Eggblogg

Customer magazines - delivering a one-way message?

 
Are customer magazines an anachronism from a pre-digital age or valuable engagement tool?

Something in Marketing Magazine's 'Customer Publishing' supplement this week got me thinking about this again. I say 'again' because I've always been ambivalent about customer magazines. As a marketer, to me they instinctively feel right. They look like *real* magazines but they are utterly under the control of the brand-as-publisher. Yay!

But as a customer, I feel differently. There are few customer magazines that I would take the time to skim through meaningfully, let alone read. Significantly, the only ones that spring to mind are those you either have to pay for, such as Waitrose's magazine, or those that have you as a captive audience, like the airline magazines you get on a plane. To unsubscribe from a customer magazine is time consuming and in some cases impossible.

So the comment that interested me was from Toby Smeeton of Sunday Publishing. His point was that 'so much digital communication is fast, and feels disposable' and was 'far from satisfactory when it comes to engaging the most important audience - existing customers.' On the other hand...'customer magazines are highly portable and loved by consumers. They deliver a richer, more considered, more meaningful brand experience.'

Naturally, as someone who has spent the last 8 or so years attempting to create 'meaningful' customer relationships for clients through the medium of email newsletters, I take issue with the opinion that email isn't up to the job. Yes, it's disposable, as indeed are Tweets, Facebook updates and the like. But the idea that customer magazines are not seems odd. The very fact that such magazines usually arrive in the post in polythene wrappers is in itself an annoyance as it means having to remove the wrapper before I can put the magazine in the recycling.

More importantly, relegating email newsletters to the 'direct marketing in digital format' pile hardly does justice to the format. The best email newsletters include a healthy mix of editorial and promotion, encourage customers to contribute content in return, ask for feedback, respond readily and openly to comment and change content readily according to reader preferences. Maybe the problem with Smeeton's assertion lies in the very vocabulary he uses - there's a lot of talk of delivering. Delivering a brand experience. Delivering salience.

To deliver something is a one-way process. One-way marketing = 20th century marketing. My feeling is that it's time to get over the one-way thinking. Customer magazines have a place, but to suggest they are an enduring medium in their present format, and offer something more engaging than digital communication, is to ignore the social revolution and to see digital as it was ten years ago.

What do you think? Do customer magazines do it for you? Do they engage at a more meaningful and lasting level than digital communications?

Images from http://apa.customerpublishing.org/

Permission email marketing: permissible, or not?

Hands up if you like receiving unsolicited email on subjects that don't interest you!

No? Ok then....what about unsolicited email on subjects that do interest you?

I see a couple of hands going up there. So what's the problem, the rest of you?

Ah, I get it - it's the unsolicited bit that's annoying. Stuff you haven't asked for, clogging up your inbox, even if you are tempted by the subject line.

Yup - there's no denying that spam (bulk, unsolicited, commercial email) is truly one of the evils of the internet. But permission email, stuff you've genuinely signed up to receive (as opposed to not having seen the little checkbox saying 'no thanks') - that's OK, though, isn't it?

Apparently not always!

I was interested to see this blog post by a company stating that they do not, and will never, send marketing emails to customers, apparently because they hate being on the receiving end themselves, but also because they're 'just quite confident that you don't need to be reminded that we exist.' 

This might well be the case, but it's a tricky decision to make - just because you find any kind of marketing email from a company unacceptable, is it right to assume all your customers feel the same way?

There are all sorts of reasons why a company might not do any email marketing.

I chose to stop sending an email newsletter a while ago, the reason being that I felt my blog and twitter activity combined were enough, and offered more opportunity for two-way conversation. I also acknowledged that the market was crowded and I no longer had the time or the inclination to write the type of content that was needed and send it regularly.

For some businesses, email marketing doesn't deliver enough of a return to justify itself, or it's been supplemented or replaced by something else such as an active Facebook page. Or they just don't have the resources to do it well, or regularly. Or their customers don't use email. These are all reasons to abstain.

But according to the research reports, permission email is still a marketing mainstay delivering a good return on investment. A recent eConsultancy report found evidence that 'more than a third of consumers (36%) say that receiving an email prompts them to make an online purchase'. I have ecommerce clients whose sales peak every time the newsletter goes out. It appears there are plenty who do actually want to receive marketing emails.

