Golden Leads

I am always excited to attend OMMA. Not just for the people I get to meet up with at this twice annual event, but for the quality of the speakers, conversations and format of the event. I will be trying to capture as much of it as I can for you and will post it during the week.

If you are in town (NYC) come over and meet some of the EEC on some of the panels. I will be on a panel with Stephanie Miller (ReturnPath), Jeanniey Mullen (Ogilvy) and Lee Sherman (AvenueA Razorfish Monday at 4:45 at the Hilton.

Topic: ROI, What makes email valuable to your business!

Email has a great ROI, yet gets less than 6% of the marketing budget. Is ROI or attribution modeling the problem? Who gets credit for the sale when a customer is exposed to display media on a third party site, does a search and then opens and clicks through from an email? Come and explore how marketers address this very controversial issue of attribution modeling and how email marketers apply this to their ROI story.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

I was taking a look at the Adverblog email today and it had a story about the new Halo 3 site. The site is built from an actual diorama. The level of real world detail that went into an online experience to promote a video game is astonishing.

There is great use of images, video, characters throughout your site “travels” - this really ups the ante for storytelling when it comes to videogame microsites. The level of detail that went into the visuals of games has been amazing for a couple years now, but always lacked some real meat to the storyline.

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Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

This is a relevant study just released yesterday from Shop.org and Forrester on how super effective email marketing is for retaining customers and a top priority for many marketers.

Some key highlights:

E-mail marketing to house files is delivering higher response rates and lower costs per order than other channels

E-mail is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, according to two surveys conducted by Forrester Research on Shop.org’s behalf to create the State of Retailing Online 2007 report. This is compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs.

91% percent of those surveyed said they use e-mail to a house list as a marketing tactic while 88% of them said it has increased as a priority in 2007

Average click-through and order-conversion rates of e-mail are an astounding 11% and 6%

Most popular and effective e-mails are those that tout online-only promotions, with 71% of those surveyed saying they use the tactic and 66% rating it as “very effective.”

One of the lowest-rated types of e-mails were those following shopping cart abandonment, with 17% saying they use it and 13% rating it very effective.

More info and full article here:
http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/email_metrics_healthy/

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Studies have shown that welcome emails have significantly higher open rates than regular emails, and are key to setting expectations and communicating the brand. So it's surprising that only 72% of major retailers send out welcome emails. That's the top line finding of the Email Experience Council's second annual Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study, which will be released next week. This report is a follow-on to our Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study, which examines the subscription practices of 122 of the largest online retailers, and looks at the welcome emails that were sent as a result of those subscriptions.

Based on the fact that last year only 66% of major online retailers sent welcome emails, it appears that more retailers are recognizing the value of these critical emails. However, many are still missing out on the opportunity to use those emails as a selling and relationship-building vehicle. Instead of engaging subscribers with incentives and links to products, departments, loyalty programs, catalogs and other shopping-related material, a great number of the largest online retailers simply say hello and leave it at that.

However, there was some improvement on this front over the past year, with 98% of retailers' welcome email now containing a link to their shopping site (up from 88% last year), 33% containing store locators (up from 31%) and 14% containing links to catalog information (up from 6%).

Over the past year, more retailers have also made their welcome emails CAN-SPAM-compliant. This year a full 58% of welcome emails were CAN-SPAM-compliant in terms of including both a mailing address and unsubscribe method, versus 52% last year. While non-promotional emails are not required under the law to be compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act, we believe that all emails should be compliant. Since we also recommend that welcome emails be more promotional, that change would also necessitate becoming CAN-SPAM-compliant.

This year, for the first time, we also tracked the passage of time between subscriptions starts and the delivery of welcome emails. The good news is that 61% of retailers deliver their welcome emails within 10 minutes of sign-up, with most of those delivering within 3 minutes. The bad news is that 19% take more than 24 hours to deliver their welcome emails, with nearly a third of those taking more than a week to deliver. In the world of digital communications, that's an eternity to wait for a welcome email.

