Golden Leads

This is a common sales lifecycle for most marketers from a business perspective.  A closer look at today's definitions of these categories shows that some have changed from past seasons.

Acquisition:  The art of generating new customer business, right?  Some define this by a conversion or sales event.  Many in the email marketing space are redefining this to mean acquiring a permissible engagement.  The net is, millions of consumers are online, most use email, and organizations are trying to engage as many as possible through email so they can bridge and lengthen the sales cycle. When you get three seconds to communicate your product, make a connection to a customer value set and creative enticement, that's becoming more and more expensive to do these days.   The art of acquisition is defined by the "consideration cycle" involved in buying, and the channel chosen for acquisition changes how much you can move the needle during this cycle. Redefining the term acquisition through all channels will help keep you sane in today's world.  Comparing all channels equally and only valuing a conversion event will keep you running in circles.

Activation:  This used to be defined as re-engaging old customers or dormant customers. Today it is being defined as maximizing the first purchase.  Whether you are selling car insurance, hotel bookings, women's apparel, automobiles or business software solutions, your goal in the activation phase is to maximize the first purchase and move people down the "ready-to-buy" scale. Many marketers are taking an extended view of the sales cycle and are trying creative ways to activate a customer through promotional, seasonal and targeting content and offers through a multi-step program.  Anything to help the customer "actualize" the purchase event and amortize the initial acquisition cost.  We call this lead incubation or lead funneling, and it can even be categorized for cross-sell — but requires you to leverage all touch points to be successful.

Cultivation:  In the days of CRM, cultivation was about customer relationship management.  Today it has evolved to touch point management.  The cultivation of a customer relationship has evolved channels and emerged into "discrete experiences." Yes, this seems soft, but much focus has been put on optimizing email to balance offline and online experiences in cultivating a client's relationship with your brand.  In layman's terms, this is about identifying your highest value, lowest value, and channel value customers and optimizing programs, testing and analysis to your programs.  This can include loyalty programs, content programs, advocacy programs, cause marketing — anything that ties the brand and the consumer to a common experience.  The last mile of this phase is to monetize these events through database value sets.

Conversion:  Intuitively, we all understand this.  It's about maximizing the conversion event.  Yesterday this was the endpoint in the dialogue.  Today it's the fourth step in the sales cycle, and never-ending.  Yes, businesses are taking a longer-term view of the customer and willing to invest more.  If you believe it costs more to engage a new customer than to market to an existing one — that's yesterday's thinking.  Today's thinking is about creating the most commercially valuable program for your business.  Some customers may have transactional value to you, some may have content syndication value, and some may just be monetized "eyeballs" for your site advertising and newsletter programs.  While acquiring new customers is costly, so is growing a database and marketing in mass without responsible quarantines of non-responder customer segments, which can make up 40% of your email file today. 

While this is a business view of the sales lifecycle, it's important to recognize that we have less control over this cycle today than we did in the past.   It can/will vary dramatically by product, customer segment, and multichannel influence.  Your recognition of this — and program balance — will be the catalyst to your success.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

If you have trouble snaring a big-enough share of your company’s marketing budget and mindshare for your email program, your problem may be that you are arguing your case with the wrong numbers.

Your CEO, for example, will likely not be blown away if you brag that your email campaigns or newsletters are beating the industry averages in open, click and delivery rates. So what if you have a 10% click-through rate on your last message? Big deal. Did that 10% help you meet your quarterly sales goal? OK, now we’re talking!

To drive your program’s strategy and judge its value, you need to move beyond a narrow set of email statistics. Instead, show how email, better than any other marketing channel, helps your company achieve success by measuring your program with specific, business-focused goals.

Here’s an example for a business-to-business company, but applicable to any business built around sales: Instead of building an email campaign with primarily email-focused goals (achieving a 8% click-through rate, improving delivery to 95%, etc.), start with a key company business or marketing goal first, such as increasing cross-sell revenue by 15%. This is a goal that your email program would play a significant, measurable role in achieving.

