Golden Leads

Not sure if any of you have seen Silver Jet Airlines. They are not your inexpensive NYC to London flight option, but they are one of the nicest ways to fly it seems to me if you have that juicy corporate travel budget. But besides this I have loved these Virgin-esque tie ins they promote that is a great brand escalation to me with a brand like the Rolling Stones. Tickets to the Stones last time I saw them were not all that low priced as well and the humor works.

The creative is a good blend of text, image and a call to action towards the top of the email and left justified, which should play well in most email preview panes.

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Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Dear Email Diva,

I received this request to opt-in for email from [a well-known car rental company]. I am a long-time, loyal customer, and an all-too frequent traveler. But each and every time I rent online (as recently as two weeks ago), I decline their emails. On the one hand, it seems like a legitimate request, since I have an ongoing relationship with them. On the other, it’s in complete disregard of my permission preferences.

Ruth Presslaff
President
Presslaff Interactive Revenue

Dear Ruth,

You say that you decline emails when you rent online, but, actually, what you do is fail to opt-in. It may sound like a different way to say the same thing, but, in the world of data, it’s not. What likely happens is the site captures only those who do check the opt-in box, and sends their email address to the email database. They don’t capture the negative preference, i.e., had the option and didn’t check the box. As email becomes more important to the organization, they realize the fabulous ROI they get from email subscribers and want to grow the list. So they send requests, like the one you received, inviting customers to opt-in. They’re not violating CAN SPAM, but they are annoying those who think the company should know their preferences, based on past behavior.

This was a problem at another company I worked with that ran many sweepstakes, each having an opt-in. If the customer opted in the first time but didn’t the second, was that a request to opt out or did the customer think it unnecessary to opt in a second time? The problem can be solved with a profile page, but its requisite user name and password presents a barrier to the marketing message that a substantial portion of low-commitment customers will not leap. (It also requires you to ask all your customers to update their profiles, which is the email you received.)

This preference ambiguity is the reason I am a proponent of requesting negative preferences –what you don’t want — which I described in this article. With an opt-out, it’s trickier — we don’t ever want to assume customers want our email; we want them to actively request it. One solution is to use radio buttons: send me email/don’t send me email. This way, the intent is clear.

Mark Bronlow, of Email Marketing Reports in Vienna, Austria, is also a fan of negative preferences and alerted the Email Diva to another smart application of the idea: “At an email marketing workshop yesterday, Nikolaus von Graeve suggested an excellent and elegant solution for managing opt-outs. Instead of providing a standard opt-out link with each email, you could offer two opt-out links — a standard universal one and one that lets the recipient opt-out just from “these kind of emails.” Read the complete article, “Elegant Ways to Avoid Unsubscribes.”

Wishing you a very clear crystal ball, flawless data and…

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.

In a 2006 study by Yahoo and OMD called the “Long and Winding Road: The Route to the Cash Register,” Yahoo identified four distinct purchasing paths people take. The study incorporated 4,301 online surveys and 13 in-depth and in-home ethnographics. Research on broadband users was focused on several categories: autos, finance, tech, Retail Goods, and Consumer Packaged goods. Pete Lerma at Clickhere wrote a nice article about this a few months ago, as did David Verklin and Bernice Kanner in their book, “Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here”.

What makes this so interesting are the four paths and their personality traits. For years we’ve contended that there are different levels of active considerations involved in an online and offline purchase, yet we’ve typically not isolated it to online or influence of channels. If you tie these to the traditional stages of the “purchase tumbler,” (researching a purchase, streamlining options, deciding where to buy and making a final decision) the study was able to show how consumers now turn to the Web (more even than to friends and family, offline reviews and traditional media sources), and are open to new suggestions floated there. Rather than narrowing their choices, the Internet often broadens them.

