Golden Leads

While each organization is unique in its needs, cultures, budgets and focus on the email channel, I've seen so many types of email teams put together — from cobbled-together teams infused into marketing groups, fully functional email departments and then the "one person show."  The exact organization isn't as important as the chemistry and responsibilities within each role.  Let's think for a minute about all the roles needed to properly manage an email program, and talk about them in terms of personas rather than ambiguous titles.

-    The Idealist:   the one who brings ideas and plans to the forefront, the creative inspiration, the task driver, the manager ultimately responsible for the finished, delivered email and how it bridges consumer relevance and marketing goals.  This person usually has more ideas and promotions than the average team or agency can handle and is continually challenged with tradeoffs (time vs. budget).  Critical to success is his or her ability to make decisions, surround herself with information and do so "on-the-fly." 

 -   The Moderator:  this is the one who is driven by tasks. He or she insures that creative is on target, the lists are appropriated and segmented properly; he's the coordinator of the campaign, the approval moderator and ultimately the final gatekeeper of the email campaign.  Critical to success in this role is the ability to infuse key learning and best practices into each campaign, and the innate ability to manage many moving tasks and needs within a given schedule.

-  The Interpreter:  formerly known as the creative team.  They are tasked with optimizing to the medium, interpreting ideas, insight and understanding of the audience to craft messaging and design that clearly communicates the intent of the message.  It's persuasion, inspiration, and how the content/message and intent convey the brand and direct response goals of the campaign.  Keys to success in this role are the ability to understand the consumer experience, maintain this integrity through creative execution, and build on the continuity of the message (it isn't the message, it's the experience).  They must have clear insight into past experience, performance, and how the different consumer environments impact the consumer experience.

-  The Inquisitor:  this is the person who probably knows how to code properly for Outlook 2007 and understands all forms of CSS and their limitations.  This person may code and manage your email system, but she is strongly considered the power user of the email platform. She usually knows more about your customer file and the data than anyone on your team. Critical to success in this role is the ability to stay on top of big issues in the channel, and see how these evolve by ISP, to help translate performance from trends with consumer and B to B ISPs. 

-  The Miner:  yes, he's usually deep in the mine, digging up nuggets of data.  He strives to understand patterns in response, how that translates by acquisition, by demographic, by product/service group, by needs and attitudes. He will typically be the one that propagates online survey questions and strategies.  These are hard folks to find and grow, as data can be terrible fragmented and the needs are real-time.  Keys to success are knowing what you have, (data) knowing how you got this data (source) and having intimate knowledge of the business and how it operates.  I've rarely found this breed of person that can do it all. Rather, you'll have an analytics person (mine the data), analyst (interpret it), and strategist (who builds strategy around it). 

While few companies have all these people dedicated to email, the roles are still critical.  As I wrote in a past article on recruiting for the interactive space, our challenge will be to get people excited about the channel, keep them entertained, and balance the need to grow these skills internally and add a spice of external expertise and influence. Critical to doing this right is maintaining knowledge inside your company..

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

One of my favorite speakers at the recent Silverpop customer conference in London was Michael Nutley, editor-in-chief of New Media Age, the U.K. weekly news magazine. Ignoring the standard PowerPoint and visual aids, Michael got up and did something unusual–he just spoke.

He gave a terrific presentation, and I filled pages with notes on his provocative ideas. I won’t take you through them all, but here are a few things he said that really stood out for me:

• PVRs (personal video recorders like TiVo) are the rejection of interruption advertising.
• The hegemony of TV and TV advertising is breaking down because people no longer live scheduled lives.
• Communities are no longer limited by geography–they can now be based on shared interests regardless of where members live.
• All roads lead to interactivity–all media is moving toward a dialogue.
• Quoting G. M. O’Connell, founder of Modem Media, on the overuse of interruption-based advertising, Michael said, “You can’t annoy people into liking you.” This is a sobering point for marketers of otherwise well-respected brands when they ask, “How often can I send to my email list?”
• In the social media space, you don’t buy media–you earn it. This is one of my favorites.
• Brands are no longer what we as marketers tell people they are–brands are what people’s friends tell them they are.
• Marketers should aspire to the condition of service. In other words, view your marketing as a service to your customers.
• Each new medium spawns a brand new form of advertising. For the Web, it was search. The question is, what will the ideal advertising form be for mobile? It’s definitely not search, Michael said. My own thought is that it’s not likely to be any form of interruptive marketing because mobile devices are simply too personal and too awkward to manage a stream of incoming messages.

Michael, thanks for coming out and doing such a great job.

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

Okay, I don’t actually love them. But I have learned to appreciate them for what they are: instruments in the democratization of modern marketing and perhaps the most authentic measurement of customer dissatisfaction we have.

Here’s how I see spam complaints:

1. They democratize marketing: one subscriber, one vote.

No other marketing metric says “Get lost!” as clearly as the spam complaint.

Even the unsubscribe can mask a subscriber’s other motives, such as changing an address, switching to one of your other lists or simply having a change of heart or situation rather than outright dissatisfaction.

Metrics like click-throughs and open rates don’t measure dissatisfaction. If the open rate goes down, is it because subscribers choose not to open your messages? Or, are they reading your content in their clients’ preview panes or with blocked images and thus blocking the open from being recorded?

The spam complaint also helps democratize marketing the same way voting works in a democracy: One subscriber, one spam complaint.

Individually, spam complaints measure subscriber dissatisfaction better than any other metric we have. If complaints spiral upwards every time you send a message, you are clearly doing something wrong. You have stepped outside the boundaries of your subscribers’ expectations, and they are casting their votes to tell you that.

Viewed as a whole, complaints also become an exit poll revealing your general subscriber base discontent, the same way election-day exit polls can indicate which way the electorate is leaning.

