Marketing online
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Last Updated: Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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By Emily Ross
In so many ways, email has revolutionised business, and in particular direct marketing. Online marketing guru and chief executive of US-based IQ Interactive, Tony Quin, calls email the “golden goose” because of the real-time relationships companies can have with their clients.
Quin’s company created an award-winning email video newsletter on behalf of cruise line client Royal Caribbean, which has been viewed by more than three million people. The newsletter gave customers a virtual experience of Royal Caribbean’s new ship. (Take a look at the campaign here).
The campaign won his firm a swag of awards including a 2007 HSMAI Adrian Award and a coveted Webby. Admittedly, this type of campaign has the equivalent budget of James Cameron’s Titantic, but this type of email gives a clear idea of the potential of email marketing to knock the socks off customers.
Through the email, people on Royal Caribbean’s entire database were able to virtually experience the new ship before it was built. Now there’s a benchmark in email marketing. The company’s regular newsletters are also highly interactive.
While major corporations with mammoth marketing budgets can afford such campaigns, where does that leave SMEs who want to develop great email marketing campaigns?
The good news is the basic cost of email marketing is dropping. Adding to that, new, affordable email marketing software is able to perform more complex, targeted mailouts and monitor website activity more effectively (for example, see which pages a customer visited after viewing the email from the business).
When email marketing firm returnity started out in Sydney seven years ago, there were literally two or three firms in the country doing email marketing. Now there are five main competitors and dozens of smaller businesses that market software and manage campaigns for Australian companies.
New technology breakthroughs have seen the cost of email marketing campaigns come down significantly and that trend is set to continue. According to returnity managing director Paula O’Connell, an email marketing campaign now costs an average of 3–5¢ per email. When returnity started out, the rates were typically 10¢ per email.
O’Connell estimates that an SME can set up its own system for as little as $500. There are programs such as FileMaker Pro (that has a 30-day free trial), List Builder, SmallBizMailer, CheetahMail and YesMail.
There is also the option of freeware from companies such as Business Catalyst and Adobe. Before choosing software, it is critical to test its usability, to ensure staff can manage it and see whether it is compatible with the company’s databases.
Unlike print, radio and television, where it takes big budgets to establish a brand, the key ingredients to a successful email marketing campaign is a healthy, active database, a great offer and a dash of creativity. It’s all about finding a genuinely good reason to be lobbing into your customers’ email box.
Marketing Angels director Michelle Gamble believes that many smaller companies underestimate how important email marketing is to their branding and positioning. A poorly thought out email campaign can show up “a lack of sophistication”, she says, “and dilute your company’s brand in seconds”.
Gamble cites Marketing Angels' work with Queensland-based Pure Heaven, which sells organic aromatherapy products online and through a concept store in Stanthorpe, Queensland, as proof that SMEs can execute email campaigns successfully.
Pure Heaven uses a website program by Melbourne-based IASP. It cost $4000 to set up an email newsletter to VIP club members, plus an annual fee. According to Pure Heaven director Maria Heaven, the week after the newsletter is sent out with special offers, there is a 20% jump in activity on the website, and there are more online purchases and inquiries.
Avoiding the big turn-off
The peril for all businesses with email marketing is the danger of becoming greedy. It’s so cheap to send emails, why send one a month when you can send one every week?
There is a simple reason why less is more. One too many irrelevant emails and your company becomes a spammer, the customer opts out and the relationship is dead – and you will see declining opening rates and low click-throughs.
Byron Bay-based travel business TotalTravel.com.au uses email to send out a monthly newsletter to 230,000 potential customers. The travel company was established in 2002 and has 40 staff. Its website receives an average of 1.6 million visitors per month.
The newsletter has a high delivery rate of 97% and open rates for the newsletter are a healthy 40%, with click-throughs at 20%. (Across the industry, an open rate of 30% and a click-through rate of 7–10% is considered good.)
TotalTravel.com.au’s marketing manager Paul Fisher says that the database is increasing by 20,000 a month. “At every possible touchpoint, we encourage people to sign up for special offers,” he says. People who sign up and existing customers who update their contact information go into the running to win a holiday. The trick is to make it as simple as possible for customers to sign up.
The newsletter is typically delivered on a Tuesday, “when people are starting to arrive at work”, says Fisher. Mondays are a no-no (too many people take long weekends) and later in the week workers typically have less time to read their emails. The newsletters are never delivered in the wee hours (2–5am) as they are prime spammer hours.
TotalTravel only sends out its newsletter once a month unless there is a remarkable hot deal that customers need to be alerted to (or its risks annoying clients). “If you go to the well too often, it will dry up,” says Fisher.
Aware that TotalTravel needed to move beyond a “textbook” newsletter mailout, Fisher has chosen Epsilon Interactive, a digital firm with expertise in database management, to help TotalTravel with its email strategy. Epsilon sent out 26 billion messages on behalf of its clients (including Sensis and Fairfax) in the past 12 months. TotalTravel pays a monthly fee to Epsilon, depending on how many emails it sends out.
