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How Email Marketing Works
Under The Hood
by Jay Neuman
. Print Friendly Version
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online
The Internet has turbo-charged old-school direct mail to create the email we all
know and love today. To understand how, we must take a quick look at how
email works under the hood. This article will focus on two key areas where
email has advanced beyond its offline print roots: (1) mass customization and
(2) real time relationship marketing. These two areas of advance are made
possible by the technology platform underlying email campaigns. An
understanding of that platform reveals how all of this is possible. However, it
may get a little technical. Technical jargon will be kept to a minimum.
This article shows how email marketing systems work under the hood. If you
have read up on email before, you might notice something is conspicuously
missing from this discussion. There is no attempt made here to describe how
the technology behind physically delivering email works. Instead, this section
only shows how the technology behind creating an email marketing campaign
works. The assumption is that marketers really do not need to know about how
the mail physically gets there, just so long as it gets there. However, you do
need to know about the technology that allows you, as a marketer, to engage in
real time one-to-one marketing with your customers. That is the topic of this
section.
There are four components to the typical email system. These are shown in
Figure 7.2. The interaction of these sub-systems allows the direct marketing
process to be automated and significantly enhanced. These four components
are software systems, each handling a different part of the process.
Email systems come in various shapes and sizes. It is technically possible for all
four of these sub-systems to run on the same physical computer (server). For
some smaller systems, that is exactly what happens.
For larger scale systems, these four components are always separated. Each
component runs on one or more separate machines to optimize the performance
of email delivery. For a small business, you can send email to your customers
and prospects without needing all of this hardware. You can outsource your
email program to an email vendor (recommended approach) or you can buy an
email system where all of the components run on the same machine. As you
are successful, your email program will grow. By understanding how these four
components of the email system work, you will be better prepared to scale up
your systems as needed to accommodate growth.
The Campaign Management Software
The heart of any email system is the campaign management software. This is
where email campaigns are created and executed. There are five major
functions of the campaign management software.
1. Define Your Email List and Customer Segments
The first part of setting up an email campaign is to tell your email system who
will receive the email. The campaign management software will allow you to
address your email to the entire mail list or to specific addresses on the list. It
will also let you send different versions of the email to different segments of the
list. This is the main purpose of the campaign management software.
One of the powerful features of email is the ability to send targeted
communications to different recipients. You do this by defining customer
segments in your campaign management software. When you set up your
campaign, you will also choose the criteria for inclusion in the campaign. The
simplest case is to select everyone who has opted in to receive your email. This
could come from a checkbox on your customer registration page agreeing to
receive a newsletter.
However, you will often want to create targeted mailings for specific groups.
You may have a bi-weekly newsletter. On your registration page, you could
include checkboxes for a variety of interests. Then you could create different
versions of your newsletter based on the interests customers identified. You will
use your campaign management software to define which customers get which
version. This is done by setting up customer segments when defining your
campaign.
Since your campaign management system is linked to your marketing database
(discussed below), you can create targeted segments based on any information
in the customer profile. You could send different promotions to women versus
men. You could give a different offer to loyal customers versus one-time
shoppers who signed up for your newsletter.
More advanced email systems allow you to go beyond simply sending different
versions to targeted segments. You can define parameters that will identify
content elements to be inserted into the email document. Perhaps you are an
art broker and have an online store selling fine arts. You could ask your
customers what type of art they are interested in: sculpture, painting, mixed
media, etc. Then you could create a single email campaign that notifies
customers of new art in the categories they selected. When the campaign runs,
it will check the marketing database for each recipient, to identify their
interests. Then it will search the product database to see if there are any new
products in each category they selected. If there is, it will insert the products for
those categories into the email document.
2. Load the Email Document(s)
The next step is to load the email documents themselves into the campaign.
This is a fairly straightforward process. The campaign management system will
have an option to load your document and identify which segment of the
campaign it applies to.
