Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The Digital (non) Dialogue

Today I received an email from a bank with the subject line: Private Bank: Your direct access to Top Management.

The email started off with: "At XX Private Bank, we're well aware that your time is your greatest luxury . . ." and ended off with the Regional Manager's personal details.

First problem: I'm no longer a customer of this particular Private Bank, and haven't been for upward of a year (but that's for another rant . . . I mean blog post, entitled "Please manage your data").

Second problem: it was addressed to DEAR PRIVATE BANK CLIENT. Enough said.

Companies still treat email communication as a monologue


What horrified me the most was that the email came from a no-reply mailbox.

Frowning, I looked through the rest of my regular supplier communication, and guess what? There are still loads of companies that treat email communication as a monologue. Unbelievable!

This business of sending emails from a noreply@company.com address and actually advertising in the content that "this mailbox is not monitored", is just plain bad practice. Why do they think it's okay to push out email communication without a reply path? Is my time less important than theirs?

Companies reap the cost and efficiency benefits of sending emails to customers: transactional notifications, personalized documents, triggered communication – all cost much less to deliver electronically than a phone call or posted letter.

Why make it less than 100% convenient for the recipient to send back a reply?

Don't you want your customers to engage with you?


Your marketing department spends millions trying to get your customers to engage in a dialogue with your company. There's a whole team of people paid to find out what customers think. Yet communication that is guaranteed to be sent to customers, such as statements, invoices, transactional notifications, are often treated as monologues.

Not to mention the deliverability problems that come along with having "do not reply" in the email address or body copy. Have you tested your delivery rates on no-reply emails? You'll be shocked at how many don't get delivered or get pushed straight to junk mail folders.

Worship the dialogue


Appoint a team to take charge of managing responses to your outgoing electronic communication. A lot of what you get back might be rubbish, but can you really take the risk of missing the pearl of wisdom in a suggestion from a customer? Or worse, ignoring the desperately disgruntled customer who takes his comments into the public domain after receiving no reply from you?

Inbound message management doesn't require a massive call centre. All you need is a team of well trained agents using decent electronic messaging software that manages inbound communications in the same way as you manage inbound calls. There are applications smart enough to filter spam and bounce backs, and to route emails based on your customer service business rules. This is not rocket science.

You have to encourage the dialogue, nurture the conversation and value the feedback. And making it difficult for customers to engage with your company is just plain bad practice and a missed opportunity.

[This is an automated blog post. Please do not reply.]

Alison Treadaway
www.striata.com

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

7 Email marketing trends for 2011: it's back to basics

I spent some time this past month researching what email marketing and communications trends we can expect to see emerging in 2011. The common theme I found is:

Continued economic pressures, increasing customer demand and advancements in email technology (i.e." Smart" inboxes) means marketers will have to continue to find ways to do more with less, more effectively and more efficiently to produce greater results.

As marketers; what should we be doing in 2011 to overcome these challenges?

My 7 trends to maximise email communication results and efficiencies

Trend 1: Data management - growth, maintenance and hygiene

With international legislation protecting the rights of consumers, you simply have no choice but to ensure your data is well managed and maintained throughout the customer lifecycle.


Your data is the foundation on which your Lifecycle Communication Programme is built and should therefore be the number 1 strategic objective of your marketing strategy and hence a continuing trend into 2011.

Trend 2: Segmentation and relevancy

The more you know about your subscriber base, the easier it is for you to craft content and offers into communications that are relevant to each subscriber. Whether it is preference data captured during the customer's lifecycle, to past behaviours and activity tracked and recorded, you should be profiling each and every customer.


Segmentation and relevancy is important for a number of reasons, but none more so than ensuring your email stands out above the rest – we see this as a key trend gaining more traction in 2011.

Trend 3: Customer lifecycle communications

We predict a shift towards more automated triggered communications in 2011. Companies will attempt to automate as much of their customer communications as possible. Not only does it require minimal effort, but the impact is significantly higher with better response rates.

Trend 4: More social media integration

As marketers begin to understand the symbiotic relationship between email marketing and social media, the trend will move towards more consistently integrated campaigns. For those marketers who have yet to understand and embrace the social media space, 2011 will see those marketers including simple share functionality on their communications at the very least.

Trend 5: Greater mobile integration

It is widely accepted that mobile penetration is significantly high in most countries when compared with the computer and smart phone adoption is climbing rapidly. As a result, a large proportion of mobile web use is spent checking email.

So 2011 will see a greater demand for "mobile friendly" versions of email communications that can be read on mobile devices.

Trend 6: Deliverability and authentication

Proper attention needs to be placed on deliverability because if not managed properly it can do more harm than good.

