Golden Leads

I don't think we have enough fun with email these days, so let's take a break from all the issues with the channel and get inventive. Considering we are coming up to the busy holiday season, I figured a look at the top five functional reasons to communicate with your customers would be an appropriate theme.

5.     To fulfill or confirm an order. Can you add some creativity to standard emails?  This can be as easy as modifying your template with a holiday theme, or having fun with the messaging. For example: "Santa thanks you for your order; it's less for him to carry down the chimney."  People appreciate humor and creativity, and your team can have a lot of fun with this.

4.     Promote your site, product, or service. When you promote your company, do you tie your USP to a theme? A creative voice gets the most attention in the inbox. Try a few options with your promotional strategy. Tactics like countdowns to Christmas got a lot of traction last year in the retail space, but think outside of that and come up with some witty metaphors to wrap your product/service around. Imagine a product promotion that's a surprise only to be opened on the site or tied to an instant win, or sweeps with pick-a-present under the tree. Check your calendar. There are over 20 events from October to January to which you can tie a theme, each unique and with different audiences.

3.     Deepen the loyalty to your site or brand. Think about the considerations involved in making your consumers enthusiastic supporters and evangelists of your brand. They need a "container" to carry your message and build on it in their own social mechanisms. Is it a refer-a-friend / share component or an incentive to share?  Think outside the box and bring a creative metaphor to the table. It could be putting their face on "Sexiest Man Alive" on the cover of People magazine, or a comical photo-sharing contest — anything to create additional value that can travel. Instead of thinking solely about your communication goal, think about enabling the community of customers. Remember, Halloween is the most prolific photo-sharing event of the year; how many ways could you take advantage of this community event with your product or service?

2.     Introduce your brand or acquire a customer. It's tough to brand amidst the noise of the holiday season. This puts more pressure on you to create great acquisition messaging and programs that are fun, engaging, and have the ability to be shared and syndicated. Whether it's a list rental, partner email, sponsored email or your own prospect list, this is the time to be creative with themes. Remember, though, they may not know your brand well enough to understand an off-the-wall metaphor, but that doesn't mean they won't appreciate a bit of fun and humor in your messaging. Remember the first time you traveled on Southwest Airlines and you got a sarcastic response from the flight attendant? You were a little shocked at the candor, but worked yourself into enjoying the experience.

1.     Thank them for their patronage. Did you know that the type of email that gets the highest open rate is an apology letter? The personal touch is widely appreciated, yet we reserve it for mistakes only. We all want to be recognized, so personalized notes thanking customers for their patronage to your brand is a worthwhile effort. A brand can't live on direct promotion alone - there needs to be a little massaging of your messaging to show you aren't a robot marketing arm sending to the masses. This is ideal for a New Year's e-mail, thanking them for a year of loyal patronage to your brand. It's also very easy to tie a reward to this message.                          

The most successful opt-out page I've ever seen was for Milwaukee Best Beer. It had a super-attractive female asking if you were sure you wanted to opt out. For men, that was a reaffirmation of why they were on the site in the first place. An opt-out page doesn't have to be a lost cause.  You could have Santa ask them if they are sure they want to be taken off his list. Satire and humor give color to your brand. Play with it and you'll be amazed at the feedback you get.

I look forward to seeing some great creative samples this holiday season. Please feel free to share with me if you have one or two you are particularly proud of.

Cheers!

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

As an avid football fan, and sports fan in general, I decided tonight to opt-in to every NFL team’s email list through my AOL account. This took about 45 minutes.

I have always been frustrated with my favorite teams and their inability to treat me like an individual fan. Fans have such brand loyalty, why can’t pro sports email marketing make you feel like they care about you? They treat you like a herd of brainless followers (maybe we are).

Over the next month I will be breaking down the NFL and what is done right and wrong by each team. We will look at the opt-in process, creative, content, and segmentation.

First team-up: The Indianapolis Colts.

Look for breakdown next week

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

We talk a lot about how email is the one marketing medium that comes closest to a one-to-one conversation with our customers/subscribers, but we spend more time making sure readers see the message we want them to see and not enough designing the email so that it’s just as easy to navigate.

