10. Data Protection Impact Assessments

It has always been best practice to take a privacy-by-design approach when developing your data capture and processing strategies, as well as a key part of any technology implementation. Privacy impact assessments are fundamental to this approach by giving marketers a useful tool to consider properly the privacy risks that their data processing entails. All the GDPR does here is make privacy by design an express legal requirement and makes PIAs (renamed in the regulations as Data Protection Impact Assessment or DPIA) a requirement under certain circumstances where the data processing is likely to result in high risk to the data subjects such as:

• where new technology is being deployed
• where a processing activity is likely to significantly impact individuals
• where there is large-scale processing on special categories of data

For most marketers, it will be the first two circumstances that will be most likely to trigger a DPIA but it is important to know the special categories of data if appropriate in the future.

In many if not most situations, the DPIA will indicate that the processing of the data is not high risk or if it is high risk, you will be able to address those risks. If you cannot mitigate the risk, you should contact the ICO for guidance on whether processing the data will comply with GDPR.

If you haven’t already, you should start to asses if any DPIAs are warranted within your organisation, who will lead them and who else needs to be involved. There is great guidance published by both the UK ICO and the Article 29 Working Party on DPIAs and privacy by design.

11. Data Protection Officers

US President Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read “the buck stops here.” It was his assurance that he was ultimately responsible for how the government operated under his administration. Historically when it comes to data, the buck has not stopped anywhere due to the way that the collection and processing of data has grown organically within businesses and other organisations. I was speaking with one head of CRM recently who told me of the over 80 marketing databases that they currently have. It is going to come down to this CRM manager to get all of that data into a single place.

Every organisation should designate someone to “take the data buck” – to be ultimately responsible for data privacy and compliance. You should also have a think about where this role of Data Protection Officer (DPO) sits within the organisation and overall governance structures so that the person in this role has the freedom to act, should the need arise. In many instances, the GDPR has overcome this by specifying situations where a DPO is required such as:

• public authorities
• organisations that carry out large scale, regular and systematic monitoring of individuals
• organisations that carry out large scale processing of special categories of data

Whomever the designated DPO, it is important that they have the knowledge, support and authority to carry out their role effectively. The article 29 working party has some good guidance on roles and responsibilities of a DPO.

12. International Considerations

The first thing to remember here is that Brexit will have little to no impact on GDPR. The government has confirmed on multiple occasions including as recently as the Queen’s Speech on 21^st of June 2017, that GDPR will be the data protection law in the UK going forward. Moreover, the UK will still be an EU member when the law goes into effect on the 25^th of May 2018.

If you operate in multiple EU member states, then you should determine which would be your lead data regulator. This is not meant to be a way to be under the auspices of the most favourable regulator. Your lead regulator should be the state where your central administration in the EU is based or the location where decisions about your data processing are taken. You can do this by mapping out where you take your data processing decisions and the country with the preponderance of those decisions is the one you should choose. If on the other hand you are not engaged in any cross border data processing, then your decision here is quite straightforward. Once again, the Article 29 Working Party has produced some guidance that will help you make the correct decision.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of part 1, data recently released by the DMA indicates that marketers are feeling less prepared for GDPR than they did in February. Marketers are also feeling less knowledgeable about GDPR in general and their four big concerns are:

1. Consent
2. Legacy Data
3. Implementing a compliant system
4. Profiling

I hope that this blog series has gone a little way to making you feel more prepared or at least has given you some things to think about and some things to start discussing internally. Over the coming weeks and months, dotmailer will be publishing useful guidance from recognised sources geared towards email marketers. Our approach is to keep our readers up to speed based on facts directly from this reputable guidance or vetted by the UK or other data regulators around Europe. In addition, our teams will be ready to help you implement the advice you receive from your professional advisors within the dotmailer environment.

