Putting it all Together
It took about 10 hours for the graphic designer on Listrak’s professional services team to create the HTML template for the dynamic content email campaign as well as the 10 dynamic content containers. He built the HTML template using a combination of Photoshop and Dreamweaver. He imported the content using Listrak’s HTML editor and he used Listrak’s Media and Content Libraries to build the dynamic content containers.
The Media Library is a feature of Listrak’s email marketing solution that allows users to upload images for online storage, ensuring that the links remain valid and the images render correctly. Listrak’s designer simply copied the images from DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s website, pasted them into Photoshop, saved them, and then uploaded them to Listrak’s Media Library. Then, as he designed the message, he simply inserted the graphics from the Media Library into the message.
Similarly, the Content Library allows users to create and store blocks of plain-text and HTML content for use in the dynamic content containers. Then the user simply has to add the dynamic content containers to the body of the email and define the profiling filters so the system knows which content block to use for each individual email.
After the emails were created, Listrak worked closely with DiscountBeautyCenter.com to ensure it reviewed each content block carefully, along with the other sections of the message. Because this was DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s first experience with dynamic content, Listrak wanted to explain in detail the profiling filters, content blocks, and dynamic content containers that would lead to the 24 different versions of the message.
The total development time for Listrak’s version, including the data mining and the time to create the content containers, was 10 hours. However, as this was the first dynamic content email for DiscountBeautyCenter.com, many items had to be generated from scratch. Future campaigns will take much less development time now that some of the key items are in place. In contrast, the previous DiscountBeautyCenter.com newsletters only took about four to six hours to create as the CEO would simply select products to promote without any research into purchase history or segmentation.
With the differences in creation time Listrak knew that it needed to increase the amount of sales in order to match the ROI generated from the regular email campaigns. But it still felt that the targeted approach would deliver higher response rates and conversions.
The Results
Listrak’s dynamic content email campaign generated more sales for DiscountBeautyCenter.com than the End of Summer Sale email campaign it sent out in August, making this email send its greatest performing email campaign to date.
Listrak found that there was a noticeable lift in both open and read rates for the dynamic content emails when it specified brand preference in the subject line. Open rates rose from 13.2 percent for non-preferential segments to 15.5 percent when it had brand preference stated in the subject line – an overall 15 percent increase in lift. Concurrently, read rates, which Listrak tracks as a message opened for five seconds or more, rose from 9.1 percent for non-preferential segments to 12.4 percent when it had brand preference stated in the subject line – a 27 percent lift.
Listrak also found that the click through rate increased 41 percent - from 3.4 percent to 5.8 percent - when brand preference as well as category preference was dynamically inserted into the email messages. It is important to note that the average click through rate for all of DiscountBeautyCenters.com’s email campaigns in 2007 is 3.68 percent. The preference-based segmented campaigns represent a significant milestone by going above and beyond what has been previously possible. It is also significant that Listrak was able to increase response without heavy discounting which was one of the goals set forth by DiscountBeautyCenter.com’s management team.
