Segmentation – its really not that hard

Posted on June 16, 2011 by andyfrancis

3 groups. Increased results. Simples.

Segmentation is something we bang on about constantly. We do so with good reason. It works.

What is it?
I’m only going to write two sentences here (yes, this is one of them!) because if you’re reading this blog you should know what segmentation is. Just in case, basically it’s splitting your database into groups of people by a number of variables with the intention of targeting these people more specifically.

What are these 3 groups then?
We often ask brands who come to us for strategy advice, what segmentation are you currently running? The response is normally a bit vague. Some brands have dabbled with a male/female split (hardly a difficult one that) and not much more. Why not? “Well, because even though the data is there the actual hassle of creating the segments is simply a task that never gets done, more important things get in the way. Plus, with segmentation we will have to create more than one email which takes more design work, more campaign building and more results to go through and we simply haven’t got the time”.
Aaaaaggghh! I hear that a lot and it drives me mad ever time. You have more important things to do than target your mailing list based on their past patterns of behaviour?! Besides, it’s not a hassle, it takes just a few minutes and will, in the vast majority of cases, improve your results dramatically.

The three groups are easy to create. Firstly, a group of all people who have bought something from you. Any e-commerce back end will be able to give you that list in just a few seconds. Now split that group into two sets. Those that have spent more than a threshold (say £1000) and those that have not. That gives you two groups, let’s call them “spenders” and “big spenders”. Our third group is those that have viewed your email campaigns regularly but have not purchased – again simple to create.
That’s about 10 minutes of work and we are on our way to making the boss happy.

Now what?
Well, now we have 3 segments of people. The brands that moan about not having the resource to run more creatives, more campaign building, more results to compare etc. might have a point. Those sorts of things do take time and effort. Fortunately for them they are now e-style digital clients and benefit from being able to ask us to do everything for them as part of their monthly fee. So whether they are creating one email per week or (if they’ve been listening) three campaigns to different segments each with different creatives, they can get us to do all of the work. Lovely.

If you’re reading this and want to give segmentation a go, email me or call me and I’ll let you give it a go through us completely free. Seriously, no charge at all and you can do what you want – I’m that convinced that what we do here will work for you. Call my mobile anytime, 07899 885568 or mail me andy@estylegroup.com and let me show you.

Until next time,

Andy Francis

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Love is in the air?

Posted on February 3, 2011 by andyfrancis

Top 5 Valentine’s Day Tips

Some say it’s just for kids, others throw themselves head over heels into it.  Whatever you thinkk Valentine’s Day is another time of year a lot of etailers can bank on.  There are a few ways to ensure you stay ahead.  Here are my top 5 tips for a successful Valentine’s Day.

1. Targeted
We mention segmentation so much these days with more and more brands giving it a go.  Valentine’s Day is a perfect time of year to try a very simple form of segmentation based on gender.  We see many etailers sending a general Valentine’s email that is clearly sent to their entire database without even a gender split.  I’ll put it as simply as I can – the girls should get a different email to the boys!.  That’s not to say that the girls email only contains gifts for the boys or vice versa though.  An email aimed at the girls should be split creatively into two clear sections – one that showcases gifts that she would love and another that showcases gifts that she might like to buy her man.  Talking of creative, that leads us on to tip 2…

2. Unique Creative
Almost every single one of our clients went for bespoke creative emails for the Christmas campaigns.  The ones that didn’t now wish they had done!  I can’t stress enough that at these gift heavy times of year bespoke creative is well worth it.  We detest template based emails here at e-style.  They are lazy, they are boring and they soon go very stale.  Investing the time (and admittedly a little money) in unique creative, especially for Christmas and Valentine’s day can pay huge dividends, trust me!  Even non-e-style clients can come to us for creative work so give it a go, you won’t go back to your template ever again!

3. Dress your site
At Christmas we spoke about looking to the US etail sites to see how they prepared for Christmas.  A lot of brands stateside chose to dress their site with a little Christmas cheer. Not overpowering, not tacky but just enough to make the site more aligned with the season.  The brands that make a little effort with this for the week preceding Valentine’s Day should see the biggest rewards.  It doesn’t take long to redress a page banner or add a bit of sparkle to a navigation bar.

