What is the Cookies Law?

The new legislation is based on the EU’s Privacy and Communications Directive and is designed to protect consumer’s personal information.

Who does it affect?

Everyone who has a website and runs cookies on it. Site owners are liable, not suppliers/ hosts.

What do I have to do to comply?

In basic terms it states

• –      You must obtain explicit consent from site visitors before setting cookies to work i.e. they must opt in to have them turned on
• –      Must tell visitors what cookies are used on the site
• –      Sites should have ‘opt in’ on every page of website (only exception is when a cookie is ‘strictly necessary for a service requested by the user’ e.g. to fulfill a shopping cart order)

Does it include Google Analytics?

Yes, although the focus of the Directive means it is a less urgent requirement.  The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) have stated it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action will be given to focusing on cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals; for example analytic cookies that collect anonymous data.

There is a sliding scale of intrusiveness of cookies; the more intrusive (high/medium), the more important it is to gain express consent and, if you don’t, the more likely enforcement action will be taken against you.

The reality?

It seems everyone is waiting to see who moves first. The ICO implemented changes to their site with catastrophic implications to their analytic tracking. BT are another example of good practice. It seems, as well, there is some skepticism as to the ICOs ability to prosecute (limited resources, many websites) so it seems some are playing the waiting game. Do be aware, no matter what your business size, you could still face enforcement action for high to medium intrusive cookies and failure to comply can result in fines up to £500,000.

FootAnstey have created a fantastic guide on what actions you need to take to ensure compliance – you can download it here.

Other sites that may be of interest include

CookiesLaw.org 

BT.com

ICO.gov.uk

Webtrends

When compared directly with the good old postbox, email marketing has some great advantages…

The Savings

A standard first class stamp has increased from 46p to 60p and second class from 36p to 50p. An email can cost as little 2p. To put this into context a direct mail campaign sent first class to 1000 people will cost you in the region of £600 (depending on the size of your flyer of course), a campaign on MailAway to 1000 people will cost you £30. Of course you also save on print, envelope and fulfillment costs.

And in my eyes that’s not even the real benefit.

Posting your letter

You pay all that extra money and what do you get for the pennies? Do you know when it was delivered? If the Postman even put it through the letterbox, or that it was indeed the right person you addressed your mail to?

With email you know exactly what emails were delivered, to who and which ones failed, along with the reason for failure; such as blocked by the client, the recipient doesn’t exist anymore or mailbox full (just as examples)…  we’re not sure you’d ever know if your mail was eaten by the dog!

Reading your mail

You also know what time the email is delivered and even better, what time it is opened and how many times.

You know which articles were read and of particular interest to your customers, you know this because generally they will click through to read the full article. This is great intelligence for future campaigns, which leads me to the next point.

Last minute changes

Developing creative for a print campaign not only takes more lead time but once its printed it’s printed. Change of availability, pricing or the need to get last minute sales can never realistically be catered for using print.

Reacting

Knowing the response rate from a campaign can not only help you justify the spend (and as marketers we all know how often we have to do that) but it also means you can improve each campaign every single time it is sent. Posting flyers sometimes means you don’t know if it was even delivered, knowing for sure what was read or really of interest can be a difficult ask.

Post has its place; it can be massively effective if the recipients, proposition and call to actions are all right. However the reporting with email does it for me – not only are the reporting capabilities of email far superior to anything that the postal system can offer, it is also cost effective, flexible, interactive. Do I need to go on?

General best practice advice is to keep copy short; to the point titles, snippet paragraph to ‘whet the appetite’ (max 200 words) and clear call to actions (CTA) at the end of the article. In the mobile world, it seems short isn’t short enough, luckily there are some funky things we can do with mobile to ensure the desktops get their snippet text while mobile viewers may only get a title with a CTA.

