The ability to sense advertising puffery within emails is a consequence of the increase in both the number and sophistication of email users – the ability to self-select and aggregate content sources to handle the plethora of personal and business email they receive.
In my opinion, these issues encompass ‘Customer Engagement’, succinctly described by Richard Sedley, Customer Engagement Director of digital agency cScape, as “Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.” It is also explored in greater depth in the excellent “Second Annual Online Customer Engagement Report 2008,” which is published by E-consultancy in association with cScape.

Subject lines: an editorial and strategic challenge

Create ‘stand-out’ by carefully crafting subject lines to be both appealing and consistent with the communication style of your digital channels. Differentiate your email from the many others cluttering up inboxes and relate to, and entice, recipients’ fleeting curiosity as to its content. Insert personalisation and the name of your organisation or brand - by now it’s getting long and convoluted, particularly if you have any subscribers with multi-syllabic surnames:

“The January Bright Spark Newsletter from European Investment Entrepreneurs for Camilla Fotherington-Halliday”

Descriptive, yes, but not everyone is using a 21 inch monitor widescreen email client. And how appealing would it be crammed into a PDA/iPhone/Blackberry window? A better solution would be to use an automated solution to split test subject lines for each campaign delivery, including personalisation in some. Monitor which type achieves the best opening rates and deploy the most successful. But do continue testing - what worked today will most likely appear dated as quickly as three months from now.

Day and time of delivery – statistical challenge with a technological solution

Apart from the obvious guidelines of ‘avoid sending on Monday morning and Friday afternoons’, the day of the week and time of delivery can have significant impact on how visible your message will be in a crowded inbox. Monitoring the day and time of opening of each individual email in order to predict the optimum time for sending future messages is a gargantuan statistical challenge – unless your email service provider can do it for you (and I know of only one that can). That said, the majority of people on your list will display pattern behaviour. The skill is being able to recognise it and act accordingly.

Inbox and direct marketing clutter – a strategic challenge

It is almost impossible to quantify how many other emails subscribers will be receiving from numerous sources but it is a considerable number. A 2005 survey by CACI, entitled ‘Understanding the ‘ambiguous’ relationship between UK consumers and the direct marketing channel,’ suggested that on average consumers would receive weekly six to ten direct mail pieces, three to five door drops and 11 to 25 emails (excluding B2B). Industry statistics show this has increased significantly and will continue to do so for some time.

Appearance in preview pane – a design and content challenge

Inbox clutter results in people scrolling through and making a cursory glance in the preview pane to see if an email is of interest – if what they see adds to any positive impression gained by the subject line, you are ahead of others competing for attention. Even if the email isn’t opened and viewed now, it is considered worthy of getting back to when they have more time and won’t be relegated to ‘irrelevant’ status and deleted via the ‘mark as spam’ option, frequently used as an unsubscribe method. An unsubscribe link following a simple one click process should always be present, no matter what.

Be prepared to adopt and handle many different approaches to email marketing. The ease of set-up and very low delivery costs allow you to experiment with different treatments and approaches. Try as many as you can but do set up your reporting and evaluation systems scrupulously.

Tailor the style of communication according to its purpose and to the people you are addressing. The copy and style used to motivate a first time purchaser to repeat purchase is different from that used to encourage a regular purchaser to maintain an email dialogue with you over time. You should be able to show - or at least imply through electronic trickery - that you know something about their wants and needs. Make them feel valued by delivering content and offers with direct, tangible benefit or reward to them. After all, they have continued to receive your emails and therefore provided you with the lowest cost interactive channel through which to cross-sell, up-sell, deploy loyalty incentives and promote customer advocacy.