Other key findings from the study include:

•   32% of welcome emails include a discount, reward or incentive, down from 34% last year. That's in line with the results of our subscription study, which saw a move away from incentives during sign-up.

•   62% of welcome emails asked the subscriber to whitelist them by adding an email address to their address book, up from 49% last year.

•   79% of retailers sent out HTML welcome emails, up from 69% last. The remainder sent text-only welcome emails. That said, most of the HTML welcome emails were HTML "lite," making extensive use of HTML text.

•   53% of welcome emails included links to the retailer's privacy policy, up from 45% last year.

•   75% of the welcome emails include the retailer's brand name in their subject lines, on par with last year. Including branding here helps subscribers recognize the email as one that they requested.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

In my previous post on using email for the lead paint recalls, I glossed over how such an email might work. The problem for retailers is that many customers will have purchased several products that are affected by the recalls. The trouble of creating a separate email for each possible product (as well as for related products that aren’t being recalled) is matched by the risk that customers will get frustrated with receiving a stream of messages when only a single message is needed.

It turns out that there is an evolving feature set available in a few leading email marketing tools that makes a single email possible–it’s called relational tables. Actually, relational tables have been around for a while, but use among marketers has been pretty limited. I suspect that some of this is due to the fact that set-up of campaigns that utilize multiple tables can be pretty complex–sometimes even requiring marketing teams to have someone on staff who can create and maintain SQL statements. As such, through most of its history, email marketing has been about flat lists–each recipient has a single set of attributes like email address, name, age or gender. In relational tables, each recipient can have multiple attributes of the same kind.

In the case of our product recall message, retailers could use their existing customer email list, but link it to a product purchase table that contains all the products purchased by all their customers. The simplest use of relational tables would be to send one message per product, but benefit from only having to set up a single target/segment definition. An even more interesting approach would be to use a feature like Silverpop’s multi-match dynamic content. MMDC takes advantage of Silverpop’s ability to handle relational data but it allows every matching product record to be put inside a single message. So, if customer A bought one affected product, that person’s message would contain only that single product. However, if customer B bought eight affected products, that person’s message would list eight products. This is an entirely new level of personalization and something that both marketers and consumers will be seeing more and more in 2008 and beyond.

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

No, we are not Chris Berman, but we are completely open to answering any question you fire at us. Send us a question, rant, etc. and we are happy to respond and answer your question in a post. So comment now.

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

We are moving away from webinars as we feel that it is a medium that is just not working as a whole. In testing them this past year we saw large numbers of people attend but you can never answer all the questions. So what we are doing is opening up our lines of communication to you. Why not just call and ask us our thoughts, what works and what might work for you. We find that so much more value is in a one on one conversation that it is in a mass sermon or presentation. When was the last time you left a webinar thinking, well now I know what to do with my online marketing program. That’s what we thought.

So here is what you can do, really. Pick up the phone and call. Talk to our strategists one on one. We love listening to people and hearing what challenges they have with their marketing campaigns. From the 1000’s of campaigns we have created and deployed, our team of strategists can shed some light from our learnings to you. One on One.

There are Three ways to take us up on this:

1. Here is the number for you to call and get some time on the interactive marketing couch. 1-877-217-6955

2. Or if you are better inclined, drop us an email to sales AT eroi.com and we can interact using that great medium of email.

3. Post a comment on this blog. Just like HIPPA compliance, we will keep these posts private and not post them live on this blog. But we will need a way to contact you like an email address or a phone number. We are smart, just not Johnny Carson or David Blaine smart.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Here we are at the start of one of the busiest seasons for email marketing. With the holiday and end-of-year rush about to hit not only marketers but consumers on October 15th, the segmentation, development, design and behavioral elves are busy in workshops across not only the US, but the entire world. So why do we keep reading that email marketing is dead or dying?

The reason is other marketing media — direct mail, search, blog, PR, new 2.0 media, viral, broadcast and print — are all changing. These industries are trying, in essence, to lobby against each other to place themselves at the top or portray themselves as leading, or at least not losing, prominence in the minds of their audiences. It is the fight for dollars in the advertising business.