Long copy within an email is generally frowned upon. Click throughs generally drop, your subscribers could be thinking any one of the following;

• 1. You’ve given me all the information I need, I don’t need to click through to find out more
• 2. Wow that’s a lot of text, my poor brain can’t scan read it in the limited time I have
• 3. Bored now

There are some guys out there that always use long copy in their emails (here’s one great example). Either they’re not up on testing their performance or they know what works for them, and that the copy they use is right for their subscribers.  Most people do scan read email content (the same as we scan read websites), its been proven by eye tracking research, so long copy generally doesn’t work.

The problem is, what may seem long to you or me could seem reasonably short to someone else so how do you decide what’s a good length email?

Using split tests to evaluate the content of your email is a great way to improve performance.You could perform a test on short vs long copy and see which of your campaigns performs the best (which is something you can do within the MailAway system pretty easily).

I think that at the end of the day, yes copy plays a part in your email campaign success but there are of course so many other factors to also consider, what about your online reputation, the from name and address, the time of send, the design? Testing each of these elements individually will ensure that going forward your email campaigns do perform the best they can.

What about you? What’s your experience of long vs short copy? Have you run any experiments yourself?  I’d love to hear from you…

Read more – some interesting and useful tests here and here

Litmus’ amazing report illustrates the durability of desktop clients, the need to develop email marketing campaigns that fit all our clients in not just one ‘band’, demographic or mobile device. We cannot assume everyone has smartphones nowadays as clearly that’s not necessily the case and if it is, it doesn’t mean Your message is the one they’ll pick up on the phone and be received and/ or responded to in the best way if it is.

A word of warning

Email client tracking is notoriously difficult. One of the reasons for this is that it relies on images being downloaded to record the open, some programmes don’t download images by default, others choose not to and some simply don’t have the capabilities to do so, this makes tracking really difficult. For example;

• •  iOS (Apple) downloads images straight away (so even if you don’t open but move from one email to the next it will register as an open). Outlook does exactly the opposite – default is not to download.
• •  Gmail customers using the Android app are recorded as web viewers
• •  Gmail inc on Android blocks images by default

So what does this mean for your campaigns?

Take your email client reports with a little pinch of salt and a whole lot of analysis

Some people say to take your iOS report and divide by two to get a more accurate open rate (i.e. people who opened because they want to, not because they deleted their previous message and the next opened automatically in response – all you iPhone users will know exactly what I mean by that!.

Add to your Android figure; chances are the penetration of Gmail has reduced your real read rate

Accept that Outlook/ desktops are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future. Don’t ignore them. Just because you’re creating mobile specific emails with content/ design/ call to actions and time fuses doesn’t mean you can’t also create desktop specific content for the busy office worker with really fast internet connection…

This isn’t through lack of ability from our developers, nor a lack of trying, it’s simply the capacity of the operating system or device you are using to view your email. Technology has improved rapidly and with that comes quirks of the good, the bad and down right ugly. Here we discuss a few…

Email clients

All email clients make up their own rules on how to decide how to display emails. The web is lucky, there are ‘web standards’ developers stick to and know in creating websites. In the world of email we’re not so lucky and a piece of html code that makes something look gorgeous in one client could totally break it in another. Simple examples include (we have tons of these) Gmail turning links a ghastly bright blue unless you tell them not to and Yahoo converting emails to ‘mobile versions’ unless you add some extra code to the header to tell them not to. In our experience Gmail and all the varying Outlook options are the hardest to deal with.

Email clients used to be the bane of our design worries, not anymore…

Operating systems

With the advent of mobile devices we not only have our email clients and different web browser combinations to think about, now we have additional operating systems for mobile devices (the main ones being Andriod, iOS, Blackberry and Windows).

Further to this, on a mobile device you then have ‘native’ email clients (the email client that is built into mobile devices (to allow you to sync with your own emails) as well as webmail apps, these again add to the mix of display possibilities. Gmail for Android is by far the most popular (I’ll speculate because of it’s connection to the marketplace on Androids) and Gmail is notoriously difficult, further making our lives excitingly challenging by stripping out some code and implementing stricter default settings.

