Golden Leads

For years, BtoB email marketing has lived in the shadow of its larger sibling, BtoC email marketing. The volumes traditionally have been smaller, and the sales process usually more complex, so it can be tough to measure an ROI directly from an email.

One of the best BtoB marketing companies out there is Texas Instruments. MarketingSherpa recently did a great case study of how TI consolidated its databases and centralized its global email marketing under the guidance of Email Marketing Manager Leona Green. We’ve had the privilege of working with Leona and her team for years, and MarketingSherpa did a great job capturing their challenges and successes.

With leaders like TI, I believe BtoB email marketing has the potential to become one of the “big new things” in online marketing in the coming years.

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

Don’t you think that if you were going to ask someone to buy the rest of the matching set, you would know what they bought to begin with? This is the classic example of a missed opportunity. We work with many online retailers and one of our basic principals is “target those customers that have bought from you in the past and leverage what they have already bought from you as an up-sell opportunity.”

With an email like the one I received from Faucets.com, you would think that since I have bought from them before, I would have received a customized image and PURL or at least one of those, but nothing. The email is even titled “Find your perfect matching faucet” and the email simply points to the homepage.

Take a little bit of time to download your customer database for the last year, include the most recently purchased faucet and personalize the message with an image of the faucet purchase, the line, or even the brand, something that lets me know that you know me and love me, especially during a holiday that says “I love you”

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

Javelin Strategy and Research - Identity fraud declines, study finds

Saw this on the wire today…interesting read.

ID fraud is dropping because consumers, financial institutions and the government are improving in their efforts to fight fraud,” said James Van Dyke, president and founder of Javelin Strategy & Research, San Francisco. Several years of data now exist from which to learn about criminal patterns, and “resources are much stronger as measured by systems, staff and sophistication. More and more consumers are changing their behavior to effectively protect their personal information, and institutions and the government are helping to provide further education for fraud prevention and detection as well as greater assistance in resolving fraud cases.” The survey, done via 5,000 telephone interviews with consumers in October, is co-sponsored by CheckFree, Visa and Wells Fargo & Co. It is considered the nation’s largest, most up-to-date benchmark on identity fraud. About 500,000 fewer U.S. adults fell victim to identity fraud in 2006 than in 2005. Of the nation’s adult population, 3.7 percent were victims, down from 4.0 percent in 2005. This shows a continued year- over-year decrease since data were first collected in 2003, when 4.7 percent of the adult population was victimized.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.javelinstrategy.com/2007/02/13/identity-fraud-declines-study-finds/

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

Listrak’s content machine is running in high gear.  We’ve taken some of the collective wisdom gathered over the past six years and have authored some great whitepapers to help email marketers go beyond the response rates they are seeing today.  I recommend downloading some of our newest whitepapers and implementing the throughts found within.

• How to Make your Email Campaigns More Relevant
• Email Marketing Pre-Flight Checklist
• HTML or Text: Practical Advice on Campaign Formatting
• Implementing RSS as a Marketing Tool: Delivering Content to Drive Leads
• Getting the Most from Your Welcome Message
• Crafting a Must-Read Email Subject Line

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

Our Creativity Journal Contest is nearing an end on February 28th. If you are still interested in getting your creative into the mix, send it on to create AT eroi.com.

This past holiday season, we put together a creative journal and send it out to some of our select customers. These journals were a hit, finding their way into the hearts of all who received them. Thank you emails rolled into our inboxes, many asking, “Can I get one more for a co-worker?” Well due to the love of these Creativity Journals, and the fact that we have a few boxes of them left, we wanted to hold a contest with our subscribers to send us their BEST email campaign creative. Now this is open to eROI customers and subscribers alike, so no pressure as everyone has a chance to get a journal. The only requisite: the creative must ROCK.

To enter, simply send us your email creative in HTML, JPG, or PDF format by February 21st, 2007 and we will hold an internal review by our entire team to choose 10 winners. These winners will have their work featured on ReturnOnSubscriber once they are chosen and our comments will follow on this blog. Please make sure to attach your name, company, email address and 100 - 250 words describing what the campaign was for, the target audience and what time of year it was sent. Also important is the Subject Line, or lines if you did an A/B list split by Subject Line.

We look forward to your submissions and if you have any questions, reach out and touch us at “create AT eROI.com”
Submit Your Campaign By Feb 28th

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

I’m on the plane home from a B2B marketing conference sponsored by Penn State’s ISBM – Institute for the Study of Business Markets.  The topic on the conference was moving from Best Practices to Next Practices.  The two day event in Tampa uncovered some innovative concepts, but the common thread that was woven through most of the sessions was how you communicate with your customers on an emotional level.  Specifically, how does your product or brand make your customer feel about themselves when they use or interact with your product. 

In the near term I’m going to be challenging email marketers to face the challenge of relevancy by not only providing their subscribers with relevant content but content that reaches them on an emotional level.  It’s my view that emotional content is a next practice of email marketing.  Segmentation, personalization and context (right message at the right time) will help to get there but understanding customer needs will be foremost.

Two recommended links:

Rick Short – B2B marketer extrodonaire
Lou Carbone – Experience Engineering pioneer and author

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

In a recent conversation with an anti-spam advocate over the best way to stop unwanted messages, he suggested to me that all the challenges in his industry and mine would go away if emailers would only double opt-in all their recipients.

It has been a while since I’ve heard this argument, but it’s not surprising that it came up again. It’s a very logical point of view, and it would seem almost foolproof. The problem is that it doesn’t always work.