To achieve successful email delivery, the focus should be on the full scope of an email's journey - from sender to recipient. This will be a key focus area for email marketers in 2011, especially when they see their delivery rates declining.

Trend 7: Testing and analysis

We have covered testing extensively in the Q4 of last year, and see this trend growing as companies start to experiment with their communications to achieve better results within their marketing budgets.

The next step to maximising your email communications in 2011


This blog just briefly touches on the emerging trends; I will continue with a closer look at each trend in some future blogs. Can't wait? Here are some great resources containing tips on how to prepare in advance:

Data - check out Mia Papanicolaou's blog It's all about the data!

Segmentation and Relevancy - Nicola Els says If you're not segmenting, don't bother advertising and Mia asks Is your email marketing relevant enough to make you stand out?

Customer Lifecycle Communications - I covered this topic in my blog Dear Sir. Why have you stopped communicating with me?

Deliverability - Read this edition of eMarketing Insight entitled The importance of deliverability.

Testing - check out our series on Email Testing covering Tips on how to test email subject lines, The Call-to-Action: Email Body Testing and Testing design and layout in email

Haydn James
Head of eMarketing, Striata
striata.com

10 eBill Presentment & eStatement predictions for 2011

Despite all the activity and market hype surrounding eBilling and eStatements for the past 7 years and in particular in 2010; we believe that 2011 will not herald anything really significant. Unfortunately we expect it to be a "more of the same" year.

Here's how we see it playing out:

1. Billers will yet again fail to suppress any meaningful percentage of paper bills: Over the past 3 years, billers in North America have managed to turn off an average of 2% to 3% of their total paper bills per year. This year will be exactly the same with the exception of those billers that have been driving paper suppression for 5 years or more, and are now approaching 15% paper suppressed, they will see a diminishing increase as they move beyond the innovator and early- adopter segments of their customer bases.


2. Banks will fail to turn off more than a few percent of paper statements:
Unless banks come up with a way to electronically deliver statements; paper turn off rates will disappoint yet again in 2011. Read this previous blog I wrote on why 82.639% of internet bankers will not turn off paper statements.

3. Biller electronic payment will continue to migrate to internet banking: The trend of electronic bill pay migrating away from Biller Direct websites to internet banking bill pay will continue. The migration will not only continue here in the USA but will gather momentum somewhat in 2011 in other first world countries.

4. Banks will fail in their attempts to gain critical mass in 'presenting' bills within internet banking: The math doesn't add up and billers don't want it. For the same reasons why other consolidators of bill presentment will always fail, so too will banks that try to do the same thing. Which leads me to my next prediction...

5. eBilling Consolidators will fail to gain significant traction: I recently wrote a blog on why eBill consolidators will always fail. This coming year will be no exception.

6. We will see the first negative paper suppression incentives and a subsequent consumer push-back: As has been tried many times internationally, charging people for a paper statement / bill not only has immediate, vocal, churn inducing and dramatic customer push-back, it also has only minimal paper suppression success. Nonetheless we'll see some major billers go down this ill-advised path over the next 12 months.

7. Positive incentives for paper suppression will continue to have disappointing results: It has been proven time and time again that if your only paper statement / bill alternative is to view and download an electronic version from a website, then incentives will have little to no appeal to the mass consumer market.

8. New 'push' players will emerge in the US market: Being the only game in town is no fun. After hearing about it for ages, we really do expect one or even two new "push" players to launch in the US market. We are also hoping that the handful of billers who have told us repeatedly that they are developing push eBilling themselves will actually go ahead and go live this year.

9. Billers and financial institutions that rolled out email document delivery and email billing programs will enjoy another 12% paper suppression increase: Both the US and Canada will see the public launch of top tier consumer brands deploying a 'push' strategy.

10. Email will continue to clean up its act: Email has seen dramatic improvements these past 24 months with regards to inbox functionality, auto-organizing, spam control and deliverability. We expect this trend to continue and strengthen in 2011.

In conclusion

Perhaps the only noticeable occurrence in 2011 will be the lack of traction of the two new biller consolidators in the US market. We can therefore expect 2011 to be a foundation, building year for 2012 with consolidation amongst vendors, mobile strategies gaining some penetration and yet another 10% of 'me-too' billers building and launching self serve portals in the vain hopes of suppressing paper and postage.

And finally, Striata US grew by 40% in 2010 and we aim to exceed this considerably in 2011 with at least 40 new bank and biller clients.

Do we have it covered? What are your predictions for eBilling in 2011?

Garin Toren
Striata USA - Chief Operating Officer
striata.com