The Preference Centre Balance

There is always that temptation at the beginning of any relationship to try too hard. Wanting to know every piece of information and turning a potential relationship into an interrogation.

Information Collection Balance

It's a difficult balancing act. You want to maximise subscriptions by not asking too many questions, but you also want to learn about the subscriber to enable personalisation and deliver relevant content.

But instead of attempting a balance, look at the information gathering exercise as a progressive flow where one piece of information gathered leads onto another, perhaps gathered at another moment in time

Information Collection Flow

Of course this is what is usually called Progressive Profiling. And it works.

It can be as simple as adding the option to update your profile on every piece of communication you send out to a subscriber.  A few years ago working with a Life Sciences organisation whose audience were researchers and scientists, we were able to improve the percentage of key fields populated from 25% to 75% in less than 6 months just by incentivising profile updates via the business as usual newsletters.

Newsletter subscription is not an excuse to conduct a market research exercise!

Help Us Give You Good Content

Email content is very regularly based on previous engagement

Email content is more often that not based on what customers have done in the past

• what they said in the email sign up
• how they have opened and clicked
• what their online behaviour looks like
• What they've bought

As well as obviously some assumptions made by the brand.

But the Brand wont always get it right, perhaps if only because we've not given the customer the right content, based on what customers have done in the past ;-)

so it was nice to see this little addition to the last email I got from Halfords following on from my HMV post on their preference centre ( More of this, less of that )

Leading me to the page with these tick boxes

Although I would perhaps look at re-positioning  and re-phrasing the content

Why at the top are you asking me about car and cycling related products, but only subsequently asking me if I have a car or a bike?

More of this, less of that

I haven't been speaking to HMV recently - that's Amazon's fault to be honest .

Well HMV noticed and sent me a very nice email asking me to tell them what I wanted to hear about.

The Customer Preference page they sent me too was a nice example of how you can make these pages a little more engaging.

It let me switch my emails on or off and provided sliders to let me decide which of the categories I wanted to hear more or less about..

A couple of nice touches were the inclusion of :

My nearest store details - nice multi-channel touch although shame they didn't ask me to confirm that was my Preferred Store

An indication of how many emails I might expect to get from them - although again an option to change that would have been a great move

The acid test is...will I notice any difference in next weeks emails?

Keeping the Flame Alive

So how do we keep email subscribers engaged?

My view is that we can't really focus on the business as usual aspects of our email programmes, but look at the whole subscriber experience.

So we are talking about

Lighting that Flame
Keeping the Flame Alive
Last Minute Relighting

Lighting the Flame - The Sign Up

It always pays to start as you mean to go on. The sign up provides the launch pad for the rest of the programmes. It's important to manage customers expectations from here on on.

Key tips include
 1.Make It Easy to find and do 

2.Provide one newsletter subscription page including information about all  newsletters

3.Clearly state when users have navigated to the newsletter sign-up process

4.Don’t pre-select any newsletters for users

5.In multi-step processes, let users know how many steps remain

6.Explain the ‘value proposition’ – what’s in it for me?

7.Manage expectations – what will I get when and how often?

8.Have a clear privacy policy

9.Use incentives - but  be transparent

10.Send a confirmation email, or maybe even the last newsletter

I think this is also a real opportunity to get some information from subscribers as to what other channels they might like to receive information through. And don't just stop at Social channels. I've been working recently with clients where mobile and direct mail are still playing a strong part in the mix for certain segments


Keeping the Flame Alive - Relevance

When we talk about 'inactives'. We need to be careful as to what the definition is we are using. This definition will vary from Client to ESP to ISP. Reminding me of the old adage

''there are lies, damned lies , and email metrics''

Some of the key take outs included

 - They were never ever going to be active. Beware email addresses that were acquired as a result of a competition or a prize draw.

 -  They never got your emails in the first place. Data hygiene is an issue. Use of double entry of email addresses and some data tidying behind the scenes can pay high dividends. As can looking at Inbox Delivery. Return Path believe that only 81% of permissionable actually hit the inbox.

- Nothing lasts forever. There will always be subscribers who out grow what you have to offer. People move on and in true old school marketing speak you will need to pour more subscribers in the top end to cope with the leaky bucket. Of course you can minimize those losses by keeping relevance up by understanding the value of delivering

a - the right content
b - at the right time
c - optimised messages for the relevant device
d - context specific messages


 Last Minute Re-lighting - The Unsubscribe

The time to say goodbye will come - but that doesn't mean giving up without something up your sleeve

Some tips include

1.Provide a way to unsubscribe directly via the website

2.On the un-subscribe page, list the user’s email address and current newsletters, 

3.And a simple way to unsubscribe from any or all newsletters.

4.Provide a separate process for unsubscribing.

5.Offer users an option to change frequency as an alternative to unsubscribing

6.Provide a confirmation screen verifying unsubscription

7.On the confirmation page, list other ways to receive updates eg: through social or a blog

8.Ask for feedback about why they are unsubscribing

9.Send only one email confirmation to users after they unsubscribe

10.Unsubscribe users immediately.

But a good point to bear in mind is that if deliverability isn't an issue with you and neither is CPM - do you really need to take these subscribers off the list?

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In the words of someone famous

“  we didn’t improve one thing by one hundred percent 

we improved one hundred things by one per cent.”

There is no magic bullet. As with most eCRM, it's all about improving step by step.

Content is a summary of my presentation at the DMA Email Event on Winback in November 2011

An A to Z of eCRM - U

U is for Ubiquity

Good eCRM is everywhere and nowhere.

It’s not just about marketing messages but service messages that help me build confidence in buying online or offline from you.It’s helping me connect with other similar consumers to share reviews and recommendations.

It’s valued, relevant, engaging, and useful. Good for the customer and the organisation.

Bad eCRM is in your face.

It’s ignoring my privacy and preferences to send me unwanted communications.

It’s intrusive, pushy, irrelevant, exploitative, salesy

Do the good stuff, not the bad stuff