In my book, “The Quiet Revolution In Email Marketing,” I cited a ClickZ article that suggested double opt-in failure rates upward of 50 percent. In other words, for every 10 people who sign up for a double opt-in based permission email newsletter (or promotion), only five will actually complete the process. This kind of drop-off can undermine even the most successful email programs and begs the question: Why do so many people fail to complete the process? Here are some possibilities:

• The actual confirmation email isn’t sent out immediately. By the time someone receives a confirmation, the person has forgotten all about signing up or has decided he or she no longer wants to be on the newsletter list.

• The recipient doesn’t recognize the “From” field. In the past especially, a lot of double opt-ins would come from auto-responder systems that didn’t allow the brand of the actual marketer to be displayed. So recipients would get a strange message and be unsure of what to do with it.

• Recipients have been trained never to click on anything in a message. I’ve spoken to people who are so concerned about phishing and Internet security that they won’t click on anything in an email–not even a link to verify their permission.

All these reasons may be valid, but I believe the largest driver of failed double opt-ins is spam filtering. A recent article by Ken Magill of Direct online magazine brought this home, and it’s worth reading if you’ve ever considered using a double opt-in. To summarize, a very legitimate mailer found its opt-in confirmation messages being blocked by an ISP spam filter. This is more common than most ISPs want to admit, but this particular case was worse than most. It turns out that some malicious person was providing a spam trap as their opt-in address. And, of course, the confirmation was then sent to that spam trap address, completely convincing the ISP’s spam filter that the marketer was spamming.

The bottom line is that double opt-in is a powerful approach, but it’s not a cure-all. On the positive side, I recall one of our clients using double opt-in to reconfirm a list they’d inherited, and the overall response rates were very high. On the negative side, malicious users, aggressive spam filters and poor execution all can combine to make double opt-in a problem. And, in my view, the only way to make customers even angrier than sending them unsolicited email, is NOT to send them the critical email updates they went out of their way to request. There’s no easy answer for these challenges, but I’d love to hear from folks out there who have had strong experiences either way with double opt-in.

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

This Thursday, February 22, 2007 11:00am PST (2:00pm EST) - Podcasting: A How-To Guide:

Unless you have living under a rock, you have probably heard the term “Podcast.”

This Thursday, join eROI’s Alex Williams is going to lift up that rock and introduce you to the exciting world of Podcasting.

You will learn what Podcasting is, why it is creating buzz, and what topics and strategies you could use to start a Podcast. Discover this hot new technology for creating community and reaching consumers.

Also joining us will be Frank Rinaldi of Cascade Media. Frank will be on hand to show you what tools you need to get started, from recording to editing to the finsihed product.

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

We’re putting the final touches on a new white paper that’s written on the subject of relevancy.  While making my contribution to the document, I came across something that should be mentioned in this blog.  There is a scenario that plays out when supporting email marketers that goes something like this….  When we first started our email marketing campaigns the results were really good, however, lately we’ve been seeing declining open, read and click through rates – what gives?

Usually this issue points directly to a relevancy issue than can be fixed one of two ways.  Either add more people to your list on a more frequent basis to balance out the people who aren’t paying attention to your messages anymore or provide them with more relevant content.  The attention span of the average recipient is extremely narrow and when you divide that by the growing number of messages (solicited and non-solicited) that recipients receive each day it doesn’t take long to understand that relevancy really makes sense.

My most recent experience with this sort of thing was from a travel site that was not seeing a great increase in unsubs, however, their performance metrics we’re heading downhill fast.  I was able to pinpoint that most of their subscribers were essentially staying on the list to “lurk” for good deals and special trips by using the subject line as a determining factor to open or click through on the message.  Generally the travel site sent the same offers to the Caribbean and other southern destinations.  What we found however, when an offer was sent for a weekend getaway to New England was that performance metrics soared.  This was a classic case of a stale content mix and a marketer that wasn’t paying attention to gradual slipping away of the relevancy of the email marketing program.

Is it time to give your email marketing program a relevancy check-up?

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

In its usual great job of uncovering interesting facts and sharing them with marketers, MarketingSherpa has just released its latest information about how online consumers are viewing their email.

To find out whether BtoC email marketers should be designing for preview panes and image blocking like their BtoB counterparts, the research firm recently surveyed more than 1,300 email users age 18 and over. It discovered a couple interesting things.

One is that preview pane usage is on the rise. As the major ISPs and email clients upgrade to newer versions offering preview panes, nearly 40 percent of consumers have now been exposed to them, and nearly 27 percent say they have begun using them by default. I think this growing availability and adoption across demographics probably stems from the fact that active content, such as ActiveX, is always disabled, making preview panes much safer to use.

Somewhat surprising to me, MarketingSherpa also found that fewer than half of online consumers surveyed routinely block all images. Based on how many ISPs and email clients now block images by default, I would have guessed this number to be higher.

So what does this all mean? In a nutshell: Creative really does matter, particularly for BtoB marketers (where an estimated 70 percent of recipients use preview panes). Great design and layout are essential to the effectiveness of a message because it must be able to function whether seen in its entirety, or confined to a preview pane and/or with images disabled.

As Silverpop’s 2006 “Email Creative That Works Study” revealed, response rates go clearly higher when message elements like logos and links are easily viewable and actionable by recipients.

MarketingSherpa’s report is filled with interesting and actionable information, and I encourage you to check it out here. But hurry. Free access only lasts until Feb. 26.

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