Each system could display differently and has alternative default settings (the main one being iOS displaying images as default, Android blocking them by default).

Devices

Older mobile devices have poor support for html emails, it means you’ll often get a plain text email or even worse, a pile of code, as the device is unable to read what’s been sent. An inability to download images also means you can’t track these devices being opened (this tracking relies on images being downloaded).

With the aim of not getting too geeky on you, each and every device and operating system reads code and display images slightly differently. There are over 500 different screen size variations within Androids alone, that’s a whole heap of ugly testing, even for us.

So how do we cope?

At MailAway we perform rigorous tests on every campaign to make sure that even if it doesn’t look the same, it does look good and maintain its integrity. There’s a difference between looking different and looking bad or ugly. We’re also lucky that Android and iphone currently hold 36.9% and 28% of the UK smartphone market respectively; both rock at offering css support (that’s the code that helps emails look pretty) and dominate this most awkward world of coding (accommodating for them means we will be working towards the majority of users). We’re also pretty dam confident we know our stuff with code across numerous platforms.

Long-term everyone wants a better user experience, whether that be a marketer looking to send an awesome email, or the next genius developing radical technology to let us do even sexier stuff (live content in email anyone?) We are in a fast changing sector and although that brings challenges and can frustrate at times, it also keeps us on our toes and allows us to create you something beautiful.

The obvious place to look is your junk folder, or it could be that its just takes a few minutes longer than normal to deliver, which could be for any number of reasons including sending hefty files that’s blocking your inbox.

Sometimes though, it just never seems to get there. It can be incredibly frustrating, and worrying because you may think your own customers won’t get your emails either. The system is sending them out – where are they going?

Spam filters

The problem lies with sending emails to yourself, from yourself.  Some mail servers try to stop spam by checking for emails that claim to have been sent from the same domain as they are being sent to, some others will block an email claiming to be from within the organisation because the built in filter knows its from outside so they couldn’t possibly have sent it, it has to be a fake. In either case the filter thinks ‘We’ll block you just to be sure’.

To illustrate; When your email is sent from Harry@widgetmakers.com to William@widgetmakers.com the possible outcomes are;

The filters will never tell you (us or the  MailAway system) what is going on because if they did, that would defeat the object of the game (blocking spam, if they told us we were blocked and we were spam, we’d find away around it to continue sending our malicious messages).

Rest assured

This problem will not affect your customers at all, because their email addresses are not at the same domain as your ‘from’ address.

How to make sure test emails get through

•  If you drop into the Trash, first port of call is to check the content of your email for spam triggers

•  If you know it’s an issue with blocking because of domain name try speaking to your mail server administrators to whitelist our IP addresses, or simply change the from name during testing (to your personal email address for example).

•  Contact us if you have any specific problems, we’d be delighted to help!

Ipad use has exploded (Return Path 2012)

Litmus reported that with ipad use we’ve seen

• ▪   Recipients who are relaxed and engaged
• ▪   Huge preview pane
• ▪   Images in emails displayed by default
• ▪   Support for video in email
• ▪   Large, vivid color screen

So what’s the difference from a desktop?

In the same way as mobiles are improving the possibilities of engagement through reading during ‘downtime’, tablets can only serve to increase this interaction ability. No more do recipients have to be at their work desktop, stressed and rushed, attempting to read your emails during a lunch break, they can now relax while commuting or on the sofa. This can certainly lead to greater engagement. Not only that but Merkle recently reported that the percentage of commercial email time is increasing, which is a great indication that us marketers are starting to get things right – more relevant and engaging content that recipients actually want to read (I’d speculate this is because people are engaging with friends and loved ones using other channels, such as SMS and social media). The essence here is that when provided with an environment that allows time for recipients to digest your emails, they will do so and enjoy it!

