Golden Leads

This is a great glimpse into the power of email marketing, Email Data Source released a study today of the Hotel Industry looking at the the Brand Equity Index™ which is defined by “…compiling historical data on email marketing messages and measuring a combination of factors including the emails’ perceived effectiveness in driving website traffic and the quality of the delivered email.”

Top 10 Highest Email Brand Equity Marketers in the Hotel Industry

1 Ritz Carlton - ritzcarlton.com
2 Hampton Inn - hamptoninn.com
3 Wyndham - wyndham.com
4 Marriott - marriott.com
5 Starwood Hotels - starwoodhotels.com
6 Choice Hotels - choicehotels.com
7 Hilton - hiltonhonors.com
8 Best Western - bestwestern.com
9 Hyatt - hyatt.com
10 Accor Hotels - accorhotels.com

Read the Press Release

Thanks to Return on Subscriber for this great article.

We’re publishing some exciting research today – our first case study on our all new Dynamic Content feature.  We worked with DiscountBeautyCenter.com, on a preference-based dynamic content email campaign that included two distinct dynamic content containers that displayed variable data based on past purchase history.  The results of using the preference-based dynamic content version versus the non-preference based version were compelling:

• 15% increase in open rates
• 27% increase in read rates (opened for 5 seconds or more)
• 41% increase in click through rates

The case study is available for free download here.

If you think dynamic content might be for you you’ll be interested in reading Brent Shroyer’s blog post, “Using Dynamic Content for Email Campaign A/B Split Testing.”  It offers a practical approach to using our dynamic content system for email testing.

Here are a few additional Dynamic Content Resources:

• Dynamic Content Strategy Guide
• Best Practices: Creating Relevant Email Campaigns with Dynamic Content

If you’re looking for ways to boost your response rates for your upcoming Holiday Season campaigns it’s not too late to consider using dynamic content.

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.

An effective email marketing program isn’t just a big single-cell creature. It’s an interconnected ecosystem, with many factors that affect its vitality. Using a limited set of metrics to measure performance can mislead you into thinking you’re succeeding wildly or failing miserably.

Instead, use a “balanced scorecard” approach to get readings from all around the ecosystem and help you understand more clearly exactly how well you’re really doing.

This concept, used often by companies to assess corporate performance beyond just financial measures (e.g., customer and employee satisfaction, innovation, brand strength, etc.), can help you grasp the bigger and more complicated picture.

Applied to email, this forces you to move beyond simple metrics such as revenue per campaign or opens and clicks. Both sets of statistics will give you only part of the picture, no matter how accurate they might be.

This concept goes along with my previous EmailInsider column in which I urged you to begin assessing the strength or weakness of your email program in terms of business goals, not just email-oriented metrics.

These seven factors are one example of what might make up the balanced scorecard for your email program:

1. List growth and health

2. Deliverability

3. Message level

4. Campaign performance over time

5. Conversion activity

6. Subscriber/customer engagement and relationship

7. Financial performance and ROI

Using the balanced scorecard can help you assess whether changes in your email program are ultimately helping or hurting it. One classic example is in deciding to increase message frequency in order to bring in more revenue — a timely example as we head into the holiday shopping season.

If you rely only on bottom-line performance, you might think you’ve succeeded if you see an increase in number of orders, order size or total campaign revenue. This is actually what happened with one client that increased mailings from five a month to 12.

However, that increased frequency had a severe cost. Once we looked at process metrics, such as delivery rate, opens, unsubscribes and spam complaints, we uncovered a whole lot of subscriber unhappiness. Spam complaints and unsubscribes went through the roof, outpacing the revenue increase.

The total cost of boosting frequency — reacquiring the subscribers who left, acquiring new ones, sending more campaigns, potential lost revenue — would have actually cost the company money over the longer term and immediately harmed the client’s sender reputation.

The balanced scorecard approach will help you spot problems in other areas so that you don’t find yourself, six months down the road, wondering why you aren’t making money anymore and why your email messages get blocked at every major ISP. And, it doesn’t just help you avoid failing. It can also show you where you are succeeding when you want to measure things other than financial performance, such as customer engagement, list health, etc.

Yes, using a balanced scorecard will take more time and effort, but your reward is a more accurate picture of your email program’s vitality and contribution to your corporate goals. That can help you justify your requests for a bigger share of the marketing-budget pie and for email’s place as a strong channel in a multichannel marketing program.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

I spent yesterday traipsing the floor at Ad:tech — and although there wasn’t much information to report back regarding email, it was interesting to note that the Ad:tech folks are trying a new strategy to deal with the age-old problem of satisfying the vendors and creating meaningful content. With a Solomon-like gesture, they split the baby in two. Monday and Tuesday it was just vendors and no content, and today and Thursday will be just content and no vendors.