4. PPC – Up your limit
Away from the Inbox, get your PPC fired up for the week preceding Valentines.  With a huge volume of retail related searches coming up I would strongly consider increasing my PPC budgets for the next 7-10 days, an easy way to have a great effect. It would be terrible to miss out on potential business if your PPC campaigns are paused due to lack of budget.

5. Gift nudge
This won’t be for everyone but we love it and it can work wonders.  Basically, an email to all the girls on your database can showcase gifts that you think are perfect for them.  They can nudge their man into buying it for them.  They simply select the appropriate product, enter their man’s email address (think database growth people!) and instantly the guy gets an email telling him what his lady wants for Valentine’s Day.  To help him along you offer him a discount if he buys today…easy huh?  It needs the data capture mechanics put in place but I think I know an email provider that can do all that for you…

Until next time,

Andy Francis

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No email marketing predictions from me this year…

Posted on January 11, 2011 by andyfrancis

2011 – Let’s Get Creative!

I hope you all enjoyed your Christmas break, late December was supposed to be very quiet for us with some personal down time so a special mention must go to the client that had me working on campaign until 1.30 in the morning on December 28th….you know who you are!

At this time of year you’ll see so many blog articles looking forward into 2011 answering questions about how email is going to have a great year and things are going to be changing. The truth is you’ll see the same articles refreshed every year, it’s a safe blog post that gets rolled out fairly easily.

I’d rather spend a moment looking back at 2010 and highlight things that worked and lay out reasons why nothing has to necessarily change just because it’s January.

Across the board the stand out winner for just about every client we have was the ability to have a new creative effort for each campaign. We see so many brands still working with template based email systems….shame on you. Templates are lazy and a very easy sell. The ability to be able to just drop in one or two images and some text to build an email campaign must seem very appealing but believe me there is no replacement for fresh creative to keep your audience engaged.

Take a long look at the brands that put emails in your own inbox. The template followers are so easy to spot and once you become used to the layout they actually become extremely boring.

Whether you use e-style or now, I implore you to drop your template based provider and get with someone that gives you the ability to use a unique creative piece for each email campaign you launch. After a small handful of emails you’ll no doubt see a raise in response rates, if not come back to me and prove me wrong!

Another easy winner is segmentation, if you don’t know what that means by now you’re reading the wrong blog. Segmentation, although easy to win with, is also easy to get wrong. Suddenly you have the ability to slice and dice your data any way you want but where to start? That’s where we hear brands falling down at the first hurdle. They get busy with the knife and don’t stop slicing and dicing until there’s nothing left to work with. Just take a step back and start with an easy one, male versus female. An easy split to produce and once you know you’re communicating with one gender your tone of voice is suddenly set free. Think about talking to a gender rather than just to your entire audience.

So, no mystical predictions for 2011 – I’ll let someone else waste your time with those. I’ll be the sensible one banging on about the stuff you NEED to get right – creative and segmentation.

Until next time,

Andy Francis

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It will be anything but a quiet Christmas

Posted on December 7, 2010 by andyfrancis

Quiet Christmas? Think again!

Cyber Monday is now behind us, thank god for that. The office has been a madhouse for the last week, I’ve lost count of how many campaigns have gone out, millions of email recipients viewing and clicking all over the place. The live feed we have of all activity across all campaigns fell over twice!

We need to look forward to Christmas week now. It’s always a busy time for etail even after last delivery dates for Christmas have passed. As ever, a large number of etailers will be launching Boxing Day sales. Some brands will start even earlier than that. John Lewis started their online clearance at 6pm on Christmas Eve last year and immediately had their busiest ever hour with over 1 order every second.

Something else that works in your favour is that Boxing Day falls on a Sunday this year. With limited trading hours available shoppers are surely more likely to favour the cosy living room. Add to that the threat of more tube strikes and you have the perfect recipe for another huge online shopping day.

From name and Subject line
Promotions will be flying around all over the place so again it’s a time to stand out in the Inbox. Professional design in a must but that only comes into play once the email has been opened so we have two areas to focus on, the From name and the Subject line. Brands often miss the chance to alter their From name to encourage views. If your from name is “Andy’s Emporium” why not make it “Andy’s Emporium at Xmas” or “Andy’s Emporium Offers”.

