If you use a reputable email service provider it should automatically monitor and manage any bounced addresses – perhaps by removing them from the “send” list after three failed attempts – but rather than completely ending the relationship and removing gone-no-address or “GNA” customers from your database for good, it’s worth trying a few approaches to get back in touch. After all, retaining customers who are engaged with your email programme is a whole lot easier than acquiring new email addresses, not to mention a whole lot kinder to your budget!

Here are three simple ways to attempt to reunite with your database exes, instead of breaking up for good:

1)      If you can, flag bounced addresses in your CRM or loyalty system and get your front line team to politely request new contact details when that customer next makes a purchase in store or phones your call centre.

2)      Where you have mobile numbers for customers, text GNAs with a simple request for their new email address. This can be made a whole lot easier than it sounds via an automated programme that’s set up to send a text every time an email does bounce.

3)      Consider running a regular direct mail (DM) campaign that invites those with bounced email addresses to update their details online or via TXT.

Of course, in an ideal world, all your customers would be so highly engaged by your relevant, timely communications that they’d make a point of keeping you updated with their details. But the reality is that people do swap jobs, move countries and change email address and in any year you can expect a 3 – 6 % churn in your database. That’s why it’s important to also have a plan in place to continually attract new subscribers. Check out my previous blog for some ideas on keeping your opt-in list well stocked and refreshed.

QR Codes are one of those recent arrivals that have yet to gain real traction in New Zealand, but if overseas uptake is any indication, we’re likely to be seeing a lot more of them.

On the face of it, there is plenty to like about these little black boxes: in our always-on, always-connected world, QR Codes help deliver on customers’ expectations for immediacy of purchase or contact, and for marketers they also overcome the dilemma of how to make traditional static media instantly interactive and engaging.

Add a QR Code to a poster, print ad or even packaging, and with a quick swipe of a mobile phone it instantly becomes an opportunity for a customer to engage with you via email, take part in a survey, watch an online video, get a map with directions to your nearest store or make a purchase from your website, depending on the information you’ve chosen to encode within its maze-like pattern. In Spain, clothing company Diesel is even enabling customers to immediately “Like” their favourite garment by scanning a QR Code which then posts to their Facebook wall.

A Quick Overview

Although the name is fast becoming ubiquitous, “QR Code” or “Quick Response Code” is actually just a name for one of several types of 2D barcode.

Originally developed in Japan way back in 1994 as a means of tracking car parts, they function in much the same way as the 1D “zebra crossing” barcodes on shopping items, except they can store a far more complex level of information. Where a 1D barcode is scanned to reveal a price, a scanned 2D barcode can, for example, take customers to a website, send a text message, or display company contact information.

While marketers can generate 2D barcodes easily, customers must have a “scanner” or “decoder” app loaded on their mobile phone in order to read them. Of all the available 2D barcode formats, QR Codes seem to have become most popular because they are “open source”, meaning any 2D barcode reader app can scan and decode them.

The Kiwi Conundrum

In New Zealand the use of QR Codes is probably being hampered by a lack of consumer understanding, and although some mobile phones now come with a pre-installed 2D barcode reader app, it’s all a bit of an unfortunate chicken-and-egg situation: until New Zealand marketers start using 2D barcodes in their campaigns, there’s no incentive for mobile users to be intrigued enough to download a decoder app. And until enough Kiwis have downloaded the necessary scanners on their mobile phones, it will be hard to convince marketers that they’re a medium worth using.

Where I have recently seen QR Codes used to great effect locally, is in direct mail (DM) pieces that aim to drive people online. Instead of just giving customers a login and ID code to gain access to the relevant site, some marketers are now also providing prospects with the option of scanning a unique QR Code that takes them straight to their personalised entry point online. It’s a small, relatively straightforward addition, but it instantly reduces the complexity of the task and improves the customer’s experience of the promotion.

Tips for Success

I guess time will tell whether the historians of the future will look back at these 21st century hieroglyphs as just a blip on the marketing landscape or the tentative first words in a revolutionary new language. For those of you who have decided to take the plunge and engage customers via QR Codes, here are a few best practice tips:

Finally, as with any customer engagement campaign, QR Codes will only be as successful as the extent to which they reward the customer for the time and effort involved in “reading” them. Make sure that whatever content you provide via QR Code actually has meaningful value for your customers so that their experience is a positive one whether your goal is customer acquisition, retention, increased revenue, or just to build a loyal brand advocate base.

Aggregated results from campaigns deployed through our Engage platform in December and January showed that around 15% of our clients’ emails were opened by customers on the go. That’s up from just 5% at the same time last year. For some clients the figure was even higher – with up to 25% of their emails being read on mobile devices.

