WITCHERY (19/4)
Style in the City from day to night

THE CONTAINER STORE (18/4)
ORDER UP! Got a taste for organization?

SUSSAN (18/4)
It’s all in the detail with our newest bedtime collection…

ANTHROPOLOGIE (17/4)
Five ways to work it.

BED, BATH & BEYOND (16/4)
Pin to Win Sweepstakes + Don’t forget! Your 20% offer is waiting.

TONY BIANCY (16/4)
Fashion Re-Boot

Now I am no means perfect when it comes to the practice, but I quite often found myself being overruled from an art direction perspective. It always seemed that the powers to be in the fashion industry were unwilling to compromise on the image they had in their head in order to gain conversion. Which seemed silly given as retailers we are in the industry of selling.

So I find myself asking, how important is it that anyone involved in email marketing have at least a small amount of tech know how so that decisions are not compromising results?

Looking through my inbox from the last week, I stumbled across at least 10 emails which were even design with the ability to have the copy hard coded in. Instead, they just simple sliced it all as images.

Why not get this content straight in front of the user before the images have been loaded? Surely this lack of understanding is hurting the quality of what we do and something that could be fixed with some fairly simple training.

NET-A-PORTER (14/4)
White re-mixed, cool clutches and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s style secret
The story telling at net-a-porter never fails to impress. Time and time again they set the benchmark in all things fashion and really know how to flow content from their online magazine. Its simple, cool and always grabs your attention for a quick 5 minutes reading.

OLD NAVY (13/4)
25% Off: Early Birds Get the Worm
Old Navy continues to keep it simple. Promoting their online exclusive sale they show great use of an old school saying. Simple, effective, perfect!

BANANA REPUBLIC (12/4)
Skirt alert: 1 skirt, 2 ways.
Just like their colleagues at Old Navy, Banana Republic has the perfect mix of fashion story telling and short, simple subject lines.

BODEN (12/4)
Fall for a fabulous Italian (fabric)
To introduce Boden’s range of Italian jaquard lines, the creative department has pitched it at their female audience perfectly. Who wouldn’t want to fall for an Italian during their busy work day.

Jo Mercer (11/4)
Double the love with 50% off your 2nd Pair
Adding a little bit of flair to their simple offer, the team at Jo Mercer has brought relevance to their subject line. The creative left a little to be desired, but the subject still has us clicking.

But are we not already at saturation point where subscribers are receiving way more content than they can digest, often in formats that are brash and almost rude? Does it not seem that email marketing has lost all the quality with business just looking for a quick return for no effort?

When did it become OK as a business to bombard users with messages they really are not interested in? Surely as digital marketers we must realise that when a user opts into your program, it is the start of a relationship where the customer wants you to provide them with value.

I think its important to remember the relationship that the customer has allowed your business to have with them. Its personal and its not to be taken for granted. So quite simply, don’t abuse the good faith of your subscribers by bombarding them with material just because they initially opted in to your program. A subscription does not guarantee an open, much less a conversion!

So what is stopping businesses and why does Australia seem so far behind?

There is obviously the capex requirement from a business to put in place a solid platform to run the program, and given the struggling retail environment, this could well be a struggle for a lot of businesses, however its other industries that I constantly look at and wonder why they aren’t the first to jump on board and really set the standard.

An example of this, I believe to be professional sporting clubs across various codes. Across the country, there seems to be sporting clubs that are significantly better off than most businesses with seemingly stable bank balances. They also have audiences / databases that are engaged to levels only dreamed about in other sectors, yet these clubs fail to truly implement a real CRM strategy and engage their audience in new ways. This ultra engaged audience also means they are in a position with the most to gain from implementing a CRM program.

Now take any AFL club as an example. Each club is going about building a big social media following, many of them measuring fans in the hundreds of thousands, and most clubs running a weekly EDM program that sees them blast out a newsletter, with the latest happenings inside the club. But what is the true value to the club in any of these campaigns?

What if a club decided to really get their act together and treat their database as their biggest money making tool? They no doubt have the information available too them, so its just a case of getting the same and systems to start marketing effectively.

They know who is a member, they know which fans have failed to renew membership and they know every game that every member attends. The club also knows which games they need to boost attendance to in order to receive a higher dollar return for each member through the gate, so instead of simply sending out a weekly newsletter and continuing to post the normal content on social media, why not play the numbers game.

Implement a simple set and forget campaign that targets members based on attendance to specific games. Don’t necessarily target the blockbusters, instead target the games that are falling just short of a higher per head threshold (note: clubs generally receive a specific dollar return, per head, for home games, with the dollar value being tiered based on attendance to the game). Run campaigns across a variety of channels including email and SMS and base the communications on the attendance of previous games by each member with the goal of getting each targeted game into the next per head threshold. Through simple campaigns, surely the club could grab an additional game a year from each member, not to mention the non-members increased attendance.

While only just the tip of the iceberg of what could be a highly profitable CRM program, surely it has to be a much more efficient program compared to a spray and pray email newsletter. Through simply putting some numbers behind the campaigns and content they create, the returns would skyrocket!

Just my two cents anyway…