Now, with this business goal in mind, work backwards to find the strategies to use in your email program to achieve it. Here you would use metrics, such as what percentage of your clients or customers subscribe to your newsletters, how many of them buy through your email channel, what kinds of products they buy, how often they buy, typical order size, etc.

From here, you can drill down into the numbers to find out which client segments respond best to email initiatives, which content drives the most conversions, which products sell best through email.

Finally, you can begin to build your email campaign model using email-centric goals. You know that to increase cross-selling, you need to reach a wider audience among your customers and to entice a greater percentage to open and act on your messages.

So, knowing your typical conversion rate for existing customers, you calculate that you’ll need to double the percentage of customers who subscribe to your newsletters, from a current 20% to 40% or better. To achieve the 15% sales increase will also likely require boosting frequency from once a month to twice monthly, segmenting the list according to industry and buying history, and developing unique content for each segment. Then you can look at open, click and other email metrics over past campaigns and develop strategies to boost those.

Once you deploy your new goal-centered program, use your metrics to see how close you came to meeting your business goal, in this case to boost cross-selling revenue by 15%. Regardless of whether you met or missed this goal, you now know how to use email and other process metrics to help determine where elements of your program are working or falling short.

With this kind of careful planning, you can demonstrate the killer role your email program plays in helping your company achieve success. This, more than any email-centric statistic, will get your executives behind email and help you snag a bigger slice of the marketing-budget pie.

In the end, email marketing doesn’t have an “easy” button you can push for instant success. But it does have a roadmap, and the points on the map are the relevant business goals and metrics that will point your program in the right direction.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

There is a lot of talk lately about social networks and, of course, whether they will replace email as the primary form of Internet communication. If this sounds familiar, it is. Last year, RSS was going to replace email. The year before that blogs where going to replace email. And yet, according to research group Radicati, there will be 1.4 billion active email accounts at the end of this year.

ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo mail, though, are taking what I’ll call “The Facebook Threat” seriously. Worried that social networks will begin siphoning off much needed traffic necessary to maintain high banner CPM’s, these ISPs are beginning to incorporate social networking functionality into their email offerings, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

And, on the other hand, social networking groups are adding more email capabilities, allowing, for instance, Facebook users to email SN Outlanders (those who live off the grid, so to speak: outside the social network itself).

Social networks have great advantages that email cannot offer. Having used Facebook now for a few weeks, simply seeing people’s pictures has become a great advancement to my face/name-challenged mind. I might actually recognize some of these people at the next trade show I attend. And there is a fascination in keeping in constant touch with every bit of minutiae in your network members’ personal lives. Knowing that powerful, high-ranking colleagues are suffering from insomnia, buying paint at Home Depot, or sitting around bored on a Sunday adds an aspect to business networking that is just missing from sites like Linked-in.

On the other hand, email has advantages that social networks just can’t compete with. Take groups, for instance. I’ve run a number of private email listserves and I currently run The Inbox Insiders. Like many people in my personal Facebook network, I’ve created a Facebook Group to mirror my non-Facebook networking landscape. I’m a member of many of these Facebook Groups, myself.

Setting up the Facebook Group and inviting members generated quite a bit of discussion on Inbox Insiders (Email Edition), but virtually no discussion on Inbox Insiders (Facebook Edition). And while everyone wanted to be a member of both versions of the group, there is almost no activity on the Facebook group. All the action is happening through email. The reason is that there is still an immediacy and an “in-your-faceness” to email that social networks don’t have. I have to go to the social network, but the email group comes to me, and is immediate. The social network is like a statement. The email network is like a discussion, where everyone sees the responses at the same time and they are flowing into a conduit (your inbox) that is connected to us at the hip.

I follow an email discussion while I’m carrying out my day-to-day activities. A social network requires a break from my day-to-day in order to check it.

I have found the same to be true at all the other Facebook groups I’m a member of. I sign up. And then I forget them. Am I really supporting the Monks in Burma by signing up for the appropriate Facebook Group? Doesn’t seem like it.