With the recent drop in both the cost of handsets and the price of data plans, the number of Kiwis using smartphones is set to increase even further. But before you rush to redesign all your email templates – and risk throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water –  there are some simple adjustments you can make to ensure your emails are optimised for mobile, while also providing an engaging experience for recipients who prefer to do things at their desktop. 

If you’d like to take the customer experience up yet another notch, you could always consider dynamic templates. These “smart” templates recognise the device they’re being viewed on and automatically reconfigure into the optimal layout. They do need to be considered early in the email design process, so contact us if you’d like to know more.

In our case, that silent genius in the corner is not a person but a marketing tool – a piece of functionality called Share-to-Social that we added to our Engage platform last year.

With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can add this feature to your email or other online promotions to dramatically increase their reach. I thought it was about time we outed this backroom over-achiever and encouraged more of you to use it more often.

Forward to a friend 2.0

In essence, Share-to-Social is a modern update of the old “forward to a friend” email function. By adding a Share-to-Social button to selected content in your emails, you enable recipients to share that promotion or offer with their social networks, quickly and easily magnifying your reach for that campaign with no additional investment of time or resource.

Make your brand social but not invasive

Many consumers have become resistant to brand promotions they perceive as invading their social media space, but the beauty of this function is that it’s not a digital cold call – it’s an introduction made courtesy of a friend and therefore much more likely to be well-received by your target audience. It also restores some level of content control to marketers – you choose what people see when they click through; a copy of the email, a survey or event, a website or even a custom page you create.

Get instant visibility without commitment

Even if you haven’t yet committed to establishing and maintaining a business presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, Share-to-Social allows you to have visibility in this important space – by piggy-backing on the social media pages of your customer base and letting them spread the word on your behalf.

So how should you harness this email-social supercombo to get the greatest returns possible? Here are a few simple tips for making the most of Share-to-Social in your next promotion:

1. Choose content that your target audience can’t resist passing on. A recent report in eMarketer revealed that online promotions that include discounts or special deals/free samples have the highest pass-on rate. Humorous emails trail well behind in a distant second place.
2. Compelling content beats bribes. According to the same eMarketer report, online promotions that incentivised recipients to share content did no better than those that without an incentive – what mattered was the quality of the offer/content itself.
3. Make sure you provide a clear call to action. Just including a Facebook icon next to the content can be confusing for consumers. Share-to-Social is not the same as “liking” a brand on Facebook. It’s a one-off offer that you want people to pass on, so explain that.

We’ve made the Share-to-Social feature available across our Engage platform so you can use it to encourage your database to share an event or a survey just as easily as content in an email newsletter. And Engage automatically tracks every share and on-share so that you can quickly gauge the effectiveness of social in your online marketing.

If you’d like a demonstration of what Share-to-Social could do for your next campaign make sure you contact us. We’d also love to hear your success stories!

Internationally, marketers often won’t deploy a campaign without first checking that they’ve chosen the optimal subject line, messaging, calls to action, layout and images by sending it to a random segment of their multi-million-member database, and monitoring the reaction.

Here in New Zealand, that can be more of a challenge: after all, in this country more modest five or six-figure customer databases are the norm, which can make it difficult to achieve test sample sizes large enough to provide statistically robust results.

Kiwi marketers also tend to work with smaller budgets; in many cases they simply don’t have the luxury of producing multiple creative executions.

The appetite for testing in New Zealand does, however, remain strong with marketers here understanding the value it provides in terms of optimising results.

Here’s our guide to the approaches we commonly use with clients. These are simple but effective ways that you can start improving your programme of activity:

1) Apply the 10/10/80 or 50/50 rule

In the 10/10/80 pre-deployment approach one version of an email is sent to 10% of the database, an alternative is sent to another 10%, and then the “winning” approach is deployed to the final 80% based on what was learned.

For the 50/50 test two different versions of the same email are deployed to the entire audience and the learnings then applied to the next campaign.

These approaches are most commonly used to test subject lines, or the best time to send emails.

2)  Mix it up depending on your goal

We recently helped State Insurance test the best day of the week to send their customer emails using a 20/20/20/20/20 Monday-Friday test with a live campaign.

Random segments of their database were sent the same email with all other factors controlled – the only difference was the day of the week the email was sent. They’ve used what they learned to determine the day that all their emails are now deployed.

3) Keep track of trends over time

Whichever way you choose to go, make sure you keep an eye not just on individual campaigns, but also on how the channel is performing for you as a whole over time.

This sort of longitudinal approach is frequently overlooked, but can provide some of the most useful insights for improving uptake of your communications over time. (If you’re a client of our Engage platform, make sure you talk to us about how we can now give you instant access to this level of reporting via our new Insight feature).

If that all sounds a bit too much like hard work, you could always focus on fighting the flab in your customer database instead.