Beautiful rendering

Litmus also reported that the built-in email client on the iPad has a massive preview pane. This is huge compared to desktop email clients like Outlook. They’re going to see much more of your email at a glance, meaning as long as your design is perfect and your offers are great, there’s more chance of a click through.  Using the same rendering engine as the iPhone (ever noticed that emails generally look great on iPhone 4s and beyond?), means that it’s likely that your email will look super sexy on the ipad with even a limited amount of tests (which we do for you at MailAway).

Video content

Not only that but images are displayed by default and the ipad supports video using HTML5. With all Apple products now supporting HTML5, its worthwhile keeping a close eye on your client usage, and potentially adding video content to your email, with the option of a fall back for those clients not supporting video. Reducing the need to click through (and wait for the load) could well create a great user experience for recipients.

Conclusion

So in summary, the mobile and tablet market are growing and changing, and pushing us email marketers forward in our design and coding, it is an exciting time! Before you start getting crazy excited about beautiful imagery and video content, do remember that Outlook is still king when it comes to email (Merkle 2012) and what looks gorgeous on an ipad may not render the same there.

Which campaigns performed well?

What was the from name, what was the subject line, does anything stand out as different?

Did you have any particular links that were clicked on more than others? What were these going to?  You may find by a closer analysis of the links clicked that actually there is a subject within your emails that is consistently popular with your recipient lists, equally you may find some links that are never clicked – use this to your advantage when creating new content; remove the unclicked and build more content around the popular.

Look at your email client usage

Has the demographic changed? What are your main platforms? Do you need to consider mobile optimisation for better rendering (that improves interaction)?

What are your bounce and unsubscribe rates like?

If they are high you could be emailing at the wrong frequency or using poor data collection methods so review your data collection;

Are they all above board? Collected using opt in data? Are you maximising the opportunity for people to opt in (face to face and on the web)?

It might not be about current campaigns

Performance so often relates so much to previous email content not what you’ve put in this email. Even if you wow them this time with something amazing, because expectations have been set they may never open it; customers realise there is nothing of value to your email and filter it out before you get chance to wow them again.

If you fear you could have bored your subscribers into being ‘emotionally unsubscribed‘, you’d need to consider ‘re-engagement strategies’ moving forward into the new year. I.e. what can you do to get these people listening to you again? Maybe a very special offer with a time fuse or a template redesign could help.

Big picture analysis

Use Google to see what people like on website – maybe it’s poor conversion optimisation/ checkout experience or irrelevant landing pages.  Google can also help you see the best time of day to send (when you get the traffic to your site).

No one visits our site at the weekend - it would be foolish to send an email on a Friday evening, other sites are different.

Believe it or not the wider economy can also have massive affects on your email campaigns, even down to the weather, sporting events (e.g. the World Cup), holidays, Royal Weddings… bare this in mind with the up and coming Olympics.

Conclusion

In summary, you can only improve campaigns through deep analysis of previous performance and pulling conclusions from knowing about your contact list. It’s not an easy task and takes time, but if you’d like to see better interaction, resulting in improved Return on Investment throughout 2012 it’s a necessary step in the right direction.

If you’re still not sure why your emails aren’t performing as you’d hoped why not give us a call, we’ll happily help you improve.

A recent report from Merkle stated that 55% of people with an internet enabled phone use it to check their personal email account, 43% of these check it more than four times a day, further to this, sending and receiving email is still the top activity on mobile devices (shortly followed by search). This could lead to great opportunities of time fused, last minute offers – equally as effective as SMS.

But is it really ALL about mobile?  What about those of us who are chained to a computer? Or those generations not accessing via mobile? Or those unable to access due to disability or poor technology? Or even, others like me, who subscribe to emails for work purposes (that often pass on best practice information via white papers or lengthy articles). Not sure about you but I don’t fancy reading all that on a phone. Maybe a tablet but…

In a recent gossip a friend informed me that soon enough our mobiles will be our computers, they’ll hold everything from personal contacts to work emails, documents, calendars and our online social lives. That we’ll arrive at work in the morning and simply plug our ‘computer’ into the screens. But how soon is this actually coming?  Both Return Path and Merkle have echoed the importance of remembering our precious desktop viewers, that consistently in studies, Outlook continues to be king of the desktop mail programmes.