We’ve always tried to design communication programs, media plans and site experiences to support the consumer’s level of involvement with a product needed to make a purchase decision, and we’ve tried to customize the channels to this need for information and to make the purchase. The paths include:

Quick Paths: typically routine or impulse purchase tied to decisive, opportunistic competent personality traits and those seeking instant gratification (examples of products: barbecue sauce, toothpaste, cereal).

Winding Paths: involve movement between channels and sources of information, with consumers typically comparing pricing, options, coupons, and often seeking their friends’ advice. Most involved in this path are risk-tolerant, adventurous and open to new ideas. Retail goods like waffle irons and body weights often take a winding route, involving a modicum of comparison.

Long Paths: as it sounds, this involves a long-consideration cycle. Technology products are great examples, where consumers wait for pricing to drop on flat-screen TVs and typically research through few channels. What’s important to note is that people typically only shop through one channel.

Long and Winding Paths: As you can imagine, on this path consumers can take months to make a purchase decision on items like automobiles, annuities, and home mortgage products. There is a lot of research, comparison and use of multiple channels to support this kind of purchase.

As you design acquisition programs, lead cultivation programs, loyalty programs or simple retention programs, it’s vital to take careful consideration of each customer mindset, beinh realistic about the level of active consideration involved and how communication programs can support this.

Now translate what you know about your customer base and its willingness to read consumer email, or how they visit your site to research a product, how targeting is applied, how frequency is timed to the purchasing decision, the seasonality of the purchase and how historically your consumers have consumed digital channels during these stages and events. Now you have the foundation of your communication strategy.

I’ve done a lot of work with brands in each category and love this story, as it forces you as marketers to be smarter about the incremental effect of email on the purchase cycle and how you build attribution into the entire customer story.

It’s easier to think about the value of email on a longer purchase cycle where a consumer needs a lot of information to make a decision (financial services, automobiles). We know that if you enable bill-paying at your online bank, the likelihood of switching banks is minimal, just as we know that reminding people to renew their medicines will increase persistency in prescription renewals and sales. Impulse decisions are easy to consider as well, when only one channel is involved, but when you introduce a “winding road,” the effect of each discrete channel gets clouded.

The net value is to understand each customer segment that is important to your business and isolate these purchase paths, levels of consideration, and ways that people use consumer information through email and the Web to make decisions. This is communication strategy at its finest.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

I have long been a fan of the clean design and colors used by The Body Shop. On top of that the frequency is fairly regimented and tight. They seem to have their act together. But what always surprises me is the lack of text in the email. They are always image heavy and I have turned images off to see how it renders. Not very well at all. Now do you think that they know that my email displays images by default, I doubt it as I have purposefully clicked on the have trouble seeing this view as a web page link to see if they might try sending another format. Nope.

But the big thing to me is that it loads so slow. The images take a while to fill out and sometimes I have to go back to it a few times to get it to load them. Something to think about when you are building emails. Don’t sacrifice design and beauty for an email that performs.

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Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Our chief technical officer, Chris Curtin, forwarded me an article from ClickZ highlighting how poorly some retailers are handling their crisis communications surrounding the recent avalanche of lead paint exposure recalls. Chris pointed out how the article focuses on a lack of search-based ads for communicating with the public, but never mentions an even easier, more accurate and less expensive channel: email.

Any retailer that sells children’s products over the Web most certainly has a list of customers who have purchased the recalled products, as well as similar products that have not been recalled. It would be almost trivial to send out an email to all those people informing them of the recall status and instructing them on how to return the products. Equally valuable, they could send messages to customers who have purchased products that are similar, but that have not been recalled.

Perhaps there are liability concerns that I’m not aware of. Or, perhaps, as a seasoned public relations friend of mine suggested, decades of experience in traditional crisis communications could easily lead these professionals to miss the Internet as a medium altogether. As retailers take out full-page ads and run television commercials, some seem to be completely missing the Internet. What a shame.

