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What kinds of things will trigger contact? In some instances you’ll plan and schedule your contacts far in advance (such as annual sales). Others times you’ll be responding to one of the following situations:

• Consumer requests contact. A customer might sign up to receive a personalized monthly newsletter or send an email asking about a new product you’re selling. When a new subscriber signs up for eHarlequin.com’s newsletter program, she immediately receives a welcome message confirming what she’s signed up for and ensuring that she will know how to modify her personal preferences if she should ever decide to change the content she wants to receive. When eBags receives an email inquiry from a customer, a skilled customer service professional looks up any relevant information and answers all My eBags membership, product, or order-related questions by email within 12 to 24 hours. An inbound email from a customer regarding an order the customer would like to return even triggers a series of follow-up emails that are automatically delivered within a few days of each other. These follow- up emails ensure that the customer’s product return is picked up, and that a replacement order is processed satisfactorily.

• Customer action initiates contact. A customer makes a purchase and you automatically send out an order confirmation that contains a personalized coupon for 10 percent off the next purchase. For instance, if you buy something at Barnes and

• Noble’s website and you’re a member of the ClickRewards program, you may receive a follow-on email notifying you that you will be awarded extra bonus points if you are deemed to be a loyal customer (which is based on such factors as how often you buy, when you made your last purchase, and how much money you’ve spent over the total relationship you’ve had with the company). Or imagine that a customer clicks on a link in an email and gets taken to a mortgage loan application. If she exits the site without filling out the form, the company might send her an email a week later containing an application that takes less time to submit (working off the assumption that the customer didn’t fill out the form because it was too long).

• Customer-related events initiate contact. You might send your customers special notes on their birthdays thanking them for their business. Or a customer’s change of address might trigger a contact sequence from a retailer in the home furnishings business. SpringStreet is a website for apartment rentals. It knows when people move and where they move to and it uses this information to deliver highly relevant and timely emails with special offers and useful information, such as a checklist of organizations to contact with their new address.

• External events initiate contact. Three feet of fresh powder on a nearby mountain may trigger sporting goods retailers to let customers who’ve bought ski equipment know that it might be time for a new pair of skis. Other events—from product recalls and updates to major fashion shows—can also spark this kind of timely notification. CDNOW gets a great response from sending its customers emails alerting them that their favorite artists are coming to town. Its customers see it as a value- added benefit, proof that CDNOW actually cares about them, not just an attempt to sell them something.

A Message Test Plan

The last step in the process of creating your contact plan is to come up with a plan for testing the quality and performance of individual messages as well as ongoing campaigns. The test plan outlines the criteria that must be met and describes the methods for collecting the data and feedback that will be used to determine the program’s success or failure. For instance, before Illuminations (www.illuminations.com), a retailer with physical stores, a catalogue and a website that all sell a large variety of high-quality candles, launched its email program, it wanted to compare the effectiveness of HTML email to plain-text email. It confirmed that HTML email performed more than twice as well (as measured both in terms of response rate and sales) as plain- text email and decided to make an up-front investment in developing HTML email capabilities as a part of its email program.

You can break your message testing plan into two separate categories: ongoing tests and one-time tests.

Ongoingchristian, doctrine, incarnation, god, man, jesus, christianity, belief, idea, culture, world, sense, cannot, circle, religions, dialogue, religion, writing, faith, people, church, theology tests assess the quality, reliability, and performance of new and ongoing programs. Email messages are first sent out to a ⁽⁽seed list,” a representative sample of virtual customers. This will enable you to review the layout, formatting, URLs (links), personalization, and so on, of the emails that are being delivered. The seed list should contain email addresses hosted by a range of ISPs, making it possible to test different programs such as free Web-based email services, plain text email programs, AOL email, Eudora, and Microsoft Exchange. The customer data for the seed list should also contain a mix of data that exercises all variants of personalization. For instance, if the email is personalized based on gender, it is important that both men and women (as well as customers who did not specify their gender) receive the message. Before an email is delivered to the actual customer base, the seed list is targeted and a group of designated testers picks up the emails that have been mailed out and carefully inspects them to make sure they were delivered correctly and contain no errors.

Ongoing tests are also used to monitor the performance of a given program. They offer a baseline against which to measure the success of your program over time. One way to perform an ongoing test is to define a control group that gets excluded from select email programs or campaigns. By comparing their activity with those who participate in the email program you’ll be able to measure precisely how effective your program is. Another ongoing test is to define a control group that receives a subset of your emails, for instance, only the promotional emails but not the informational emails. This allows you to measure the long-term impact of a blended contact mix on customer retention and customer value.

One-time tests are designed to test limited-duration or onetime marketing programs. One-time tests are also very helpful when designing and planning new campaigns. The mechanics of implementing and executing a one-time test are similar to those of the ongoing test plan. For example, Amazon.com may run a onetime test to see if people who have purchased auto repair books are likely to be interested in coffee table books on antique cars. Or, an Internet apartment rental service might develop a one-time test to see how different customer segments respond to an email newsletter designed to provide information and relevant promotions for people who have just moved to a new apartment. A one-time test might be used to determine whether the newsletter will generate a better response if its content is personalized based on the recipient’s city as well as other information gathered from the recipient’s demographic profile (data submitted at the time of the initial apartment search). Different designs and different levels of personalization can be tested to measure their impact. It may be possible to quantify the value that a highly personalized newsletter will generate, thereby justifying the additional cost of running the program.

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