Email opens up to a wider audience

Due to the impressive cost-effectiveness and accountability of email marketing, advertisers in the US and Europe have been increasing their eCRM (e-customer relationship management) spend exponentially. However, Asia-Pacific marketers have been slower to experiment with email. The travel and finance sectors, both of which have traditionally relied on direct-response communications, have been leading the way, but other sectors have been reluctant to follow.

This looks set to change during 2008, with ZenithOptimedia predicting that email will be one of the key digital channels to benefit from a 7.4% increase in advertising spend across Asia-Pacific ahead of the Beijing Olympics later this year. Brand owners in Hong Kong appear to be leading the charge, with Sony, HSBC and Nike all embarking on extensive eCRM strategies. Meanwhile, brands in sectors such as FMCG are investigating how they can use email.

Best practice

As new sectors begin to look in earnest at email, what can they learn from brands who already use it? Perhaps the first lesson is relevance. Research carried out by Radica Systems shows that more than 40% of consumers in Asia say they have purchased promotional items as a result of an email marketing message. A further 59% of respondents said they would happily open and read emails that they had opted to receive. Crucially, however, 87% of consumers insisted they would delete emails from unknown senders, highlighting the importance of permission-based email marketing.

“Far too many companies across the Asia-Pacific region spend far too much time, energy and money emailing consumers without any consideration for their needs,” argues Dominic Powers, senior vice-president, Asia-Pacific, at email and data firm Epsilon International. “Marketers need to show respect to their customers to gain anything from consumers’ cluttered inboxes.” Asian consumers delete large numbers of unsolicited messages without ever opening them. That’s not surprising given the issue of spam – in China, 56% of emails sent to consumers were spam last year.

Spam is one of the major reasons Asia’s marketers have not embraced email. “Clients are worried at being seen As spammers,” says an agency source. “One major technology company told us it is reluctant to do email for this very reason, despite the fact we would only be using opt-in lists.”

For marketers who decide to use email, then, it is imperative to look for ways to make their messages compelling. “Asia- Pacific consumers want to be in control of their private digital spaces and see most email as spam,” says Alastair Duncan, chief executive of MRM Worldwide. “Email must be used smartly and with caution as spam threatens to clog up the very pipes that supply our internet.”

Online travel firm Zuji is an example of a company that takes email seriously. Zuji gives consumers the chance to sign up to receive a personalised email newsletter by selecting their favourite three destinations around the region. The process ensures that all future emails include the latest prices to those destinations, allowing consumers to get the best possible deal. “Relevance will determine whether the reader trashes your spam email or views it as the best thing since sliced bread,” says Sean Seah, Hong Kong country manager at Zuji. “We work extremely hard to ensure that our emails are as relevant as possible.”

Another travel firm that has invested in email in Asia is British Airways, which appointed OgilvyOne Worldwide to handle its direct and digital marketing account in the region. According to Skip Fedura, partner at OgilvyOne in London, the rapid development of Asia-Pacific countries presents brand owners with significant creative and strategic challenges. Foremost among these is ensuring the content of promotional emails is compelling enough to convince consumers to interact. “More and more email clients are not rendering images and are limiting what can be done creatively,” says Fedura. “Consequently, marketers have to be much more creative in how they use their data to make their email communications effective.”

That means having and using an effective customer database. Up to now, marketers in Asia-Pacific have been slow to invest in high-end data management. But with data-reliant online channels growing in importance, that may have to change. “You need a crystal clear idea about who you are targeting, an insight that gives you a new way of reaching your audience and a strategy for engaging them,” argues Tony Effik, head of planning at Publicis Modem. “Without this your email is just junk.”

Good layout

Once the data is ready, marketers must pay close attention to design, making sure that their emails are visually appealing, yet simple enough to convey special offers and price promotions. For example, when a consumer clicks on a link within an email, they expect to be taken to the product or service featured in that email in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Good design is essential to boosting clickthrough rates, which in the US have remained largely unchanged at 5% for the past five years, according to Forrester’s report, ‘Email marketing comes of age’.

Despite the problem of getting consumers to open emails, Forrester claims that US consumers who buy products advertised in email spend 138% more than typical non-readers, with 50% of consumers who open and read email marketing messages also likely to purchase other items on impulse. “Email is widely regarded as the single most cost-effective digital channel,” explains Mike Teasdale, planning director at email specialist Harvest Digital. “Particularly for large ecommerce operations such as Amazon, email is arguably the most important driver of repeat business.”

Asia-Pacific advertisers also need to focus on implementing tracking techniques to gauge the success of their email activity. Quantitative metrics such as delivery, open and click-through rates are effective in providing marketers with a snapshot of a campaign’s performance. “Emails must be tracked and analysed to improve understanding of customer behaviour,” says Zuji’s Seah.

More advanced techniques such as conversion tracking allow marketers to assess how many consumers go online to buy a product as a result of receiving an email. Post-click tracking gauges the level of post-email user engagement with a campaign, while qualitative techniques can assess consumer satisfaction with any given email promotion. “Only brands tracking down to the ROI level can truly understand the value of email marketing and justify its place on the media plan,” argues Powers.

Increasing budgets mean that email marketing is becoming ever more sophisticated. As well as segmenting consumers by age and demographic, advertisers can now target their campaigns based on user-behaviour and online purchases. Brand owners can also add dynamic content to their emails to make them more relevant and appealing.

But the advice for marketers in sectors that have not traditionally used email is this: master the basics. By concentrating on targeting consumers with relevant messages from an accurate database, brand owners can ensure their eCRM activity is both cheap and highly effective. If they manage that, email will be a feature of media plans for many years to come.