Transcript

This is a transcript of Claire Nicholson, Founder of More2, speaking at our Email Marketing Masterclass in February 2008.

Today's very much about a case study - really hands-on - about one client that we've been working with since April 2005 which is PhotoBox, to take you through the customer journey of how we use email marketing to integrate with the marketing mix with really specific pointers as to what we've done successfully with that client.

Quite simply, for any business - whether your B2B or consumer - your marketing efforts should clearly be focussed on three things. First thing is obviously finding prospects. Secondly about keeping your customers - so retention - and thirdly, it's about waking up old customers.

So what's the first bit? Well obviously acquisition and we tend to find a lot of our clients focus huge amount of money and time and attention on acquisition but it can be really hit and miss. And this is where integrating data into your email marketing can be really, really valuable.

I think it's very important not to get caught up in a numbers game because there's no point having 20,000 prospects on your database if actually only 200 of them are ever going to become good customers. You've spent a huge amount of money acquiring quite a lot of crap, to be quite frank. So that's not a good use of time or effort.

So how do you then keep them? Well we think with PhotoBox having 2 million members on its database, all at different stages of 'active' within the file, it's really important that we try to lock them into the brand. And we found email to be a really vital part of the marketing mix that we've used for PhotoBox.

In all the campaigns that we do, the messaging is focussing on increasing spend. So getting people to step up - so if they've ordered an enlargement for example in the case of Photobox - getting them to step up to order a poster. And when we've done offers ('You know you brought enlargements, have you thought about buying a poster?'), we saw fantastic response to those campaigns.

So you need to gather information about what are these people interested in and then tailor the content dynamically so that what you're doing is inspiring them to want to come back to your site, use it again and ultimately place an order.

Now email is a great tool but it's not the only tool you can use for marketing. So I guess although this is a conference about email marketing, I would just say don't walk away from this and suddenly divert your entire budget into email marketing because it could go hideously wrong. So if you know already what's working really well for you - direct mail might be working or various other methods - I'd say approach email with caution because it is a great tool but may not be the thing that works best for your brand and your customers.

We had literally thousands and thousands of registrants on the Photobox database, who had registered their details so the client was absolutely delighted that they were gathering all these names on a monthly basis. But when we dug deeper and looked at the data, we realised that a huge percentage of those - up to 75% - actually were not converting on the same day. So they were going onto the site, registering their details and then they weren't buying.

So what we did was test. We took a segment of the prospect file and we entered them into the 28-day trigger email program and the rest of the registrants were treated just as they had been before, where they were getting the monthly newsletters and nothing else. And it actually proved so successful over a three month period - so we didn't just do it once and say 'Oh look we're delighted this is what's happened' - over a three month period we tested and consistently, we proved that people that were entered into the trigger email program converted at over double the response rate over people that just received the monthly newsletter.

What we used to do was obviously send out a traditional promotion and then measure the results and say 'Well that was a good promotion' or 'That was a bad promotion' and then what we decided to do was send reminder emails to people who hadn't responded to the offer, to remind them that it was about to expire. So again, it's about taking that data that you've got and really using it intelligently so that the content you're sending to people is relevant but also timely.

The other thing we try to do - and it's really important for Photobox - is increasing the average order value. You can imagine with a business of their size, you're not talking about large average order values on a normal customer transaction; you're talking about sort of 20-30 pounds. But you multiple that by two million members and a tiny increase in A.O.V. basically equals hitting their revenue targets on a monthly basis.

Whatever business you're in, I'm sure you know this, if you've got telesales teams or whatever, you don't always have to discount to get a sale. So the more you can segment and put dynamic content in and test offers and see whether you need to put a promotion in or not, the more you'll hang on to that valuable marketing money and not just give it away in margin.

We also wanted to build a community and Photobox works quite a lot on word of mouth - get a lot of referrals every single month. And so we wanted to give people a chance to interact with the brand.

And now on the Photobox site, they've actually got a blog and they're going through a huge change at the moment and a migration of a new site being launched in the next couple of weeks. So during that blogging process, they're keeping their customers up-to-date with some of the changes that are happening: Some of the things they're going to notice, the logo is changing but to keep people in the loop, we're using all these messages so they don't feel scared or shocked when they go back to the site and suddenly it's all changed.

The great thing about email is it gives you the freedom to track and measure. The horrible thing about is that you can have stats coming out your ears and then you just don't know what to do next. We advocate starting slowly, testing the big things and getting those things right, and then getting ever more sophisticated.

What we often find with our clients is that there's an offline marketing team and an online marketing team and they don't always talk to each other. And it's quite important that they do talk to each other or there might be a PR team that never talks to marketing or a sales team that doesn't like talking to marketing. But really, for these key events and anything that's going to be integrated, you do all need to get in one room because from a customers' point of view, they just see one brand; they don't really care how many people are in your company responsible for sales, marketing, PR. All they care about is 'what are you sending to me, am I interested in it, and is it consistent with the perception that I have about your brand'?

So whatever the theme is going to be of that customer communication, make sure that it's consistent and there's one tone of voice, one brand look and feel, and wherever the customer touches your site they're going to see consistent messaging.

Ultimately we really believe very strongly - and I'm sure this is something you're going to hear a lot today - in testing. Because every brand is different, which is probably not what you want to hear because it's nice to walk away with a perfect solution, but we've seen across our range of clients that there isn't a right or a wrong way. It's really about getting involved with that customer database and understanding what motivates them, what life stage are they at, what products they're going to be interested in and then rolling that out when you've proved that it's successful.