It seems like more of a trophy than a discussion: collecting groups for the sake of collecting groups. But an email list? That is up-close and personal, buster. It is requiring you to respond or be left out. And that is a powerful force that social networks just haven’t figured out yet.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

‘Nuf said.

This simple yet insightful thought was passed along to you by John Engler from UnsubCentral, quoting Datran Media Co-founder and President Matt Keiser, who spoke at the OMMA New York Conference & Exposition in September.

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

The Email Diva is fascinated by the sociological/anthropological aspects of social networks, and eager to understand the impact of the new communication medium on the practice of marketing. And yet she feels a little slimy saying that.

Do I wish to exploit these networks for my clients’ gain? Well, yes… sort of. But the key is to be an authentic participant, transparent in your motives and respectful of the channel. Do we need to follow George Burns’ advice: “You’ve got to be honest. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made”?

I say there’s a better way.

Channel some of those marketing dollars to a charitable cause, and let your association with that cause be your entrée into the social network. Will participants know that you may have commercial as well as charitable motives? Certainly. But if you are helping to heal the sick, feed the hungry or solve one of the many pressing problems of our day, does anyone really care?

A fabulous example of this is (Product) Red. As the MySpace page proudly explains: “MySpace is partnering with (RED) because we think it’s a great idea, and we want to use the power of our community to make it even stronger. (RED) teams up with iconic brands to create (PRODUCT) RED-branded products, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Global Fund, to help women and children with HIV/AIDS in Africa…. There are millions of people on MySpace, and if we all joined (RED), we could raise a lot of money for the Global Fund just by shopping for things we already want to buy…. Collectively, our MySpace (RED) community can do good in a big way!”

Wouldn’t you like to have nearly 600,000 MySpace friends gushing, “I seriously have every (red) product ever,” and “If the whole world came together & ca(red) about world hunger, disease, poverty, the dis-enfranchised, etc … can you imagine what could be achieved???…. I’m SO inspi(red) by all this, and I’m going to do my bit to spread the word!”

As this great blog entry by Jeff Mollander, discussing Converson’s Rob Key, points out, “ROI must be re-defined and, in fact, placed under a constant, inherent desire to contribute to the community.” Key advises that we need to ask “‘what can I give?’ and you will get your return.”

Yes, companies have been supporting charitable works all along, but have they ever done it like this? It’s a whole new world out there, and it’s time we got onboard, for the good of all.

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.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

At the sake of sounding redundant, great creative is a blend of tone, design, timing and understanding of the target audience. Without any of the former, the latter would produce irrelevance. The theme of this week’s column focuses on what makes email creative an effective art. Let’s first think about how great creative is measured. Is it measured by open rate, click-through rate, or conversion rate? Is it measured by combined response over time, or can it be measured independently by each discrete campaign?

I’d contend, if you are trying to measure great creative experiences by one campaign or one email, you are wasting your efforts. That’s why I so often discount awards given to campaigns for great creative; it’s such a contextual evaluation that has little to no merit in my book. Creative is a part of the success overall, a visual representation of the work and in the email world, in my opinion, only 30% of the value. The other 70% should be attributed to targeting, timing, context and promotional strategies.

Not to discount good creative, but it’s really difficult to assess great creative as an iterative process, it’s so subjective. Here are several ways to assess performance of creative and get some idea of whether you’re hitting the mark.

Click Map overlays will show you click density statistics of how your audience clicked on certain images or links within your email. That’s a start to understand if you accomplished your mission in a direct response effort or if you are trying to understand the ranking and interest of your audience by link association, but hardly a complete measure of good design.

We have Heat Maps that allow you to test discrete focus groups on their eye movements within the email in different email environments. This will allow you to see how the eye scans, tracks, and paths within. While this has proven insightful, it doesn’t tell you if you have created great creative experiences or even if it’s good design. It only measures the tasks and how the consumer scans the email.

