Sydney, Australie
Stand n°61
Du 14 au 15 mars

Paris, France
Du 21 au 22 mars

Madrid, Espagne
Stand n°412
Du 21 au 22 mars

Utrecht, Netherlands
Jan 26th-27th, 2011
Stand #B37

Sydney, Australia
March 9th-10th, 2011
Stand #46

Sydney
March 9-10, 2011

Booth #1444
3rd – 4th November

Milan
3rd – 4th November

Since the launch of its new Email Analytics tool, litmus has been collecting various stats around recipients behavior. For the first time since the service started, they have published some really interesting stats.

The main lesson to learn is that making a good first impression on the internet is even harder than most people think.

Indeed, their analysis based on a panel of 4 million opens, reveals that an astonishing 51% of users delete a message within two seconds of opening it. Of course the study is based solely on users who opened the emails. http://litmusapp.com/blog/

The key figures, for me at least, are as follows:

1.      On average, 51.1% of readers spend less than 2 seconds looking at an email

2.      In the best email campaigns, 77% of people fully read the message

Why do users spend so little time reading an email?

The answer is pretty easy and obvious. In most cases they get some many emails that they don’t have much time to devote to each and every one of them. Indeed more and more people are connected to the internet and at the same time more and more companies transition from the offline to the online world. As a result, the amount of emails received by a single user rises every day. On top of that, notifications from social networks such as facebook or twitter actively contribute to increase the number of emails in our boxes.

In such a fast pace and active society, the volume of emails has surged dramatically and in parallel the time available to read them decreases every day.

The question now Is to understand what makes the difference between a bad campaign or a campaign deleted within two seconds and a good campaign that users would read?

In other words, how to engage you subscribers?

Here are, I think, the 10 keys to success for your messages. Some of them might appear as obvious to you but in many cases they are disregarded by marketers:

1.       Insure that your email addresses have opted in: obvious but often disregarded. An opt in user is someone interested in your emails and is more likely to read them from start to finish. Intela’s advice would be to obtain the highest level of permission possible for your business model. Double opt in users are far more likely to read your emails than single opt in users.

2.       Know your audience: a subscriber is not just an email address but a person with interests and passions. The best way to engage a user is to make him tell you what he/she is interested in so that you can adapt the content of your emails.

The best ways to do this are:

· Sending a welcome message to your subscribers summarizing the information regarding their subscription.

· Inserting a preference center in the welcome email allowing users to tell you more about them from the get go.

· This preference center needs to be user friendlyreminding from time to time your audience that they can update their preferences in the preference center (and provide them a link).

· Set expectations from the start and mainly on frequency. Of course, the preference center allows the users to change the frequency but providing them with this information cause users t expect your email on specific days and even look in their spam folder in case they don’t find it in their mailbox.

· Analyzing the links that subscribers will click on. In the absence of a preference center, it provides valuable information as to what users are interested in. based on this data, you can adapt the following messages. For example, I have seen example in the past of companies sending emails to a non qualified databases (no social demographic data) advertising several  products in the same email. A thorough analysis of the clicks behavior allowed them to determine the age range, gender of the subscribers (amongst others) without any data provided by the latter.

3.       Use the same from domain as the website where the users subscribed to: Intela suggests you to have your brand name in the from address. One of the main reasons for spam complaints or even deleting the email, is the fact that users don’t know the sender or don’t recognize the sender and these are two different things. Not knowing the sender could potentially mean that the latter never obtained permission to send emails whereas not recognizing the sender could mean that he uses a different domain than the one users are familiar with. A lot of marketers have and still make this mistake and it is important to keep this in mind. For example sending communications from a co-brand could perform really bad as users are not aware of the connection between the brands.

4.       Mind the frequency of your emails. Again, set expectations in terms of frequency and honor them. Keep a close eye on your open and click rates for users not using the preference center to determine whether the frequency should be updated.

5.       Mind the Cadence:  cadence is a measure of engagement and is different from frequency which is a measure of volume. Cadence tells you when your subscribers are more likely to open your messages because they are ready and looking to buy products. For example if certain group of your audience are responsive twice a year or at the end of each quarter, only send them your offers at that moment. Their interest in these period is far higher.

