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Ad Agency Insider - April 2001 © 2001 by Infocom Group.

How to Attract New Clients Through a Well-Crafted E-Mail Marketing Plan and Then Sell it as a New Service to Old Clients

Online advertising is sluggish - expected to drop up to 35 percent this year - but e-mail marketing is expected to soar. It can be a valuable tool in pulling in new clients. Better yet, once you've designed and tested an effective e-mail marketing plan, you can sell it as a new service to your long-standing customers.

The key to a successful e-mail marketing campaign is to build a robust database of customers who opt-in to receive information and special offers, says Lisa Cross director of client services for Agile Industries ($5 million; 15 employees) in New York. However, creating a poor e-mail marketing campaign can backfire and cause e-mail recipients to forward negative nuggets and warnings to others about your campaign. How do you make sure that doesn't happen to you? Whether designing a campaign for your firm or a client, here are the guidelines you can use, straight from some e-marketing pros:

1. Build a call to action. Use the branding and the look and feel that you have already established through your Web site or printed materials. From there, you can build the concept you'll use for the piece, says Mike Gauthier, CEO of e-tractions (17 employees) in Bedford, Mass. Provide any fulfillment data required (like phone number you want the person to call or the white paper report you will provide to technology customers). As you know, many companies use financial incentives or gifts in exchange for customer feedback. Beware. Gauthier says that technique could backfire: "We almost never use incentives. We find that financial incentives buy us the audience. They buy us a demographic of people who are looking for a pay-off. They are not looking to participate in something that will benefit an e-commerce site. You get the wrong people coming to the site for the wrong reason."

2. Determine the logistics. There are two options for determining how you will handle the logistics of sending, tracking, and managing e-mail, says Cross. You can build the infrastructure in-house or you can outsource it. If you handle it yourself, you have to worry about bounce-backs, unsubscribes, and list management. If you are outsourcing, you will need to get a vendor on board about four weeks before your first e-mail launch, she says.
* When building the infrastructure in-house, keep in mind that you will need to make expensive software and hardware purchases and hire dedicated and experienced engineering and marketing staff, Cross warns. Don't try to do it yourself unless you have done it before.
* Your second option is to outsource everything to an e-mail firm like two California-based companies, NetCentives (415/538-1888) or Digital Impact (650/372-2110). For agencies in which e-mail marketing is not your core business, the second option is usually more cost-effective than the first. You can get a new e-mail program up and running within 3-4 weeks if you outsource all of the campaign logistics. Forrester Research reports that marketers who outsource the delivery and list management of their e-mail have higher conversion rates than those that keep e-mail operations in-house. If you outsource these functions to an e-mail company, they will use their experience with other clients to optimize your campaign.
Whether you plan to handle the logistics manually or automatically depends on the company and the level of email you are dealing with, says Lyn Chitow Oaks, CEO of Respond (75 employees) in Palo Alto, Calf. If you have thousands of e-mails a day, then your return percentage rate will be higher, and you will have to handle more. If you are using very few e-mails, a manual process may work effectively. You won't have to spend the resources to create the automatic system.

3. Test the plan before final blastoff. Just as in a print campaign, you should pre-test your e-marketing piece with a targeted audience. However, it's important that you have a structured process for accurate results. Here's how e-marketing professionals test: "We get an electronic focus group," Gauthier says. "We find a group of people - maybe 20 people who represent that demographic. We show them the campaign, and ask them the following:
* If you saw this - if this came across on an e-mail, or if this was a button on a site - would you click it?
* If you clicked it will you follow through with it?
You should use the data obtained to answer these questions:
* What's the likelihood that the person would open it?
* What's the open rate?
* What's the permission rate, or how likely is it that customers will submit contact information?
* What's the follow-through rate?
* Are they likely to go through all the steps we want in the campaign, watch a Flash animation, or interact with some questions in a survey and so forth?
* How valuable is the payback, the report, or the information that we are going to provide?
* Overall, are they likely to send this information to someone else? "So we test it out," Gauthier says. "If we see any particular bad drop-offs - like they are not opening it, they are opening it but they are not filling it out, or they are not going to the next step - then we rework the project."

4. Build a targeted list of prospects to receive your e-mail. You can obtain opt-in lists from associations or from your existing clients. "We try to find out if the client has a set of customers, it could be a small set of fewer than 100 people who fit their demographic already," Gauthier says. "We use that feed list or we acquire a feed list. You can buy a list from a list broker or an association." For example, lawyers go to bar associations to obtain lists. "Use only permission lists," Gauthier advises, "If you send the list to people who did not give their permission, they are going to get angry. It just doesn't make sense to go non-permission."
Once you have an initial list, Cross suggests some ways to expand it:
* Collect e-mail addresses from current clients while they're on your Web site or in your store. Example: Use sign-up cards or registration boxes. Always let people know how their contact information will be used. Allow them to opt-in to your mailing.
* Rent a third-party e-mail list with demographic selections that mirror your client base. Encourage recipients to opt-in to your list.
* Partner with a Web site that has a registration process and get an opt-in box on their registration form.
* List-swap with a partner who has similar audience demographics (this must be based on the privacy policy for each company).

5. Develop a contact plan. Tuesday is the best day to mail, Cross advises. Pieces mailed on this day will yield the highest response rate. Taking the standard e-mail response curve and in-box clutter into account, e-mail contact should be limited to four or fewer mailings per month, per customer, she says.

6. Decide how many and how often to blast off. In some cases, you blast out all the emails at once, Gauthier says. In other cases you blast over time. In the case of providing this service for a client, for example, if you have an off-line fulfillment where you are responding to customers who are interested in purchasing a new product, you want to make sure that you have the staff to handle an influx of calls. In this case, it's best to send out a few hundred e-mails over a period of time. You don't want to flood yourself with calls.