Email Marketing is Dead Long Live IBE The opening and

Email Marketing is Dead; Long Live IBE The opening and click-through rates of bulk email marketing campaigns are being seriously reduced due to a backlash by overwhelmed recipients with brimming inboxes and cries of ‘spam!’ So how can e-marketers engage customers and prospects to create increased sales, customer loyalty and better communication? Intelligent Business Email (IBE) can provide the answer. When customers and prospects decline to open your latest e-marketing campaign messages and increasingly request that you stop sending ‘spam’, what precision can you build into e-marketing to reverse this business-killing trend? Intelligent Business Email (IBE), as Forrester Research calls it, is the new online marketing channel. In a recent report on ‘Business Email Complacency’ Forrester stated, “Everyday outbound corporate email remains an ignored branding and marketing channel, even though many customers prefer it as a communication channel with companies. Intelligent Business Email services cure a nasty corporate communication blind spot: everyday email.” If you are wary and weary of techno-solutions to general business or specific marketing challenges, such as elaborate search engine marketing, complex affiliate marketing and slow one-to-many bulk email marketing options, IBE comes to the rescue. But what is enhanced email, or IBE? IBE could also be described as stealth marketing, because it automatically enhances ‘everyday emails’ to impart helpful information to customers and prospects. Sales gurus suggest that to increase sales, organisations must offer help and information, rather than the hard sell. IBE does just that. IBE is the ultimate soft sell, yet interactively engages customers and prospects with every business email sent. IBE is not spam, since it is not a bulk email process, but enhances ‘everyday email’ by automatically inserting content which is targeted, relevant, consistent, engaging, interactive and helpful. Inserted content can include branding, targeted marketing messages, a virtual business card and a legally-required email disclaimer. Branding can comprise an animated graphic banner containing brief ‘rolling’ messages and a clickable hyperlink. This can lead to either a specific web page with a response form, further information, survey, competition entry, promotional draw or any other marketing attraction, including opening a blank email for the customer to respond directly. Multiple insert templates can be created which will automatically insert themselves into outbound email in a sequential manner. One may stress customer service; another may promote a special offer; another may request feedback about online support, for example. The latest Direct Marketing Association (DMA) email marketing study says that email marketing will overtake direct mail despite falling opening rates (opening rates have fallen from 30% in 2004 to just 23% in 2005). Increasing numbers of unsolicited email marketing campaigns and increasingly sophisticated and effective spam filtering can only lead to greater levels of cynicism for this approach. This in turn could lead the Information Commissioner’s Office to call for greater email marketing controls and regulation. The beauty of IBE is that once a simple program is installed on a computer server (separate from the email server), the marketing department can control the inserted content. Users see no difference to their outbound email and do not need to learn any new techniques or processes. PrecisionMarketing Page 1 of 3 intelligent business email rocketseed info@rocketseed.com, www.rocketseed.com As an ‘everyday email’ is sent by a user, it first passes through the normal email program – such as Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise or IBM Lotus Notes – and then on to the IBE server which automatically inserts the enhanced content before sending the email on to the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The marketing department can control the content that is inserted, and it can tailor this by sender or department. For example, customer services, sales, marketing, accounts, despatch and tech support departments can all have their own inserted enhanced content, with each carrying one or more targeted messages and hyperlinks. Automatic, real time analytics for tracking sender and receiver behaviour can be received by the marketing department in order to fine-tune the marketing programme. For example, reports can demonstrate who creates the most enticing emails or which department has the lowest response rates for opening and click-throughs. Email is the most widely-used form of business communication. However, most organisations do nothing to consistently brand their email or directly engage with their customers or prospects. Furthermore, they miss out on the opportunity to request and receive customer feedback, offer further relevant information, include personalised virtual business cards and provide a consistent legally-required email disclaimer. IBE can do all of this automatically. In terms of Return on Investment (ROI), a study from Accenture, one of the world's leading management consulting and technology service organisations, revealed that nearly 75% of the marketing executives in the US and the UK say that their company is unable to measure a marketing campaign’s ROI. IBE can help redress this inadequacy. In addition, 70% of those surveyed by Accenture said that they continue to have trouble capturing the attention of customers. IBE’s interactive content engages more effectively and more cost-effectively with customers and prospects in a targeted way. The study also showed that 58% of marketing executives frequently struggle to shorten the cycle time it takes to create and launch a marketing campaign, with nearly 20% taking more than four months to develop and launch a campaign and 33% taking two to four months. An IBE campaign can take as little as 10 minutes to set up. How can IBE be used? A number of organisations in the UK such as Strategic Fusion, Fuse, Primedia, Rees Pollock, ITN, Five, News International, BSG and Pi Capital have all begun using Rocketseed IBE with ground-breaking effect. Market sectors which have proved to be early adopters of this technology include media and publishing, travel and leisure and financial services. Uses of IBE include communicating critical and timely information, driving traffic to website pages, offering feedback on products, events and relationships, market testing, driving service level improvement and offering increased brand recognition and interaction. Strategic Fusion is a strategic brand engagement consultancy. Its MD Stephen Rogers explains, “What Rocketseed enables us to do is present a much more professional image and an engaging means of reinforcing our brand. Rocketseed also provides a natural way for people to find out more about the company by following the links to our new website that are in all our outgoing emails.” Within the first month of using Rocketseed IBE, Strategic Fusion is achieving a click-through rate of 7%. IT technology services company Business Systems Group (BSG) uses Rocketseed to engage with its customers and to deliver proactive campaigns, for example attracting delegates to special events. One such campaign led to an 8% clickthrough rate and brought 55 delegates to a seminar on compliance. “I was quite cynical about IBE at first, as I thought email marketing had had its day,” admits David Carmichael, Head of Marketing at BSG. “Now I am completely convinced – response rates of over 8% speak for themselves. If we combine PrecisionMarketing Page 2 of 3 intelligent business email rocketseed info@rocketseed.com, www.rocketseed.com Rocketseed reporting with more sophisticated web analytics, then we can get a much better understanding of our customer base and I see that as the future of marketing.” Recently, UK news organisation, ITN, began using IBE to communicate and manage its total re-branding from the allencompassing ‘ITN’ to the more specific ITN News, ITN Source, ITN On, ITN Archive, ITN Factual and ITN Consulting. Mark Tuban, Marketing Manager of ITN Source, comments, "One of the key issues in e-marketing is understanding the difference in customer response to communications generally, as well as to those that involve different creative treatments. Our adoption of Rocketseed IBE has started to provide good insight into this. Combine this with Rocketseed's ability to develop and implement messaging and creative elements ‘on the fly’, and you have a powerful e-marketing package”. Editors’ Note: One–to-one intelligent business email should not be confused with one-to-many email marketing, a term used to describe sending a single format email message to many receivers. While one-to-many email campaigns have their role, one-to-one IBE email has a much higher affinity and hence a virtually 100% open rate, since the sender is mostly known to the receiver. Though some sophisticated email programs use conditional content allowing some customisation, Rocketseed claims its service enables marketing departments to turn every day emails sent by staff into targeted and personalised one-to-one marketing campaigns. This effectively turns every member of staff into a sales and marketing agent for the organisation. -ends- PrecisionMarketing Page 3 of 3 intelligent business email rocketseed info@rocketseed.com, www.rocketseed.com