6.       Determine what time of the day is optimum for your users? This can be determined on a per user basis based on a click/opens analysis. Indeed, some users could be more tempted to open their emails in the evenings whereas others would do so at lunch time. How does this information help? Well, by sending an email around the time when users usually open their mail, you will be placed at the top of the list in the inbox. Users don’t have an unlimited time to dedicated to their emails and they will open in priority the latest emails (on top of the list) and then browse the others quickly. If your email is on the 2nd page, it could very well be disregarded, or deleted with a group of other messages. Especially if your users are at work, the amount of time they are willing to dedicated to each individual message will decrease to values as low as 2 seconds (or less)

7.       Work on your subject lines: subject lines don’t guarantee that the user will read your email from start to finish of course, but it is the mandatory first step to generate interest and intrigue users to the point where they will be  eager to read the content of your email. Ideally you should perform split testing on subject lines to find the most appealing subject line for your customer base. Subject line analysis can go beyond simple split tests and can allow you to find the “profile” of each user but this is another subject.

8.       Keep the message simple and easy to read and understand. Make sure that the incentives are highlighted and clearly visible to the user in the body of the email as well as call to actions. Call to actions must be visible and more importantly easy to use (require a very simple action on the user’s part). This highlights the benefits of being in your program which are accessible with limited efforts.

9.       Make sure your users add you to their address book. “What’s the difference?” one would be tempted to ask: emails from know contacts are delivered to the inbox with links and images activated in most cases and this means that your emails will be far more appealing to a user browsing the content, to determine if he is going to read or not, than a message with just text. More than a deliverability measure, address book addition is also a esthetic measure allowing you to engage your audience and generate interest. Intela advises you to provide your users with a tutorial explain them how to add your address or domain on different email clients and webmails to insure that efforts deployed in creative design are not going unnoticed by your audience.

10.   Don’t take anything for granted and keep analyzing and testing all these elements to improve your programmes and keep you audience happy.

By: Martin Ebongue, European Email Deliverability Manager

Why expand into Europe?

Open any newspaper and you are faced with predictable doom and gloom when it comes to the financial outlook in Europe.

Financial markets are dropping, the Euro is facing a four year low against the dollar and fears of a double-dip recession are widespread.

With countries like Spain (the 9^th largest economy in the world), experiencing close to 20% unemployment, Europe seems an unlikely place for businesses to expand into.

However, Intela, a global performance marketing company with offices in the US and a European headquarters in London is doing just that, and growing its market share aggressively.

Intela has three main revenue streams: Lead Generation, Email Marketing and its own Publisher Platform. All of these channels are purely online (allowing for increased reporting, speed of campaign deployment and tracking ROI). Intela specializes in providing prospects and consumers on a cost per acquisition basis to advertisers.

But why is Europe an explosive potential market and why are “first to market” companies like Intela and others succeeding in potentially choppy waters?

Here are some of the trends identified in the latest report from the IAB European Online Advertising Report that are contributing to exciting growth:

1) The continued move from offline to online advertising

In the UK (a mature market in terms of online activity), online advertising in 2009 had a like for like growth of over 4% despite the difficult economic conditions prevailing. In Europe, the aggregate figure is 4.5% but look again and you will see that Spain has a figure closer to 7.7%. Other markets such as Poland, Turkey and Greece all grew in double digits in the same period.

2) The shift of advertisers owning their audience rather than renting media space

Due to the increased fragmentation of traditional media channels like TV and radio, brands are looking to actually own their audience and communicate to them on a tactical “one to one” basis. More relevant user data collected in this process means enhanced CRM capabilities and higher return on investment.

3) The move from buying media on a distribution (CPM) basis to a cost per acquisition (CPA)

Tougher times mean advertisers are looking to increase their margins wherever possible. Moving to a performance model (the dominant method of online marketing in the U.S.) ensures less marketing / acquisition budget is wasted on campaigns where there is no guarantee of customers.

4) Increased responsiveness to online advertising of users in emerging  countries notably France and Spain

With less frequency of emails, banners and general online “clutter” users in emerging European markets are far more responsive.

Take for example, email. On broadcasts in Spain compared to the US, open rates can be up to 500% higher. Equally, click through rates (CTR) can be as much as five times over a US average. With metrics like this, the resulting ECPM (revenue from emails delivered) can look very promising indeed.

Combine leading edge technology established through operating in a more competitive market and it’s easy to see why companies are looking over the channel to extend their reach.

The Euro area in crisis? Maybe … but with every cloud comes a silver lining!

Written by Zach Measures, Commercial Director