In truth, media are shifting. Not dying. Preferences on how people are reached are changing and we all need to change with them. We still watch TV, just in a different way in some households. We still read the papers, but they are not our go-to source of immediate information. We still subscribe to magazines and listen to the radio but for reasons other than our evolving desire of connectedness and immediate gratification. In a sense not only we have shifted this measurement as an audience, but marketers like yourselves have assisted with this always on mentality.

So what do we do? Trash one medium over another? Write studies claiming that one is dying while the other we are passionate about is thriving? Seems this is what many are doing.

We are here to let you know that yes advertising and marketing are changing, but one still does not kill off the other. They are interdependent. We actually, not sure if you noticed with all the summer events and daily noise in your own inbox, have not sent this ”monthly” newsletter since May, and here we are in September. Why? Well summer has been incredibly busy not only for us at eROI and our clients, but felt that everyone needed a little break. Is this close to what you thought it would be? Is email dead? Read some of the other articles to understand that it is only evolving right now to a medium that is working better due to marketers and companies taking it more seriously and doing it right by listening to their subscribers, customers and competition.

Long live media and strive to do better.

Stop lurking on the blogs and start interacting, leave your thoughts around this topic as a comment on this blog. If you want to share but don’t want them published, let us know in your comments and we will keep them hidden. (Thought I would spell that one out for you Ken)

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

As I write this, I’m in Vegas at Shop.org. The main show starts today — but I was able to walk the show last night and visit with vendors and join Habeas and Strongmail for an elegant dinner they threw for some of their clients. Despite the sumptuous feast, email, judging by most of the vendor focus in the exhibition hall, is still not getting the respect it deserves, especially at a show geared towards online retailers.

Last week I reported on the size of the market and wondered out loud how much revenue is generated by the $3 billion being spent on email advertising and services. The answer was supplied by Sean O’Neal at Datran Media, who pointed out that the DMA itself projects that marketers will spend around $500 million and generate over $29.9 billion in revenue as a result of acquisition email in 2007, an increase of over 18% from 2006.

So, why isn’t that bit of news getting more play?

As an industry we still do a poor job in tooting our own horn and getting this information out. The EEC provided a good start, but until recently was a mostly volunteer effort, staffed with folks most of whose full-time jobs lay elsewhere. Now that it is part of the DMA, we need for it to do more.

In a post from last week Michael Munz writes: “Our Company is very SEM and SEO heavy, with little or no attention spent on other forms of marketing with the Web. I have pleaded for e-mail campaigns and blogs and wikis and portals for the better half of a year, with little or no response. I see the stats and read the articles deciding the future of the online advertising world. I would appreciate any and all ‘ammo’ for me to convince my superiors that these other forms need to be addressed.”

Right now, today, we need to begin addressing Michael’s need. We need our trade organizations to start providing the ammo needed to convince the upper reaches of management that email really does provide the greatest return on investment of any marketing channel. We don’t need another round table on deliverability. We need solid facts from reputable sources, successful case studies that reach beyond the boundaries of our email-only focus groups and articles. We need to blow the doors off the corporate boardroom with the only ammo they understand: bottom line numbers. And those numbers and case studies need to be published in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

We’ve preached to the choir long enough. Let’s take our preaching to The Street.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

I am in the market for an High Definition Television, so I have been paying close attention to the BestBuy.com emails as of late. I received this campaign yesterday. Shouldn’t an email promoting “High-Def” have a larger image that is a little more appealing?

View Email

I know HDTV is hot right now, and this campaign will probably do ok, but shouldn’t you still have to sell the experience a little more? There is a lot of debate about image heavy emails, but I think when you are selling an experience - be it a resort, art, electronics, events, etc…. - you need to still excite the user and give them that feeling that they are missing out through dynamic imagery. A little tiny picture of a screen just doesn’t do it. It looks like just another TV set….

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.