Creative competitive analysis is a critical baseline to understanding how your experience stacks up next to your competitors. We typically line up like emails from competitors and look closely at tone, design, modularity, promotional tone, use of images, use of navigation, linking strategies, viral strategies, and the general communication design. This baseline helps all team members form their own opinions on where you are on this scale.

Focus groups are critical to assessing creative — but unfortunately, not many in the email space have access to these groups outside of internal audiences. Receiver reaction is some of the most valuable data you’ll get — qualitative, unbiased and able to balance all your other analysis. This typically comes in the form of offline intercept surveys, but you can enable this for email as well on direct response and custom landing pages, soliciting this type of feedback in the form of exit surveys. I’ve also seen some organizations use email focus groups and send out the campaign pre-campaign to get feelers on the best messaging strategies. A lot to administer, I know, but in the absence of good feedback most are just guessing.

Remember, great creative is about the experience, not the message; the reaction, not the design — and it’s about building on each experience, not a single email.

When creating a logo for your business, I used to advocate taking out every business card you’ve ever collected and placing them on a table. You’ll be amazed at what pops, and if you categorize them you’ll see a trend in aggregate — what is good and what’s missing; by looking at them en masse, you see an amazing level of detail. I recommend you do this with your email from time to time for a real-world view of the entire experience your email channel delivers. That’s the true judge of great creative.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

I like this retailer and shop at them all the time, so I will do them the courtesy of not mentioning their name.

I don’t remember exactly when it started, but many months ago, their weekly (sometimes twice weekly) emails started arriving with a subject line simply telling me that my local ads were online. Nothing in the subject line interested me because I had no idea what their specials were. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, so I opened the message and was prompted to click through to the retailer’s site. At that point, I was prompted for my ZIP code and was shown an electronic brochure of the weekly newspaper insert that I already receive.

After a while, they expanded the subject line to also include some special on their e-commerce site, which is an improvement. However, the phrase about my local ads being online always preceded anything else they wrote in the subject line.

A general rule of thumb is that you don’t want to require a click-through for your recipient to get your content. This is one of the major reasons video email stalled–email security locked video out of the message itself, and most customers weren’t willing to click to a Web site to see the video. If this holds true for my retailer, then requiring a click-through and a ZIP code must surely have negatively impacted the success and ROI of their email program.

Perhaps there are other goals at work here that might explain the change in their email strategy. Or, maybe this works. So, if any of you have tried minimal content in the email with a required click-through to a site and have found it valuable, please let me know.

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

The importance of having landing pages match email creative enough that subscribers are instantly assured that they’ve landed in the right place is an undisputed best practice. Similarly, it’s important for emails to mimic their associated Web sites in look and feel, not only for branding purposes but for navigation as well.

To see how well retailers accomplished this, the Email Experience Council recently compared the emails and Web sites of 106 major online retailers tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot. We focused on consistency of navigation and branding, which included general design elements such as logos, colors, line rules and fonts used.

We found that 32% of emails and Web sites were totally in sync, 46% were partially in sync and 22% were not really in sync. While some of those partially in sync could easily be brought more in line with the branding and design of their corresponding Web site, some of those differences are simply an outgrowth of the fact that emails are narrower than most Web sites. Because of that, compromises have to be made sometime, though generally those compromises don’t have a particularly negative effect on branding and navigation. However, retailers that find themselves in that last bucket, with Web sites and email not really in sync, should revisit their email and site designs. Consider such factors as:

Color and line rules. In the blink of an eye, this is where branding lapses can be most evident. While the difference in color schemes and design elements between emails and Web sites for Musician’s Friend and NFLshop can be jarring and disorienting, the black background and white fonts used in Bloomingdale’s emails and on its Web site strongly links the two. In Musician’s Friend’s case, its email was redesigned back in March without any corresponding changes to its site.