7. Consent

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, email marketing is consent-based. GDPR however, more fully defines how to get consent with the following stipulations:

• Must be freely given – giving people genuine choice and control over how you use their data and “unbundling” consent from other terms and conditions; in other words, consent cannot be a precondition for a service unless it necessary to deliver the service.
• Specific – clearly explain exactly what people are consenting to in a way they can easily understand (i.e. not with a load of legal mumbo jumbo) and in a way that does not disrupt the user experience.
• Informed – clearly identify yourself as the data controller, identify each processing operation you will be performing, collect separate consent for each unless this would be “unduly disruptive or confusing”, describe the reason behind each data processing operation, and notify people of their right to withdraw consent at any time.
• Unambiguous – it must be clear that the person has consented and what they have consented to with an affirmative action (i.e. no pre-checked boxes). Therefore, silence would not be a valid form of consent.

In the last instalment, we talked about deciding on the legal basis you will use to process your marketing data. Consent is not your only option. That said, it is always a good idea to know the source of all of your data, how that data flows through your various systems and what consent you have for the processing of that data. The ICO has published detailed guidance on consent and has produced a consent checklist to help you review your current practices.

8. Children

For the first time, the GDPR specifically calls out the rights of children and offers special protection for their personal data in the digital world. If you offer what the GDPR calls “information society services” to children and you rely on consent to process their data, you may have to get the permission of the parent or guardian before processing that child’s data. The GDPR set the age at which a child can consent for themselves at 16 but the UK may lower this to 13. One interesting thing to note is that the parent or guardian’s consent expires when the child reaches the age at which they can give consent, so you will have to refresh their consent at that milestone.

9. Data Breaches

The GDPR makes it the responsibility of all organisations to issue notifications for certain types of data breaches. You will have to notify the ICO if the breach is likely to impinge on the rights and freedoms of individuals such as financial loss, loss of confidentiality or significant economic or social harm. If this risk is high you may also have to notify the individual directly. Now is the time to think about your policies and procedures for identifying and managing data breaches.

So far, we have given you a lot to think about and we hope you have gotten started.

Check out our fourth and final installment, where we look at privacy by design, data protection officers and international considerations.

4.    Individuals’ Rights

Just ‘getting ready’ for GDPR is not going to be good enough because you may also have to prove to the regulator that you are ready for GDPR. One critical proof point will be the decisions you make in getting ready for GDPR, as well as what you will do going forward after its implementation. Get in the habit now of documenting all of your decisions and the deliberations that went into them (more on this under the Protection by Design section). You will also have clearly defined and documented policies and procedures to comply with GDPR. These cannot be the kind of documents that are written and then live in a cupboard just in case something goes wrong, but rather they need to be distributed to staff in a useful format with comparable training so that the processes become habit within your organisation.

One area that is very well suited to this is protecting individuals’ rights. Most of the rights under GDPR are not that different than under the DPA, but now is a good time to ensure that you have your documentation in order. It is also a good time to ensure that your procedures will be compliant around things like correcting data and subject access requests.

5.    Subject Access Requests

While we are on the topic of Subject Access requests, these are changing under GDPR. First, the down side; you will no longer be able to charge for these and you will have to reply within 30 rather than 40 days. You will also have to provide some metadata along with the data subject’s own data, such as your data retention periods and many of the other things covered under the notices provision.

The good news is that you can charge for or refuse excessive requests (too frequent) and you can ask the data subject to specify the data they are looking for if you process large amounts of data. You will also be able to provide the data electronically in many cases.

6.    Legal Basis

Under the GDPR, the legal basis for processing data is all-important because individuals’ rights can change depending on the legal basis you determine for processing the data. It will be important for businesses to balance the requirements of consent and the legitimate interests that the GDPR provides for. The other legal basis that many email marketers will rely on is processing the data with the subject’s consent.

That puts us half way through the twelve things you should be thinking about to prepare for GDPR. Check out part 3.

Editor’s note: The materials and information above is not intended to convey or constitute legal advice. You should seek your own advice specific to your business’ requirements.

