Is your email marketing relevant enough to make you stand out?

Consumers and businesses are so suffocated by competitive messaging that the only real winner is utter confusion. A recent report in Fortune Magazine suggested that individuals are subjected to 30 000 brand messages per day, making it nearly impossible for any brand to stand out.

It stands to reason you’ll overlook, ignore or discard generic messages about products or services you aren’t ever likely to use. This is most certainly the case when it comes to email marketing , which is not only competing for a customer’s attention against other brands, but also trying to stand out through the clutter and spam.

Is your message getting lost in the noise?

Consider this: an estimated 88% of emails sent in 2009 were spam messages. So, your email marketing campaigns need to speak to the consumer on a personal level. Now is the time to change. Everyone is receptive to information about things that specifically interest them and in fact, rather than merely tolerating that sort of information, it is the sort of thing they actively seek out.

It’s about being relevant, to get your email marketing messages not only delivered, but read and actioned by your customers, you just have to start being relevant to them again.

Consumers are asking: do you understand me? Do you know what I want? Do you care to get it to me in the way that I want it? If you can answer yes to these sorts of questions, you have a real chance at gaining that consumer’s attention.

If you do not, you’ll struggle to gain readership for your messages and may see your unsubscribe rates begin to climb.

What you need to bear in mind:

• Listen to your customers: ask them what information they want to receive by posing questions that determine their life-stage and interests, right at the start when they sign up for email marketing. They’ll tell you what they’re interested in or want to buy if you care to listen to them.


• Segmentation and targeting: start segmenting your customer base, not only on their interests, but also on their purchase behaviour, demographics, life-stage, activity on previous emails and activity on your site. Then you can start targeting messages that are relevant to each customer, based on all the information you have in their profile.


• Content: make sure what you’re sending to them matches their interest. This is about what they want, not what you want to send them. Get this right and you’ll grow a willing and interested reader base.


• Timing: think about the optimal time to send your messages. This will depend on your audience and their daily and weekly habits.


• Using the right channels: what’s best, email? SMS? Something else? Know your audience and how they work and you’ll significantly increase your chances of reaching them.

To sum up

The right content, at the right time, using the right channels and all based on customer feedback will enable you to be relevant to the target audience for your products or services. In the end, that’s the ideal position for a marketer to be in.

Mia Papanicolaou
Head of eMarketing
www.striata.com

eBilling vs eInvoicing – Billions vs Billions

Confusion reigns in the land of eBilling and eInvoicing. Which model will save more? Both claim to be able to save billions but most people are unclear on the differences and the drivers behind the current explosion of activity in this area.

Firstly, a couple myths to debunk:

• eInvoicing is not just another Scandinavian government plot to control all commercial activity


• eBilling is not receiving a paper bill and paying it through internet banking


• You can’t actually save a whole Amazon rain forest by switching to eBilling


• eInvoicing is not just an XML replacement of EDI


• Banks don’t want to be your online bill filing cupboard


• There can’t be one consolidator for all consumer bills

Now a few truths to confirm:

• eInvoicing and eBilling can save billions of wasted costs on printing and postage


• eBilling does save the biller more than it saves the consumer (but who’s counting?)


• Consumers do prefer to have their bills emailed to them rather than fetching them from a website


• Cross border eInvoicing is complex and needs careful planning


• You can reduce your DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) by up to 30% through eBilling


• ExPP is good for the environment

With the plethora of noise out in the market about eBilling and eInvoicing, what we need to explain is the difference between the two concepts and when to talk about each one.

At the broadest level:
eInvoicing is the exchange of invoices between businesses (B2B) that regularly do business with each other, automating the Accounts Payable processes of receiving and processing incoming supplier invoices.

eBilling is the delivery of electronic bills to end consumers (B2C) and providing a payment option for them.

eInvoicing is generally highly automated with integrated workflow that needs agreement on standards and specifications, eBilling is the replacement of paper with electronic documents delivered via email (the simplest and easiest model) or via a website (Biller direct, bank aggregator or consolidator models).

Conclusion
So when talking about sending bills to end consumers; talk about eBilling – when talking about creating the Skynet of accounting systems; talk about eInvoicing.

Michael Wright
CEO
www.striata.com

Why 82.639% of Internet Bankers will not turn off Paper Statements

I love internet banking, I really do. Outside of email and general internet access it has to be the one application that has truly changed the way we interact with an organization. We actively avoid branches and even ATM usage is a grudge action. With the advent of mobile banking and iPhone ® applications, we now have everything we need, exactly when we need it.













Source Pew Internet 2009©

So if this is the case, then why is it that 75% to 95% of Internet Bankers still receive every paper statement and document that they did before the internet?

The answer is astoundingly straight forward – there is simply no incentive / compelling reason for them not to.

From a Jan 2010 Javelin report: “At least 7 out of 10 consumers receive paper statements – and a significant number are “double-dippers” who receive both paper and electronic statements.”

Every major bank has tried in vain to compel, entice & incentivize their customers to give up paper. Considering that 75% of North Americaninternet users are below the age of 55, and just on 90% of that group have home broadband access, the answer must lie in the customer experience.

Before we talk customer experience, let’s look at what I refer to as the“incentive disconnect”. For the customer, a once-off incentive of $10 may just be enough to get 30% of them to agree to turn off their paper statement. The current average hard cost (printing, envelope, postage) of mailing one paper bank statement is approximately US $0.50. By including marketing costs, a customer would need to be paperless for 24months for the bank to break even. So, financially, this is not a feasible option.

