We live in a world where consumers move between several devices and media platforms many times a day in the blink of an eye. From browsing the internet from a mobile device while watching a TV series from our favorite streaming platform on a connected TV to texting friends and making purchases through a mobile e-commerce app. This all comes naturally to us, and even so to a new generation of consumers who are digital natives.
When asked about their expectations, 57% of consumers said they are looking for real-time responsiveness and speed of support from brands, 42% ask for seamless experiences, and 36% for increased demand for "no-hassle" convenience (source: State of Customer Engagement).
Digital transformation is forcing organizations to change their business models and adapt to the new market realities. In a recent study conducted by eMarketer (Top Customer Engagement Priorities), 49% of organizations said that establishing more meaningful connections with consumers is at the top of their priorities this year.
At the same time, email continues to reign as one of the most profitable and effective marketing channels. By the end of 2021, 80% of the US population is expected to use email, representing over 91% of all US internet users (Source). According to the same source, email should enjoy a global 11% user growth between 2020 and 2024 to reach 4.48 billion users. Today, no better than Direct-to-Consumer brands (D2C or DTC) are leading the pack to understand these new market expectations and answer consumer demands with innovative products and services.
This Email Marketing 101 guide will help Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) brands understand key pillars and establish a foundation for their email marketing strategy. This guide is also a refresher to established brands as they will find real-life examples of what peer brands are doing. I also want to encourage you to share your perspective and feedback by posting your comment at the end of this guide.
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This chapter provides a guide on what each key pillar is and how you can leverage them to create compelling email marketing strategies from goal setting, segmentation, content, personalization, automation, and measurement.
The world has dramatically changed for today's email marketers. Brands that established a path to Customer-centric strategies have experienced increased campaign performances and improved customer satisfaction through an integrated approach to engagement. With email often acting as the connecting tissue between brand's other channels such as website, mobile app, social, in-store, and customer support, it is critical to think of a holistic approach for which email is at its core.
Here are the main goals you can rely on to drive your email marketing strategy:
— Inform: This goal is usually common during the awareness phase of the buyer's journey, where you engage with your audience to explain how your brand solves their problems, addresses their needs, and leaves them aware of what your brand is, what it stands for, and what products and services it provides to them.
— Convert: This aims at using email campaigns to convert potential customers. The focus should be on tangible benefits the audience will get by becoming one of your customers. These benefits should surface through product capabilities, ease of use, expected outcome, and even hearing from existing customers' experience.
— Guide: This goal should be front and central for new customers. Brands use this goal to make sure customers follow an engagement series through which they fully take advantage of the products or services they purchased or contracted. Brands typically create an onboarding email series that highlights main product capabilities and provides additional resources to increase product usage.
— Nurture: Brands use this goal to keep their customers loyal and to stay top-of-mind. Use this goal when you offer more than one unique product as you want your brand to be the first they think of when they need a product or service that you happen to have for them.
— Win-back. Unfortunately, not everyone in your target audience will convert to your product, or if customers do, some might disengage over time. This goal is critical when you want to create an engagement strategy to rebuild the initial momentum they came to you in the first place and to win back their trust and business.
Knowing who your customers are and understanding what they need should be at the heart of any successful engagement strategy. It is no surprise that data fuels exceptional experiences. Remember that if your customers trust to share their personal data with you, they expect you will use it to send them relevant and personalized messages. This is where Segmentation becomes crucial to tailor campaigns to customers most likely to engage and transact with you.
Since data comes in different types, it is essential to understand what each type means and how to mix them to understand who customers are, their behavior, and their expectations as you engage with them. Here are the five fundamental data types you need to consider to run your Segmentation.
— Personal: This includes PII (Personally Identifiable Information) such as first and last names, email, phone number, and postal address. This information is usually collected through forms or as customers register on your website, mobile app, or other channels. Since privacy and consent should be at the heart of any data collection strategy, it is crucial to be transparent and straightforward with your customers on how you collect and use their data.
— Demographic: This includes age, gender, life stage, occupation, to list a few. A best practice is to only ask for information used to power relevant customer experiences and skip any other information that would not make sense for customers to share with your brand.
