30 SOCIAL MEDIA
Social Media – Email marketing
Shopping Centre is taking a detailed look at Marketing in the Digital Age. This month Sean Kelly investigates email marketing
Email, or to give it its formal name, Electronic Mail, has been a staple communications tool for the retail and retail property industries for the past decade. But thanks to its low cost and targeted reach it looks set to continue as the cheapest and most-effective messaging tool of choice, according to retail industry experts. Even with the arrival of digital communication channels such as
Twitter and Facebook email is a powerful business driver, they say. The networked communication channel was started in the 1960s, but emailing has rocketed in the past decade. In 2009 messaging research group Radicati predicted in its Email Statistics Report 2009-2013 that, globally, people would send 507bn messages a year by 2013 (up from 294bn in 2009) while email users would jump from 1.5bn to 1.9bn people. The problem – indeed the major challenge - for the medium is that up to 90 per cent of those messages might be ‘spam’ (defined as unsolicited messages sent indiscriminately). The other challenge for e-marketeers is in ensuring a timely
response mechanism. The Direct Marketing Association’s Response Management Council found retailers were potentially “losing millions” in income by failing to respond quickly to online consumer inquiries. “Companies are rightly spending money on marketing their
“Emails targeted to people’s interests results in significantly better click-thru rates.”
products and services, but it appears that many are failing to invest properly in the means to convert online interest into sales,” Jo Varey, chair of the DMA’s Response Management Council, said. “This is a false economy.” David Fuller, head of digital marketing at Toolbox Marketing, says email has a core role in the digital marketing spectrum for client shopping centres - not just in the UK but across Europe. “We are fans of email and do it for a number of clients,” Fuller
says. “The days of blanket emailing should be long past for the shopping centre industry. The industry has moved and now we are able to set up and monitor what people are interested in. It allows us to build up profiles of our customers. The result is that they get emails targeted to their interests and we are getting significantly
SHOPPING CENTRE March 2012
www.shopping-centre.co.uk
better click-thru rates.” Toolbox’s campaigns integrate on and offline communications to
create excitement. “Relevance is the key – it’s about sending things that matter to people at the point they want them,” Fuller says. “Many shopping centres are relatively low adapters at e-marketing and associated analysis because their numbers are low though some larger centres are making big advances. We’re using analytics more than we ever used to.”
Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemyworx, a digital marketing agency purely
focused on email., is also a proponent. “Basically emailing is the cheapest way of getting a message from a business or a brand to any given individual that has ever existed,” he says. “Compared to other means it’s a fraction of the price.” Quist, who chairs the benchmarking analytics hub for the DMA,
says that, when linked with customer research, emailing can ignite business. “The first rule of email marketing is that email should be the
primary way that the individual you already know (because you have their name and email) interacts with your brand,” he suggests. “Anyone or any customer who comes to you via a search or direct mail should not be viewed as a success of direct mail but seen as a failure of email marketing.” Alchemyworx manages all sorts of emailing including complex
email programmes for clients including Sony, Tesco, Vodafone, Lilly and Aviva, among others. Quist refutes the general idea of what he terms the “Fear & Self–
Loathing” factor of email marketing. “If you are in email marketing the first reaction from many
people is: “Oh, you’re a spammer,” he says. “People tend to be overwhelmingly negative about all things email marketing. But we shouldn’t be. Customers are as tolerant of emails as much as anything else.” The secret, he says, is to capture the opt-ins or those who fail to
opt-out and then ensure emails relevant to them are sent in timely and regular fashion. “The key is good quality data,” he says. “Spam is in the eye of the beholder – the real email secret is to ensure that everybody should be able to easily identify in their own mind how they came to be on your list.”
Find out more: For more information, please contact:
graham.parker@
jldmedia.com
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