After all, subscribers don’t always read your messages just to see your sales offer or newsletter copy. They might want to unsubscribe or change their preferences, comment on something you wrote or ask a question. You need to make it as easy as possible for them to do what they want to do with your email, not just read the content or take the action you want them to.

If your email message design merely replicates your Web site or landing page, this crucial information probably isn’t placed anyplace where readers can find it quickly. An email’s purpose differs from your Web pages. So, you must design your messages with navigation specifically for the email user.

Look at the last commercial message you sent out. How easily can you find your way through the navigation and message body for things other than the core content? Or, will subscribers just about have to Mapquest your email address or Web link to find them?

One of the best ways you can help your reader find crucial information is to package it together in an administration center and to place it in a convenient location that stays the same one issue to the next. However, if you run this standing information at the end of your message, the reader who skims your message in the preview pane might not see it.

So, you need to add a link at or near the message top to your admin center within your message, wherever you place it.

Think about all the ways subscribers can interact with you via email, and then review your messages to see how easy or hard it is to accomplish those in your standard email design. Following are some of the more common functions your email should be providing in addition to your core content:

To continue the theme I began a few weeks ago, I asked the experts on the Inbox Insiders to provide me with their case studies and statistics showing the effectiveness of email marketing. I'll be presenting those case studies over the coming weeks.

First up is some data from Simms Jenkins, who is a principal at BrightWave Marketing, an email marketing firm located in Atlanta. Besides Brightwave, Jenkins has put together a repository of email marketing statistics on a site called EmailStatCenter.com. In the ROI section, EmailStatCenter notes last week's email marketing report released by Shop.org that shows email is delivering sales at a cost of $7 per order — compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search, and $17.47 for affiliate programs. Ka-pow.

Please read that paragraph again. Shop.org. $7 versus $71. A 927% better ROI than banner ads. A 282% better ROI than paid search.

Another nice stat, according to the DMA: a $48.29 return for every dollar spent in email marketing in 2007. This number is consistent with the ROI number I reported a while back.It hasn't changed. It remains a consistent and reliable number.  Spend a dollar. Get 48 back. Ka-pow.

Then there's the Denison University Case Study: Denison University is a small liberal arts school in Ohio that worked with BrightWave Marketing in 2006 to create a fundraising email campaign. Three types of personalized emails were developed, each going to a different segment of the audience:

1.    Alumni who had not forked over any cash in the last year.
2.    Those who did.
3.    And a follow-up to those who still hadn't forked any cash over after reading the email, but who had also neglected to click on the link to the Flash presentation designed to remind them of those carefree college days.

The result? Well, those Denison grads came through big time, and the email campaign generated a 1300% return on investment. Open rates were 50% and click-throughs reached 29%. Put together, the email campaign drove over 5% of all the annual fund contributions during the time frame.

Ka-pow.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

We recently put up a post about howEven Major ESPs screw up but some people can see that as normal since many pure software providers have very little design sense, but this email below is from an agency, one that has a specialty in email marketing. Outlook 2007 is brutal on email, but this one is missing entire chunks of content (due to white on a white background) and the design is mangled. I know we are not without our rendering issues here and there, but this is pretty bad.

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Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

Dear Email Diva,

I launched my newsletter five years ago. I’ve never paid much attention to any of my statistics; I just write. It’s time I learned. I don’t know which metrics I should focus on. Over the years, 23,000+ people have subscribed. It looks like 15,300 are actually getting the newsletter, and I’m not thrilled with the click-throughs. Can you help me?

Jill Konrath, Chief Sales Officer
Author, Selling to Big Companies

Dear Jill,

Frankly, the Email Diva is surprised you haven’t been paying attention to your stats, because you are doing so many things well. Your email reads perfectly without images; begins with a compelling summary of the contents; includes a personal note with a one-to-one feel, is scan-able and benefit-oriented; expertly blends valuable content with sales messages; and includes links to main site categories. Nice job!

To answer your question about which metrics to review, you must first answer another: what are the goals of your email program? Do you want to build your brand, reach new customers, build relationships with current customers, drive repeat sales, drive traffic to partner programs, increase Web site traffic and/or drive Web site purchases?

Clarify the relative importance of these factors and identify the Key Performance Indicator that represents success for each. You may find that “squishier” information, like partner feedback, is actually more relevant than basic email stats.