— Geographics: This includes city, language, country, area, or population. This information comes in handy if you want to personalize your emails based on your customers' location or marketing products and services in different geographical areas.
— Psychographics: This includes personal interests, dietary restrictions, or activities. Again, I recommend you only ask for information that makes sense to your customers and the intent it serves during their experiences with your brand.
— Behavioral: This includes customers' online behavior, purchase decisions, user status, level of engagement, and intent. This information can be collected as part of a digital trail left behind as customers engage on your online properties (e.g., website, mobile apps, email, connected TV) or data collected through surveys on other channels.
As stated earlier, a successful email engagement relies on a trusted relationship between customers and your brand. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that you respect their privacy as they accept to share their information with you.
— Sender:
As you put your brand front and center in your email strategies, it is most common for D2C organizations to use their name as the sender of their emails, and I recommend you should too. Using the brand name will help establish your trustworthiness and reputation. There are business justifications in using other names (for example, to specify which department is sending the email, such as customer service or delivery service). Still, I recommend you stick with your brand name to keep all communications consistent and coming from one unique source: your brand!
— Subject line:
Along with the sender name, the subject line of an email is the first thing your recipients will lay eyes on. As such, it needs to capture their attention and entice them to open the email to discover what it has to offer. Several research pieces indicate that most successful subject lines use humor, curiosity, or simply direct, stressing a degree of urgency. A common practice also suggests that most D2C brands use subject lines less than 55 characters long.
— Preheader:
Email preheader is the text that immediately follows a subject line when the email is viewed in an inbox. Preheaders are often overlooked by brands and should be added to any email communication. When added, it summarizes what the email is about without opening it and helps incite recipients to open the email and learn more about its content.
— Responsive design:
According to Litmus, 47% of email opens happen on mobile devices. This stresses the importance of email content to adapt to various devices and screens sizes. Responsive content allows your audience to get the most optimal experiences as they receive your emails, whether they open them on a large monitor or a small device.
— Call to action:
An email without a call to action (CTA) is a wasted opportunity to get an immediate reaction from your audience. As your recipients open your emails and read what you have to say, you should take advantage of their attention to ask them to take action. The call to action needs to align with the goal you set for your email and match the step your customers are in. A best practice is to use only one type of call to action per email communication and to repeat it if your email needs scrolling.
We, marketers and Customer Experience Professionals, are asking for a lot of data from our customers. The good news is that customers accept to share their information in exchange for a personalized experience. The bad news is that many brands are still not using the data they collect, leading to few personalized messages and mounting frustration from their customers.
— Personalization using historical data:
Using historical data collected from your customers provides the first layer of email personalization. This will enable you, for example, to tailor email content based on where your customers live, what they purchased in the past, and their recent behavior on your online and offline channels.
— Personalization using contextual data:
Personalization gets more powerful as soon as you use real-time data on what your customers are doing during crucial moments of their experience with your brand. This could be sending a product browse abandonment email after they showed interest in a product on your website, sending an email right after a call center interaction, or when they are nearby one of your stores. Since contextual emails are more personalized and relevant to your audience, they also generate higher conversion rates.
— Personalization using predictive data:
It is becoming extremely difficult for brands to scale their business unless they use AI and Machine Learning. With the amount of valuable data brands collect on behalf of their customers, making predictions and generating propensity scores to push email personalization even further is a practice many brands are leveraging. Using predive scoring, you can optimize the right time to send your emails (send time optimization), predict the next best product to promote to many-time purchasers, or even detect customer fragility to prevent churn.
Automation becomes unavoidable to help an organization scale its business and reach the level of success D2C brands enjoy today. Automation in email marketing means identifying messages, or a series of messages, that a brand automatically sends with no manual intervention when specific customer events occur. Customer events can include, and not limited to, when someone signs up to your newsletter, opens an account, abandons a product in their cart, makes a purchase, calls the call center. You can also define specific customer-initiated events that will help you scale for customers in the same situation. It is important to note that when automation and personalization are combined, it could lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Email automation examples include:
— Welcome series.
— Abandonment series.
— Conversion.
— Loyalty series.
— Special events.
— Cancellation.