The no-content side certainly didn’t seem to affect the traffic at the booths, since the aisles seemed packed as usual. Which makes me wonder why more conferences in our industry don’t just jettison the content side of the program completely and focus 100% on networking and show floor. Of course the answer is: then the agencies don’t show up, which was the biggest complaint I heard on the show floor. Not that that should affect the Ad:tech crowd much, since over the last few conferences in New York, Ad:tech now rivals the Affiliate Show for concentration of PPC- and PPL-type affiliate network companies exhibiting.

Other than the always-great Datran Media after-party, there really wasn’t anything to report about email. Fortunately I ran into Jupiter’s David Daniels, who filled me in on his latest research into the future of email in Europe. According to the latest Jupiter report, there may be trouble ahead for Europe’s growing email business due to the over-reliance on home-grown email applications (or HEAs, as Jupiter likes to call them).

This sets up a kind of Catch-22 situation. The HEAs are not sophisticated enough in their technology to handle the types of segmentation and knowledge-sharing that an ESP would provide. Without that type of sophistication, email results will decline (as will an interest in investing in email as a marketing vehicle, one assumes). The lack of investment in more sophisticated systems that could increase email’s value means that ESPs will be less inclined to invest the time and money to expand into the European marketspace. Meaning a heavier reliance on HEAs. Meaning less ESPs and less sophisticated tools, and so on in an ever-decreasing spiral of lowered ROI for the European email market.

I’m not sure I buy the whole premise, though (although if I were a U.S.-based ESP, I might think twice before entering the European market outside of the UK). We do know, according to previous reports from Jupiter, that a sophisticated approach to email marketing and the incorporation of behavioral targeting will yield higher returns, but the old batch-and-blast method might be just good enough where the majority of segmentation is based on geography. And it seems to indicate that it is a good time for the ESPs already based in Europe to expand, since they will have less to fear when it comes to competition for U.S.-based companies.

One thing is clear, though: Email is growing in Europe, and it is going to be a very interesting market to watch over the next year or so.

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Thanks to Email Insider for this great article.

Dear Email Diva,

I work for a nonprofit and we use an old version of [email software] for our many lists. We continually run into trouble with spam trap email accounts subscribing to our opt-in lists, which causes us to be blocked by Spam Cop. Our aging system doesn’t have an effective way of identifying these or other bad email addresses. Can you recommend a utility that will scrub our subscriber lists?

Dear Nonprofit,

You need to not only clean your list but also take steps to keep it clean. First, a quick definition: a spam trap is an email address that is not tied to a real person, may be published on the Web somewhere, and is used to identify spam, as the non-person could not opt-in for email. EmailDiva@kd-i.com could be used for a spam trap, since it is used only for gathering questions for this column. You would be surprised at the spam I receive, some from legitimate companies that, I hope, have no idea what unscrupulous practices are being used on their behalf.

How do spam trap addresses get on your list? Contrary to what you imply, it is unlikely people are subscribing to your lists with these addresses to thwart you. It is more likely that your organization acquired a list that was harvested, appended or otherwise built using poor permission practices. Inactive email addresses are sometimes converted to spam traps, and, since your “aging system” can’t identify old or bad addresses, this could be another source of spam traps.

In this article George Bilbrey, vice president of delivery assurance solutions for Return Path, suggests that you mail segments of your list from a new server with a clean reputation. If the segment doesn’t cause you to be blocked, you know that portion is free from spam traps. Consider also Return Path’s hygiene services to correct errors and suppress known bad addresses.

You may also want to consider re-permissioning all of your lists, i.e., sending an email to subscribers, asking them to confirm their interest in hearing from you. Unfortunately, this will reduce your list size considerably, as not everyone will receive, open or respond to the email. If your email isn’t getting through, however, this may be a necessary step and will give you the evidence you need to get off block lists and start anew.

Next, it would be worthwhile to take stock of your list-building practices. Habeas offers a super-inexpensive $200 audit for qualifying nonprofit organizations. Let the professionals evaluate your practices and set you on the path to a clean, scrupulously built list.

Finally, you need to use an email application that gives you the feedback you need to keep your list up to date. There are great Email Service Providers at all price points, so there is no reason to do it yourself, particularly when it is crippling your program.

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.