People don't necessarily need reminding you exist, but they sometimes appreciate a nudge - and that's especially because of not despite the digital information overload.

And besides all this, it's a classic marketing mistake to assume your customers and prospects are just like you. The only way to find out is to ask them, give them the choice - which is what permission or opt in email is about.

If they say yes but then change their mind, or don't like what you send, they can just hit 'unsubscribe', and if the marketer has done his job right, the unsub will take effect immediately. The company then knows it's communicating with customers in a way that suits them, not the company.

What do you think? Is there too much commercial email, even the permission-based stuff? Do you subscribe to company emails, and if so, which ones? It would be great to find out which companies are doing it right, from the point of the view of the recipients. Or perhaps that's another post.

Why not spam?

This is a short piece from my newsletter eTips, written about two and a half years ago. The reason I've dug it up is because Cathy Watson was asking me on Twitter about the legalities of email marketing, and it seemed like a good moment to bring up an example. (It's not a comprehensive overview of the rules as they apply to the UK, but that can be found at the Information Commissioner's website.)

Resisting the temptation to spam

Over at the Email Marketers' Club recently a member posted a question which resulted in 38 heated replies. The question was, is it OK to send a one-off email to people who have bought something from you but who have opted not to receive marketing emails?

The person who asked the question said that out of 700,000 customers, only 200,000 had checked the box which said 'I am happy to receive marketing emails from you' (or words to that effect). So that meant they were sitting on half a million email addresses and it 'seemed a waste' not to market to them. He was thinking of sending them an email (just the one!), perhaps offering a free gift by way of appeasement. It was just too tempting. Surely worth a try?

There then followed a great deal of debate and opinion, ranging roughly from 'if you do so you will be a spammer' to 'you COULD try it, but it may reflect badly on you if people complain.'

The rules about what is and isn't permissible in email marketing, in the UK at least, are not straightforward. The Information Commissioner's website has detailed guidelines on the subject.

Nevertheless, in the above case I couldn't see any 'grey' area. Those 500,000 people had the chance to check the box and give their permission, and they did not. That means they don't want to get emails from this company, even 'one-offs'.

My feeling is: rather than risk losing the trust and loyalty of customers, not to mention your company's reputation, why not focus on those 200,000 people who have actually given their permission? They are the real goldmine, after all. Use your loyal customer base to up-sell, cross-sell and refer their friends.

And don't give into temptation.

Image credit: http://www.toonpool.com/

Too many emails

One of the most common reasons for people unsubscribing from email lists is 'too many emails'.

Email marketers have known this for a long time, but over-mailing seems to be creeping back in. Some email marketing service providers structure their pricing on the size of the email list, rather than number of emails sent, and this is perhaps why companies are tempted to think 'if it costs the same to send out 10,000 emails a month as 1,000, why don't we send 10,000?'

True, a direct response email sent twice a month can be yield more sales than if sent once a month. But finding the optimum frequency is important, because once you tip over into 'too many emails' then you lose good customers.

Here's an example - last weekend my husband was offered 2 free tickets to a concert in the Brighton Festival, which runs for the whole of May. We couldn't go, alas, but the person offering them said he often gets emails to say 'you've won 2 free tickets to ...'. 'We need to get on that list!' I told my other half. And he replied that he was probably already on the list, but because he gets upwards of two promotional emails a day from the Brighton Festival, he no longer opens any of them, but simply deletes. 

Our loss? Maybe, but it made me think about all those emails going unopened. Sometimes more is less.

Interesting idea: use Twitter to research best email send times

Deciding on the best time of day or day of the week to send your email newsletter is always tricky. I advise clients to test it, as it depends on so many factors that it's hard to say what works for one will work for another.

One of my clients has found that sending on a Saturday morning works well - but then she is selling lovely home accessories and decorative items to a consumer audience, and maybe the weekend is when they are doing a spot of relaxed browsing and shopping.

B2B clients tend to avoid Monday mornings when inboxes are crowded and people are busy.

I thought this was an interesting way of researching the best time to send - by setting up a keyword Twitter search RSS feed: find out when people are talking about the stuff you're selling, and adjust send times accordingly.

My only comment would be that ideally you would want to survey only your customers/prospective customers, not the whole Twitter population, plus you'd have to allow for some 'false positives' as with any kind of keyword (as opposed to semantic) search. Worth trying though, it costs nothing, and it's a great idea!