There is a lot of variety in how these stats are collected across the industry, as Strong Mail’s Email Metrics and Bounce Management report illustrates (go to the Email Experience Council Whitepaper Room ). So be careful about comparing your stats to others. But here are the basics.

Scrubbed (List Sent/Original List) - You say that only 15,300 of 24,000 are “actually getting the newsletter.” Since your Email Service Provider (ESP) won’t repeatedly mail bad addresses, I assume you are importing a list into the email program and a third is scrubbed out by the email program prior to sending. Since most ESPs charge by volume, it would be worthwhile to clean up your list. The Email ecosystem works best when you manage your list within the email application. If you’re not already doing this, ask your ESP to help you integrate their tool with your Web site.

Delivered (List Delivered / List Sent) - This tells whether your messages were accepted by the recipient’s server. It won’t tell you whether the message made it past corporate or personal secondary filters, however. Nonetheless, it is a good measure of list cleanliness and important to track over time.

Opens (Opened / Delivered) - Open rates are flawed, as they can’t be measured when images are blocked, but they are consistently flawed. Use your open rates to gauge the effectiveness of subject lines: Which seem to work best for you? Is it a function of the subject matter, the copy or both?

Clicks (Clicked / Delivered) - This is one of the most important metrics, and should be aggregated to the individual recipient, i.e., all clicks by a person count as one. This tells you how many people found something compelling in your newsletter.

Click Map (Clicks on Link A / Total Clicks) - Overlay the percentage of clicks allocated to each link on an image of the actual email, to give you a sense of what readers find most compelling in terms of offer, copy, placement, etc.

Engagement (Total Clicks / Unique Clicks) - Since you have a variety of information and opportunities in your newsletter, it will be useful to gauge the depth of involvement. The more links of interest, the higher your engagement rate.

Conversions (Desired Actions / Clicks) - The conversion rate tells you whether your goal was achieved, whether it be a lead, download or purchase. These are typically the most difficult to track, from a technical standpoint, but certainly not impossible. Ask your ESP for their expert input.

Two Big Don’ts:

1. Don’t forget that the real value of the data is for reporting test results. Develop a theory, split your data in half, and test the theory against your current practice. Know — don’t guess — what works for your audience, and continue to build your email body of knowledge.

2. Don’t leave this valuable information sitting in your email application, waiting for “some day” when you get around to thinking about it. Download the data for each campaign (within a standard timeframe), onto a spreadsheet and look at the trends, best/worst, etc. What is the story behind the numbers? This is where the real learning takes place.

Good Luck!

The Email Diva

Send your questions or submit your email for critique to Melinda Krueger, the Email Diva, at emaildiva@kd-i.com. All submissions may be published; please indicate if you would like your name or company name withheld.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

We think we live in a world of accountability - a world where passion and commitment supersede self-promotion. Yet I read so many articles in the email space that talk about symptoms, not solutions; and offer explanations, not resolve for improvement. Few of these even make the connection to a complete marketing story. I wrote a series of articles in 2005 about telling an ROI story and how to position it so it speaks to more than an email database and return on investment Not many are looking past the email channel today, which is a source of frustration for many.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the email channel of late, sizing up the industry and wondering how to generate buzz — or better yet, respect. Yeah, email is the Rodney Dangerfield of interactive marketing. Email is still the 74th slide in an interactive marketing pitch. Although eCRM is still deemed a baseline competency, I’m continually amazed at how little attention it gets in general, giving way to more sexy alternatives (media and search). Even though we’ve added to the complexity with deliverability and ISP issues today, few see email as integrated or strive to build programs that complement each.

I spent some time at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San José, Calif. a month ago, and didn’t realize how small is the group of experts who really know what they are doing. This is much like email. There were thousands of people there who were new to search. The topics were so basic even non-search people got it. The experience reminded me of some of the email conferences where you see lots of practitioners, but few who really know how to optimize programs. It’s the same at the Web analytics conferences. Everyone understands core Web analytics to some degree, but few are really able to optimize the use of tools, programs and iterating performance based on these results. Same excuses — lack of resources and expertise.

If you think email, marketing segmentation and ROI modeling are remotely complex, try SEO and the intricacies of managing keyword buys in a complex world. Try optimizing your Web analytics platform to truly understand patterns of performance by page, path, segment and how marketing programs evolve.

