Golden Leads

I had the honor of participating on a panel about Email 2.0– the next generation of technologies available to email marketers–at the Email Insider Summit. As many of you who have followed my blog might guess, I spoke about individualized RSS. My co-presenters were Brent Hill from Feedburner, Correy Honza from Quiznos and Sean Meehan from eWayDirect.

Brent and I covered the gamut of RSS opportunities for marketers from advertising via traditional RSS feeds to targeted, measurable communications via IRSS. Despite some good-natured jabs with Brent’s boss, Dick Costello, about some of my earlier blog entries on the topic of IRSS vs. RSS, Brent and I agreed that IRSS and RSS are generally complementary and serve somewhat different purposes.

Sean talked about desktop applications as a way of delivering content. These tools allow marketers to deliver email and avoid inbox clutter, spam filters and all the other nasty stuff in our business. Of course, marketers need to get their clients to install the app on their desktops, but companies like Southwest Airlines, with its desktop app, Ding, have already proven that this approach has huge merit.

Correy told the audience about Quiznos’ recent and planned efforts in the world of mobile marketing. With Quiznos’ early success with mobile video around the ultimate fighting championship (yep, you read that right), it is planning its next moves with more conventional approaches like store locators and coupons.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

When Silverpop released its study, “Email Creative That Works,” I was excited see creative best practices that were truly measured rather than subjectively recommended. At the Email Insider Summit earlier this month, Greg Edwards, the CTO of EyeTracker, took measuring creative success to an entirely new level.

Greg’s company is pioneering the use of eye-tracking technology to help marketers design better creative. EyeTracker’s tools watch a panel of users to see what they actually look at. From this data, gathered across countless clients and email campaigns, Greg was able to share some great insights on creative best practices:

• People don’t read full sentences, so don’t force them into your copy.

• “Front load” your first few bullets or words with the most important information you need to share. You may not get them to read any more if you can’t grab their interest.

• Use graphics and layout to guide recipients’ eyes. You don’t need to be blatant about it, but apply the same thinking a merchandiser might use when laying out a retail store. What will people read first, and where will they go next?

• The design needs to support a clear call to action. Don’t just tell them they can have 15 percent off–make sure to show them exactly what they need to do to get that savings.

• Recipients absolutely will scroll “below the fold” if the layout is properly designed.

• Design your content with two levels of readers in mind. The first level is the five-to-10-second quick reader. The second is the reader who wants to dig in and really understand your message. Many marketers intermix these two sets of recipients in their layout and copy, and Greg strongly recommends thinking of them distinctly.

I don’t have a lot of personal experience with eye tracking, but Greg cited examples of click rates going from 4 percent up to 16 percent and higher simply by analyzing the way people normally read messages. A gentleman from a Fortune 100 company sitting next to me leaned over and mentioned that his company uses eye tracking, and that the results Greg was citing were in line with his company’s experience.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

Josh Baer, founder and CEO of Skylist, commented on my AOL unsub post and shared the URL of a site focused on the very issue I raised with Charles Stiles of AOL. It’s a technical site, but it shows just how much thinking has gone into this great idea:

http://www.list-unsubscribe.com/

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

David Baker, of Avenue A/Razorfish, did his usual smash-up job at the Email Insider Summit. Along with his co-presenter, Gareth Morgan from Intercontinental Hotel Group, David raised the question of incremental value. To put it another way, if you do X, Y or Z to your existing campaign approach, what is the incremental value?

It seems like a simple question at first, but it really got me thinking.

Incremental value is a very simple yardstick you can use to determine which projects to undertake and which are not worthwhile. Presumably, the simplest metric for incremental value would be conversion revenue, but that doesn’t apply to every email marketer. Open or click rates would work well in most situations if you don’t have another key performance indicator already in place.

If each of the possible initiatives raises conversions by some amount, then you simply rank them by the incremental revenue relative to their cost. It’s business 101. What I liked about the presentation is the way he applied this simple yardstick to some of our cherished notions of “better email.”

• If you use an assured delivery service, do the increased conversions pay for the cost of the “stamps” or the annual license you purchased? As obvious as this question is, I’m surprised how rarely it’s brought up.

• If you add RSS (my favorite Email 2.0 topic) to your outbound mix, will the increased audience and number of opt-ins pay for the incremental cost of the service?

• If you use behavior-based targeting, will the increased response add enough value to cover the costs and hours of using this advanced approach? Again, this seems to be an obvious yardstick. Most of the data suggests this technique offers tremendous incremental value, yet most marketers still don’t apply it. (Note that 75 percent of the audience raised its hand when asked if it was using behavior-based targeting.)

The point here is that most marketers do a lot of hand-wringing when it comes to these questions, yet they don’t need to. All that is required is some testing. Maybe if marketers apply honest, data-driven measurements of incremental value to improve their campaigns, they can use that hand-wringing energy to more productively deliver some incremental value to their companies.

Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.

I’ve just spent the past 4 days interacting with some of the best minds in the email marketing industry. What a blast!

Many topics were presented; however, the theme of relevancy always seemed to be a key driver. Another topic was deliverability. Charles Stiles, AOL Postmaster (who by the way is more dapper in person than he appears in his head shot) made an appearance at the Summit. He made a few points regarding how to improve your AOL deliverability; however, many of the same things he said were a regurgitation of 2001 rhetoric. It all comes back to abuse complaints originating from recipients clicking the “Report Spam” button.

Denis McGrath, interactive marketer for P&G was here and reported that they actually did a post mortem survey on people who clicked the “This is Spam” button at AOL and found that 80% of the people surveyed “didn’t remember doing it” and of the 20% that did remember, 25% of those people said they “always use the Report Spam button as a removal tool.”

Michelle Eichner of Pivotal Veracity presented similar finds on the issue whereby her research found that a recipient has the highest propensity to click the “Report Spam” button after the 30th month on the list. This is great information for email marketers, however, it begs the question – when are people clicking the spam button on you? Is it after the first campaign (permission problem!) or is it after the 30th monthly newsletter (relevancy problem.)

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

Greetings from Park City, Utah, former site of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and current site of MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit.  While I’m having a great time networking among the planet’s best minds in email marketing, some big news has come from back home.  Tonight we were honored by the Central Penn Business Journal, winning their Business of the Year Award in the Emerging Business Category.

Currently my wife and I are celebrating here in my hotel room over diet cokes and left over pizza from last night.  She wanted to see what the award was all about so I showed her a few excerpts from the narrative that I submitted.  One section stood out.  They asked, “Name three adjectives to describe the company and employees.”  I wrote:

Innovative – Since our website supports tens of thousands of current users; technical innovation has been a corner stone of our success and the reason we are a leader within our market.

Driven – As a marketing automation company, our team is constantly searching out new ways to help our customers do more in less time.

Compassionate – We love what we do.  The core of the team has been with the company since the dorm room days at Penn State.

I can’t stress the important of a cohesive team that works fluidly together, shares the same values and work ethic.  I’m blessed to report to duty with 17 individuals who make it happen every day and contribute in a big way to awards like this.

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.