At this point, you must know about different email formats. First is text versus
HTML email. Some people do not have the ability to open HTML documents on
their home or office computer. Also, with dial up modem connections, it can
take a long time to open an HTML email document. This is not as big an issue
today as it used to be. However, there are still many users who either cannot or
do not want to receive HTML documents in their email. So how do you deal with
this situation?
One answer is to offer an option on your email opt-in page where users can
choose HTML or text versions of your email. Then you include this as a
parameter in your customer segmentation. However, this does not address the
case where users log in from different systems. In some cases they will be at a
computer that can read the HTML document. In other cases they will not. The
answer to this question is to create what is called a multi-part MIME document.
MIME is a standard for how documents are formatted when they are transmitted
over the Internet. A multi-part MIME document includes multiple formats in the
same document. When the recipient opens their email, the browser opens the
version that is appropriate for that browser. If the user can only read text, it will
open the text document. If they can read HTML, it will open the HTML document.
In addition to text versus HTML, some people will want to receive email on a
wireless device. It is very common now for people to receive email on their cell
phone, PDA (personal digital assistant) or BlackBerry device. Wireless devices
such as these use the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, to display
documents in their browsers. WAP browsers cannot display HTML files. Instead,
they read files written in the Wireless Markup Language (WML). This creates the
same basic scenario as text versus HTML. You must create another version of
your email document that can be displayed by wireless browsers.
3. Set Up Campaign Timing and Triggers
The next part of your email campaign is to define when it will be sent. When
you send an email from your personal email account, you will just hit the “send”
button. The email goes out. With an email campaign, this is not such a good
idea. We can all remember times when we hit that send button and then
regretted it. With email campaigns, you will set a time when the email will start
sending. You will usually want to send a test campaign to a few recipients within
your business first. That way you can make sure there will be no problems
when you send it to the full list.
There are basically two ways to time an email campaign. The first is to send the
email out to the entire list all at once. The second kind is sent out in response to
triggers. We will start with the simplest case.
For a one-time campaign being sent to your list, you will simply define the
campaign and set a time when the campaign will be launched. This is pretty
straightforward.
The next case is a campaign that goes out automatically on a given schedule. In
our example of the fine arts dealer, the new product announcement could be set
up to run automatically. In the campaign managements system, you could set
the time to every Monday at 11:00PM, for example. That way, your customers
would get the email in their inbox the first thing in the morning every Tuesday.
This same technique applies to birthday emails. If you want an email to go out
on your customer’s birthday, you would have a campaign run every day. It will
go through your email list and send an email to everyone whose birthday
matches today’s date (or some number of days before their birthday).
Next comes an email campaign that is triggered by an event. The most common
example of this is an auto-response to some event that occurs on your website.
For example, when someone submits a customer complaint through a form on
your website, you could trigger a response notifying the customer that their
issue was received and they would be contacted within a given period of time to
resolve it. There are a couple of different ways email systems can set up
triggers. The key thing is the ability to set up campaigns that can be launched
dynamically based on triggering events.
4. Capture Results and Maintain Campaign History
In addition to defining campaigns to be sent, the campaign management system
will also maintain a record of all campaigns that have been run. This is called
the campaign history. When you send out your email, a record is created in
your marketing database for every person who the email was sent to. So you
will have a record of everyone who you sent email to and when. But this in itself
is not very useful. You want to know how effective your email was.
When you set up your campaign, you will also identify a number of metrics that
will be recorded in your campaign history, along with the fact that an email was
sent. The most basic metrics are bounce-backs and responses. This is one
place where all four components of your email system work together. The email
server (discussed below) will try to send out every email. If it is unable to
deliver one, or more of those emails, it will record it as an undeliverable email
address. This is known as a bounce back. Some campaign management
systems will receive this information from the email server and write it into the
campaign history.
For emails that do get through, you want to know what happens when people
receive them. This is where the web server (discussed below) comes in. For
HTML emails, when a recipient opens the email, it can be set up to call your web
server to serve a tiny, invisible image into the HTML page. The web server
records this. Some campaign management systems will also record it in your
campaign history. You will have a metric for opened emails. Next, when
someone clicks on a link in your email, a web page is served. In some cases,
that page will also be served by the email system. This event is also recorded
and can be put into the campaign history. This gives you a metric for
responses. By using the web server associated with your campaign
management system, you can set up a variety of things to record in your
campaign history. This will be discussed below in a section on the web server.
