Put your marketing on the map

By Cliff Guy

I was discussing with a colleague of similar advancing years as my own (i.e. we remember the 80’s!) how much direct marketing has changed over the last decade, with the rise and rise of new media.

But something occurred to me this morning, when using dotMailer’s newest and coolest reporting feature, called Geo Mapping. I realised that some of the old ways are still the best.

You see, dotMailer’s brand new Geo Mapping tool creates a hot-spot map showing you where around the world your contacts are opening your emails. It’s eye-opening to see, because there are so often hot-spot areas you just wouldn’t have expected. You can then select map areas at the click of a mouse and instantly create data segments by geographical selections – even if you don’t have the postcode data in your database. I told you it was a cool tool!

This is leading-edge technology for email marketing, but it’s also using traditional corner-stone marketing data that some of us may even have come to overlook or neglect in recent years. It may not be as sexy or dynamic as marketing data like behavioural analysis, click paths, and preferences or even RFV, but that most fundamental of sales and marketing questions - ‘where are your best prospects based?’- can provide some powerful and lucrative answers.

Luckily, with dotMailer you can now get the answer to that question at the click of a mouse!

When budgets make no sense

When times get tough, it's easy for Finance Directors to cut marketing budgets and hard for marketers to stop them.

You don't need me to tell you how daft that is - the money you are spending is generating new business.

The problem is that marketing is often seen as a cost centre, not a revenue generator like sales. Historically, marketers have often been guilty of treating advertising as an art not a science. If you can't set up metrics that show that your acquisition costs are much less that the profits generated, how can you expect to explain it to the bean counters?

Admittedly, that can be harder to achieve with traditional media. But email marketing allows you to track each customer from opening the email to clicking on your links to making a purchase. Combine campaign ROI metrics and data about customer lifetime value and it becomes crystal clear what your return is for every pound you spend.

Once you know that, you'll be in a position to ask your Finance Director to take away your budget completely.

Because, if you can prove that your ads make money, a marketing budget is just a way to restrict how much money you can make. And your Finance Director won't like the thought of that one little bit.

*This blog was inspired by the inestimable Seth Godin. If you haven't signed up for his words of wisdom yet, do it here. www.sethgodin.com

Posted by: Peter Simmonds

Tough Times Ahead? Advice? Stay Calm

By Tink Taylor

As Woollies disappears from our high streets and others look set to follow, it is little surprise that retailers are doing their utmost to salvage as many last minute purchases as possible and capture important revenues in the forthcoming post-Christmas sales.

A quick trip down the high street sees 50% off, BOGOF offers and the promise of bargain basement prices. Online too, retailers are trying to attract punters with all the usual attractions: free postage, discounts…the list goes on.

And inboxes are feeling the strain. If you are anything like me, then you will have seen an increase in marketing messages over the last month or so and particularly last weekend, as retailers looked to cash in on the £320m online bonanza of ‘Mega Monday’.

It seems that at times like these, when the going gets tough, the tough are still falling into that simple trap of bombarding customers and prospects (some of them long-standing) with poorly targeted offers.

Now is the time for a carefully planned and thought-out CRM strategy. Every single piece of data captured throughout the year should be used to maximise returns during the festive season and January sales season.

So with Christmas upon us and those all important sales just about to start, what’s the best thing to do? Stick to your guns. Don’t panic. And continue sending the right message to the customer or prospect that will appreciate it most. Here are my three top tips to remember when sending out those last-minute emails:

• Resist the urge to mass mail. Target every message you send so that yours stands out in a crowded inbox
• With New Year sales likely to be more cut-throat than ever, using a targeted and engaging call to action will help increase click-throughs and conversions
• Finally, don’t forget to customise your landing pages. Highlight particularly important information such as delivery dates and costs, not to mention up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
  

A recession is a scary time, but the bravest thing to do is to keep plugging away at those best practices and maintaining your brand image, respect and trust.

Inside Knowledge Seminar

By Donna McNicholas

Last week dotMailer held our first Inside Knowledge seminar at our Manchester offices. Businesses from far and wide came to learn how they can increase their online presence and effectively target their customers, prospects etc with email and digital marketing. Most of the 60 attendees were from the North West but a few travelled from as far south as Kent - so a big thank you to all who attended.

We kicked off with a demonstration of our dotMailer Enterprise platform. With over 20 new features added in the past month including behavioural segmentation and geo mapping there was lots of new features to interest even our oldest and most email savvy customers.

