Under the bonnet of 20 of the UK's leading ecommerce sites

By Cliff Guy

dotMailer's sister company, dotCommerce - specialists in providing ecommerce solutions - released a cracking new benchmark report at the end of last week.

Called Hitting the Checkout, it's an under the bonnet expose of the ecommerce sites of 20 of the UK's top brand online retailers - from Asda to Tesco and from Amazon.co.uk to Virgin Vie at Home.

This is really great reading for anyone who sells directly online, or is considering the option.

Recent forecasts by the Experian/Paypal UK Online Retail Report 2009 show that UK online retail sales are set to grow by up to 137% or £12.3bn, by the end of 2011.

So online selling along with email marketing clearly represent an enormous opportunity for businesses with a product or service to sell.

What's so surprising is that this report finds most of the major online sellers are not exploiting the opportunity anywhere near as fully as they could be.

Top of the league table in the report are the online shopping sites of Marks and Spencer, followed by John Lewis. At the bottom of the table are Avon, the Fragrance Shop and Vie at Home - three beauty sector sites that unlike their customers, are not yet making the best of themselves.

When it comes to ecommerce sites, it seems beauty is more than skin deep.

Download the full Hitting the Checkout report here.

It's packed with screen shots, eye-opening examples and over 130 best practice guidelines and tips for digital marketers.

Beware of the dog

By Tink Taylor

A trend I’ve noticed of late is an increase in the number of prospects coming to us with large lists of purchased email data they are anxious to start emailing to.

Some marketers are being offered huge 3rd party prospect lists very, very cheaply by data suppliers and they’re looking to send to these contacts equally cheaply.

What I am wondering is... how far is the credit crunch impacting on businesses like these that are looking for very cheap data? And how far is it impacting on the suppliers – the list sellers and email service providers?

At dotMailer, we’ve found that marketers have maintained if not increased their digital and email marketing budgets in the face of the recession – because the trackability and ROIs they get from online channels are so much better than those from traditional marketing.

But are there some companies feeling the squeeze so tightly that they are ignoring all industry best practice advice about the data they send to?

Are data companies selling data at a massively reduced rate just to survive? And are some ESPs sending any emails, to any data, at any cost - just to try and keep their heads above water – regardless of the effects on their sender reputation? (I’ve noticed a number of ESPs tell their clients that they have been blocked by the regulators these last couple of months – not dotMailer of course!).

Here at dotMailer, we carefully monitor all the data uploaded to our system using our Data Watchdog tool.

The Watchdog makes use of a complex set of algorithms to determine whether the data that a client is loading is ‘bad data’ – at which point the watchdog starts barking, and we contact the client to discuss the data they are using.

We also require our clients to accept terms and conditions that ensure they are only sending legitimate emails that comply with current regulations and codes of best practice.

Times are hard out there, and it could be that some businesses are seeking cheap data and cheap email marketing as a short term, last ditch attempt to make enough sales to stay afloat and avoid administration.

The conclusion to all my questions? Beware email data and email service providers selling off their products and services at reduced rates, and abandoning best practice - just to maximise their short term turnover.

Make sure you check out the state of their financials before engaging with them and be sure that they have your long term business well-being as a priority, as opposed to their own short term survival.

Remember too that it’ s not always ‘the size of your list, it’s how you use it’. Here at dotMailer we like to talk about ‘narrowcasting’ rather than broadcasting, and to show you how targeting your emails for relevance will drive and delivers results and ROI.

In short - choose your email suppliers wisely and not just on price.

Still not tracking email campaigns? Shame on you

By Eleanor Workman

As part of the dotDigital Group marketing team I get the opportunity to talk to our clients, prospects and other email marketers several times a year at our email marketing seminars and at the tradeshows we attend.

The dotDigital Group attended the Online Marketing Show last week, a two day event at Olympia. As usual the two days passed in a whirlwind of dotMailer and dotCommerce demo’s, strategy consultations and champagne winners from our augmented reality game but it still surprised me to hear conversations going on around me that people were looking for an email service provider because they were sending email campaigns, for example through Outlook and not able to track the results, as well as risking their own transactional and organisational email and web domains.

The beauty of email is that it is completely trackable. You know how many times your contacts have viewed an email, clicked on any particular link, where they went from there, when they purchased and the volume of sales which can be directly attributed to that particular email campaign.

In years gone by, marketer’s have worked hard on the uphill struggle to prove that advertising and the like have been a success and have directly influenced sales but with email, this is easy, but only if you use a email marketing platform, such as dotMailer, which allows you to track opens, clicks, and ROI.

To not track your email campaigns can only serve to jeopardise your future budget for email campaigns, a channel which we all know continues to prove itself as a revenue generator.