Outsourcing aspects of email marketing makes sense to Fisher, particularly if there are technical problems. Epsilon’s system can cope if something goes wrong midway through a large mailout. Previously if there were technical problems, the entire list needed to get the email again and Fisher knows customers hate that.
Fisher is looking for a more sophisticated, personalised approach to communicating with clients. He admits that the company has been “under-utilising” the potential of email marketing. Rather than sending out one big batch of newsletters, he is moving towards smaller groups of highly specific, targeted emails.
According to research published in B&T Weekly, personalisation can increase response rates by up to 64%. CRM software that can analyse and segment databases allows a company such as Accor to send specific emails to members of its Advantage Plus loyalty program who have not been staying in their hotels recently, offering them a string of geographically-specific deals based on their previous stays with the hotel group.
Such targeted campaigns generate up to 18 times more click-throughs than “vanilla” or blanket email campaigns, according to returnity’s O’Connell. It’s all about relevance.
What’s ahead
There have been no major spam legislation changes in Australia since 2003. (A useful guide is available from the Australian Communications Authority). O’Connell does not forsee any dramatic changes to restrict email marketing in the short term.
Most businesses are still trying to understand what the rules are. O’Connell says: “Online is still in a massive education phase.”
As more companies ramp up their email campaigns, it is highly likely the public will become even more sensitive to content. Companies of all sizes must get over the fact that they can reach their customers so quickly and cheaply, and start thinking about how to have meaningful, relevant contact.
Keep your customers happy
- Allow convenient ways for customers to unsubscribe.
- Avoid long-winded registration forms. Instead use a simple sign-up form where customers only have to supply an email address.
- Customise content as much as possible.
- Deliver something special in your email. Offer exclusive deals and great offers in emails, not just an ad for your company.
Beat that spam filter: Tips from returnity
- An average of 30% of genuine, permission-based emails do not make it into the “in” box.
- Ask your customers to add your form address to their address book.
- Acquire and remove names responsibly.
- Monitor your email campaign delivery rates.
- Create messages that are compatible across all the platforms including Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo and gmail.
- Set up whitelist (the opposite of an email blacklist) and feedback loops with the major ISPs.
See also the Do Not Call Register by clicking here.
Back to top
Web sites are a very effective way to spread the news about your brand. Business owners can also dramatically cut the cost of acquiring new businesses by marketing online. Yet it is remarkable how many companies do not utilise this cheap marketing tool.
Here are seven tips to marketing online:
1: Be very clear about what your website is for. Is it for selling, marketing or branding? Make sure it is very easy to navigate and clearly set out. Don’t have a jumbled, chaotic front page: the simpler, the better. Remember people will scan looking for key words or phases. The book Don’t make me think, by Steve Krug suggests creating a clear visual heirarchy on each page. The more important something is, the more important the headline. Eliminate instructions on the site by making everything self explanatory. Get rid of any small talk like Welcome to … Flash is old hat and highly annoying. And this may sound like the bleeding obvious, but make sure your home page spells out exactly what the business does.
2: Keep your website up to date. So many people fail to update their websites with their latest products and services. The website is now the first place prospective clients go. Investors, journalists and suppliers also will check out a company’s website. Websites need news: update regularly, every day or every week. Assign a person to do this. Make sure the website reflects the spirit and culture of the company. Are you a formal large business? Reflect this with a simple but authoritative tone. If you are a smaller business whose competitive edge includes offering friendly, quick service, then make sure your website is open, cheerful and even cheeky. Make sure there are no dead ends or broken links.
3: Always use your company signature on your email. Make sure your company logo, tagline and contact details are included on emails and the website. A web designer can quickly create an email template that includes all these details. Why not include a digital signature at the end of every email? It is a friendly, warm touch.
4: Forget paper. Electronic brochures are the way to go. Again it is simple to set up a template and on request, email out an e-brochure.
5: Leverage off other people’s websites. Ask suppliers, customers and contacts to put your logo on their website. Include a section on your website called About Our Partners and list all your contacts there. Ask your network to do the same.
6: Always customise your communications. Use the name of the customer or supplier on every email you send to them. Make sure that if the offer is for Victorians only, that the email only goes to Victorians. This is simple to organise.
7: Don’t annoy your customers. If you are sending out regular email dispatches, always have an easy opt-out so that people are left with a good experience even if they are not interested in your products or services. And always ask for feedback. Why not put a blog form on your site asking for testimonials. Other people can read about how good you are.
Source: SmartCompany.com.au
By Brad Howarth
Alan Perrins never set out to be part of a revolution. He simply wanted a better way to explain the workings of his business, The BEAN Machine. But by engaging the production company BizTube to produce a low-cost one-minute video for his website, Perrins joined the early adopters of the internet’s new killer application.
Sparked in part by the rise of YouTube, and the realisation that online video does not need to meet the same production standards as television, companies all over the world are promoting themselves using video more effectively than they could through words or pictures.
“Video shows a lot more than a static website or a flyer or a telephone call,” Perrins says.
