November 2016 archive

Effective tactics for Email marketing. Waitrose analysis.

I am a very cautious person when it comes to opening unknown emails. I suppose I am scared of fraudulent email thieves trying to steal my personal information or emails with attachments that will infect my computer with a virus. Therefore I usually don’t open an email unless it is from one of my circle of users, it is from a company I know or a company I’ve interacted with at some point. Furthermore, there must be something in the subject line that grabs my attention because It’s something I’m interested in; and if my name comes in the subject line I’ll also be more willing to open it. Considering all these points I’m going to analyse what made me opened an email from Waitrose and how good it is in terms of what tactics are used in the email in order to attract customers.

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The email subject line is the first point to grab the attention of the email receiver. It has to be relevant to the customer and personalised if possible (Chadwick and Doherty, 2012). My Waitrose email subject line was offering an exclusive offer in Cadbury roses plus a 25% discount in Heston’s ice cream. Both products are similar to other products I previously bought in Waitrose with my Waitrose card and thus it was relevant to me which drove me to open it.

It is also very important that organisations only send emails to customers who have granted the permission to contact, unless they do, customers will probably tag those emails as spam. Furthermore, by law the email must have an easy opt-out process (unsubscribe link) in case the customer doesn’t want to receive more emails. Below there is the example of my Waitrose email with a link to unsubscribe.

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 I gave my email address to Waitrose when I signed up to get my Waitrose card and because of that when they send me an email I shouldn’t tag it as a spam; however this email wasn’t in my inbox but in my junk folder. This may be because of the way Waitrose has to submit emails. Therefore, two things must be taken into consideration when submitting emails, so that webmail services don’t detect them as spam: 1) including the name of the customer in the subject line. 2) Sending emails to different customers in small amounts and with different content. Organisations must make sure that the host they use to submit emails allows sending large number of emails at once (Mohammadi, Malekian, Nosrati and Karimi, 2013). Waitrose could have included my name in the subject line, but they didn’t and maybe they sent the same email to a large number of customers at the same time; which could be the reasons I got that email in my junk folder instead of my inbox.

The call-to-action (CTA) buttons are links in the email that will send the customer to a landing page or online application outside the email with the aim of attracting customers and turn them into leads. It is very easy to fail in the way of creating CTA buttons and thus ruin all the effort invested on the email campaign. Here is a guide to create effective CTA buttons.

One of the CTA buttons used on my email was a link to buy the Cadbury roses. The CTA button was very clear about the intention of clicking it with a simple and short sentence saying ‘shop offer’ on the top of the Cadbury roses’ picture. When the customer clicks on an offer in an email the landing page where is taken must be specific for the offer, so the customer focus only on that offer and doesn’t get distracted by other things that may drive the customer to don’t take action. The email and the landing page must have a similar design and same message. For example, my Waitrose email said that the item was £3.60 when purchasing with my Waitrose card and the same is said in the landing page as it can be seen in the image below. Besides both have a similar look which makes the customer think is in the right place.

screenshot_2016-10-29-11-55-25  screenshot_2016-11-01-18-01-36-1

References

Ellis-Chadwick, F. and Doherty, N. F. (2012) Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. [Electronic version] Journal of Business Research, Volume 65, Issue 6, June, pp 843-848. [Online] Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com (accessed 28th October, 2016).

 

Mohammadi, M. and Malekian, K. and Nosrati, M. and Karimi, R. (2013) Email Marketing as a Popular Type of Small Business Advertisement: A Short Review. [Electronic version] Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 786-790. [Online] Available at: http://ajbasweb.com (accessed 1st November, 2016).