What I like about the search space, and believe email marketers can learn from, is that search practitioners have been forced to move outside their channel — and the dependencies they have on the Web experience, site side search, media and competitive monitoring. They have been forced to balance the need to do SEO on the site and a great user experience on the site with Web behavior and tracking.

Search is not an organizational movement that is interdependent the business. Email is not looked at this way. It is seen as a retention and cross-sell effort; few actually understand the impact on a consumer experience that started with email and ended on the Web, the impact of external media exposure on customer value. It’s a shame, the channel is truly the only one that ties back to a deep profile of the customer. My challenge to our own space is to think like SEO people, react like a Web analytics professional, optimize like an information architect, be creative like an entrepreneur and build value in your programs through levels of attribution. You’ll never have enough resources or funding, so if this is today’s excuse, you’d better find a new one. As the proverb states, looking at email only in a business is like trying to eat with one chopstick: you’ll never have enough to eat.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

So I caved this past week, after stating that I was going to hold out, and bought an iPhone. It wasn’t for “me” but for my wife who needed a phone that brought her everyting she needed on her Apple on the go. I spent some time with it last week setting it up for her and found that the email and web experience was better than I first thought it to be. The size of the screen is not as important as that of other mobile devices like Blackberries and MS Mobile based phones, do to the fact that you can use your two fingers to zoom in and out and read content easier (and in HTML) than doing it on another phone type.

I was actually able to log into emailROI (our eROI ESP platform) and review campaign statitics and send out an email campaign from the car. (She was driving, but those that know me would expect me to be launching campaigns at 75 MPH.) I am a convert to the experience and the platform. I am not rushing out to get one for myself just yet, as I still love my Crackberry, and the keyboard experience is still better from a business utility perspective for me.

This device is going to change Business to Consumer email marketing. I can drink the Kool Aid now. The ability to target with compelling creative emails and interact surpasses that of any other mobile device I have used. The only thing holding this back from the business user is the lack of corporate business plans from ATT at this point in time. When that time comes, you will see me with one, launching targeted email campaigns from all points of my weekly travels. It also has a Moveable Type plugin to blog directly from it with MT4 which we use for our corp blogs.

Now that I think about it, I might go get one next week. I am a tech sucker… but it is for “business reasons and research” right? At least that is how I am mentally justifying it to myself right now.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Friends and clients of Silverpop know that we love to do studies. One of our recent projects was to review a random and anonymous sample of our clients’ subject lines to find which characteristics drove the highest open rates.

We did some initial research to understand the trends behind open rates. What did we find? Only one thing seemed to drive a statistically significant difference in open rates. It wasn’t subject line length. It wasn’t the use or avoidance of certain words. It wasn’t even the use of promotions or sales.

In fact, the only thing that materially affected open rates was the sender: the name of the company or person in the “from” line.

I’ve long been an advocate of Email Brand Value (EBV). I even dedicated a chapter to it in my book. But it was still a pleasant surprise to learn that EBV completely overshadowed everything other element of the subject line when it came to getting recipients to open a message.

I feel obliged to mention that these findings came from an initial review of the data. It’s quite possible that the full study might have uncovered some additional drivers of open rates. However, the initial review was so clear that we didn’t think it was worth completing the study. Also, to address some of the other studies I’ve seen on subject line attributes and open rates, I suspect the bigger impact of length and key words comes from email campaigns that are more about prospecting, and where there is no real brand relationship in place. Silverpop clients rarely do email prospecting / list rental, so we don’t have data on how subject line attributes affect open rates.

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

Remember the Boeing service that promised in-flight email and web access when you were flying? You now how much work we would all get done with 1-5 hours of uninterrupted work? I just came in on the red eye last night to OMMA in NYC and would have been able to knock out some serious work/blogging if I would have had that time.

But where this really takes me is how will it impact your email campaigns if we could really move to an always on world? Would you have people with that time to spend more time reading and maybe converting or buying? Uninterrupted time is hard to find in today’s world and I think that being able to have that in flight time would change the amount of time people have to spend leisurely reading, interacting, browsing and converting in campaigns. I am looking forward to that day.

Alaska Air says plans to launch in-flight Internet - Yahoo! News

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.