Marketers are feeling less confident about GDPR than they did in February when 68% of businesses said they were ‘on course’ or ‘ahead’ of plans to be GDPR compliant by May 2018. Since that survey, the ICO and the Article 29 Working Party have issued guidance and discussion documents bringing businesses greater clarity around what GDPR compliance will entail. This greater clarity has caused respondents to reassess their positions:

• Only 55% of companies feel they are now ‘on course’ or ‘ahead’ of plans to meet the May 2018 deadline versus the 68% in February.
• Marketers perception of their knowledge as ‘good’ rather than ‘basic’ has also slipped from 66% to 59%.
• Marketers sense of being ‘extremely’ or ‘somewhat’ prepared has fallen from 71% to 61%.

What has not changed is marketers’ four big GDPR-related concerns:

1. Consent
2. Legacy Data
3. Implementing a compliant system
4. Profiling

There are twelve things that you might want to be thinking about to get you started. The first three are raising awareness, conducting a data audit and reviewing your privacy notices.

1. Awareness

If you are the only person in your organization that is thinking about GDPR, you could be in big, big trouble. This is a major change to the legislative regime in which your business operates, so not only do key people need to be made aware of the revisions your business will need to make, they also need to be made to care.

As one of the speakers at this morning’s DMA event pointed out, good data practitioners already have the proper use of data on their radar; many of the requirements of GDPR could therefore be considered business as usual. By stressing that this data attention is now in favor of helping the business comply with the new GDPR regulations, you may be able to obtain more budget for your undertaking.

While I am sure this is true in some cases, I know that for many companies, GDPR will represent a radical change in how they do business. It is critical that senior management is made of the impact sooner rather than later and that all members of staff are trained and brought up to speed on the changes over the next twelve months.

2. Data Audit

While you are running your internal PR campaign, you can also be talking to all of the people that have data bases squirreled away here, there and everywhere; and start auditing each of these. Among other things, you need to fully document:

• What data you hold
• Where you obtained it
• When it was acquired
• How often it is updated
• All of the places it is stored within your organization
• How the data flows from one place to another
• Who has access to the data throughout its journey
• How it is stored
• Where it is stored
• The retention policy for each datum

3. Privacy Notices

One of the things that will most likely have to change for most UK businesses under GDPR is their privacy notices. Being open, honest and transparent with consumers about what data you are collecting, why, how you will be using it and how you will take care of it has been a core principle of data protection law since the original Data Protection Act of 1998. What has changed, however, is that the legislators feel that data owners have not always done this to the best of their ability, so they have given marketers more detailed instructions as to what openness, honesty and transparency entails in practice. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has released a great code of practice on privacy notices.

Check out our second installment of GDPR: 12 things to think about.

Editors note: The materials and information above is not intended to convey or constitute legal advice. You should seek your own advice specific to your business’ requirements.

Secondly, I don’t think anybody on either side of the Brexit debate would advocate not trading with Europe. If we look to other non-EU countries that rely heavily on trading with Europe like Switzerland and Norway, we see that they keep the laws that relate to commerce roughly in line with those of Europe. For most laws it is just more expedient than handling the differences in their trade agreements but for data privacy laws this makes sense for the reasons mentioned above.

What all of this means is that GDPR is going ahead in May 2018 regardless of the outcome today. Over the next two years we will be working through the DMA and directly with both government and the Information Commissioner’s Office on how best to implement these new regulations. We will also share the guidance on the new regulations as it becomes available.

In times of great change it is always comforting to have some constants in life. Like it or not, in or out, GDPR is here to stay. Let the politicians and bureaucrats worry about implementing the results of the vote and focus your attention to getting ready for May 2018.

Want to learn more? Check out our Email Privacy Officer James Koons blog post What Brexit could mean for the future of email privacy.

1. My wife is an accomplished writer and has an English degree, so the suggestion of using all lower case was completely offended her.
2. If using all upper case is the digital equivalent of shouting, using all lower case must be the equivalent of whispering. At the very least it sends a clear message to your recipient of your confidence in the quality of your own content.
3. It just looks unprofessional and a bit slapdash.
4. The “tip” was just … WRONG!

Email deliverability and inbox placement is based on the user level ratings across more than 1,000 attributes, so to imply that the case of your subject line will help with deliverability is just nuts. In fact, the biggest driver of inbox placement is user engagement and how likely are your recipients to engage with an all-in-lower-case subject line?

