Digital Design Blog

It’s In The Mail: Thoughts About Designing Meaningful Email Interactions

Engagement is the cornerstone of email marketing’s value to a business. All the things we love about the channel exist to support and foster engagement with brands. Email is cost effective, relatively real time, and it is ubiquitous — it is continually ranked as the number one Internet activity performed. People spend more time answering email during a day than they do using any other channel, surpassing browsing the Internet and even watching television.

Email is a utility to a business and a consumer, providing notification value, promotional value, informational value and community value. With the emergence of social media and social networking, email as an engagement vehicle is as pervasive as ever. But engagement is a delicate blend.

From a business perspective, email engagement can be classified as the ability of a brand to reach consumers over a given lifecycle and reinforce the values extended in this brand connection. It takes on many levels though and email is a facilitator.

Level 1 is a simple relationship — often used by list publishers — whereby there is an exchange of content for a given permission. This is the newsletter space, which has spawned creative niche publishers (e.g. Daily Candy, Very Short List, Active). These are typically monetized through list rental or advertising revenue in the publication. These are both niche and business specific, but the core engagement value is just that, seeking consistent viewers and monetizing their online behaviors.

Level 2 is a promotional relationship where a brand uses email for its notification value, commonly used in retail. Email is an engagement vehicle for driving online retail sales in the form of email specials and promotions. The value to consumers is more in line with that of traditional catalogers, keeping the consumer updated with new merchandise, products, and seasonal trends. There are programs that go deeper, such as Pampers and IAMS dog food, which cater to specific lifecycles for the new baby or pet and adopt a newsletter approach, but litter it with promotional and product content. This exchange is perfectly acceptable to the masses as evidenced by the success of these programs.

Level 3 is centered on a transactional relationship. The Financial Service and Automotive industries are the best examples. Each caters to a myriad of email practices designed to bring people into a lifecycle of products, services and extended relationships with the bank or financial service provider, or maintain loyalty amongst car owners. They have very significant lifecycle strategies, highly defined welcome communications, and strive to use email prolifically as a convenience to the consumer. One of our great successes at the agency was delivered for a Travel client.

No longer do consumers sign up for a vacation and wait for all the documents to come in the mail. By developing a vacationer on-boarding program all delivered through email, this client is building value with their consumers through a sequence of messages that are designed to help them attend to legal requirements, build expectations of a great vacation experience, educate the new vacationer on what to expect, and upsell ancillary services pre-vacation.

We must remember one thing about customer engagement and email: there is a finite group of consumers that will truly engage with you through email and some, only in degrees. Our job is to find those people, foster the relationship, optimize the cadence of our communications and help our clients understand the worth it has for their business. This post on engagement and email is adapted from the Avenue A | Razorfish Global Solutions Newsletter and was written by David Baker who leads our agency’s Email Solutions Group.