2. They’re potentially damaging but ultimately manageable.

Even the best email marketer can expect to generate them. Complaints are also a big negative, because behind each one is a dissatisfied subscriber and possible ex-customer. Also, too many spam complaints will damage your sender reputation, the No. 1 factor ISPs consider when deciding whether to pass your email through to the inbox, block it, or divert it to the junk folder.

You might think you’re powerless to stop subscribers from hitting the spam button, but you have the tools to reduce the conditions that give rise to spam complaints. Just do the following:

One of my favorite conferences for general marketing is put together by the eMarketing Association. I’ve been attending and speaking at this gathering for many years. It’s a small, intimate event that does a great job of covering a wide range of current topics from the world of online marketing. I can readily recommend this conference for anyone new to emarketing as well as those who are experienced and looking to brush up on the latest and greatest in the industry today. You can check out the eMA’s Web site to learn more about the upcoming eM7 conference in Atlanta October 23 - 24, or its conferences in 2008.

P.S. I really don’t get paid for writing this or for speaking at the conference. I just like the what it offers.

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

We get asked often about how to help build an email list and a good back-to-basics article from ClickZ came out the other day that is a good, simple refersher for everytone:

It’s crunch time. You’ve been tasked with developing an e-mail marketing program, pronto, to market your company’s product or service. The goals are high, but the house e-mail list is anemic. What now?

Read the whole article>>

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

I always like simple but insightful models, so I made a note to share one of the better examples I’ve seen recently. Skip Fidura, who manages OgilvyOne Worldwide’s email marketing department in London, presented at Silverpop’s customer conference in London last week. One of his many good slides included a pyramid with the six levels of relevance. You’ll have to imagine the graphic, but here are the six levels from the bottom up: Offer, Profile, Affinity, Collaborative, Expressed and Behavioral.

Skip pointed out that many marketers debate whether expressed preferences or behavioral targeting are a more accurate way to drive relevance. I happen to agree with his ranking, but it is a good point.

Another interesting note from his presentation was based on what I believe to be Ogilvy research: Who you market to is 50 percent more important than Where, When and What you market. Noodle on that for a while…

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

I signed up for Fmail, the new Gmail app for Facebook, this week. Facebook wants you to live your life through it, and adding these everyday apps will continue that quest.

So, how is Fmail for email marketers? Scary. Take a look at this scerenshot:

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What does this App mean to Email Marketers? First off, there is no sideways scroll. All you see is what is in the screen area shown. So if you have a left hand column, the content is not accessible. By not viewing the full image, your email is severly damamged.

Also, you will notice that I scrolled down to get past the top Fmail nav. So you’re traditional fold is reduced by about 100+ pixels.

On the bright side, click thrus do expand to a new screen. and the formatting holds up pretty well, no major rendering issues.

The more email client apps for sites like Facebook, the more issues email marketers will have. A “View this Email Online” link is more important than ever.

We will stay tuned to these apps and report back to you what we find.

Rest assured, our email marketing campaigns will be viewed more and more on mobile devices and through apps and widgets. Our advice is too learn as much about your audience as possible. The more you knowledge you can gain now, the better for the future.

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx, a U.K.-based agency focused on email, is one of the most thoughtful (and entertaining) people in the email business. He was on a panel at our recent customer conference in London. One of my favorite Dela skills is coining new phrases. And, once again he came through.

People who don’t respond to their email for long periods of time recently have become referred to as “emotionally unsubscribed.” That is, they are no longer interested in the email, but haven’t bothered to unsubscribe. Dela has a different twist on this that, frankly, makes a lot more sense to me. In many (if not most) cases, people do want to receive the email, but they don’t care about the content at this particular point in time. He believes that recipients find it too difficult to unsubscribe and then re-subscribe. So they simply remain subscribed, but with every intention of being more interested in the content in the future.

So, there you have it… “unemotionally subscribed.”

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

I’m on the tail end of a great trip to our London office to speak at our annual customer conference in Europe.

The event was held at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, the very same place that Winston Churchill ran Britain during World War II. For those of you who have read my book, you know that I’m a huge fan of Churchill. It was a powerful experience to visit the place where he lived and worked and to see so many reflections of his words and actions. Most of the 120 people at the event had not been to the museum, and they all agreed it was an amazing venue for a business conference.

The conference, which we called Advanced Email Strategies, was a great snapshot of the U.K. and broader European email marketplace. Our managing director, Mike Weston, did a great job of lining up speakers and delivering high impact content. We took the opportunity to introduce our U.K. retail email marketing study, which highlights trends in email marketing here in the United Kingdom and contrasts them with what we’re seeing in the United States. (You can read the Silverpop press release, which contains a link to get a free copy of the study, here.)

Keep an eye out for my follow-on posting as I get a chance to transcribe my notes on the many things I learned during this knowledge-filled day.

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

I was just thumbing through the recent Direct Marketing Association report, “The State of Retailing Online 2007.” It’s a great report filled with statistics from some of the most sophisticated marketers out there. One section really caught my attention: the comparison of email from 2005 to 2006. In every category, the effectiveness and scope of email marketing improved. Among the findings:

• Open rates went up from 23 percent to 26 percent despite the increased use of image suppression by popular email clients.
• The percentage of retail customers who have opted into the retailers’ lists went up from 45 percent to 55 percent–clearly customers are buying into the value of email.

And, best of all, not only did the average size of the lists explode from 1.6 million names to 2.4 million names in 2006, but so did the average conversion rate–it went up from 5 percent to 6 percent.

This is great news for those of us in the email business. Our channel is increasing in usage while simultaneously increasing in effectiveness. I can only attribute this to the fact that marketers are really adopting the email channel and investing the effort to really make it live up to its potential.

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