Saving your Bacon

Deni Simeonova, Stream:20

Fri, 05-08-2011 03:39

It’s official – Spam is on the way out and Bacon’s riding high. Now you could be forgiven for thinking we were talking lunchboxes, but no, I mean our email inboxes.

While most people are aware of Spam, Bacon is the relatively new kid on the block. The phrase ‘Bacon’ was first applied to emails that – unlike all-out spam – are legitimate coms that we’ve actually signed up for (willingly or unwillingly), but that we simply haven’t got around to reading (or unsubscribing from). So they end up clogging up our inbox.

They’re alerts from news sites, generic and all-too-frequent newsletters, status updates from social sites or relentless daily deal emails. They represent email marketing gone wrong – and the bad news is that, while Spam emails are on the rapid decline, Bacon is on the rise.

The ROI from email is just too good to miss so businesses continue to launch quick fix email campaigns that ignore best practice in the channel. So how do you ensure your emails are ‘wanted’ and not communications that a reader can be neither bothered to read nor unsubscribe from?

Let's look at The 7 Deadly Sins of Bacon, and how to overcome them…

1. Not knowing who your engaged customers are. Build profiling around how often your customers open your emails and work out who these engaged customers really are. Then create a strategy based on the behavioural data you have and make your emails as relevant as possible to the way your customers handle your emails.

You hold a lot of information, so why waste it? That way you avoid ever falling into the Bacon trap. It will significantly improve your response rate if you carefully build a plan around these customers.

2. Sending irrelevant content. Send content based on preferences, past behaviour and data you have gathered over time. Use link-naming conventions to track preferences and ensure you feed that information into your future campaigns. Your response rate will also significantly increase as your emails will be relevant to your customers.

3. Letting unengaged customers go unnoticed. If you have customers who don’t seem to be engaging with your emails but are still not unsubscribing, your emails will be Bacon to them.

Separate these unengaged customers into a special group and build a strategy around them, creating different offers specifically for these Bacon subscribers. Don’t just treat them like your other subscribers, otherwise you’ll never re-invigorate your relationship with them.

4. Using the same old, tired subject lines. Use teasing subject lines to try and engage your audience so they don’t leave your email until later and then leave it languishing in the depths of their inbox.

5. Sending too many emails. Yes they’re cheap to send, but less really can be more. So reduce the frequency of your emails and monitor uptake in response rates.

Test the new frequency over 2-3 months and see whether the reduction in sent emails has an impact on your Bacon subscribers.

6. Not giving your customers any control. Try giving your customers the option to control how often they hear from you: daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly – and of course, the email type.

7. Offering no real value. Whatever you do, make sure your emails deliver real value to the recipient. Create a proposition for your channel communications that the user can identify with and look to offer unique promotions, content or services through your emails.

Deni Simeonova is a Consultant at Stream:20 specialising in email Marketing. Stream:20 is a leading digital marketing consultancy. Its dedicated teams work in house with their clients on all aspects of their online marketing strategy from planning through to implementation. Stream:20’s goal is to help clients maximise returns from their budget, driving incremental sales through all digital marketing channels. Clients include Sky, Betfair, Experian, Lloyds and Trend Micro.