Our Client Services Director, Tink Taylor did a lively yet informative presentation on our Hitting the Mark report, looking at the email practice of the high street and showing our guests just how they can take lessons from the retailers to change their own email marketing to deliver real and tangible results. The feedback and buzz from this presentation was echoed throughout the festive drinks and mince pies that were served during the networking after the seminar closed.

Simon Bird’s session on driving traffic to your site and then converting the sales completed the day and the cycle that many online visitors experience. Helpful and practical tips were shared on how to quickly increase your Google rankings by following simple SEO tips and tricks.

The event from start to finish was great and I'm looking forward to further events throughout 2009.

20 new features in our email marketing platform

By Cliff Guy

In June this year we launched dotMailer Enterprise - our new feature-rich email marketing platform. Pretty much every week since then we've deployed an upgrade to the system, adding new capabilities and performance for users to benefit from.

In the last month or so we've upgraded the dotMailer platform by adding over 20 new features - quite a feat on the part of our development team. Each feature we add is designed to help save our clients time and enable them to send powerful and effective email campaigns intuitively. Plus we in the marketing department at dotMailer get to take advantage of the new features too!

How clean is your data?

By Peter Simmonds

Last week we launched 'Data Integrity Scoring' for our clients here at dotMailer. It sounds complex but it isn't - it's just very, very useful.

The quality of your data is a critical factor in your deliverability rates and response rates.
The cleanest, most responsive data is that which you've collected yourself from your website or viral promotions, or at any touch point with your prospects and customers.

Sometimes however, buying a quality list of legally opted in prospects is an option marketers choose to pursue, in order to extend the reach of email marketing campaigns.

So to help monitor the quality of our clients' data we've introduced data integrity scoring to dotMailer.
On upload of new data to a client's address books, dotMailer automatically checks the contacts being loaded for 'integrity'.

The system scans the data, looking for email addresses that are not likely to have been opted-in, e.g. 'info@...' 'contactus@...' and 'abuse@...'

dotMailer will also look for email addresses that are flagged as mandatory suppressions on our system. These will be complainants who have requested not to be contacted by any email sender again. We'll look for frankly 'dodgy' email addresses such as the ubiquitous 'Donald Duck' and score your uploaded data on its integrity in terms of containing what is likely to be legitimately opted-in contacts.

If we think there's cause for concern for in the data a client has uploaded then their Account Manager will give a call to let them know what we've found and advise on how they can go back to their data supplier and ensure the data being supplied is what they have paid for.

It's all part of our fight against spam and for the best service for our clients.

Will your emails and websites break in IE8?

By Tink Taylor

I attended the DMA’s conference on Internet and Email Security Measures for Digital marketing at the end of October. With Craig Spiezle, Director of Online Security and Safety from Microsoft Internet Explorer, a main focus of the conference was on the launch of IE8, InPrivate browsing and the implications for online tracking. The news is that there won’t be an issue with IE8 for emails but there will be for websites.

So the message I send to you all this Christmas (apart from the usual Christmas cheer and greetings) is: YOUR WEBSITE WILL MORE THAN LIKELY BREAK IN IE8 and in the best boy scout fashion, please please please be prepared

• Evaluate the third party content on your site
• Evaluate your privacy policy
• Identify your partner data and privacy policies
• Investigate InPrivate Feeds - Contract TRUSTe
• Publish a thirdparty.html page

Download a beta version of IE8 and test your website. Read the advice on what to do if it breaks your site and fix it before the major release of IE8.

If you have 3rd party content on your site, make sure you link to who provides the content and continually build trust throughout your site. IE8 will make the world wide web a safer place to do legitimate business, we all just need to be ready.

After the conference the speakers and I went for dinner. As I was taking photos of the dinner I noticed how well dressed several of my companions were.

Denny Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer, Eloqua who spoke on email authentication, in his green shirt, Craig Spiezle, Microsoft, in his salmon pink shirt and Dela Quist, CEO, Alchemy Worx who talked on the changing rules of deliverability and the importance of data mining and hygiene in purple. How splendid it was that my email marketing colleagues chose to wear dotMailer's 3 corporate colours, including Dela's purple - the colour our new dotCommerce product is branded with!

Its always a pleasure spending time with my fellow Email Marketing Council members at the DMA. At the council we put a lot of hard work into providing thought leadership through such events. Watch this space as I will be posting the details of all the up coming events I recommend you attend. Whilst you wait why not also check out our Email Marketing Council blog which is full of practical advice.