5. Generate Reports
Finally, your campaign management system will generate reports. Basically,
anything that has been captured into the campaign history can be reported on.
How much reporting is available will be a function of your campaign
management system. Some provide very little reporting. Others let you to
build elaborate customized reports.
The Marketing Database
Behind the campaign management software sits a marketing database. This is
the database where you store your customer list and all the information about
your customers that is needed to run campaigns. There are three core
components in the typical marketing database.
1. Customer List(s)
Your marketing database is fundamentally a database of customers and
prospects. At the core, it is a list. The simplest version of a marketing database
would be a simple list of everyone who opted in to your email list and their email
addresses. However, this would not allow much flexibility with your email
program. Most marketing databases will also include a lot of information about
each customer on the list. The general rule is that everything you might need to
know to effectively market to your customers should be in the marketing
database. This information is sometimes called the customer profile.
2. Customer Profile
The customer profile refers to a set of fields in the database with information
about each customer. Perhaps you have an email program for your company
consisting of a weekly newsletter and birthday rewards. When customers sign
up for your email, you give them the opportunity to choose which of these they
want to receive. You also ask them some basic product interests that you will
use to target the newsletter content. A fairly basic marketing database will
contain the name and email address of each recipient plus fields for each of
these options.
This basic customer profile will be quite sufficient for many email programs.
However, if you want to get more sophisticated, you can include almost anything
you want in the customer profile. You could include demographics such as age
and income. You could create custom segmentation codes based on how much
money they spend with your company or how long they have been a customer.
For almost anything you can conceive, you could probably find a way to get it
into the marketing database. Once there, you can use it to create targeted
email campaigns.
Another important thing stored in your marketing database is information that
will be used as triggers for relationship marketing emails. This could be your
customer’s birthday. It could be special days they identified when they need to
make gift purchases. If you offer financial services, it could be the stock value
when they want their stock to be sold. Once again, almost anything you can
think of can be stored in the database.
One caution about your marketing database is to take special care with
information that may be subject to your privacy policy. Websites and email
programs are subject to strict enforcement of privacy concerns. In other words,
people do not want their personal information being made public. Now most
companies do not willfully violate their customers’ privacy concerns but
accidents do happen. We have all heard news stories about organizations who
have had their computers hacked into or accidentally released information about
their customers. You must be vigilant against this happening to you. The first
line of defense is to take care to ensure the security of your customer data and
the computers it sits on.
3. Campaign History
The marketing database will include a record of every campaign that is sent
out. This was discussed above. You will have a record of each campaign, of
each recipient of those campaigns and a variety of metrics you have chosen to
measure. By having this information, you will be able to measure the success or
failure of your email campaigns. You will also be able to measure trends and
continuously improve your email program.
A simple way to understand the campaign history component of your marketing
database is to think of it as consisting of two tables. A table is basically the
same thing as a spreadsheet with rows and columns. In the first table, you have
one row for each campaign. It shows the basic details of the campaign,
including the name, description and timing of the campaign. In the second table,
you have a row for each recipient of each campaign. Clearly, this is the bigger
table. In fact, it can get quite huge. There will be one row for each person on
your email list every time they receive an email. It will record the campaign
they received plus all of the metrics you set up to be measured for that
campaign.
By having all of this information in one place, you will be able to do analysis
about both campaigns and customers. You can see how well campaigns work
with different types of offers. You can see if your emails are more likely to be
opened if they are sent on different days or have different subject lines. You
can see if different customer segments respond better than others. Having all of
this information in one place allows you to easily create a set of reports that can
be used to continuously monitor and improve your email program.