This is the problem with the popular wisdom of email; it is usually wrong. There are no words that you absolutely cannot use in your subject line. Just because your open rate benchmark is 25% does not mean that 75% of your list is unengaged and there is no best or worse day of the week or time of the day to send your email to guarantee an open. What we have here is the equivalent of kids talking about sex on the school playground: there are a few grains of truth and a whole lot of guessing and hearsay.

So what is a marketer to do? First, download our cheat sheet called First Impressions Count: Capture your audience with killer subject lines. After getting some new and fresh ideas from the cheat sheet, I would normally suggest you test these ideas to find out what works best with your audience. I am still going to recommend that but as the third step not the second.

The problem with jumping straight into testing is that more often than not you will get it wrong and it can take a long time to even get near your sweet spot. If only there was a way to start near your sweet spot before you begin testing…

…well there is. There are a number of platforms on the market which use artificial intelligence based on millions of subject lines sent to billions of recipients that will help you find your sweet spot. We partner with a tool called Phrasee and have asked them to join us for a dotlive event on Thursday the 21^st at 6pm at our London Bridge office.

So the real answer to the question “what’s a marketer to do” is:

Download our cheat sheet: First Impressions Count: Capture your audience with killer subject lines.

The verdict was that 90% of Europeans want the same data protection rights across the board, regardless of where their data is processed, which will result in an end to the existing patchwork of data protection laws.

First and foremost: marketers shouldn’t panic. There are two more votes on the wording between now and early January, and assuming it passes both votes, the member states will have two years to implement the changes. So it looks like the changes will come into effect in late 2017 or early 2018. Secondly, these changes are really quite a good compromise. They meet the needs of European Citizens, 70% of whom are concerned about how businesses use their data and the business community, which relies on marketing to generate sales.

The first result for the industry is that direct marketing has been defined as a legitimate interest. This means that it will continue to operate under an opt-out regime, but of course this can be changed for specific channels like email which will remain opt-in. Similarly, the text refers to “unambiguous” consent rather than the stricter “explicit” consent – another positive move. Again, we will have to see how this plays out for specific channels, but this shows a willingness to work with the marketing industry. All consumers will have the right to “object” or “opt-out” of having their data processed for marketing purposes, and this will have to be brought to the fore from the first communication and not hidden away.

The definition of personal data is also not as strict as we once feared it would be. While online identifiers such as cookies have been included as personal data, this is not universal. It will depend if the online identifier can be used to identify the individual as to whether it is covered. For example, a cookie tied to an email address or login will be covered but a cookie placed by an advertiser would not.

The new language also classifies profiling under the term “automated decision-making”, but is only an issue where the profiling either produces a legal effect on the recipient or “significantly affects” them. Based on previous information released, this should only impact using marketing data to make offers which have a legal effect (pre-approved credits cards, etc.). But it will be interesting to see if “significantly affects” extends into marketing automation.

The final language was only agreed and released last night so we are all still digesting it. But it’s safe to say that we can all stop holding our breath and relax; Christmas has come just a little early.

In 2010, we wrote a blog on ‘5 Steps to Ensure Spot-On ROI Tracking’, which looked at how even though overall UK marketing spend fell in the final 3 months of 2009, it was expected to increase in 2010, including email marketing, for the first time since early 2007.

Well, four years later, the latest research from the DMA’s annual National client email report found that “more than half of UK client-side email marketers anticipate increasing their 2014 email expenditure, after ROI for the channel reached 2,500% in 2013. (Source)

And according to MarketingCharts, “8 in 10 US marketers who responded to an Adobe survey agree that there is more pressure to show return on investment on marketing spend”.

So, with that in mind, here are some thoughts on how you should be tracking and measuring the ROI from your email marketing and how you can improve it.

Set goals

Like any other marketing activity, you need to set goals for your email marketing that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed.  These goals should go deeper than the process metrics like opens and clicks that are easy to track. They should be based on the performance metrics that are true indicators of success for your business.  You can then work backwards to see how the process metrics correlate and identify which are the best indicators of true success.