— Win-back series.
Please refer to the Email Examples chapter, as I provide examples from real-life D2C brands.
In a customer-centric strategy, it is essential to know how your email marketing campaigns are performing. Focusing on the following key metrics will help you assess your efforts and improve any of your email campaigns.
— Emails sent: for each email campaign, this is the total number of messages sent. This metric is used to calculate other metrics that will help you measure your performance and inform the business.
— Emails delivered: number of emails sent that were delivered in your customer's inbox. This metric helps you determine if your Email Service Provider (ESP) or Campaign Management solution is doing its job sending your emails and making them to their recipients.
— Email opens: As indicated, this measures the number/rate of emails your recipients opened. With the recent changes announced by Apple on its iOS 15 operating system, this measure is on its way to being deprecated as it will become less relevant over time. I recently wrote a specific post to explain these changes and six tactics you can leverage to maintain relevant email campaigns.
— Email click-throughs: This metric indicates the percentage of your recipients who clicked on a link inside your email. This constitutes an important metric as it measures a direct and tangible response to your content leading to fulfilling the business goal of your email.
— Conversions: This is the most important metric as it measures the number/percentage of your recipients who completed your intended goal (e.g. purchasing a product or becoming a customer).
— Cost and ROI: Your campaign ROI is the overall return on your investment for your email campaign.
In addition to the above metrics, I also recommend you measure and pay close attention to the following three metrics as they will provide more insights into the technical health of your email campaigns.
— Unsubscriptions: As you engage with your audience, some of your recipients will, unfortunately, disengage with your brand and ask to be removed from your list. This metric measures the number of recipients who clicked on the "unsubscribe" link inside your email. A high unsubscription metric is a sign that one or several pillars of your email strategy is off. This could come from bad Segmentation, a lack of personalization, choosing the wrong time during the customer journey, or sending too many emails during a short period of time, leading to customer fatigue.
— Bounces: Your bounce rate is the number/percentage of your total emails sent which weren't successfully delivered to your recipient's inbox. A high bounce rate might indicate bad data hygiene and the need to clean it and keep it up-to-date regularly.
— Complaints: Your complaint rate is the percentage of your email recipients who marked your email as spam. As with Unsubscriptions, you need to keep a close look at the complaints as this will affect your brand's reputation and ultimately hurt your bottom line.
Here are real-life email examples taken from D2C brands.
Welcome emails are a chance to educate and introduce your brand to your subscribers. Use them to promote your products and the benefits they provide to your audience.
Automated retargeting emails are a great way to follow up on customers who initiated an action but didn't have the opportunity to finalize it. The most common retargeting tactics are those where brands send emails after product browse and cart abandonments. These emails usually have higher conversion rates as they are relevant and personalized to customers' recent behaviors.
Sending an email acknowledging a conversion is as mandatory as expected by any customer who buys or contracts your products. Although historically, these emails have been trimmed to the bare minimum, they have, however, reached a high level of sophistication for the past years, including real-time personalized offers and product recommendations based on the recently purchased products.
Keeping customers engaged and connected to your brand is a continuous effort. Emails, sent during this phase of the customer journey, highlight product recommendations, new services, loyalty status achievements, and benefits reminders.
Here are examples of how Allbirds and Glossier acknowledge purchase events through email confirmations.
Special events such as birthdays, holidays, VIP events are occasions to send specific and tailored content especially designed for those moments.
Although you want your customers to stay loyal to your brand, cancellations are inevitable. When a customer cancels their paid service, I recommend that you acknowledge that event with an email. However, you can give your customers a reason to change their minds with a limited offer, service extension, or any other content that will help you win them back.
A win-back email is a message you send to your inactive customers who previously showed interest in your brand but, for some reason, they've stopped doing so for an extended period of time. This is a chance for you to reach out with the business objective to win their business back.
Email marketing will continue to play a significant role in delivering personalized experiences to customers and strong return on marketing investments for brands. I recommend you use this guide as a starting foundation as you define or adjust your email strategy whether you are using a Digital Experience Platform (CXP) or not. As mentioned earlier, I want to encourage you to share your perspective and feedback by posting your comments below.
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