eBilling adoption rates - What's a realistic goal for 2012?

As an eBilling practitioner, the bad news is that you are probably falling short of your target numbers. The good news is that it’s not your fault - but this may not prevent you from getting the axe.

Board level expectations of 15% eBilling adoption per annum are normal. In today’s connected society where we are online more than offline and 'going green' is on everyone’s agenda, turning off paper for the majority of customers within 5 years should be a reasonable expectation.

What is preventing eBilling from achieving significant customer adoption?

Realistically, allowing for a quarter of your client base to stick to paper for various reasons, the goal should be 75% customer adoption and paper turn off.

While it is true that poor craftsmen blame their tools, you may have a valid case to point at your portal model as the reason for missing your adoption targets.

Portals (or Pull eBilling) are only one part of a comprehensive eBilling strategy. Globally, approximately only 17% of customers are perfectly happy to go back to the biller’s website or a consolidator to fetch their bills – but these customers aren’t the majority of the base. The majority will choose to do nothing.

This is where email billing (or Push eBilling) comes to the fore. Armed with your customers email addresses, you can send secure bills or statements without requiring customers to register and choose a username and password. This puts the power of customer adoption in your hands. Customers that receive their bill by email can’t resist opening it - this allows the biller to turn off the paper.

How to achieve a customer adoption rate exceeding 15% pa

Across all industries, the average annual paperless adoption rate falls below 10% and the most common point of failure is the registration process. By including an electronic consent form in the eBilling process, you have a sure-fire way of driving customer adoption over 15% pa. The eConsent process presents the terms & conditions and an agreement to turn off the paper.

Striata customers are routinely achieving adoption rates that are double their industry averages this way.

Striata provides services and strategies to many well known utility brands, by assisting them implement email billing as part of their paperless strategy. These clients are successfully using Striata solutions to replace paper intensive processes with electronic bill presentment and payment and as a result, are seeing a surge in electronic payments and paperless adoption.

What is a realistic paperless goal?

A fully functionally document distribution strategy should have the 3 P’s – Print Pull and Push.

Print may never go away, so expect 25% of your base to cling onto paper.

Pull Portals should be good for another 25% of customers in the long run but at least half of these may want paper as well as a backup.

Push email document delivery will quickly turn off paper for the other 50% of your customers without massive marketing and incentive spend.

Executives are not setting ridiculous success targets. Annual double digit growth is reasonable, but you need the right tools to deliver the right results. Find out how.

Michael Wright
striata.com

Need to exchange that sale item but don't have the receipt?

An ingenious application of the humble transactional email is the electronic retail receipt. How many times have you wanted to exchange a purchase, only to find that the receipt has disappeared into the black hole that is your wallet?

Enter digital retail receipts

Picture yourself at the checkout point in your favourite department store, arms full of January sale items or unwanted Christmas gifts...

Sound crazy?

Not to the big brand stores that are already operating a paperless receipt service. According to the New York Times , you will be offered an electronic receipt when you shop at stores such as Apple, Sears, Kmart, Gap and Banana Republic. And it's not the first time this concept has made headlines. But what's driving this renewed interest in electronic till slips?

For the retailer:

• Going paperless - digital receipts bolster a business's environmental efforts
• Cost reduction - reducing paper and printing costs is a major benefit for margin-sensitive retailers
• Future view - coupled with cellphone payment processes, the digital receipt rounds off a totally mobile, electronic process
• Marketing – perhaps the most attractive benefit is that the retailer now has your email address

For you, the consumer:

• Easy storage – no more wads of paper slips stuck in the zip pocket of your handbag or stuffed into a drawer in your study
• Searchable – no more rifling through said handbag and/or drawer to locate a receipt
• Sendable – bought a gift for a friend who wants to exchange it?
• Easy – send them the digital receipt (make sure there are no embarrassing purchases on the same receipt!)

Of course there are challenges and concerns around queue delays, fraud, data errors and privacy, but none of them compelling enough to offset the obvious benefits. As consumers store more and more of their daily interactions electronically (bills, policies, contracts, payment confirmations, paystubs), it makes perfect sense that retail receipts should follow suit.

And think about the convenience when it comes to filing your tax return. Instead of rifling through the shoebox of till slips, you have a folder in your email application in which you have stored all of your deductible expense receipts. What a relief.

Just remember to back up your email records!

Alison Treadaway
striata.com

Should you consider industry standards for Open and Click rates?

Our eMarketing team is often approached by clients for industry statistics on open and click rates in an attempt to measure email marketing campaigns.

While wanting to benchmark your campaign results against an industry average is understandable, it is somewhat misplaced as no two target audiences, campaign messages or commercial relationships are the same.

Open rate is influenced by many factors:

• The relationship between your brand and the recipient - have you historically provided relevant and valuable content, so as to build a trust relationship with the target audience?
• The relevancy of the content to that recipient - is the offer/message in this campaign relevant to that recipient, at that moment?
• The subject line and from address - can you slice through the inbox clutter (especially at this time of year when the noise reaches peak levels)?

Click-through rate is also influenced by the above factors, especially the recipient's previous interaction with the company. If customers have a relationship with the brand, they're more likely to click through on a call to action that interests them. Click-through rate is also influenced by a couple more factors:

• Call to action - is the action required to take up the offer clear and simple?
• Timing - have you tested what day of the week and time of day gets the best response?
• Layout - people read emails in a specific way. To achieve the best possible click through rate, have you tested which layouts produce the highest response?

Because no two campaigns could have identical elements in each of the influencing factors, the usefulness of an 'industry standard' is questionable.

Create your own standard

A better approach is to create your own benchmark by measuring your own campaigns against the contributing factors and then strive to improve on those rates. If you send out an email newsletter, then look to better the open and click-through rates on the previous edition. This will also drive the right measurements, as well as shape your split-test plan. For example; if October's newsletter beat all your previous open rates - record what you did, and test that approach in your next edition. This way, you are constantly aiming to improve on your own measurements.

But make sure you always measure the rates in the same way, otherwise the exercise is pointless.

Can't do without industry benchmarks?

If you still feel you need to measure against some kind of industry averages, here are some useful resources:

Mailchimp's Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry
Mailer Mailer's Email Marketing Metrics Report
Online Marketing Trends

Alison Treadaway
striata.com