Track your customer journeys – from email through to purchase

Site tracking enriches your data and your understanding of your contact’s engagement with your site.

By tracking certain pages of your website, you can track which pages your contacts go to after clicking a link in your email.  Your email service provider (ESP) should be able to provide you with a piece of JavaScript code that you can add to your web pages and this site tracking information is then provided within the reporting area against the relevant campaign

What to do with this ROI information?

Split testing on ROI as a metric is extremely powerful as it enables you to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

Most ESPs will give you the power to test subject lines, content, friendly from names and from addresses for open or click performance. While these will give you some insight, most of us make no money from these process metrics and we need to be looking at these tests in the context of sales and ROI, whether that is units sold, revenue, AOV or order frequency.

How to improve your ROI from email marketing

Once you have a better understanding of your email marketing’s performance, you can benchmark your metrics against previous periods and start looking at ways to improve it going forward. To start, have a look at these key factors:

• Segment your data to send relevant emails
• Use marketing automation to be proactively reactive. In other words, use automation to immediately react to strong buying indicators with programs such as abandoned browse, abandoned basket and thank you messages with cross-selling up-sell offers. Split test your emails to see what works best for you, including subject lines, friendly from name, creative and from address
•  Test different landing pages and see what resonates with your audience best

Tools in Dotdigital that make it happen

For a while now in Dotdigital, you can set up site and ROI tracking. If you haven’t already, find out how to here

ROI Split Testing

A new feature to Dotdigital’s split testing functionality enables you to measure winning split test campaigns on ROI data, not just the amount of clicks and opens. If you’re using our site and ROI tracking, you can start using this immediately. Read more in our blog post and forum.

Is there another way?

By now you might be thinking this assumes all of my email marketing is done in a vacuum – that none of my other marketing influences this behavior.  Attribution could be the topic of a whole book, not to mention another post. In short you are correct, as this uses last touch attribution. In our experience, it is not a perfect system but it is directionally accurate. In some cases, email gets the credit at the expense of other channels but this balances out with those situations where the other channels get credit at the expense of email.

If you are not comfortable with this, there is another way to look at it. Instead of focusing on the value-driven by a campaign, turn the question around to look at the value of your email list as an asset to the business.  This can be measured simply by taking the revenue generated by those customers for whom you have an email address, which gives you the value of the list. You then divide this value by the number of addresses, which gives the value of each address.

Typically, a subject line is around 50 characters long. So how can marketers craft a snippet of text that not only entices a recipient to open, but also encourages them to take a desired action?

Before you consider fancy wordsmithery and snappy sales spiel, you’ll need to get back to basics. First identify the purpose of your email and clarify what it is that your potential readers needs are. It is this that will give you the context upon which to craft your subject line.

What Is Contextual Marketing?

Anthony Muller, on the Forrester blog describes context as being ‘derived from a wealth of signals pulled from environmental, social, emotional, cultural, and economic factors.’ Hubspot say that due to technological advances, ‘rather than marketing to one audience with one message, we can now market to an audience of one. We can deliver a consistent, personalized message to each individual across every medium.’ And that includes an emails subject line.

Subject line – Read All About It!

Subject lines provide context for the entire email, much like a headline within a magazine or a newspaper. When reading a newspaper, typically we glance at headlines before deciding whether to read on. Similarly to a headline, whatever the style, a subject line should relate clearly to the body of the email.

Getting the context of your email right from the get go will help to put your readers into the right mindset for when they read the body of your email. It will help them mentally shift to the right context before they read the rest of your message. It will act as a virtual ‘prompt’ in the direction of your call to action that they will likely encounter later on within their journey.

Right Message, Right Person, Right Time

First things first, decide on the objective of your campaign. Ask yourself what action you want your reader to take upon receiving and reading your send.

Do you want to…

• Move leads along the purchase path, nurturing them towards a sale?
• Build awareness of your brand or product?
• Change the perception of your brand or product?
• Serve content to your existing customers?
• Cross-sell or up-sell to your existing customers?
• Generate new sales leads?

Once you’ve established this you will be better placed to lock down your subject line’s keywords. Keywords like ‘buy, learn, read, save’ for example.

