• by Lynn Russo Whylly , February 22, 2007

Harnessing best practices for greater buzz

What's working in e-mail marketing? The discipline is getting more complicated as spam filters are snaring more missives and consumer attention is increasingly in short supply. As we move deeper into 2007, here are some progressive ideas and best practices for your e-mail marketing campaigns:

Strategy: "Companies are building preference centers on their Web sites to allow registered recipients to adjust the frequency of the e-mail they receive," says Jeanniey Mullen, senior partner and director of e-mail marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide. "This is also providing an opportunity for companies to collect additional information, such as a job title or number of children, which can be helpful in integrating e-mail into a multimedia campaign," she says.

Viral marketing: To drive excitement for the release of "Gears of War," Microsoft Xbox's most successful game release of 2006, "We sent an exclusive e-mail invite 48 hours in advance of the launch to a hard-core fan base of 600,000," explains Andrew O'Dell, president of digital advertising for AKQA. "And we encrypted it with secret codes. That generated a lot of buzz on the message boards and forums."

After launch, AKQA sent two additional messages to the entire Xbox database announcing that the game was on the shelf and included a link to a downloadable version. The results: O'Dell says the 21 percent open rate and 23 percent click-through rate were fairly standard, but what really proved the campaign successful is that 44 percent of the people who went to gearsofwar.com were not in Xbox's files, considerably adding to the fan base.

Newsletters: In March 2006, IBM launched Forward View, a monthly e-newsletter delivered in Flash format to small and medium-sized businesses. Content versioned by industry preference is delivered through a series of videos, which are then added to the Web site for reinforcement. Appropriate keywords are purchased to tie everything together. Videos are also archived for six months.

"It's a truly integrated 360 degree surround program," says Leslie Reiser, IBM's program director for worldwide interactive marketing for small and medium businesses. "Web sites are the hub, and Forward View is the primary interface, so that gives us both push and pull." Threaded in between, she says, are additional short-term promotions.

"When we moved to rich media, click-through rates jumped to 11.1 percent, compared with 1.2 percent for HTML, but depending on the topic, we have captured open rates as high as 22 percent," says Reiser. To really make it a fully integrated program, IBM will test a hard copy of Forward View in April. OglivyOne handles the program.

Promotions: For the holidays, Sears, Kmart, and Lands' End launched a combined e-mail campaign that drove customers to a multi-brand site, readysetholiday.com. The campaign included a daily deal with promotional offers and a weekly content-focused wrap-up. "I think Sears is trying to figure out how these brands work together and how their customers overlap," observes Chad White, director of retail insight and editor-at-large at the Email Experience Council.

Final words of advice: "Don't over communicate, especially with the younger audience," says O'Dell. "These guys are being talked to in so many different ways and they're getting it from all sides. But don't believe that the younger audience doesn't use e-mail either. If you send a valuable message they'll not only engage with you, they'll distribute for you. The challenge is not collecting e-mail addresses, it's keeping them engaged."

Adds OgilvyOne's Mullen, "When expanding e-mail off the desktop and onto handhelds and RSS feeds, step back and look at your data capture and data-feed capabilities. If you are asking people to opt into wireless, the first thing you need to do is ensure you have the ability to capture that data and to make it accessible through various delivery engines."