So my thoughts?

Analyse your own campaign performance and email client viewing to see what platforms are most commonly used within your recipient base. It may well be that mobile just isn’t right for your market. For example Financial Services are still very much desktop based with a high penetration of Lotus, where creative industries would clearly be more Apple focused. Age demographics also plays a part in client usage, as does time/ day of viewing (weekends are typically higher mobile usage, where mid week is desktop).

Essentially you need to be where your customers are. If they’re mobile, great, jump on board. If they’re not, then why invest now when the technology will only change in a few months time?

Litmus put the thought well “For marketers the definition of mobile is changing and evolving. Tablets are becoming more common, bringing new kinds of email experiences into new places and times. Thinking about all the ways your customers are viewing your content is an important part of staying ahead of the curve.”

So, what are your thoughts? Where do you think mobile and tables will take us? Where do you see us viewing, sending and receiving personal and work emails in 5 years time and how do you think interaction with commercial emails will change?  I’d love to know your thoughts!

1) The customer has the power. With so much information available to the consumer these days, via the web and social forums, communications are now on their terms. We cannot assume that one communication route will suit all, and it’s crucial that marketers understand that no channel sits alone. We’ll all need to connect with customers through different means, personalised to their needs.

2) Location based marketing. Or local marketing initiatives will explode this year and be a “key differentiator in 2012”, with applications such as Foursquare and “Check-ins” growing enormously. Marketers should get their thinking caps on for ways to join up on and offline promotions to encourage more interaction of this kind.

Silverpop rightly advise to “Link up your email marketing with other channels and establish loyalty programs—and related rewards—based on behaviors such as recent purchases, check-ins and social sharing of your content.”

3) Being human. A while ago I blogged that ‘selling’ is gone and its all about engagement; whether that be with end customers or ‘influencers’. This trend is continuing well into 2012 with consumers expecting corporates to be more human in their approach. The joining of social media with business blurs the lines between communication, and a stuffy corporate Facebook page simply won’t hit the mark anymore. Consumers want to know there are real people behind this organisation and not be sold to, but listened and talked to.

Suggestions for your email campaigns include

• * Sell, inform and entertain within the content, add value and give opportunities for interaction.
• * Put faces to names, and real people. Using testimonials and quotes can improve email performance.

4) You have to embrace mobile. I’m personally shocked at how many businesses I speak to who still haven’t embraced or don’t understand the importance of mobile platforms and how optimising (looking pretty and performing perfectly) on all screen sizes is going to be vital for continued success in 2012.  The growth in mobile internet use is immense, and growing.

Merkle reported an extensive growth mobile email use, “of the [mobile] activities investigated, the most ubiquitous is checking personal email (55%), followed by the use of search engines (44%)”. They also reported an increase in commercial email use and a change in email reading behaviour. (More on mobile email here and here).

We therefore need to make sure we’re not only optimsing email for mobile; our websites and landing pages should also be spot on for finger tapping, quick browsing goodness.

The report also indicates consumers are subject to 5,000-plus advertising and marketing messages a day.  This affects email engagement and likely churn (hovering at 30%) as consumers opt out through information overload.

• *Understand all your subscribers are not the same and they need more tailored, specific messages of relevance to their needs
• *Segment databases and adopt engagement strategies across multiple platforms with all

In summary

There are plenty of thoughts on what 2012 is going to bring, personally I also think there is going to be even more of a move towards value when it comes to making a purchase. We’ve seen in our own organisation that price, or budget isn’t the decider so much as what I’m going to get from my investment. This is great for us email marketers as we know the returns on investment are frequently and consistently high, and growing.

In essence the 2012 landscape looks fast paced, exciting times for us marketers, with technology and consumer habits still developing and changing at rapid speeds.  We need to look at engagement on all levels, adopt multichannel techniques and though using data intelligently, monitor the results robustly.

What do you think 2012 is going to bring?