Now that you’ve decided on the purpose of the email, consider the recipient data that you have in your armoury.

Why Does This Matter?

Context is all about delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time. The more data that you have about your recipients, the more targeted subject lines you can tailor for individual audiences.

If Content Is King, Context Is Queen:

Context will give your recipients a more personalised and relevant experience. They’ll be more likely to give your email message the time of day when the subject line is pertinent and interesting.

SEO technology company Conductor recently reported that 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails, 864 thousand hours of video are created daily. Because of this content bombardment, when it comes to email, the subject line is a marketers chance to get the context right. To ensure they reach people who are likely to have a million and one other things on their mind.

Many marketers are guilty of delivering the same message to prospects regardless of their relationship with the business and/or their purchase history. But clever marketers know that any data they have about contacts interests, history or behaviour is an extremely powerful tool for segmenting their contacts. As a result, their marketing messages and subject lines.

Subject lines can be personalised and given context with previously collected data including recipient’s names, geographical location and/or their purchase history. Plus of course any other data that you might have collected from previous campaigns.

Ok, so by now you should have decided on the purpose of your email and thought about the data you have about your recipients. Ready to move on?

Seasonal Awareness:

What time of year is it? What’s going on at this moment in time? Why am I asking you this? Well, marketers should take advantage of events, trends and seasons. This will add some personalisation and context to their subject lines.

Although I mentioned seasonality, I’m not just talking about the weather here. Think about whether there are relevant business orientated seasonal factors too. For example:

• Is it appraisal time?
• Tradeshow season?
• Are budgets being finalised?

Or if you operate in the B2C space, is it the school holidays? Is there a relevant sporting event going on? Marketers could have a field day with Wimbledon, Tour de France, F1 and The Ashes all within the space of a couple of weeks.

When telling me about their latest app offerings, iTunes used their subject line to recently inform me about their most timely new additions including the latest ‘great tennis apps.’ They told me about it via an email subject line the week of the Wimbledon final).

Subject Line Newsjack:

Newsjacking is another great way that marketers can add context to their subject lines (and of course email copy).  The Content Marketing Institute says that ‘newsjacking is the process of injecting your brand into the day’s news, creating a twist that grabs eyes when they’re open widest.’ Newsjacking is about tying your email campaigns to current events that are top of mind.

The content Marketing Institute recently wrote a post about how budget airline Spirit Airlines harnessed the ‘fiscal cliff’ debacle. This was the popular term used to describe the budget challenge that the U.S. government faced at the end of 2012. They used this news event to craft eye-catching subject lines.

They sent an email in which the subject line read ‘So, about that cliff everyone’s talking about…’ Then they added within the body of the email that ‘when it comes to travel, spirit is always fiscally responsible’. At the time this story was dominating the news headlines, I’d certainly have been more inclined to open an email that talked about something that was already front of mind rather than a ‘save 50% on your next flight.’

State of mind:

Next, consider what frame of mind your recipient might be in at the very time that they receive your email. What do I mean by this? Well, consider how far along your sales funnel they might be. Have they previously purchased from you?

Lessons From Amazon:

There is no denying that Amazon is an absolute master of this! If you’ve ever shopped with them you’ll have probably noticed that they know a fair bit about you and they manage to deliver it cleverly in a helpful manner.

On their website they use their collected data to show shoppers suggestions of items similar to those they are considering. Amazon also show online reviews by others who purchased items they are looking at. They use this data to send email reminders of sales specifically targeting items a recipient has previously expressed an interest in along with emails regarding incentives related to previous purchases.

I recently received an email from Amazon in which the subject line read ‘Trade in “Alternative and Activist New Media (DMS – Digital Media and Society)” for a gift card’. I’d purchased the book a few years ago, read it and it was now sitting on my bookshelf not doing very much. Because Amazon’s subject line hadn’t simply read ‘trade in a book for …’ and had related specifically to a purchase I’d made, I took them up on their generous offer and traded it in for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card, which they told me I can use on millions of items across the store.