Subject lines only get glanced at these days, rarely read in full so think hard about the first 3 words. The cardinal sin is to repeat your brand name in the subject line, what a waste! Consider this example:

FROM                                              SUBJECT
Andy’s Emporium                           Great Christmas Offers from Andy’s Emporium

The subject line is dreadful. Firstly the word ‘offers’ is a spam trigger but worst of all I have repeated my brand name in the Subject line and wasted a couple of words, criminal.

How about this?

FROM                                               SUBJECT
Andy’s Emporium @ Xmas            Fancy a deal this Boxing Day?

I’d score this combination pretty high. Stand out From name plus a subject that offers me a deal in the first 3 words. I’m definitely going to at least open it, then we rely on the professional design to hit hard in the preview pane, but that’s a different story….

Until next time,

Andy Francis

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Cyber Monday countdown – look across the pond

Posted on November 29, 2010 by andyfrancis

Keep your eye on the US this week

So today is ‘Manic Monday’ as yet another stupid name rolls of the press. Whether you’ve seen huge sales today or not it’s now time to turn your attention to Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday is coming to the UK next Monday 6th December and retailers are falling over themselves to win attention in the inbox with the right promotion. However, here in the UK there is something else we can be doing, look west…

Cyber Monday in the US comes a week earlier than it does here in the UK. Over there it falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, which happens to be today.

Take a look at the sites of your favourite US retailers, let’s face it there are many of those and you’ll notice a lot of them have something in common. They have amended their site design to look Christmassy (is that a word?!). With only a week to go you might not be able to make too many cosmetic changes to your website but think of it like this; why do supermarkets blast the smell of freshly baked bread in to the air? Well, you can achieve the same affect by altering your site design to reflect the Christmas season. Retail outlets have been doing it for years so why not do it online?

PPC
We obviously have a busy week ahead with a strong focus on the inbox but what else should online retailers be getting right this week? I would personally think about your PPC. With a huge volume of retail related searches coming up I would strongly consider increasing my PPC budgets for the next 7-10 days, an easy way to have a great effect. It would be terrible to miss out on potential business if your PPC campaigns are paused due to lack of budget.

Segmentation
Something I love to bang on about is segmentation. At this time of year it’s simply essential. The more targeted your email campaigns are, the better a response you will get. It’s a very simple concept but still brands are ignoring it. I can’t name names but we receive campaigns from brands who clearly don’t do anything with my gender, age or spending habits data. I know they have that data yet they do nothing with it, very frustrating, they should give us a call!

Busy week ahead, until next time.

Andy Francis

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Email Marketing Blog – Trained Eye training session

Posted on November 22, 2010 by andyfrancis

A great training session with The Trained Eye

Just finished running a half days training course with the latest students of The Trained Eye who train Photographers

We often get invited to talk to classes of this type regarding best practise methods for social media, SEO, email marketing, paid search etc and running it today just reminded me of a few things that I thought we should share.

I was reminded that despite the many ways online can be exploited to better your business, regardless of industry, it’s always essential to keep it simple. It’s all to easy to over complicate things in an effort to be everything to everyone which can often end in disaster. Find your niche and stick to it was one of the main lessons of the day.

Regular blog readers will know I often bang on about your online dialogue and ensuring everything you do online is based around a two-way conversation. This has neve been more relevant. The brands who do email marketing the best are conversing with their customers (regardless of volume), the guys that do Facebook best are those that encourage conversation about their brand. Whether you have 10 followers or 10,000 followers, let’s ensure we are providing them with value and interesting content.

Once the course had come to and end today we had covered just about every aspect of online promotion so the question was obvious, where do we start?! The answer was actually fairly obvious too. Get your house in order, ie your website. Get that right, clean coding, no broken links etc and the rest will follow suit. Any promotion of the site, traffic building work should wait until your site is perfect.

I guess this all seems obvious but it’s nice to be reminded every now and again.

Rant over…

Andy Francis

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Email Marketing Blog – Ready for Cyber Monday?

Posted on November 15, 2010 by andyfrancis

Ready for Cyber Monday?

Yes we know it a silly name but Cyber Monday is coming. Monday December 6th is set to be the busiest internet retailing day of the year.

Why Monday? Well people spend the weekend looking for the perfect gift, then once they reach work on Monday morning they jump online to dig out the best deal.

