The email marketing industry is actually surprisingly small, with a limited number of email service providers (ESPs) all vying for attention. If you compare their features, at a glance there isn’t a huge difference in terms of product differentiation; most of the big players supply the essentials required to run and measure an effective email marketing campaign.

However, for me, what makes Campaign Monitor really stand out is, firstly its attention to detail when it comes to its highly user-centric SaaS (software as a service) interface, and secondly, a handful of  features that add that extra pazazz (yes that’s the technical term).

I’ve cherry picked 5 features, that make me choose Campaign Monitor every time:

1. Compare Previous Email Campaigns – model your future email activity

Comparing previous email campaigns is by no means exclusive to Campaign Monitor, but I’ve chosen this feature regardless.

Email marketing is a process of continuous improvement; modelling, measuring and modifying email campaigns based on previous results can make all the difference in ‘outcomes’.

Campaign Monitor makes it easy to compare multiple campaigns offering graphical and tabular data as well as a handy export function should you need it.

2. Worldview – view your geographical reach

The Worldview screen is certainly one of Campaign Monitor’s sexier tools.

Once you have broadcast your emails, the Worldview screen presents a real-time global map with pins indicating where your emails were opened or clicked, as well as the email address of the subscriber.

The Worldview is a simple snapshot of your global performance and visually very appealing. You also have the ability to zoom in on countries or regions.

3. Social tools galore – social sharing within campaigns

Nowadays, a truly integrated email campaign will often include a social marketing element to it. To fulfil this, Campaign Monitor offers two social media tools that answer this need.

Social sharing within email campaigns

Firstly, you have the ability to embed Twitter and Facebook social sharing widgets within your emails.

This is carried out with considerable ease within the WYSIWYG editor. Anyone receiving your email then has the ability to ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ it, with Campaign Monitor providing you with a social interaction report.

Prior to this feature being available, I remember having to URL encode each social sharing link within the email, which was slow going and often prone to errors.

My only criticism is that more social sharing services should be made available, particularly LinkedIn and Google+.

Promote your email campaigns via Twitter and Facebook

Secondly, Campaign Monitor offers marketers the ability to share campaigns via Twitter or Facebook using a shortened URL .

This is a handy feature allowing the use social channels to increase reach. And, as above, uptake can be measured within the social interaction report.

4. Manage client accounts – perfect for agencies

Campaign Monitor was conceived in 2004 by Ben Richardson and David Greiner, whose web design background led them to develop a service that was ideally suited to web designers and agencies looking to run client campaigns. Nowadays over 100,000 companies (agencies and clients) use the service.

If you’re a marketing or web design agency looking to broadcast on behalf of your clients, Campaign Monitor gives you a range of customisation options allowing you to maintain a branded experience. And, furthermore you can customise your clients’ permissions from the draconian viewing of campaign reports only, to the ability to upload, broadcast and pay for campaigns with less agency involvement.

The beauty of a well designed interface is that the service works equally well for both agencies or clients, without interfering with the software’s user-centricity and ease of use. A classic case of form follows function.

5. A/B tests – means continuous improvements

Continuous improvement should be at the heart of any email marketing campaign. A/B or split testing functionality is one way of achieving incremental improvements in outcomes be it open rates, click-through rates or other metrics.

Whilst A/B testing is by no means exclusive to Campaign Monitor, its interface allows easy testing of subject lines, from addresses or variations in design. Once you’ve selected your testing criteria, Campaign Monitor will serve each version to a pre-defined number of test subscribers.

A winning version will then automatically be selected based on your pre-defined criteria such as open rates, total unique clicks or total clicks on a selected link.

The software will then wait for a period of hours or days (again defined by you), before sending the winning campaign to the rest of your subscribers. Just what marketers need from an industrial strength ESP.

Well done Campaign Monitor and thank you!

As a woman of a certain age, I thought it time to organise my will, as I have previously put this off time and again. Having sourced what I presumed to be a reputable company online, I emailed a request for a consultation.

The phone call from this company came less than 24 hours after the initial request, by which time I had found an alternative source. I told the customer services representative on the phone, that this was the case, and thanked him for getting in touch, but I was quite specific that I would not now be needing their services.

Knowing When To Stop

Within the next 24 hours, I recieved three further phone calls from this company, together with a written communication at my home address. In pursuing me in this way, this company has now alienated themselves from any future purchase, or recommendation to my circle of friends and family.

Often, we believe that re-contacting customers, or being less subtle in our approach to them, will reap business rewards. In the same way that we need to consider what we say (see previous blog about the Lost Art of Conversation), how and when we say it is so very important.

Sense and Respond: surprise and delight your customers

Contrast my experience of the will writing company with Amazon.  They took one of the world’s major sporting events, the Superbowl, and understood their role within the programme and how to engage their potential customers without shouting, or deploying overtly obvious sales tactics. They used their product strength to effortlessly remind the public what they do best and how to access their huge range of music product on offer in an intelligent and subtle manner.