Would I have still acted if they’ve not added relevant context to their subject line? I guess we’ll never really know, but they certainly harnessed the potential of contextual marketing within their emails subject line to edge the bets in their favor. Bravo Amazon, bravo indeed!

Online habits:

Next, ask yourself what you know about your recipients online habits that could influence the timing of your send? In a previous post we spoke to Francesca, head of editorial for Fresh Business Thinking. She told us that they’d been sending their newsletters daily at 8am on the dot for as long as she could remember. Their open rate had been pretty consistent during that time.

In an effort to improve their stats she opted for shaking things up a little. Francesca ‘trialled a month long test for each of the new times she wanted to try sending at and was pleasantly surprised that their open rate increased by almost an entire per cent when they opted for sending at just gone midnight.

She said that ‘we chose 3 times to trial based on what we thought our recipients might be doing at those times. Midnight was one of the times we chose because we send (in the main) to business directors, owners & entrepreneurs and we know they work late, often past midnight or else start very early. We also know that almost all of them use smartphones. So even if they’re not at their computer they’re likely to still be ‘switched on’.’

‘4/5 years ago 8am sends worked for us but we knew that as our recipients were changing we needed to adapt to keep up.’

Timing:

By thinking about the timing of your send and the reasons that you have chosen to send at that time, you might also be able to add some relevant context to your email’s subject line text. For example, if you’re a food retailer and you’re sending emails at lunch consider asking your recipients what they are having for lunch today or whether they fancy something a little more satisfying than the sandwich they packed this morning. Similarly, if you’re a florist, consider your send time around key events (like mother’s day) based on when customers are likely to make decisions and purchases. If this is a week before the big day, use your subject line to ask recipients whether they are spoiling mum this year or about what her favorite flower might be. I could go on but I’m sure you get the idea J

And we’re done!

Now, I’m aware that this might seem like an awful lot of thought to put into a adding some context mere 50 characters of text. Subject lines really do have the potential to make or break your email campaigns.

The effects of cleverly adding context to your subject lines are vast. By delivering more relevant messages to your prospects based on what you know about them, the world around them and their habits, your results will only go one way, and that’s up! Click here for 11 tips on writing subject lines that get opened.

Since launching our feature forum as a place where we can better understand the demand for improvements to our products, we’ve had some really interesting conversations with clients that have helped us look differently at things we take for granted.

Just such an example arose recently around the discussion of how dotdigital reports email activity and how email marketers should monitor their campaigns.

So let’s look at the question that was posed:

When is an opened email not an opened email?

Once upon an email

In the early days of email, marketers used the ‘open’ metric as a way to differentiate email from other marketing channels and as a result, it was pushed hard as the channel’s key USP.

At the time, it was quite novel to be able to attribute an open to a recipient and have cradle to grave tracking of a marketing campaign – digital or otherwise.  Email was sold as the solution to the 50% problem – “I know 50% of my marketing spend is wasted. I just don’t know which 50%.”

Email was also the only channel where you knew who was sent the communication, who received it (as defined by ISP acceptance, which is also not the most accurate metric), who opened it, who clicked on it, and ultimately who bought as a result.

The times are a-changing

They were the days before default image blocking, so the only false negatives came from people who received plain text versions.  Now of course, the opportunities for false negatives are much greater with more email clients switching off images by default.  At the same time the use of the preview pain has increased the instances of false positives as rendering takes place automatically.

In the grander scheme of things, all the standard email stats (delivers, bounces, opens, clicks, etc.) are process metrics, which are useful for diagnosing the health of an individual campaign or even an entire programme, but (and this is where it gets interesting) it’s important to remember that these metrics are not a measure of an email’s effectiveness or a campaign’s success.  To really supply useful figures that prove success, you need to start looking at things like ROI and ROE (Return on Engagement).

It’s a debate that has been raging within the email community since the mid-2000s but was picked up in earnest by the US DMA in 2008:

Should we continue to call these things opens and if not then what are they and how should they be considered?

This has not really taken off in the UK market yet but we are closely monitoring it with interest. Would love to hear what the followers of this blog think and where they see the debate going in the future. How are you reporting the success of your email campaigns?