The consumer experience examined:
Today, with Internet banking, consumers can download PDF versions of their statements easily and quickly. This brings us back to our burning question – if this easy option exists, then why do more than 80% of US consumers still receive paper statements?

The answer comes down to 4 reasons:

1. Current convenience: "I don’t have to do anything to get my bank statement"
2. It’s an effort: The consumer has to act in order to turn off the paper. In most cases, the action required is a multi-step website navigation process – find the correct webpage within internet banking, navigate through very intimidating legal language and check multiple boxes (each with its own legal warning of some kind). All this to save the bank some money? Ask yourself, who would actually do this? The answer – only 5% to 10% of extremely tech savvy consumers will.
3. Keeping records: Consumers have been educated to keep their bank statements. Even though banks do offer a multi-year history online, most feel that it’s simpler to just file them (in many instances, unopened) when they arrive.
4. No incentive: There is no real compelling reason why consumers will elect to go paperless. ‘Why should I when I can have the best of both?”

My prediction is that unless financial institutions change their current paperless strategies dramatically, the number of consumers who will opt for electronic statements only, will plateau at less than 20% and even that will take another 3 years of aggressive promotion.

So what will work for the consumer? Logically it has to be a strategy that includes all of the following elements :

• The consumer does not have to do anything to go paperless.


• Going paperless is more convenient than not. The proof – will it take me less or more time to open my electronic statement than the paper one? (If it’s more than 5 seconds, it’s too long.)


• Their statement is delivered to them - they do not have to go and find it and it can be read with just a single click.


• It is delivered in such a way that it can be opened and read both on a computer and mobile device, without any technical knowledge, special software etc.


• It must be more secure than paper delivery and can be saved securely with just one click.

This might sound like an impossible scenario, but today, solutions exist and are very much available. Three of the top ten global banks, have deployed a secure electronic document delivery approach, with evidence of consumer paperless adoption rates exceeding 50%!


In conclusion – until financial institutions adopt secure electronic document delivery , paper statement suppression will remain an elusive goal.

Garin Toren
Chief Operating Officer
www.striata.com

If iPhone and BMW can do it, why can't an eBill?

Whilst I’ve never been directly involved in consumer product development, it strikes me that to ensure success, there is at least one fundamental requirement: the new product should be better than the one it’s replacing. When the iPhone 3G was introduced, it took all the attributes and features of the old model and added faster networking. The latest flat-screen televisions are clearer, larger but much thinner than the bulky old CRT models, and hence fit into our lifestyles (literally!) much better. The latest BMW 5-series is faster, more economical, less polluting, better looking and better equipped than the old model.

So ‘improvement’ is truly a fundamental requirement… unless, it seems, you’re introducing an eBilling product… in which case it appears that you’re allowed to remove the customer’s convenience of having the bill delivered to their doorstep, and provide them no additional benefits in return.

Is it really an upgrade?
The paper bill has recently had an ‘upgrade’. Today in Asia, the average eBilling offering is an in-house development and falls into 1 of 2 categories: either the customer must register and then log into the biller’s portal to pull their bill details from the website, or else a pdf or html version of the printed paper bill is pushed to them via email. So, just where exactly is the benefit to the customer in these situations?

The portal-based solution is certainly far less convenient than paper; there’s a website registration process, another id/password to remember and the need to download the bill if you want to store or print it locally. Plus, while a flat pdf or html rendition of the printed bill delivered via email could be considered as convenient as a paper bill (or perhaps more convenient to some customers), it doesn’t add any real value to the billing experience.

Did BMW or iPhone pay their clients $5 to upgrade?
Giving a $5 credit on the next utility bill for registering for eBilling, or charging $2 per month for a paper bill is a clear indication that your eBilling product doesn’t meet your customer’s requirements. If there’s no real value for the customer – no added convenience, they just won’t go for it! And that’s why many end-customers need to be cajoled and pressurized into adopting eBills and turning off paper. They just don’t see a benefit in it for themselves.

What does a real bill upgrade involve then?
Well, the minimum starting point is actually emailing the bill to your customers – you always delivered the paper bill, so don’t expect your customers to be happy by now having to go fetch their eBill from your portal. But then let’s add a payment form within the eBill, to allow bill payment without visiting (and logging onto) another website. Not only is this convenient, but your cash-flow will improve significantly because many people will pay the same day they get their bill. Then we can include the facility to slice and dice the bill details and dynamically graph say, IDD vs local calls or peak vs off-peak energy consumption. Or let’s allow the customer to upload the bill details into Excel or their accounts package for further convenience. And how about targeted marketing? Done properly, marketing within eBills (transpromotional marketing) is a real value-add to the customer, and a great new channel for generating additional revenues. Suddenly eBilling sounds like something worth having for the convenience and benefits provided to the customer; not just something reluctantly accepted to avoid surcharges for the paper bill.

Sure, you’ll still have to market your eBilling offering, but you won’t have to threaten, pressurize and cajole your customers, wearing them down until you eventually hit double-digit adoption rates. They’ll like it, they’ll want it and they’ll tell their friends about it. And best of all, this functionality and more is readily available through eBilling suppliers such as Striata; no need to develop/maintain such complex solutions in-house.

In conclusion, here’s a note to all of my own billers; my telco, my ISP, my energy supplier, my water company and bank. When BMW introduces a new model that is slower, thirstier, uglier and worse equipped than their previous model, I’ll sign up for your slower, less convenient, poorly equipped eBilling solution. Until then, keep sending me the paper, thanks…

Keith Russell
Sales Director - Asia Pacific
www.striata.com