Push and Pull

With all the data capture now available at our fingertips, companies also have the added pressure of knowing when to contact customers, and how to contact them. Our Email Marketing training course extols the do’s and dont’s of a good Touch Strategy. Imagine the Amazon Superbowl story re-written to include flyers landing on doormats and you will see what I mean.

In my view, the context of a conversation is equally as important as the content.  Behaviourally targeted advertising cuts through to a point, but planning the right weight and timing of these messages can mean the difference between success and alienation. I am very happy to recieve my daily Groupon offer email for example, but were these to  come through 5 times a day I would happily distance myself, no matter how tempting the offer.

On the flip side, I am an avid fan of All Saints clothing, but since signing up to their email offers, I am now bombarded daily with emails and banner ads that has instigated me hitting the  ‘unsubscribe’ button.

Bill Gates once very wisely said that ‘The Internet will help achieve “friction free capitalism” by putting the buyer and the seller in direct contact, and providing more information to both about each other. To all of us who have stuff to sell, we just need to ensure that this direct contact is consistently  intelligent, considered and timely.

I was however surprised to receive an email offering me the chance to receive two free flights if I apply for a Lloyds TSB credit card before the end of the 2010.

A few days ago, I received an HTML email from Airmiles with the subject line: “A little thank you from Airmiles and Lloyds TSB”. Given that I am an Airmiles account holder through my Lloyds TSB Airmiles Duo Credit Credit, I opened the email expecting to receive a freebie or an member-only offer of some kind.

I was however surprised to receive an email offering me the chance to receive two free flights if I apply for a Lloyds TSB credit card before the end of the 2010.

Simple mistakes

The mistake is simple and could have easily been avoided.

Firstly, I am an existing Airmiles customer (and a loyal one too – I accumulate lots of Airmiles each month), so why am I being emailed offers to apply for a credit card? My frustration was compounded by the fact that it was personalised indicating that they knew I was either a subscriber or account holder.

Secondly, the subject line “A little thank you from Airmiles and Lloyds TSB” was misleading.

My initial reaction was that I was being rewarded for loyalty. So, clearly I opened this email. No doubt, they recorded a reasonably good open rate as a result of this campaign. As you can imagine, I was rather annoyed to find out that I was effectively misled.

The moral of the story

So what should we conclude from this saga?

1. Understand your segments

A common mistake in email marketing is to blanket bomb your subscriber list without considering your segments. This demonstrates a blatant disregard to customer loyalty.

Whilst I doubt Airmiles are entirely arbitrary in their segmenting, they may well have had my name in a prospects segment which is why I received the wrong email.

2. Plan your retention strategy

When broadcasting emails as part of a retention strategy, it’s important to consider your long term strategy – be it 6, 12 or 18 months ahead.

Broadcast emails to your existing customer base or opt-in prospects that encourage greater engagement. And, the above case, broadcast content such as member-only offers and deals to your loyal customers that will delight them. Second guess what they are expecting and you will win loyalty. I often refer to this as adopting a “sense and respond” approach.

3. Test, test, test

Testing is an inherent part of email marketing. Testing comes in all sorts of flavours, but in the case of Airmiles, something clearly went wrong. Maybe they broadcast the wrong content to the wrong segment? Or maybe their subject line A/B test went a little pear shaped!

4. Don’t mislead

Be careful with your subject lines. It’s easy to write a subject line that will increase your open rates, but will your conversion rates improve?

By all means use a subject line to hook in the customer, but in the case of Airmiles, the hook was sent to the wrong subscriber who was expecting a reward for loyalty.

The final metrics?

Whatever the reasons for the above campaign, I’m curious to know how it performed. My hunch is that they had above average open rates with poorer than average conversion rates – not to mention unsubscribe rates. Unfortunately we will never know!

Drift Marketing is essentially a form a re-marketing aimed at lowering form or cart abandonment in order to increase sales and conversion rates.

If a customer is engaged enough to add items to their shopping cart, then a website owner should be able to provide an incentive to those customers that will push them back into the shopping process in order to complete the sale. Well that’s the theory!

The maths speaks for itself

Let’s take a hypothetical set of data over one month:

1000 orders started per month
600 orders completed and 400 carts abandoned
£100 average sale
That’s £60,000 revenue generated per month

If you can recapture 12% of those abandoned orders, the difference is tangible:

48 additi0nal orders started through drift marketing
648 total orders completed per month
£100 average sale
Total monthly revenue is now £64,800

Real Examples

S&S Worldwide – a leading online retailer in arts and crafts, educational supplies, youth sports and physical education equipment – used Silverpop Engage Transact for re-marketing. S&S was able to capture previously lost revenue opportunities to the tune of circa 25%.