The Web Server
For any given email campaign, one or more HTML documents will be created and
loaded into the campaign management system. When the email is sent out, an
HTML document is sent out to the recipient. This is actually an HTML web page
that is served by your web server. The web server loads the HTML document
plus all images and other files to be displayed, just as if it were serving a page
on your website. The only difference is the page is served into the email
document. The web server will generate a complete email document for each
recipient as the email is being sent out. A common technique is to also include
in the document a call for a tiny, invisible image to be served from the web
server when the user opens the email. This allows an open rate to be calculated
for the email campaign.
In more advanced systems, the web server will sometimes be used to also
generate the landing pages for links in the email document. This gives you
more flexibility in customizing landing pages based on parameters in the email
campaign. The campaign management system can recognize the customer
identifier carried by the email link and tell the web server exactly what landing
page to serve. (This can still be done without linking the web server to the
campaign management system, but it requires extensive use of parameters in
the linking URLs from the email message.)
An even more significant reason for serving web pages through the email
campaign itself is that it allows the campaign management system to track
every action that occurs after the customer clicks thru. Some companies will
include copies of all the key pages, all the way through the conversion event. In
addition to ease of tracking results, content on the pages can be tailored to
reflect the marketing messaging in the email campaign. This capability of more
advanced campaign management systems also allows email agencies to offer a
much more robust service to clients who want to outsource a larger integrated
marketing program.
The Email Server
The final component to the email system is the email server itself. This system
does nothing except send out emails.
When the campaign management system starts running the campaign, it creates
a separate document for each and every recipient on the mail list. This includes
at least a minimum of personalization in the email address and the opening
greeting. In some cases, there will be customized documents generated for
each customer based on preferences they entered when subscribing to the
email.
These email documents are queued up in the email server. They are then sent
out one at a time. The email server checks the email address and attempts to
deliver the email. It will record all of the successful deliveries. Unsuccessful
deliveries (called bounce backs) are also recorded. The list of bounce backs is
usually used to purge the email list of bad email addresses. For example, if an
address cannot be reached in three successive campaigns, it may be tagged as
a dead email address. By removing it from the list, you will reduce the load on
your email server in future campaigns.
Now let us see how all four components of the email system work together.
Mass Customization
One of the most powerful features of email is the ability to customize messages
to each subscriber. Most email documents today are in HTML. That means your
email message is a web page. All of the customization that you are able to do
on a web page can also be done with email. We saw how this works above. You
can ask your subscribers to provide information about themselves and their
email preferences. This information can then be included in their customer
profile. When the email is sent out, the campaign management software
searches the marketing database for the parameters associated with each
subscriber’s profile. Then content is inserted, by the web server, into the HTML
page based on those parameters.
You may receive emails like this yourself. A common type of customized email
is to allow users to enter a search criteria for information that interests them.
For example, a real estate website could allow users to enter search criteria for
the type of home they want to purchase. Then an email could be sent out with
new listings matching that criteria. This could be a weekly email. Or it could be
sent out only when new listings appear that match their criteria. In this second
case, the campaign could actually run every day, but only send email to those
where search results are found meeting the user’s criteria.
Real Time Relationship Marketing
The last section has shown how the email system can create a customized email
for each subscriber. Now let us see how it also allows you to use triggers to
send out those emails at times that are customized to the needs of your
relationship with each customer.
We saw above how a subscriber’s search criteria can be used as a trigger to
send email to them. They simply enter the criteria for information they want to
receive and the email system sends an email whenever that search returns
results matching their search. There are also other ways to trigger email based
on needs the customer identifies within their customer profile. These can
include:
Next, is email triggered not by information defined in the user profile, but by
events that occur on the website or with the online business. Examples of this
type of triggering event include:
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500
companies, startup Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their
Internet Marketing and Database Marketing challenges. Jay is currently Sole
Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. - www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
Under The Hood
by Jay Neuman
. Print Friendly Version
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online
The Internet has turbo-charged old-school direct mail to create the email we all
know and love today. To understand how, we must take a quick look at how
email works under the hood. This article will focus on two key areas where
email has advanced beyond its offline print roots: (1) mass customization and
(2) real time relationship marketing. These two areas of advance are made
possible by the technology platform underlying email campaigns. An
understanding of that platform reveals how all of this is possible. However, it
may get a little technical. Technical jargon will be kept to a minimum.