Logos. When you think of branding, the first thing you probably think of is logos, which is why it was shocking to find that a few retailers were using Web site logos that differed from email logos. For example, after becoming the official ecommerce site for the DisneyStore in July, DisneyShopping still hasn’t settled on which logo it’s going to use. Right now, its emails have the DisneyShopping branding while its Web site says DisneyStore.

Walgreens also had logo issues — while the site is branded “Walgreens.com,” the email is branded “Walgreens.” And Sears is using slightly different logos as well.

Saks Fifth Avenue used a nice little trick when it changed its logo in January. Because its old logo and new one were the same size in both places, the company just replaced the source file of the old logo with the new one, and - voila! — the logo was changed everywhere, even in its old emails.

Navigation. After logos, navigation bars probably do the most to establish a consistent feel between Web site and email. Nav bars in emails also provide an important gateway to the Web site, serving as a reminder of the full breadth of the retailer’s offerings. This is where many compromises are made because of the difference in width between emails and Web sites. For example, OfficeMax excludes some of the departments from the nav bar in its emails to save space.

Many of these compromises have limited downsides.

However, we saw many instances where the order of departments, and even their names, was different. For example, in HPshopping’s emails, there’s a tab for “iPAQs.” However, on the Web site, that same tab says “Handhelds.” Clearly there was an update to the site that never got reflected in the email template.

In a few cases, we saw emails with nav bars that were shortened unnecessarily. For instance, Hanna Andersson’s emails appear to have room to list all its departments, but the company chose not to for some reason.

Overall, 45% of retailers have email and Web site nav bars that differ. Another 13% chose not to include nav bars in its emails. The remaining 42% of retailers had nav bars that were consistent.

Most of the inconsistencies between emails and their corresponding Web sites arise from site relaunches done without the nvolvement of the email team (although there are certainly a few cases of the reverse). With the holidays just around the corner, we’re pretty much at the end of the Web site relaunch season, so it’s likely too late to make any major adjustments. But it is a good time to check your emails against your Web sites and make sure that they are in sync as much as is reasonably possible. During the holiday season, even the smallest of details can have a measurable impact.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

Today’s article is about changing the way you do business. Here’s what I mean:

This week my 17-year-old son’s junker of a car finally died. It was a ‘91 Subaru without airbags, so my wife and I decided that it would be good to upgrade him to a safer car. A used or new Prius would be just the ticket, we thought. I could use the Prius to commute, saving on gas money, and my son could drive my nice safe Toyota Rav 4 to school and to work at the local Petsmart.

So I head down to the Toyota dealership where my wife had seen a used Prius a few days before. Three years before I had bought my Rav 4 at the same dealership, so I was a going concern to them. I ask the salesman about the used Prius. He doesn’t know anything about the car and is sure I’m mistaken. I call my wife, who tells me exactly where in the lot the car is located. I wait with the salesman for 20 minutes while someone moseys around and gets the keys so we can test-drive the car, during which time the salesman tells me how much he dislikes selling cars.

We do the test-drive and I’m ready to deal. I ask about a new Prius as well, since there’s a 2008 Prius in the lot. He tells me I could buy it outright or get a three-year lease. Then we run into the first snag: “How many miles you going to drive?” asks the salesman. “I don’t know,” I say. “Well, I have to know right now,” he says. If you go over the mileage, they charge you 50 cents a mile.” Already I’m forced to make a decision that could affect my life three years from now — and I haven’t even taken out my wallet or had my coffee yet.

I tell him to run some numbers: new, used, lease. “Well, what do you want, exactly?” persists the salesman. I tell him just give me some options. “On that used car, you can make us an offer,” he offers, unsolicited. He disappears. I sit there for 30 minutes. He come backs. First thing he says: “There is no negotiation on the used car price. Or the new car, either.”

He shows me some really high monthly numbers. I do a little calculation and see that his numbers are wrong based on the interest rate he’d quoted me. He recalculates. We go back and forth. I’m getting angrier and more impatient. He brings his manager over, who dismisses the problem by saying: “You have a bank, right? Go get a loan from them and pay us cash.” Now I’m insulted. I leave.

