E-Mail Marketing in UK

A recent report has suggested that in the UK retailers are not only failing to take lessons and best practice on board to improve their efficiency in the online marketplace, but are actually performing worse at email marketing.

The dotMailer ‘Hitting the Mark’ industry analysis took a close look at how 36 UK retailers were managing their email marketing campaigns, and gave full brownie points to HMV and Republic for making full use of the technology and know-how to conduct effective strategies, but relegated Currys to the bottom of the league table for effectively not taking best practice on board and messing it up. The average score in email marketing effectiveness of just 60% does not bode well for the UK retailing industry as unprecedented numbers of consumers continue to choose online outlets over their main street equivalents for purchasing products of all kinds.

Econsultancy recently conducted another Email Census and discovered that half of the respondent companies are taking advantage of the opportunity to personalize emails, up almost 20% since 2009. But here again, retailers are losing out, with only 8% opting for personalization, despite studies showing that open and click rates can be improved through email personalization. Only New Look actually took the trouble to tailor customer feedback for use in personalization after the initial sign-up stage, so there is clearly much room for improvement. The advice contained in the report to retailers in particular is that they should put much more effort into collecting data from the outset in order to personalize emails, although the collection in terms of website design should not be too overpowering, so there is a balance to be met if the customer is not to be turned off by too much obtrusiveness.

Marketers need also to look at how many of their outgoing emails are ending up being read from portable devices like Blackberries and iPhones, which continue to proliferate. Emails read from a handheld device need to be optimized to be kept as brief and succinct and relevant as possible, to an even greater extent than those read over other channels, if they’re not to be immediately relegated to spam. They’ll also need to incorporate a choice of links, such as ‘view in browser’ and ‘view over mobile’. Links allowing the forwarding of an email to friends is an important factor to take on board here too, and even though recent studies suggest that not many users take advantage of the facility it doesn’t do any harm to include it, and few retailers are doing so, with 64% just not bothering. One of the few doing it is Next, with a prominent option for sharing, and Next also uses this to promote its links with social media networking. This is surely the way forward for the retail as well as every other industry that pretends to a serious presence online, and worthy of emulation. Studies show that the integration of email and social media as implemented by Next greatly improves campaign effectiveness.