This article shows how email marketing systems work under the hood. If you
have read up on email before, you might notice something is conspicuously
missing from this discussion. There is no attempt made here to describe how
the technology behind physically delivering email works. Instead, this section
only shows how the technology behind creating an email marketing campaign
works. The assumption is that marketers really do not need to know about how
the mail physically gets there, just so long as it gets there. However, you do
need to know about the technology that allows you, as a marketer, to engage in
real time one-to-one marketing with your customers. That is the topic of this
section.
There are four components to the typical email system. These are shown in
Figure 7.2. The interaction of these sub-systems allows the direct marketing
process to be automated and significantly enhanced. These four components
are software systems, each handling a different part of the process.
Email systems come in various shapes and sizes. It is technically possible for all
four of these sub-systems to run on the same physical computer (server). For
some smaller systems, that is exactly what happens.
For larger scale systems, these four components are always separated. Each
component runs on one or more separate machines to optimize the performance
of email delivery. For a small business, you can send email to your customers
and prospects without needing all of this hardware. You can outsource your
email program to an email vendor (recommended approach) or you can buy an
email system where all of the components run on the same machine. As you
are successful, your email program will grow. By understanding how these four
components of the email system work, you will be better prepared to scale up
your systems as needed to accommodate growth.
The Campaign Management Software
The heart of any email system is the campaign management software. This is
where email campaigns are created and executed. There are five major
functions of the campaign management software.
1. Define Your Email List and Customer Segments
The first part of setting up an email campaign is to tell your email system who
will receive the email. The campaign management software will allow you to
address your email to the entire mail list or to specific addresses on the list. It
will also let you send different versions of the email to different segments of the
list. This is the main purpose of the campaign management software.
One of the powerful features of email is the ability to send targeted
communications to different recipients. You do this by defining customer
segments in your campaign management software. When you set up your
campaign, you will also choose the criteria for inclusion in the campaign. The
simplest case is to select everyone who has opted in to receive your email. This
could come from a checkbox on your customer registration page agreeing to
receive a newsletter.
However, you will often want to create targeted mailings for specific groups.
You may have a bi-weekly newsletter. On your registration page, you could
include checkboxes for a variety of interests. Then you could create different
versions of your newsletter based on the interests customers identified. You will
use your campaign management software to define which customers get which
version. This is done by setting up customer segments when defining your
campaign.
Since your campaign management system is linked to your marketing database
(discussed below), you can create targeted segments based on any information
in the customer profile. You could send different promotions to women versus
men. You could give a different offer to loyal customers versus one-time
shoppers who signed up for your newsletter.
More advanced email systems allow you to go beyond simply sending different
versions to targeted segments. You can define parameters that will identify
content elements to be inserted into the email document. Perhaps you are an
art broker and have an online store selling fine arts. You could ask your
customers what type of art they are interested in: sculpture, painting, mixed
media, etc. Then you could create a single email campaign that notifies
customers of new art in the categories they selected. When the campaign runs,
it will check the marketing database for each recipient, to identify their
interests. Then it will search the product database to see if there are any new
products in each category they selected. If there is, it will insert the products for
those categories into the email document.
2. Load the Email Document(s)
The next step is to load the email documents themselves into the campaign.
This is a fairly straightforward process. The campaign management system will
have an option to load your document and identify which segment of the
campaign it applies to.
At this point, you must know about different email formats. First is text versus
HTML email. Some people do not have the ability to open HTML documents on
their home or office computer. Also, with dial up modem connections, it can
take a long time to open an HTML email document. This is not as big an issue
today as it used to be. However, there are still many users who either cannot or
do not want to receive HTML documents in their email. So how do you deal with
this situation?
