Rich email - the poor man's direct mail?
For those who have peeked around the technology corner and seen the latest activity that is going on in the US, then rich email will already have been spotted by the keen marketeers.
So what is the excitement all about? Put simply – marketing efficiency. To put the email’s attraction into perspective: response rates to emails are 42% higher than those of radio, TV, print, and banner advertising, and 39% higher than those of postal direct mail
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With a bit of investigation, the explanation of this increased rate is clear. Email is the number one reason why people turn on their computers. In fact, consumers check their email more times each day than they watch TV, read the newspaper or listen to the radio. 45 per cent of British households are now on-line and 53 per cent of the working population switch their computer at least six times a day just to access their emails.
Apart from getting a better response, email is also highly cost-effective. Internet direct marketing is estimated to be 60-65 percent cheaper than traditional direct marketing
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Rich email – what is it?
Everybody has received marketing information in their inbox. So what makes the difference between reading it and deleting it.
The number one reason is recognition. If you don’t recognise the sender, or are suspicious of the source, then the message is most likely to end up in the wastebasket. To ensure the email you send is read before it is binned, it is important that email broadcast lists are generated responsibly. All recipients should have given their permission to receive your email or actively opted-in to a list. In practise this means you have one of three ways of getting your initial list.
The easiest ways are to either use your existing contacts or simply buy a list from a recognised email broker. The other way is to use your existing marketing methods to actively collect email addresses. And don’t forget that emails have an inherent advantage over printed matter. They are much easier to forward on to friends and colleagues – the viral effect.
The viral effect can produce a significant increase in the number of people actually reading an email – far greater than the initial broadcast amount.
Of course the other reason emails are read is to do with the message itself. Rather like a good piece of direct marketing collateral, an informative, interactive email is more likely to attract a recipient’s attention compared to a standard text-based email. The definition of a rich email could be summarised as “an email containing functionality/dynamism to provide worthwhile interactivity between the recipient and sender”
The creative possibilities are endless.
Rich email enables a message to be sent enhanced with audio, video and animation. It can be as simple as an email that contains an image, or as complex as a message that contains real, helpful functionality – from ecommerce capabilities to automatically adding an event into your electronic diary.
An interesting, if perhaps unanticipated response to rich email, is that some users separate unwanted from worthwhile content by noting that spammers are very unlikely to spend the time or money on developing a rich-media product. "If I see that I have a rich email in my inbox," says one client, "I'm much more likely to open it than I am the dozens of other emails I get. Rich email shows that the sender is substantial and serious."
Functionality also leads to trackability of who and where emails go; essential as emails all have viral capacity.
For the marketer, this provides the first time in history that word-of-mouth can be tracked. Purchases and click-through rates are all figures that can help a marketer judge the effectiveness of their campaign.
The latest statistics according to GartnerG2 in the US show more businesses are now using email marketing campaigns rather than traditional direct mailings. The research firm suggests that e-mail marketing has become a more cost-effective way to acquire and retain customers. It also claims that direct mail campaigns have reached their peak.
Typically the US is 12-18 months ahead in rolling out new technologies, but the news from Europe suggests that rich email is making its appearance quicker than usual. According to a new study from DoubleClick, almost half of European marketers now use online marketing tools and at 73 percent, UK marketers are leading the way.
In the UK, rich email pioneers are beginning to appear. One of these is quadsite, a creative marketing company based in the heart of the advertising district in Central London. Darcy Peters, creative director has been involved with internet based marketing and advertising for 8 years, but has recently seen a significant increase in demand for rich email, noting “the last 6 months have seen a huge surge in enquiries about producing rich email marketing campaigns”
Quadsite handle rich email campaigns for a range of clients, from small on-line retailers to worldwide brands. They specialise in creating visually exciting content that can be used in pan-European campaigns, often in a number of different languages!
Peters believes that the rich email take-up will be even greater in the UK than in the US. He points to Europe’s more sophisticated approach to graphic design and creative presentations, features that have been almost impossible to build into emails until recently.
This combined with the ability to send it worldwide, and in whatever language
is needed, be it English, French or Spanish for example, makes email well
suited to European marketers. It is usually too expensive to have printed
matter prepared in a range of different languages, but with email, it is
possible to have foreign language translation incorporated on even very
low volumes. Coupled with the recent surge in the uptake of broadband internet
connections, rich email will soon be an essential part of the internet marketing
mix, along with web-sites, microsites and banner ads .
