Applying the Technology

When The Bookseller asked me to write this feature about email marketing technology, I thought an overview of current internet marketing activity in the booktrade would be useful. Now, if I’d known exactly who I wanted to speak to, and their email addresses, I could simply have dropped a survey into an email and whizzed it off to them. In fact, I could have added a plug for Email Reaction’s system with an auto-response set to email further information for those requesting it. The replies would have been neatly summarised for me including graphs to show that x% did this and y% did something else, all automatically generated. And I would have been building up a list of people who’d requested more information. All of this would be automated by the system. It would be cheap to implement and save a great deal of time. These are some of the reasons why email is a growing part of the marketing mix for businesses selling over the internet.

In the UK booktrade, the most active email marketers at present appear, naturally enough to be the online bookshops – led by Amazon.co.uk - and academic/specialist publishers that already use direct mail to reach their targetable markets. Amazon uses a variety of profiling methods to keep their newsletters relevant to the recipient: sales information; customers’ own selection of categories of interest; and the option for customers to create website wish lists that can be emailed to friends and family pre-birthdays (do you have to be under 10 or not-English to have the gall to do this other than for a wedding list?!). Their emails offer recommendations, reviews, articles and interviews. Links from the email to their site mean that it’s only one click from developing a need to supplying it. As Ian Ramsden-Morris of Hammicks Online and The BookPlace commented, “Internet shoppers are very promiscuous. For example, we get many new customers via the comparative shopping sites, and email allows us to try and build loyalty and brand awareness.”

As a marketing technique, email has a great deal going for it. As demand for email management grows, the tools to meet it are becoming increasingly sophisticated and user-friendly. Emails are cheap to send, they help attract recipients to your website, and they can generate revenue through advertising. SwotBooks, for example, with its student market, expects its value-added e-newsletters to generate revenue from advertising and e-list sales, and to find new customers. In addition, compared to print and postage, the production and despatch costs are low and it’s easy to change the content. Delivery and response times are so fast that an email campaign can be pre-tested and the results analysed in a matter of days.

The key to successful email marketing is to ensure that the information you send is information that the recipient wants to receive. If you’re not sure what your customers want, simply ask them. They don’t have to search for a pen or find a stamp – they just fill in a form you’ve included in the body of their email and hit ‘send’. The same forms can be used on your web site. Entries to a competition, a vote or a survey can be sent via email or on the web, or both. There are many other facilities that integrate data collected in this way with back-end data to build an eCRM (customer relationship management) system to provide information for use throughout a company. In practice, for many companies still experimenting with the uses and management of email systems, integration with other databases is a prospect for the future.

What is it for?

The use of email for marketing purposes may be broadly divided as follows:

Retaining customers Email can be used to increase repeat traffic to your site and thus drive up sales. An opt-in area on the web site asking visitors if they’d like to register to receive more information (eg a regular newsletter) is the typical method for building lists. On some sites a competition or other incentive persuades visitors to register for future emails. Combined with sales data and details gleaned from other promotions this offers 3 ways of judging your customers’ interests:

what they’ve bought from you in the past (though the purchase of Train Spotting for Beginners could have been a present for a friend rather than the beginning of a life-long personal obsession);
what they have asked for information about (by, for example, selecting from a list of subjects for a newsletter) – probably the most useful indication that this is a customer worth pursuing with your latest book about train spotting;
what they have (possibly) demonstrated an interest in (collated by tracking the links they’ve clicked in an email and on your website).
Acquiring customers Email can be used to solicit new business through buying or renting lists direct from other companies or through list brokers, or by the use of viral marketing. Many lists now available in the UK are opt-out lists (ie where the customer didn’t say he didn’t want to receive material from ‘selected companies’). The more valuable opt-in lists from specialist email list brokers are built from customers actively registering to receive email promotions on particular areas of interest.

Content is King

It goes without saying that the content of your emails must offer value to the recipient. As Arndt Roller of BOL UK said “The challenge is to send interesting information to people without driving them mad. The difficulty is to get the balance. If the customer enjoys the information and attention then it’s a win-win situation providing every marketer’s dream with data they can measure accurately from emails.”

Most emailed newsletters from publishers and booksellers take the form of ‘teasers’ mentioning the latest books and inviting recipients to click on the email to learn more or buy on the web. Some email solutions offer easily customisable tools allowing marketers to devise their own interactive emails without the need to call on technical support. You might start by personalising and customising each email to suit the recipient.

A simple ‘mail merge’ operation will allow you to begin your newsletters with “Dear Vicky” (you can of course be more formal, but companies who wouldn’t dream of addressing you by your first name in a letter seem to feel it’s OK over the ether). If you don’t already have this data, or not in a suitable format, you might make this part of even the simplest opt-in page by adding a box for their customers’ name when requesting an email address.

The easiest way to ensure that emails are tailored to suit the recipient is to ask them what they want. One of the key advantages of using email as a marketing tool is the ability it gives you to conduct a dialogue with your customers. Empower them by including a form in your email allowing them to select from pre-defined categories. A good email system will manage these selections for you. You devise a single newsletter to email and the system will automatically deliver only the sections your customer has selected. Now you are sending an email that’s been requested, with individualised content, so the customer will be more likely to read it, respond to it, tell others about it, and continue receiving it.

A key question that plagues marketing departments: do customers prefer HTML emails, with colour and pictures, or would they rather receive plain text? To be sure you’re sending what’s wanted, put the question in the email. Replies will trigger the system to send the appropriate version in future.

Your recipients are now so delighted with the information received that they’ll want to tell their friends about you: give them a form to complete with a friend’s email address. Waiting in the system is an email you set up earlier. The customer returns the form off goes the email to ‘friend’ automatically filled in to say that “Fred” suggested you contact them (ie this isn’t spam!).

What next?

According to many internet research outfits, email marketing has only just taken off, and Europe has yet to catch up with the US. Forrester Research suggests that demand for email marketing services will accelerate to create a $4.8 billion industry by 2003, $3.2 billion of which will be spent helping marketers to retain their customers by mailing to their in-house lists, and the remainder going to outsourcers who help marketers acquire new customers.

It is also very much at the experimental stage. Caroline Benn of Penguin said ‘Email is a major part of our promotional activities now. We look at the possibilities for every lead title. For example, for Matt Roberts’ “90 Day Fitness Plan” visitors could opt-in to receive a “tip for the day” by email. It offers a very interesting way for publishers to be in direct contact with readers. We’re thinking of adding competitions and votes into emails, and also considering video.’

Among those I spoke to there’s a consensus that email is an increasingly important part of their marketing strategy. Email offers a simple, cost-effective tool and one whose possibilities are, as they say, limited only by your imagination.

First published in The Bookseller 2001

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