One answer is to offer an option on your email opt-in page where users can
choose HTML or text versions of your email. Then you include this as a
parameter in your customer segmentation. However, this does not address the
case where users log in from different systems. In some cases they will be at a
computer that can read the HTML document. In other cases they will not. The
answer to this question is to create what is called a multi-part MIME document.
MIME is a standard for how documents are formatted when they are transmitted
over the Internet. A multi-part MIME document includes multiple formats in the
same document. When the recipient opens their email, the browser opens the
version that is appropriate for that browser. If the user can only read text, it will
open the text document. If they can read HTML, it will open the HTML document.
In addition to text versus HTML, some people will want to receive email on a
wireless device. It is very common now for people to receive email on their cell
phone, PDA (personal digital assistant) or BlackBerry device. Wireless devices
such as these use the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, to display
documents in their browsers. WAP browsers cannot display HTML files. Instead,
they read files written in the Wireless Markup Language (WML). This creates the
same basic scenario as text versus HTML. You must create another version of
your email document that can be displayed by wireless browsers.
3. Set Up Campaign Timing and Triggers
The next part of your email campaign is to define when it will be sent. When
you send an email from your personal email account, you will just hit the “send”
button. The email goes out. With an email campaign, this is not such a good
idea. We can all remember times when we hit that send button and then
regretted it. With email campaigns, you will set a time when the email will start
sending. You will usually want to send a test campaign to a few recipients within
your business first. That way you can make sure there will be no problems
when you send it to the full list.
There are basically two ways to time an email campaign. The first is to send the
email out to the entire list all at once. The second kind is sent out in response to
triggers. We will start with the simplest case.
For a one-time campaign being sent to your list, you will simply define the
campaign and set a time when the campaign will be launched. This is pretty
straightforward.
The next case is a campaign that goes out automatically on a given schedule. In
our example of the fine arts dealer, the new product announcement could be set
up to run automatically. In the campaign managements system, you could set
the time to every Monday at 11:00PM, for example. That way, your customers
would get the email in their inbox the first thing in the morning every Tuesday.
This same technique applies to birthday emails. If you want an email to go out
on your customer’s birthday, you would have a campaign run every day. It will
go through your email list and send an email to everyone whose birthday
matches today’s date (or some number of days before their birthday).
Next comes an email campaign that is triggered by an event. The most common
example of this is an auto-response to some event that occurs on your website.
For example, when someone submits a customer complaint through a form on
your website, you could trigger a response notifying the customer that their
issue was received and they would be contacted within a given period of time to
resolve it. There are a couple of different ways email systems can set up
triggers. The key thing is the ability to set up campaigns that can be launched
dynamically based on triggering events.
4. Capture Results and Maintain Campaign History
In addition to defining campaigns to be sent, the campaign management system
will also maintain a record of all campaigns that have been run. This is called
the campaign history. When you send out your email, a record is created in
your marketing database for every person who the email was sent to. So you
will have a record of everyone who you sent email to and when. But this in itself
is not very useful. You want to know how effective your email was.
When you set up your campaign, you will also identify a number of metrics that
will be recorded in your campaign history, along with the fact that an email was
sent. The most basic metrics are bounce-backs and responses. This is one
place where all four components of your email system work together. The email
server (discussed below) will try to send out every email. If it is unable to
deliver one, or more of those emails, it will record it as an undeliverable email
address. This is known as a bounce back. Some campaign management
systems will receive this information from the email server and write it into the
campaign history.
For emails that do get through, you want to know what happens when people
receive them. This is where the web server (discussed below) comes in. For
HTML emails, when a recipient opens the email, it can be set up to call your web
server to serve a tiny, invisible image into the HTML page. The web server
records this. Some campaign management systems will also record it in your
campaign history. You will have a metric for opened emails. Next, when
someone clicks on a link in your email, a web page is served. In some cases,
that page will also be served by the email system. This event is also recorded
and can be put into the campaign history. This gives you a metric for
responses. By using the web server associated with your campaign
management system, you can set up a variety of things to record in your
campaign history. This will be discussed below in a section on the web server.
