The following post is focused on the effectiveness of e-Marketing techniques being employed by Evisu; a Japanese denim/fashion company.

Permission

It makes sense to begin this blog by ascertaining how Evisu obtained my email address. The email that I am looking at is a permission based email as I have previously ordered from Evisu and granted them consent to contact me with marketing information. According to Kim and McMillan (2008) and Pavlov et al (2008), permission based emails are on the rise amongst large companies as they are more successful than other forms of digital marketing. As a multinational company, the use of permission based marketing is also beneficial to Evisu from a legal perspective as spam emails are illegal in some territories and very unpopular amongst customers!

Personalisation

The first opportunity Evisu had to grab my attention was through the subject line. The newsletter is being used to promote a sale event and the subject line of ‘Just For You: 20% Off Our Current Collection’ is attractive to customers and would be likely to draw an engagement from current patrons of the brand. However, Ellis-Chadwick and Doherty (2012) found that personalisation improves click through rates for emails of this nature. As a previous customer Evisu already have lots of my personal details including age, location and name. Theoretically if Evisu were to have included some of this information in the subject line to make the email personal to me, there would have been a greater chance of me reaching the landing page and making a purchase. However, it is also important that companies use an appropriate level of personalisation based on the information given by the customer; too much information can leave the customer feeling uncomfortable.

Template

According to Rossiter (1981) executional tactics play a decisive role in attracting customer attention; the layout, usability and design of marketing emails affect click and conversion rates amongst customers. Goddard et al (2008) state that companies need to reduce the effort required for customers to evaluate available products and complete the checkout process. Evisu’s executional tactics are in concurrence with this notion as their email is simple and mainly contains attractive sale-related information in order to avoid losing customer attention. ‘Shop’ buttons are clear for users to see and lead to the landing page where conversions can be achieved. The landing page is relevant to the information given in the email.

This email employs the Golden Triangle scan pattern. Within this pattern, it is assumed that users have little interest in reading through information and are going to instantly search for the navigation buttons; for this reason they are placed saliently at the bottom of the page (Hernandez and Resnick, 2013). This model is customer-friendly with regards to usability, making it an appropriate tool for e-marketing of this nature. However, research suggests that the Golden Triangle is no longer as relevant as it once was due to mass usage of smartphones which are more conducive to horizontal scanning (West, 2014) http://www.eyegaze.com/eye-tracking-study-reveals-how-users-scan-google-search-results/. An example of the Golden Triangle is depicted on the Evisu email below.

Call to Action

With regards to the call to action, Evisu made the value and pricing of their sale clear to customers as it consumes most of the space. Customers are made aware that if they spend X amount, they will receive a percentage off of their order regardless of which items they purchase; this can be appealing as many branded sales only include unpopular items. However, Evisu failed to communicate a sense of urgency to their customers by not including the end date of the sale. This purveyed sense of urgency could be the difference between customers ‘sleeping on the sale’ or grabbing their debit card and spending hundreds of pounds! The image below shows a comparable True Religion email, whereby the end of the sale is stated as 9th November. This email would be more likely to draw an instant click and conversion as it has been made clear that the sale is not on for long. Some interesting information has been included at the following site, explaining the relationship between human psychology and the projection of urgency.  https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2016/03/how-to-create-sense-urgency-in-emails/

Images

Ellis-Chadwick and Doherty (2012) explain the importance of clearly positioning branding. They cite that best practice is to prominently place the logo at the top left of the screen so that it sticks out to customers prior to scrolling. Evisu have placed their logo in the top middle of the screen, however it is still prominent and will be noticed by customers. Ellis-Chadwick and Doherty (2012) also suggest that nice images can help to sustain reader attention and potentially improve click through rates. Evisu have managed to do this in an attractive manner by including images of their items. Some more information has been included at the following link: https://emailmarketing.comm100.com/email-marketing-ebook/email-images.aspx.

Overall, Evisu’s e-Marketing strategy is partially consistent with academic literature on the topic, however the following changes can be implemented for potential improvement:

• Add a greater degree of personalisation to emails
• Project urgency in marketing emails
• Assess current scanning styles for different devices and design marketing emails accordingly

If Evisu were to follow these guidelines, there is potential for improvement in engagement, click through and conversion rates.

References

Ellis-Chadwick, F., & Doherty, N. F. (2012). Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6), 843-848. (Kim and McMillan (2008) and Pavlov et al (2008) cited in text).

Hernandez, A., & Resnick, M. L. (2013, September). Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 1042-1046). SAGE Publications. (Goddard et al (2008) and Rossiter (1981) cited in text)