Email marketing is the best performing digital channel, both
in terms of acquiring new customers as well as in engaging with existing
customers and retaining their loyalty. Its death has already been announced on
numerous occasions, but to paraphrase The New York Times, email is “the
cockroach of the internet”: it clings on and comes back whenever it faces the
threat of extermination. Since it was created 40 years ago, its technology has
stood the test of time and continues to adapt to the changing digital world.
Unfortunately, email marketing suffers from years of abusive
mailouts that emphasised quantity over quality. Our inboxes gleefully
overflowed with many and varied messages. It was difficult for us to find our
way around, sort through our personal and business messages, newsletters we had
subscribed to, emails from advertisers whose offers and products interested us
and junk mail (spam, phishing and other barbaric—and occasionally
malicious—practices).
Furthermore, even a tempting offer might end up in the
“trash can” if the user receives it 5 times in a row. Marketing pressure
exerted too heavily is irritating to consumers, thereby reducing our chances of
success and decreasing a campaign’s performance…
…not to mention a welcome offer reserved for new customers
sent out to a loyal customer! In other words, it is essential to distinguish
between the acquisition campaign audience and the loyalty audience, as well as
to target your communications.
What are the consequences of these abusive practices?
To improve the user experience, email service providers are
implementing increasingly stringent anti-spam policies. Deliverability of
messages may decrease if good practices are not followed. Moreover, users
themselves can take direct action to deal with email overload: making spam complaints
and unsubscribing from your communication mailing list (opt-out).
Without good control of media planning and capping for each
message, consumers exposed to a high number of emails are likely to turn away
from your brand. The entire advertising chain will suffer as a result:
advertisers may lose responsiveness and engagement of prospects or even
customers. This can lead to a sharp drop in publishers’ database performance.
Mailouts that are too frequent, or exposure to a non-relevant message, usually
mean that money is wasted on both sides, regardless of the campaign’s economic
model.
What is deduplication?
However, there are solutions to allow better control of
marketing pressure. Segmentation of email address databases for targeting
purposes, together with a deduplication strategy, help accomplish the
well-known goal of direct marketing: send the right message to the right
person, at the right time.
We will focus here on the deduplication of emailingdatabases. Two or more databases are combined in order to identify duplicate
email addresses.
Here we make the distinction between two kinds of
deduplication in the acquisition of new customers and qualified prospects:
– Deduplication of the publisher mailout database with the
advertiser database (including opt-in, opt-out, CRM databases). Therefore, we
do not invite users already engaging with a brand to subscribe to special
offers reserved for new customers. This will also avoid contact being made with
consumers who no longer wish to receive ads from the advertiser (opt-out)
– Cross database or multi-database deduplication, i.e.
various publishers’ email addresses are combined, and shared addresses are
detected. This practice aims to reduce the number of times the same message is
sent. If the address of a user is included in five different databases with
which the advertiser or its agency is working, the user is likely to receive
exactly the same message five times. The results can be disastrous, as
described above.
Both types of deduplication are complementary and may form
two phases of an overall strategy. We advise that they be used simultaneously,
even if in practice this is tricky to achieve. Indeed, it is often difficult to
perform deduplication between different publishers and marketplaces. We should,
nevertheless, turn increasingly to the purchasing of audiences, following the
model that matures in display or video advertising.
Deduplication of email databases by Powerspace
Some of you may know Powerspace for its expertise
in the field of acquisition email marketing. Powerspace advises advertisers on
exclusive offers to set up, designing and developing mobile ready (responsive
design) email messages for them, and implementing dedicated transformation
tunnels. The technologies developed by the company allow qualified leads to be
collected, which, thanks to API, can be directly integrated into advertisers’
PRM/CRM tools. Our customers and partners are also fond of our rich text
campaign reports with a captive audience profile and a source of leads
(desktop/mobile, OS etc.). All this data can be both converted into customer
intelligence and be used to better optimise future campaigns.
To go one step further in optimising the effectiveness of
advertising, Powerspace offers deduplication services. The choice of
development tools based on big data technologies means they are fast and
robust, able to withstand a substantial amount of data, with almost instant
deduplication. From a security point of view, advertiser and publisher
databases are protected by email address encryption in MD5 format (a unique
sequence of 32 characters). Therefore, it is now possible to extract from
publisher databases those users who are already customers or unsubscribed from
the advertiser, thereby controlling the marketing pressure exerted on each
contact.
Application of deduplication
Let’s take a closer look at the figures from a test campaign
distributed on behalf of a large retailer.
The promotional offer was sent by 8 publishers selected by
Powerspace to audience segments with an affinity with the target brand. The
segments were of different sizes, from 70 k to over 900 k addresses. The sum of
non-deduplicated addresses reached over 3 million contacts. The advertiser
provided Powerspace with its “anonymised” (MD5-encoded) opt-in and opt-out
databases, with almost 2 M contacts to be excluded from the system. 350 k of
these addresses (i.e. 11% of the initial volume) were found in the 8 mailout
databases and discarded from the campaign. The number of prospects was thus
established at 2.75 M single contacts following this first step of
deduplication. The campaign was sent to these users.
Powerspace also simulated multi-database deduplication.
Those addresses located in two or more databases made up 18% of the overall
volume. This means that 550,000 individuals were potentially exposed more than
once to the same offer, via different senders (publishers).
What is the future for duplicates?
It is out of the question to completely remove the 550,000
addresses from the campaign audience. Corresponding to the targeting criteria,
these contacts are potentially interested in the offer promoted by the message.
To minimise the risk of excess pressure on this audience, it would be wise to
select—for each duplicate email—a single database via which advertisement will
be sent. We will select the most performant and qualitative database, which is
supposed to achieve the best response from users.
Towards a more sustainable use of databases
Some publishers may be reluctant to allow deduplication to
be carried out between theirs and their competitors’ databases. The most often
cited reason is a loss of income due “lost” contacts, requested by another
publisher that is expected to perform better.
Such reasoning, however, is unfounded, as it results in
“media hype” (message received several times by the same user). Let us not
forget that sending emails to contacts who may not respond may also end up
being costly to the publisher (routing and churn). Moreover, these same
addresses, not relevant for campaign X, can be much more responsive for
campaign Y.
Deduplication is beneficial to the entire advertising chain
– from advertiser, by publisher to the consumer – and its practice should no
longer be marginal. Aiming to reduce marketing pressure, it will enable better
use of publisher databases: a user who is exposed to fewer ads will be more
attentive and responsive to them. As for the advertisers and publishers who
send the actual messages, their brand image will be preserved. In practice, the
opt-out rate should decrease. And email marketing can only benefit in the long
term…
Article From: blog.powerspace.com
