure of engagement)
iPost:
Fill in the blank: the most important component of a strong email marketing strategy is____. If applicable, how does this differ from any other marketing strategy?
Dave Chaffey:
Great question! Easy answer, it’s “Relevance”. No surprises there… Not so different from other digital strategies like search. That’s why you need a communications strategy so you can become more relevant to your subscribers.
So how do you become more relevant? Here are three ways:
-
Ask your customers what they want through a survey
-
Watch what they click on, for example, in an enewsletter or on your site and give them more of that
-
Follow-up through relevant triggered emails for related products after they buy – dynamic content insertion can help here.
iPost:
Your book, Total Email Marketing, offers practical tips designed to improve email campaign results. Since this book was published, what tips have you developed that you wish you would have made it into this book?
Dave Chaffey:
I hope that many of the fundamental principles of communications strategy, targeting, creative template layout and deliverability haven’t changed. But some areas which are interesting and effective right now are the creative use of pre-headers, product ratings, video and “share to social”.
Simply, many emails just aren’t interactive enough. Even basic polls and customer opinions can help. Engagement is the name of the game if you want to avoid the dreaded ‘Emotional Unsubscribes’.