It won’t ever win an Emmy, but Perrins says the video clip is useful for explaining his company’s Coffee Pod portable coffee-vending machines to potential clients and local councils. He says creating the video was more cost-effective than producing 1000 high-quality flyers for direct mailing.
The growth of video online has resulted from a combination of both the falling cost of digital video production equipment and the increase in penetration of the broadband connections needed to watch it. Numerous companies have emerged offering low-cost production of standard video formats. For less than $2000 businesses can have a short video produced for the web.
And it’s not just small companies that are benefiting. Larger companies are combining their familiarity with television advertising with the internet’s ability to better target consumers.
The group operations manager for Sensis’s MediaSmart Group, Rob Manning, believes that online video will further accelerate the already rapid growth in online advertising.
“One of the things that has kept the fast-moving consumer goods companies out of the [online] market is they haven’t had the ability to properly target the audiences that they wanted, nor have they been able to reach them with rich messaging in a way that they can now,” Manning says.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 36% of Australians have downloaded video, while 33% have “streamed” content across the internet. The question now for websites and advertisers is how to make money from that activity.
The managing director of Insomnia Marketing & Communication, Mellissah Smith, says video is clearly the hot area among her clients, and is frequently being used in direct marketing campaigns. Smith also sees strong potential for video in press releases, particularly in fashion and consumer brands.
“Our clients are looking at it as part of the integrated marketing mix,” she says. “And it’s allowing companies to tell messages more often, because of the ability of having a camera on your desk and saying a message and putting it online. It can be done in a matter of minutes.”
In one instance, a direct marketing campaign using online video produced a 93% response. “That’s enormous – where else can you get that sort of response?” Smith asks.
For many advertisers, the entry point into online video is simply to put their existing television commercials on to their website.
But the managing director of Sydney-based online marketing company Bullseye, Jason Davey, says online video is better used in contextual placements that match the other content that the consumer is looking at. He points to a study by Viewpoint in the US that measured the responses of 4000 web users to campaigns run by four advertisers, where the “annoyance factor” associated with video advertising was only 26%, as opposed to 57% on television.
Davey says video also holds great potential for allowing consumers to interact with the advertising they are viewing, such as clicking on a link to request further information. He says the interaction rate for video advertising is around 8% – much higher than click-through rates on banner advertisements.
“Video is a very emotive medium, and online allows you to extend that, and perhaps take part in and direct the narrative,” Davey says. “With our clients, if we know that there is a film shoot happening, we will typically work with them to make sure they shoot some footage specifically for online, and we can consider how to repurpose footage before it is shot.”
In the case of the health food company Blackmores’ sponsorship of the Sydney Running Festival, Bullseye used video blogs to show the training regime of high profile athletes.
Further, sites such as YouTube have led consumers to accept lower-quality images, although Davey says it is important that the quality of the content itself remains high. For its work with the Sydney Aquarium, Davey says Bullseye used lower-quality equipment than it would if making a television commercial.
“The production cost of actually producing video is lower than television advertising but higher than banner advertising, so there is a slow swing towards that as bandwidth levels increase and as digital advertising budgets increase as well,” Davey says.
The rise of video also has implications from the perspective of how search engines find and rank sites. The director of search engine marketing company PayPerClick, Stephen Murphy, says sites video clips must be properly titled and tagged so that search engine crawlers can find and categorise it.
He says Google’s universal search is also capable of returning video and audio files in addition to simple web pages, improving the chances of video content being seen.
“Humans can process images a thousand times faster than words, so what we are seeing in search engine result pages is that if you have an image that represents a video clip in the search engine results, even if it has a lower ranking, people’s eyes are fixing on the image much more so than the top rankings,” Murphy says.
The interest in online video is extending all the way through the marketing realm. The chief sales officer at Yahoo!7, Markus Barnikel, says that for the past few months almost every conversation with agencies or clients has involved video.
“We’re seeing agencies creating video especially for online, because they can play around with formats and length,” Barnikel says. “And that’s happening more and more, and will be the next step.”
The growth of online video has also presented new opportunities for television networks. The general manager of digital media at Network Ten, Damian Smith, says that online video is a key priority.
“It’s a lot easier for a broadcaster to come to grips with online video than it is with certain other types of online content,” Smith says. “This is the part of the medium that our traditional advertising base is most likely to be comfortable with, because they’ve invested in video advertising for many, many years, and a large part of their hired or agency infrastructure is really set up about video-based advertising.”
Smith says Ten cannot reveal the contribution online video will make to the network’s revenue. “But what I can tell you is I have a business plan that calls for this business unit to be a significant contributor to revenue and profit within the next five years,” he says. “The bottom line is we think we can make money out of it, and we think we can be a sizeable contributor to Ten’s overall revenue and profit.”
Tips for making the most of online video:
- The quality of the message is more important than the quality of the footage
- Ensure that the content suits the context that it is being presented in
- Keep it short – no more than 60 seconds
- Don’t be ambitious – sweeping pans and zooms do not translate well onto a small video window at low quality
- Use colours and images that capture the casual viewer’s attention
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