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

Time is here and we need your votes. Voting ends on October 19th and we need some groundswell now. As a loyal or first time readers we need your help today in giving us some much due cred. Take a moment and give us your vote. Takes only a few minutes and yes you need to register, but in doing so you can use this site to explore and find so many other great blogs in different niches.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

My colleague Elaine O’Gorman, Silverpop’s vice president of strategy, recently authored an article for our clients on an emerging term in the email world called BACN. In the event you find yourself at a cocktail party with a bunch of email geeks, I wanted to make sure you were up to speed and not left out of the conversation should this new term get bandied about. Here’s the article:

What’s the Buzz About Bacn?

There’s all sorts of buzz about the newly coined term “bacn”–email messages recipients want but typically don’t read immediately. It’s email a cut above spam, and is quickly becoming a hot topic of conversation among bloggers.

The recognition of such messages is indeed valid. Many of us do receive information on a daily basis that we want to read, just not the very minute it arrives in our inbox. That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in these messages; simply that we don’t have time to process or consider the information or offer immediately.

For email marketers, making “bacn” isn’t necessarily bad. You’re sending messages that are relevant enough to keep around for awhile. MarketingSherpa reports that half of emails are opened within nine hours of receipt, and another 25 percent are opened in 28 hours. The average campaign achieves nearly all the opens it will generate in just under two weeks. Will the messages you send still be relevant two weeks from now?

Whether your messages are opened immediately or days or even weeks after a send, the content must still matter to the recipient. If what you send is interesting enough to keep around for a couple of weeks, pat yourself on the back. You’re delivering something of interest. Something worth hanging on to.

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

I am always watching about 200 brand emails. I am looking for people that are trying new things and doing it right or wrong (in my opinion). I like to hammer home ABOVE THE FOLD over and over again so this was a breath of fresh air. Wish I knew if this had a big impact on the email click rate and the conversion rate. I get tempted to buy from brands that I see doing it right. So of course I pulled out my wallet and looked for a book I have been meaning to stop in and pick up. But alas it was back ordered. I am a little impatient like that.

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But back to the creative. Notice the read navigation links at the top of the email. They are all stacked neatly at the top driving me to find what I am looking for in thier LONG emails. Not that I hate the emails as they are a book store with so much to talk about each week, but they are rather overwhelming to me at times.

If you aren’t trying, succeeding, failing or learning from each campaign, you are not trying to do better. I know that many of your don’t want to fail, but as a great agency live by… fail harder. It is the only way to learn is to take risks and be prepared to learn.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Not too often do I see a campaign with email as the driver really hit it on the head. I was forwarded this campaign from a friend at Adverblog today and we all loved it. It was simple, on brand, on target and done with media to WOW you. You need to check this out and try it. And the fact that the URL is www.dylanmessaging.com alone was odd enough to make me want to know if it was a dynamic campaign URL set up just for me. Of course it wasn’t when I got there it did not let me down.

And how does this whole concept spread you ask??? Email or course. But yet you have read that email is dead right? Come on now. If I need to read that one more time I might explode. Email is the glue online, the driver, the easiest and most effective way that word of mouth occurs. You see something cool and instantly want to send it on to so many others.

I particularly loved that they let you participate in the campaign and then after the fact asked if you wanted to opt in. Classy touch.

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

I read this article on ClickZ this AM and could not agree more with this statement below. Can’t you see that many marketers approached and still approach email marketing like using dynamite for fishing. Sure it works sometimes, but unless you have the means to capture all the fish at the surface then much of the effort (or lack of effort) goes to waste.

“There’s been a great deal of discussion lately about why, after 10 years, e-mail marketing is still struggling with the basics of deliverability and consent. The general consensus among industry heavyweights is many organizations fail to follow e-mail marketing best practices. Broadly speaking, blame for bad behavior is placed on three groups: the new and inexperienced; offline marketers who try to apply their principles to e-mail; and those knowingly playing fast and loose to make a quick buck.

Much of the trouble we see today is of our own making. We messed up, big time. The root cause can be traced to two phrases: “prior business relationship” and “one bite at the cherry.”

Read on at http://www.clickz.com/3626927

Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.