Keeping it real with email

Marketing is data. Ever since we started using email for marketing purposes, this statement has become more and more true. We split our customers into ever smaller segments, all the way down to the level of the individual customer. This allows us to be more and more relevant in our communication. But are we? I am convinced that we can be, but it’s a long and sometimes painful process.

Do you read incoming marketing emails? Do you click on the ‘promotions’ tab in Gmail? Do you open emails and then read what is written in there, not just opening so it’s marked as ‘read’? Sometimes I read them. I don’t have high expectations. All I want is for the email to make sense and offer some kind of value. It should be relevant to me. There’s that buzzword. If it’s not relevant, I stop reading and often unsubscribe.

I don’t think I have high expectations when it comes to relevance. What I like to see is: no spelling mistakes, understandable language and no obvious lies. If you see in the email ‘10% off, just for you’ that’s an example of a lie. I know you’re not just sending this to me. Secondly, whenever I see a spelling mistake, I assume it’s a 12-year-old writing the email to me. It’s a bit of an insult. Lastly, an email is understandable if it is written in the language I would write an email in. This is the most difficult one. Belgian Dutch and Netherlands Dutch is not exactly the same when it comes to certain expressions. It’s similar to American English and British English. You don’t want someone to pretend to be your best friend at the start of the email to then start writing in a way that you or your friends would never write.

Personalisation does not equal relevance

Nuance is key. I understand that your system can write my first name on top of an email. I also understand that you can have any part of the email personalised, based on my behaviour as a customer. But all this segmenting and personalising creates room for error. Your customer is expecting a perfect email, and when it’s not, you lose. It’s not because I placed a bet on ice hockey once, that I’m interested in some World Championship that is coming up. Personalisation does not equal relevance.

Kevin Rose is a personality in Silicon Valley. He has a presence on Twitter and hosts a podcast. He also has a newsletter that has 100k subscribers and over 50% open-rate. His email newsletter is not personalised at all, yet I read it and I click pretty much every single link.

Kevin did not trick me into leaving my email address by signing up somewhere. His product is the email. I know I will receive it on the first day of the month. I also know that during the month, he is deciding what will make it to the newsletter and what won’t.

Kevin is not trying to sell me anything. I wouldn’t even mind if there was a section in the email about a sponsor. All he does is provide value by sharing interesting articles, videos and podcasts. The email is a way to build a brand. So far, Kevin has made no money out of me. I wouldn’t even know how he could. But if he ever writes a book, I will buy it. Because I trust his brand.

Finding value

When I read an email, I want something of value. And that doesn’t have to be monetary value. In online gambling, we often think ‘what do we want the customer to do?’. Instead of asking ourselves ‘what does the customer want?’. This seems obvious and easy to fix, but it’s a fundamental issue at the core of our marketing strategies. Have you ever wondered what a customer expects from you? Would you be delighted if you received your own email?

How do you measure long-term trust and loyalty? Retention rates will tell you something, but you won’t know why the customer is playing on your website. It might just be the bonus causing him to play with you, while the customer has no brand loyalty whatsoever. Because it’s hard to measure, we don’t really focus on it. We want to see the instant impact of our marketing campaign, preferably in real-time. But what does that really tell us? If you make a click-baity subject line and promise to reveal more on the website, you will have high open and click-through rates. You won’t be building much long-term trust and loyalty though. You can easily achieve a 100% monthly retention rate for a group of bonus hunters if you send them a small bonus once a month. Long-term loyalty is much more complicated than retention rates.

We’re so focussed on data and short-term KPIs that the actual email copy becomes an afterthought. Artificial Intelligence will soon allow us to automate this part as well. This would in effect remove the need to speak to your customers. I believe in technology, but removing the ‘human’ part in marketing might be a bridge too far.

I would argue that speaking effectively to your customers is even more important than listening to them. The iPhone wouldn’t be what it is if Steve Jobs had listened to his customers. Or what about the famous quote that is assigned to Henry Ford: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’.

An easy way to achieve brand, loyalty and trust through email marketing is simply to be honest. If you send an email to 100,000 customers, don’t pretend you sent it to an individual. Gamblers often feel that their loyalty is undervalued, so we give them more bonuses. A more effective and cheaper way to increase perceived value is to recognise the customer as a person. You enjoy receiving emails that someone actually spent time writing and thinking about. To make it personal, it’s not enough to have a bunch of dynamic fields that reflect my previous transactions. An email should read like it’s a friend talking to me, not some over-enthusiastic TV commercial voice actor.

Personalised is not personal

Personalised does not equal personal. Think about that before launching any kind of marketing campaign. Is this a real person talking to a group of other real people? Does this message provide any value to the receiver? Are we building brand, loyalty and trust? Or are we just trying to get the customer to do something so we can achieve our target?

If you want to be perceived as authentic and trustworthy, you have to start by being authentic and trustworthy. It’s not enough if you pay a marketing agency to come up with a campaign to bring across that message. It needs to be a way of doing business within the organisation. Integrity is a great corporate value and it needs to be lived. Do people speak up when they make a mistake? Do they speak up when someone else does? Is integrity something you actively look for when recruiting? Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer for WordPress, looks for four characteristics in people: integrity, curiosity, taste and work ethic. I think that’s a good place to start.

Ward De Bock started his career at 18, dealing cards in Belgian casinos. In 2011, he moved to London to work for one of the biggest online operators. He recently started a gambling consulting business.