5. Generate Reports
Finally, your campaign management system will generate reports. Basically,
anything that has been captured into the campaign history can be reported on.
How much reporting is available will be a function of your campaign
management system. Some provide very little reporting. Others let you to
build elaborate customized reports.
The Marketing Database
Behind the campaign management software sits a marketing database. This is
the database where you store your customer list and all the information about
your customers that is needed to run campaigns. There are three core
components in the typical marketing database.
1. Customer List(s)
Your marketing database is fundamentally a database of customers and
prospects. At the core, it is a list. The simplest version of a marketing database
would be a simple list of everyone who opted in to your email list and their email
addresses. However, this would not allow much flexibility with your email
program. Most marketing databases will also include a lot of information about
each customer on the list. The general rule is that everything you might need to
know to effectively market to your customers should be in the marketing
database. This information is sometimes called the customer profile.
2. Customer Profile
The customer profile refers to a set of fields in the database with information
about each customer. Perhaps you have an email program for your company
consisting of a weekly newsletter and birthday rewards. When customers sign
up for your email, you give them the opportunity to choose which of these they
want to receive. You also ask them some basic product interests that you will
use to target the newsletter content. A fairly basic marketing database will
contain the name and email address of each recipient plus fields for each of
these options.
This basic customer profile will be quite sufficient for many email programs.
However, if you want to get more sophisticated, you can include almost anything
you want in the customer profile. You could include demographics such as age
and income. You could create custom segmentation codes based on how much
money they spend with your company or how long they have been a customer.
For almost anything you can conceive, you could probably find a way to get it
into the marketing database. Once there, you can use it to create targeted
email campaigns.
Another important thing stored in your marketing database is information that
will be used as triggers for relationship marketing emails. This could be your
customer’s birthday. It could be special days they identified when they need to
make gift purchases. If you offer financial services, it could be the stock value
when they want their stock to be sold. Once again, almost anything you can
think of can be stored in the database.
One caution about your marketing database is to take special care with
information that may be subject to your privacy policy. Websites and email
programs are subject to strict enforcement of privacy concerns. In other words,
people do not want their personal information being made public. Now most
companies do not willfully violate their customers’ privacy concerns but
accidents do happen. We have all heard news stories about organizations who
have had their computers hacked into or accidentally released information about
their customers. You must be vigilant against this happening to you. The first
line of defense is to take care to ensure the security of your customer data and
the computers it sits on.
3. Campaign History
The marketing database will include a record of every campaign that is sent
out. This was discussed above. You will have a record of each campaign, of
each recipient of those campaigns and a variety of metrics you have chosen to
measure. By having this information, you will be able to measure the success or
failure of your email campaigns. You will also be able to measure trends and
continuously improve your email program.
A simple way to understand the campaign history component of your marketing
database is to think of it as consisting of two tables. A table is basically the
same thing as a spreadsheet with rows and columns. In the first table, you have
one row for each campaign. It shows the basic details of the campaign,
including the name, description and timing of the campaign. In the second table,
you have a row for each recipient of each campaign. Clearly, this is the bigger
table. In fact, it can get quite huge. There will be one row for each person on
your email list every time they receive an email. It will record the campaign
they received plus all of the metrics you set up to be measured for that
campaign.
By having all of this information in one place, you will be able to do analysis
about both campaigns and customers. You can see how well campaigns work
with different types of offers. You can see if your emails are more likely to be
opened if they are sent on different days or have different subject lines. You
can see if different customer segments respond better than others. Having all of
this information in one place allows you to easily create a set of reports that can
be used to continuously monitor and improve your email program.
The Web Server
For any given email campaign, one or more HTML documents will be created and
loaded into the campaign management system. When the email is sent out, an
HTML document is sent out to the recipient. This is actually an HTML web page
that is served by your web server. The web server loads the HTML document
plus all images and other files to be displayed, just as if it were serving a page
on your website. The only difference is the page is served into the email
document. The web server will generate a complete email document for each
recipient as the email is being sent out. A common technique is to also include
in the document a call for a tiny, invisible image to be served from the web
server when the user opens the email. This allows an open rate to be calculated
for the email campaign.