Here are three top tips for getting – and keeping – your subscriber list in peak performance shape.

1. Have a summer clean out

Make a resolution to park inactive subscribers (those who haven’t opened or clicked on a link recently) to ensure you don’t affect your delivery rates.

Over-emailing people who aren’t responding for some reason will both annoy ISPs (Internet Service Providers) – increasing the chance of all your emails being banished to the Junk Mail box – and irritate those customers, potentially leading them to unsubscribe.

Instead, take the hint and back off a bit. It doesn’t mean you have to break up for good; just put them to one side while you focus on doing a great job for the people who want to hear from you. (Watch out for tips on how to re-engage your lapsed subscribers in an upcoming blog.)

2. Commit to regular maintenance

Make it easy for people to stay subscribed by providing them with opportunities to update their address details every time you get in touch.

Many of our clients also run six-monthly “Update your details” campaigns as part of their regular annual database maintenance to encourage customers to keep their preferred communication channels up to date.

People love being given options so offer them a range of alternative ways to stay connected – for example, by inviting them to receive special promotions via TXT instead of email.

3. Plan for churn

In a perfect world, your communications would be so relevant and useful that subscribers would take the time to let you know whenever they change their phone number or digital address. But no matter how much effort you put into your relationships, a few customers will move on at some point.

As a marketer you can expect customer churn of around 3-6% percent of your database annually. Check out my previous blog on database acquisition to put a plan in place to  ensure you’re continually topping up your database with more engaged prospects and customers than you’re churning.

Here are our top tips for getting the most out of your customer engagement programmes for the next 12 months:

1. If you’re not already tracking the engagement level of your customers, now’s the time to start

Customer engagement is all about building relationships – and like any relationship it pays to keep an eye on how the other partner is feeling: do you need to spend more time with them or less? Are you giving them good reasons to notice and interact with you or are you turning them off?

By observing customer interactions with you over repeated communications you can start to see who in your database is highly engaged with your brand and who is just a click away from opting out, then tailor your messages and approach to optimise the relationship – and your results!

Track engagement levels yourself by monitoring your uptake and response rates or make use of tools like our new Insight reporting feature to easily monitor customer engagement scores over multiple campaigns.

Ideally, you’ll start seeing an increase in the number of highly engaged customers over time – that’s a sure sign that your communications are hitting the spot.

2. Segment your highly engaged customers and target special communications just to them

This group are your goldmine and deserve VIP treatment. Consider incentivising them to become your brand advocates with unique offers or opportunities and make it easy for them to share relevant content and messages with their own community, using features like our share-to-social function.

3. Consider re-engaging lapsed customers with a win-back campaign

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: if customers haven’t opened an email for a while, give them a mini-break for three or four months before welcoming them back with a “We’ve missed you” approach.

4. Start thinking more broadly to make connections that count

Provide customers with a range of ways to engage with you; don’t be afraid to ask them for their preferences and give them a choice of channel options for different messages, such as the ability to receive TXTs instead of emails for special offers/promotions.

Consider integrating direct mail (DM) and digital experiences by sending customers and prospects an intriguing piece of DM and then inviting them to respond via TXT or coupon.

5. Finally, don’t forget the basics

Some rules don’t change: the key to keeping your existing customers engaged is to provide relevant, timely content.

Segmentation by location can be a great way of delivering a highly personalised experience, and thanks to fuctionality like dynamic content change-outs, it doesn’t need to be expensive or resource-intensive.  Simply set rules around what information you want a customer to receive depending on their physical address, and a platform like Engage will automatically add or delete content based on that customer’s profile, removing the need for you to manage multiple templates.

Great examples of relevant local content include providing in-store specials for the franchise or outlet nearest each individual customer, or sharing details of any local sponsorships or community initiatives that your brand is involved with.

By ensuring you’re relevant you’re more likely to win your way into your customer’s heart, continue to earn their attention and ultimately enjoy an ongoing – and profitable – relationship.

As part of our new in-depth reporting feature Insight, we’ve been looking at the devices Kiwis use to read the millions of emails deployed via our Engage platform each day, and while it’s still too early to draw statistically significant conclusions there are some interesting trends emerging.

Over the last two months 5% of emails sent by our clients were opened on an iPhone, while 1.4% were opened on an iPad, compared to less than 0.5% on devices with Google’s Android operating system, and less than 0.1% on BlackBerry.

Of course, as I mentioned in my previous blog Three Simple Steps to Optimising Mobile, the most important thing when drilling down into this sort of data is the observations that you make about your own customers’ actual behaviour. Depending on their particular demographic they may or may not follow this pattern.

If you’re a client of Ubiquity, and haven’t already started mining Insight for deeper knowledge of your own database, please let us know and we’ll provide a tour of this new Engage feature.

