What questions to ask consumers to tailor email communications?

While I was mucking around on the IKEA Obama Inauguration site (see blog post), I clicked through to the IKEA website and subscribed for ongoing email communications. When going through the registration process, they asked a few questions about my interests (see details below).

Fingers crossed IKEA will actually use these details and send me personalised communications.

IKEA Customisation - Tailoring questions

IKEA Personalisation - Tailoring question

POSSIBLE COMMUNICATIONS

From these questions, IKEA can use the information to send information about the following:

• IKEA experience – if you haven’t been to IKEA, there might be an introduction to the store, what to expect or special offer to get you to the store. If you have been there, there might be an offer to get you back.
• Interior design interest – if you are interested in interior design, then communications about design services or special trade offers to use IKEA’s services
• Number of people in the house – updates and information about storage or other products that might be useful in a shared house or in a house dependent on your answer
• Children in the house – updates and information about children’s products or special offers, children services over the holiday period (free child minding)
• Business based information – business furniture specials and new products, tax time specials
• Location based information – specials or offers only available at the local store, opening hours over holidays or special trading periods, unique products available at the local store

CONSIDERATION

While having this much data about consumers is great, if you don’t use it you can annoy them. Based on the above six questions, there are so many different combinations of the information you can receive. If you are a client, you need to make sure you have a email deployment engine that can personalise content on the fly.

How do you do this?

• Template – create an email template that can be used for all emails
• Content – create all content combinations
• Technology – ensure that your content can be sucked seamlessly into the email template
• Test – create a generic newsletter (no personalisation) and test this against the personalised messages
• Measurement – set up benchmarks over three months.

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QUESTION

• What would you consider the optimum level of personalisation?
• Would you use as your base level of personalisation?
• What is over the top?
• Who is doing it well?

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RELATED POSTS

• What are email best practices?
• How to ensure subscribers see HTML emails?
• What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & ALDI
• Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

What & when retailers send emails? Tesco, Coles & Aldi

After looking through my blog stats, I found that two of the most popular posts have been about the Tesco and Coles emails. So I thought I would look at the other retailers emails I receive and see if there is anything else of interest.

When looking at my archive of retailers emails (Aldi, Coles, Tesco), it was interesting looking at the summary of the emails and when they had been sent, the collective subject lines and the file size.

ALDI LEARNINGS

1. Subject lines: ALDI have only recently updated their subject lines to be more meaningful – rather than being ‘upcoming ALDI special buys’ they include the email focus and the date they were sent.
2. Timings: ALDI always send their emails on a Friday. They are not sent at a consistent hour, but they are sent between 12 – 5pm.
3. Email size: The file size of the emails are between 41 – 52Kb, which is a reasonable file size.

ALDI Email Overview (AU)

It seems that ALDI are starting to pay more attention to the emails they send out to consumer (opted-in base). The focus is more on the subject lines than the creative. Unfortunately the emails are still extremely long, don’t have any personalisation, include too many different categorise and no segmentation (see example below).

ALDI Email - 18 September 2008

COLES LEARNINGS

1. Subject lines: Coles don’t have any consistency with their subject lines. They don’t include Coles or a common theme between them.
2. Timings: Coles doesn’t have a strategy around their email send times.  There is no consistent day or time that their emails are sent meaning that they are a surprise when they arrive in consumers inbox.
3. Email size: The file size of the emails are between 25 – 50Kb, which is a huge variation. The latest emails are reducing in file size (high 20s), which is great because it means they are quick to download (not including images).

Coles Email Overview (AU)

Coles have two different email databases. One for promoting their weekly specials and the other for promoting their special feature newsletters and sections: Pets and seasonality (spring).

Coles eNews Overview - Special Interest Newsletters

TESCO LEARNINGS

1. Subject lines: Very consistent and always include Tesco in the subject line.  Most subject lines are quite short (under 50 characters), no matter what the email is.
2. Timings: Tesco doesn’t have a strategy around their email send times. Tesco have so many different emails they send out. There may be some thought around each email, but it doesn’t look that way.
3. Email size: The file size of the emails vary between 19 – 62Kb, which is a huge variation. The ‘Top Offers of the Week from Tesco.com’ are the biggest emails.

Tesco Email Overview (UK)

LEARNING SUMMARY

There are a few things that need to be considered before you send out emails/newsletters on random days and at random times.

• Think about the subject line. Anything with less than 50 characters gets a higher click through rate than those with long subject lines.
• Think about when the emails are sent. Is the key to be focused on a time, day or date? Whatever is decided it must be maintained and enforced no matter what.

Coles Supermarket – great email communications & templates

After looking at the Tesco emails, I thought it would be a good experiment to see if any Australian retailers/supermarkets are doing emails well. Coles is probably the best place to start as they have recently revamped their emails and also repositioned Coles Online to be Coles.com.au (I think that’s a great thing – one umbrella brand without any sub-brands, so easy for the consumer to remember when they are going online).

Currently, Coles send out a weekly email and most elements of the emails are consistent. The only exclusion being for promotional emails. The Coles email structure is:

• Coles logo
• Key navigation on the right-hand side
• Anchor links to email articles/sections
• Heading including images
• Hero promotion
• Staff introduction
• Weekly offers
• Competition/promotion (if relevant)
• Recipes
• Support service (contact details and links)
• T&Cs

Below is an example of a bespoke email that was sent out during the Olympics, it follows some of the above but not all.

Coles promotional email

Below are examples of the standard Coles weekly emails:

Coles weekly email

Coles weekly email (alternate week)

Below is a section of the email showcasing the offers and recipe.

Coles email details - page 2

Below is my favourite section of the newsletter. Coles is actually showing they are there for their customers if they get stuck. The links to other Coles sites is a great way to drive traffic to their sister companies.

Coles support - contact and links

Below is an example of the T&Cs in one of the weekly emails. They are so long and could easily be a link rather than so much text/copy.

Coles T&Cs

Collection of the subject lines – there is no consistency with the subject lines. Fingers crossed Coles are testing subject lines to see which ones are getting the highest click through rates.

From email address

SUMMARY

Overall, I think Coles are doing a great job with their emails and there are only a few things that these emails can do to improve:

1. HTML link at the top of the email
2. T&Cs link rather than a few paragraphs
3. Subject line consistency