The open rate for Diapers.com’s shopping cart abandonment campaign was 48% higher than any previous campaign and the click-through rate 78% higher.

Next Steps?

Normally, drift marketing is carried out by way of a triggered email that is sent to the customer at a designated time period (e.g. 30 minutes) after the cart has been abandoned.

As with any email marketing campaign, the content, design and header of the email will need to be carefully tested and will of course vary according to the vertical, customer segment and product/category.

Content Strategy

Marketers may want to broadcast an email asking the customer if they had an problems checking out and whether there is anything that can improve this process.

Alternatively, an email could be broadcast a day later which could contain saved cart contents as a reminder which could trigger a sale. A good ecommerce platform should have this facility already integrated.

If you have enough margin, you could include a discount code to incentivise a sale, but the danger here is that your customers may realise they can get discounts by abandoning the checkout process.

Legal Issues

Bear in mind, when broadcasting re-marketing emails, you will need to adhere to the right legal framework. In most cases this requires opt-in from the customer, which can be attained within the shopping cart process – before it is abandoned!

To conclude, the positive implications of drift marketing or re-marketing are easily measured in terms of clicks, sales and conversions. The negatives are less tangible as the emails that don’t result in conversions could be perceived either as too invasive and “big brother”, overly aggressive or simply spam.

Building a well targeted and segmented opt-in database is the root of successful email marketing.

The question is what opportunities exist out there to gather subscriber data that will result is good quality click through rates (CTR) and hopefully conversions too?

Well, there are many ways to reliably gather opt-in data but many methods tend to be ignored either because they are too blindingly obvious to consider or because marketers don’t have these methods at their disposal.

Before we embark on our recommendations make sure you obtain permission from all potential subscribers. If youdon’t, your subscribers haven’t opted in and you are in breach of the law.

1. Add a website sign-up form
Add a sign-up form to your website, ideally with the subscriber data feeding straight into your database as this minimises data entry work and the potential for typos.

Ensure that there are calls-to-action across your site (on a run-of-site basis) that link to the sign-up form. Also ensure that you collect the right data from the outset in order to segment your email content and broadcasts appropriately.

2. Offer great content
Arguably the most important recommendation of all: offer great content and make it relevant to the segment to which you are broadcasting. You will conspicuously reduce your unsubscribe rate if the content is anticipated and relevant, so don’t blanket bomb!

3. Incentivise your potential subscribers
Incentivise potential subscribers to opt-in. Incentives can be anything from access to reports to product or service discounts. It really depends on your sector.

Avoid generic “spend and save” incentives; instead be more targeted to your subscribers’ needs. Some subscribers might be prospects, others might be clients or customers and others might be “explorers” only.

4. Be regular with your broadcasts
Get in the habit of regularly sending emails to your subscriber list even if the content is relatively short. An active list is much more likely to grow as interest spreads.

By the by, we actually recommend short amounts of content broadcast more regularly than longer emails sent infrequently.

5. Promote the benefits of subscribing
Promote the value of subscribing using customer testimonials, sample emails and of course strong calls-to-action on your website and sign-up page.

6. Be viral
Include a “send-to-a-friend” option in your emails. Bear in mind some email service providers wont be able to provide this functionality. Whilst you can’t collect your subscribers’ friends’ email addresses, you can provide links for those friends to opt in.

7. Use direct mail
Encourage email opt-in via your direct mail campaigns. Either provide a printed subscriber form in the direct mail or publish a link to subscribe online.

8. Use your email signatures
Here’s a simple one. Add a subscribe link to all of your employees’ email signatures. It could be prolific exposure for you if your company is large.

9. Capture data via your call centre or telesales staff
Brief your call centre or telesales staff to request opt-in data from customers or prospects.

10. Use postcards or flyers
Use simple incentivised postcards or flyers to capture data. If prospects receive these in the post, supply a freepost facility. Postcards or flyers can also be distributed at tradeshows, seminars or any other events.

11. Promote your mailing list on invoices or receipts
This can be especially useful if you are sending our large volumes of receipts or statements – be they electronic or print.

12. Harness point-of-sale opportunities
Display printed opt-in forms or flyers at the cash till of shops. There’s ample opportunity for incentivising customers with discounts, or buy X get Y free if you sign up.

13. Use syndicated press releases and articles
Promote the benefits of opting in to your email database in syndicated (online) press releases and articles.

14. Use company marketing collateral
Promote your online newsletters and subscriber benefits in printed newsletters, magazines and brochures. Include a web link to sign up as a subscriber.

15. Include opt-in information on customer satisfaction surveys
If you are regularly sending out online customer feedback surveys, include a hyperlink to your sign-up form. Satisfied customers may well want to hear back from you if they have already received great service.

16. Sponsor a competition
Encourage interest parties to sign-up by providing their email addresses and any other opt-in data.

See full details of our email marketing training course