The preceding week therefore is set to be a very busy week for email marketing. Inboxes will be busy places so you need to stand out. We have a few ideas that can help so get in touch.

Getting the basics right
Most of you will undoubtedly increase your message frequency over the coming weeks as we approach Christmas but don’t forget to ensure the basics are always ticked off. Subject lines need to be appealing, ensure your email renders correctly across all clients and browsers and get that primary call to action in the preview pane.

It may be a time of year to relax but don’t let that creep into your email marketing.

Segmentation can make all the difference
The days of sending exactly the same email to your entire database are gone. If this is still your ‘strategy’ then you are being left behind. Many brands and etailers are turning to segmentation to drive their returns up.

All e-style clients can ask us to do the work as part of their ‘all-in’ package. They simply tell us the groups of people they’re after and we do the rest. We create the segments, run them and inform you of the results.

An e-style client that recently began segmenting on a regular basis, combined with a more targeted approach to email content is now regularly achieving response rates of over 65%. These figures would be unheard of with a scattergun approach.

With the live segmentation tools available with e-style you may find a campaign has several versions all launching at the same time, all needing individually designed elements. You need a design team that can handle this pressure.

As an e-style client, you could use as much of our design time as you need to – every single day. We don’t charge any extra for design.

Until next time,

Andy Francis

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e-style week 8th November

Posted on November 12, 2010 by andyfrancis

Apparently people don’t just have birthdays anymore, they have to have a birthday week. That’s if you listen to Andy anyway. It was his birthday on Wednesday but we’ve been hearing about it all week! He did buy lunch everyday though to celebrate so we can’t be too harsh!

Would you believe on the actual day he spent the afternoon number crunching with clients instead of going down the pub, dedication?

Hectic as ever, roll on Christmas please! It’s simply relentless this time of year but we now feel like we’re getting somewhere. Jobs are starting to get wiped off the board quicker than they are being put on which is a good feeling.

A couple of trials with luxury brands ended this week, follow up meetings to come but going through the data and spotting patterns of behaviour has been encouraging. We have a number of luxury clients and feel we really know how to work with these brands, let’s just hope they agree with us come decision time, watch this space.

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e-style week 1st November

Posted on November 5, 2010 by andyfrancis

Quite frankly, we’ve all exhausted, what a week!

It’s been full on campaigns, analysis, consultation, trials, creative work, print jobs and plenty of caffeine!

It all seems a blur now it’s Friday afternoon (oh evening actually – that says it all) and now I finally get the chance to write this e-style week blog post.

Where to start, well we’re a man down as Paul was struck down chicken pox…perfect timing with Christmas round the corner. Thankfully the rest of us have had it.

Couture Lab were in mid-week planning not just their Christmas email strategy with us but also talking about their magazine launch and the associated campaigns. They really have some great ideas going forward. You can a look at one of those campaigns here. With the huge amounts of data and reporting we have for them, finding patterns of behaviour and building targeted segments should be easy (famous last words?)

We’ve also planned in some great campaigns for Lavender Room (lavender-room.co.uk) with a strong focus on segmentation and personalisation. If you’re looking for a great gift this Christmas, and something special, you could do a lot worse that visit them, tell them e-style sent you.

Until next week…

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Email Marketing Blog – Looks like a bumper Christmas

Posted on November 4, 2010 by andyfrancis

Looks like we’re in for a bumper Christmas.

Had an email in from Pure yesterday that I thought was worth sharing. A headline like “£6.4 billion to be spent online this Christmas” is bound to get anyone’s attention as savvy shoppers turn to the Internet for the best deals.

Latest results from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index show that shoppers in this country spent £4.8billion during September which is £79 for every one of us. It’s also a year-on-year growth of 24%. If you break it down in to clothing, footwear and accessories the numbers are even more impressive with growth of 28% on September 2009.

With a huge rush of buyers looking to the Internet for the best deals this Christmas, brands will be doing more than ever to attract the customers to their sites. Email will play a huge part in this. Just a gentle reminder that at e-style we offer consultancy and strategy advice whether you are a direct client of e-style or not. Christmas planning for most brands should be well underway but it’s not too late to get moving if you’ve left it late.

You can view the Pure email in full here.

Until next time,

Andy Francis

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