In the meantime, we’re looking forward to bringing you more insights into the broader digital engagement behaviour of New Zealand customers over the next few months – let us know if there’s a topic you’re particularly interested in.

But there’s nothing like a real case study to help bring buzz words to life, so I thought I’d share some work we’ve been doing with Harvey World Travel who place a huge emphasis on keeping in touch with their thousands of customers.

Late last year, they began managing all their email communications using our Engage platform and since that’s been running smoothly with great uptake, we agreed that it was time to take the next step and focus on further enhancing the end-to-end experience for their customers.

The result is a really great example of a multi-channel automated customer on-boarding and engagement programme, and the marketing team has kindly agreed to let me share it with you here.

So what’s the secret?

1. Automated welcome email

• As I mentioned in a previous blog, this is quite simply best practice when it comes to customer engagement.
• In Harvey World Travel’s case they’ve gone the extra mile by creating a variety of templates that are automatically sent depending on how each individual customer signs up. For example, if they’ve signed up in-store, the message in their welcome email acknowledges that.

2. Minimum information required on sign up

• Sign up forms can look pretty intimidating if they have a long list of questions and this can act as a barrier to uptake.
• Harvey World Travel’s subscription forms now just capture the minimum of information.
• We still extract a richer data set from customers but we do it further down the track, once the relationship is established.
• Four weeks after sign up customers are automatically sent a follow up along the lines of: “Hope you’re enjoying these emails – to help us provide you with useful info and offers, tell us a bit more about yourself.”

3. Aim for fewer emails but make each one more relevant

• As a first step towards being able to segment customers and send them more targeted relevant messages we ran a data capture campaign to ensure Harvey World Travel had just one set of up-to-date data for both new and existing customers.
• The marketing team can now start using that information to automatically provide customers with only those offers that they have indicated are relevant.

4. Move beyond offer-based emails to adding value with relevant content

• Together, we’re working to ensure that Harvey’s World Travel’s reputation as a trusted advisor extends to its email with really useful travel advice.

5. Surprise and delight

• With the unique customer insights available to Harvey World Travel via our Engage database, they can now set up automated emails with a personalised “birthday” or “anniversary” offer to each customer, further deepening the one-to-one relationship.

6. Offer TXT options for time-specific messages

• Harvey World Travel recognised that email may not always be the best way to reach customers, so we’ve now built a database of people who want to receive TXT alerts. When an email with a great – but short turnaround – offer goes out, these people now automatically receive it via SMS.

7. Triggered programme of emails and texts

• It’s always nice to be welcomed back: when a customer returns from their Harvey World Travel holiday, their travel agent can choose to automatically send them a personalised “welcome back” email or text.

Like to find out how automated marketing could help your business? Contact us.

The Marketing Association’s new Copy Essentials Digital course could be a good place to start. It promises to help you learn to write more effectively for the web, email, banner ads and search.

When: Wednesday 16 November, 8.30am – 5.30pm

Where: University of Auckland Business School, The Owen G Glenn Building, Auckland

Check out the Marketing Association site for more information.

In the meantime, here are a few of my favourite online writing tips:

1. Ready, set, type

Before you even put a finger on the keyboard, make sure you’re clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Is your aim to inform, entertain or entice your reader to do something? If you’re unsure of your goal, your copy is likely to wander aimlessly and leave your reader similarly confused.

2. Break it up

Your reader’s time is valuable and in the digital environment it’s likely that they’ll scan things quickly – you have seconds to attract their interest and prove you’re worth their attention. Help them out by breaking your content into easily digestible chunks, for example by using sub headers with short paragraphs, bullet points and numbered lists.

3. Use links for further information

If your content is enticing enough, they’ll want to read more – just don’t bombard them all at once. Instead, use links through your copy to take them to more in-depth content. For example, you could tease the first paragraph of your blog in an email newsletter and then provide a “Read more” link which takes them to the full article on your website.

4. Get to the point

If you want your readers to do something, such as register for an event or enter a draw, make sure you provide a clear call to action. In the case of email, this should ideally be above the “fold” ie on the first part of the screen they see so they don’t have to scroll down the page to find it. A separate button can make sure this message stands out. If your communication is long, consider repeating the call to action – perhaps at the start and again at the end.

5. Invest in a spare pair of eyes

It goes without saying that you should check your copy for correct spelling and grammar but it can also be useful to ask someone else to read it for clarity – is your message clear? Are all the links and necessary information included?

6. Monitor what works and repeat

While the above tips are generally best practice conventions, it’s always worth keeping an eye on how your own customers respond to communications. What links do they click on? What content catches their eye and how is it presented? Over time you can begin to use these insights to make your communications even more relevant – and more engaging – for the people you most want to reach.