The next day I went to Craigslist. I bought a used Prius for half the money the dealer was asking. End of story. Oh, except to say, I’ll never go back to the dealer again.

Even with email programs, we, as marketers, need to reinvent ourselves constantly. Am I treating my established customers right? Am I sending out my offers too infrequently, or too often?

Am I making it easy for them to buy? Or am I losing customers forever without even knowing it?

If you find yourself doing things the same old way, technology is going to bury you. There are a lot of people on Craigslist who would just love to take your customers away. Don’t let them.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

Dear Email Diva,

Our B2B services business operates an opt-in email alert program from our corporate Web site. Web visitors are given the option to subscribe for alerts sent when new content is posted, either anywhere on the site, or within certain business unit sections of the site. Each quarter, I analyze the list to see what percent of subscribers are from our existing and target client company list.

The portion of client subscribers for business unit lists can range from less than 1% to as much as 5%. Other subscribers include our own employees, media, other consultants and business services, and college and university students and staff. I’ve been challenged in meetings to state how well our list composition compares with benchmarks. I’ve never found any benchmarks or standards, and our email marketing group isn’t aware of any for this kind of email marketing program in our industry or overall.

Do other marketers care about this statistic? Is there truly no quantitative research on the topic?

Communications Manager, Major Consulting Company

Dear Communications Manager,

The Email Diva will give you some data, but must first hit you upside the head. If regular communication with customers and prospects is important to you, the question should never be “are we doing about as well as the other guys,” but rather, “how can we improve?”

First consider how you can optimize the opt-in process on your site. Marketing Experiments has a wealth of information on this subject, based on scrupulous research and testing. They advise you to eliminate “anxiety and friction” in your opt-in process. When I subscribed for email on your site, I had no idea what I was going to get, how often I would get it, and whether it would be relevant.

Your email content options seem to be arranged by business units rather than customer needs. The majority of your list is made up of those motivated to separate the wheat from the chaff, while customers simply want what they want when they want it. Talk to customers and get feedback on the communications they receive as well as what they would like to receive.

You require a double opt-in, which puts an additional barrier between your communication and your customer. What percentage of subscribers don’t confirm their opt-in? Is it really necessary? If you were offering a popular incentive for opting in, it would be wise to confirm the transaction, but for your site, it isn’t necessary.

Immediately after opting in, I got four emails from you — one for each content option selected, plus the double opt-in request. This also raises a red flag that you are deluging your audience with information rather than providing the highlights and allowing them to drill down.

To steal a phrase from a presentation by Stephanie Miller (Return Path) and Sean O’Neal (Datran Media), the invitation to opt-in for email on your site should be “prominent, compelling and everywhere.” While the “Email Alerts” button is in the global navigation, satisfying the “everywhere” guideline, you fall short of making it prominent and compelling. What is the value of signing up for your email? Condense the answer into a persuasive sentence or two and feature it throughout your site. If you don’t have a compelling value proposition, it’s time to scrutinize and improve your program.

The Email Diva rant is now completed, and I will furnish some information provided by my colleagues in the Inbox Insiders. Remember that you are almost certainly comparing apples and oranges.

“The range is between 18-25% of the marketing database for B2B and 30-40% for B2C.” (Jeanniey Mullen, OgilvyOne Worldwide and the Email Experience Council

“An ecommerce site with 15 million unique viewers a year has an email list of 3.5 million, nearly 20%. But they run very aggressive list-building operations, like contests. A retail chain with 7 million customers has a list of 1 million names. Among that [number,] 500,000 are estimated to be customers, so [it’s] 7% of the customer base. Their target is to reach 20% of their customer base. (Marc Desenfant, Come&Stay)

“Most customers I talk to in B2B are around 30% to 40%, and B2C is about 15% to 25%.” (Jeff Mills, eROI, Inc.)

Looks like you have some work to do. You have great content, now you need to package it in a way that is accessible to your audience.

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.

Share This

Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.