In more advanced systems, the web server will sometimes be used to also
generate the landing pages for links in the email document. This gives you
more flexibility in customizing landing pages based on parameters in the email
campaign. The campaign management system can recognize the customer
identifier carried by the email link and tell the web server exactly what landing
page to serve. (This can still be done without linking the web server to the
campaign management system, but it requires extensive use of parameters in
the linking URLs from the email message.)
An even more significant reason for serving web pages through the email
campaign itself is that it allows the campaign management system to track
every action that occurs after the customer clicks thru. Some companies will
include copies of all the key pages, all the way through the conversion event. In
addition to ease of tracking results, content on the pages can be tailored to
reflect the marketing messaging in the email campaign. This capability of more
advanced campaign management systems also allows email agencies to offer a
much more robust service to clients who want to outsource a larger integrated
marketing program.
The Email Server
The final component to the email system is the email server itself. This system
does nothing except send out emails.
When the campaign management system starts running the campaign, it creates
a separate document for each and every recipient on the mail list. This includes
at least a minimum of personalization in the email address and the opening
greeting. In some cases, there will be customized documents generated for
each customer based on preferences they entered when subscribing to the
email.
These email documents are queued up in the email server. They are then sent
out one at a time. The email server checks the email address and attempts to
deliver the email. It will record all of the successful deliveries. Unsuccessful
deliveries (called bounce backs) are also recorded. The list of bounce backs is
usually used to purge the email list of bad email addresses. For example, if an
address cannot be reached in three successive campaigns, it may be tagged as
a dead email address. By removing it from the list, you will reduce the load on
your email server in future campaigns.
Now let us see how all four components of the email system work together.
Mass Customization
One of the most powerful features of email is the ability to customize messages
to each subscriber. Most email documents today are in HTML. That means your
email message is a web page. All of the customization that you are able to do
on a web page can also be done with email. We saw how this works above. You
can ask your subscribers to provide information about themselves and their
email preferences. This information can then be included in their customer
profile. When the email is sent out, the campaign management software
searches the marketing database for the parameters associated with each
subscriber’s profile. Then content is inserted, by the web server, into the HTML
page based on those parameters.
You may receive emails like this yourself. A common type of customized email
is to allow users to enter a search criteria for information that interests them.
For example, a real estate website could allow users to enter search criteria for
the type of home they want to purchase. Then an email could be sent out with
new listings matching that criteria. This could be a weekly email. Or it could be
sent out only when new listings appear that match their criteria. In this second
case, the campaign could actually run every day, but only send email to those
where search results are found meeting the user’s criteria.
Real Time Relationship Marketing
The last section has shown how the email system can create a customized email
for each subscriber. Now let us see how it also allows you to use triggers to
send out those emails at times that are customized to the needs of your
relationship with each customer.
We saw above how a subscriber’s search criteria can be used as a trigger to
send email to them. They simply enter the criteria for information they want to
receive and the email system sends an email whenever that search returns
results matching their search. There are also other ways to trigger email based
on needs the customer identifies within their customer profile. These can
include:
 | Reminder programs (for example, it is time for an oil change) | |
| Emails based on triggering events (for example, a product that interests | |
| them appears in current inventory) | ||
| Emails based on special events on the calendar (for example, their | |
| birthdays) |
Next, is email triggered not by information defined in the user profile, but by
events that occur on the website or with the online business. Examples of this
type of triggering event include:
| Customer reaches a certain level in their reward points program | |
| Customer exceeds a certain sales volume and qualifies for a discount, or | |
| a loyalty reward | ||
| Customer buys certain items and receives coupons for other related items | |
| Customer fails to return to make a purchase after a certain amount of | |
| time and receives an incentive to return or an inquiry about the customer service experience. |
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500
companies, startup Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their
Internet Marketing and Database Marketing challenges. Jay is currently Sole
Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. - www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
The Complete
Internet Marketer
Internet Marketer
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