By Brian McKenna, VP Strategic Partnerships and Zach Labenberg, VP Client Strategy

DMi’s recent Email Marketing Success During COVID webinar introduced five ways we’ve seen brands make effective adjustments to their email programs during the chaos of recent conditions. These examples are not intended to serve as a comprehensive checklist, rather illustrations of smart email strategy and execution that we’ve seen brands achieve amidst unprecedented circumstances. Many of these efforts correlate closely to best practices described in our previous installment, How Brands Best Positioned Themselves Before the Pandemic. The importance of that preparation is formative to these responses at the pandemic inflection point.

Communicate Changes Given the drastic differences in state-by-state (and even county-by-county) lockdowns and the varying timeframes in which they were implemented, email served as a critical channel to quickly share operational messaging and shifts in business models with customers. Harkening back to the importance of progressive profiling discussed in the previous blog installment, businesses that robustly built out segmentation – particularly geotargeting – were in an advantageous position. Knowing where their subscribers were located allowed for the distribution of the correct messaging observing specific protocols in the subscribers’ regions, and proved exceptionally effective.

For example, while every business sector has been affected in some manner, the disruption was especially brutal in the restaurant industry. Having robust progressive profiling and segmentation in place allowed restaurants adhering to varying restrictions in different locations to communicate protocols to customers, so they were aware when the business was shifting from a dine-in experience to a pickup and delivery model.

Seek Feedback By directly approaching a customer base, brands get a better sense of their audience’s needs. We’ve seen brands do this very well by explicitly driving customers to a landing page or asking them within the email: We know your life has changed, how often do you want to hear from us? What is the content you would like to hear from us today? Often, this messaging is more centered on impacts to their business that relate to the crisis: Where can I buy now? When will inventory be back in stock? However, that explicit request also tends to yield a lower take rate, with only a minority of the audience responding. Building implicit measures can provide efficient feedback. For example, if customers are engaging less with promotional information, it would be best to pull back on the tactic. If they are engaging with updates on the business, changes in protocol, or even positive PR-driven news, that information provides valuable insight into what the audience will be receptive to in the future. Unfortunately, many brands are not doing this as regularly as recommended (particularly the implicit decisions), and these practices have transitioned from ideal to crucial in terms of maintaining engagement and avoiding negative perceptions.

Adjust to Expectations & Behaviors In response to a radical shift in subscriber behavior, brands have been turning more towards smart send features and solutions. These tools provide marketers information such as the time of day subscribers tend to engage with their email content. Most of these services, regardless of the ESP or third-party providers, are excellent sources for building pattern mapping during a paradigm shift like we have experienced during COVID-19.

You can probably recognize this behavior in your personal email patterns. Where you might have gone through the inbox as you settled into the office in the morning while working remotely, that schedule has most likely been altered. DMi recently launched a recalibrated smart send time feature for a client, resulting in an open rate improvement of 34% week-over-week. Whether subscribers are engaging in the evening versus in the morning or afternoon, it all comes down to gathering this data, interpreting it, and adjusting quickly.

Speeding Up Learnings, Slowing down Sales Pushes We’re accustomed to clients leveraging different timeframes to determine engagement levels of subscriber segments, generally, via 30, 45, or 60 day engaged lists. That thinking has shifted during the COVID-19 crisis – perhaps permanently – as brands rethink traditional rule sets.

If a subscriber on an active 45-day file hasn’t engaged in 45 days, that equated (at the time) to zero interaction over the entirety of the “new normal” quarantine. This forced clients to rethink some of the governing factors that defined their segmentation and make adjustments accordingly. While change can be hard, in this case, it resulted in cleaner lists and a better understanding of the right triggers that are driving sales pushes.

Sending the Right Message to the Right Customer Much of the above leads back to the principle of brands sending the right message to the right customer and segment at the right time. Successful marketers are justifiably cautious right now of sending messaging that doesn’t ring true or is too promotional. Effective campaigns have relayed transparent information to keep driving their business without hyperbole, overpromising, and promotion veiled as concern. Before COVID-19, brands that may not have been doing as well as they would have preferred in this area (and were limiting their ability for a significant success through email), but they weren’t necessarily hurting themselves as a result. In the current climate, tone-deaf choices like sending the champagne popping in the office welcome email can have a negative effect on long-term engagement through email. Successful email campaigns have been sensitive to the climate and ensured that their messaging displayed the appropriate tone. And with that, we’ll break before taking a look at how brands that were hit hard during the pandemic have successfully rebounded – see you there!