Top UK retailers failing to integrate email with social media

Research from dotMailer reveals that UK retailers are continuing to ignore key email marketing techniques that can increase online traffic and sales, and failing to use email to exploit the opportunities offered by the growing popularity of social media marketing.

The benchmark study assessed emails sent from 36 UK retailers in April 2010. Each email was evaluated against 16 criteria based on dotMailer’s Hitting the Mark scoring matrix, with each retailer awarded a total score out of 100.  Two new categories – social media and mobile – were added to the study in 2010, reflecting the changing nature of recipient behaviour.

Socially connected

This year’s report includes a brand new section on social media marketing. Scores here were low, with a dismal average of 5.7 out of 15. Just 17% of email campaigns studied included any ‘share on social network’ links and with only four of the retailers included a link to their blog in the email content, a further seven had blogs on their site but no reference to them in the email. Other opportunities to build mailing lists and help recipients spread their marketing messages virally were overlooked by the majority of the retailers surveyed, with 50% not even including a ‘forward to friend’ link in their email.

Tink Taylor, Managing Director at dotMailer said: “The study clearly demonstrates a lack of integration between email and social media, despite the latter’s growing popularity and influence. The combination of these two marketing disciplines offers new ways for retailers to really engage with their stakeholders to deliver meaningful results such as interactions online, sales and loyalty, but too many are failing to integrate these channels.”

Using the information contained within the report, dotMailer’s Tink Taylor has outlined five top email marketing tips for retailers striving to ride out the recession:

1. Include forward to a friend and ‘add to social networks’ links – only 17% of the retailers assessed included ‘add to social networks’ links in their email messages. Viral and word-of-mouth marketing can provide lucrative opportunities to spread marketing messages, drive traffic, collect contact data and increase revenue – at little or no cost to the marketer.
2. Add links from your email campaigns to your social media pages and blog – Email can be a powerful and highly effective tool for driving traffic and signups to your organisations social media sites, helping to build further engagement and sales opportunity
3. Personalise your greeting – Opening an email with a personalised greeting can significantly improve both open and click-through rates by engaging the recipient and helping to establish one-to-one communication. 92% of the emails we looked at failed to do this, a big increase on the 70% in 2009.
4. Check renderability before sending – 19% of recipients will delete an email unread if it fails to render (display) correctly. There is still more work to be done in this crucial area with only 8% of emails we studied rendering correctly in every type of email account.
5. Make sure your template has a good balance of text to images – as well as helping your campaign to pass spam filters, this ensures an email is readable when images are switched off by the email client – a simple step that can increase open rates by up to 40%!
6. Initiate some action – the key to the success of an email campaign is to help recipients answer these three questions: Who is it from? What’s in it for me? and What shall I do next? Make sure you provide clear guidance on what you expect a recipient to do once they have read your email, for example click through to a product page, forward it to a friend, or contact your team. A third of retailers failed to provide a clear call to action.

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