The Email Wars

In the world of multichannel and location opt in and opt out how do you keep your lists in sync? Can you?

Let me put some scenarios on the table to give you some real world examples of challenges I have been facing in some recent work with a retailer.

1. Your customer opts in from your site. First time here and they subscribe to your newsletter. They want to simply get your newsletter about alerts and deals. Easy and done.

2. They buy some merchandise from you and at the checkout, since you had the box checked (bad idea) they opted in again to your newsletter through your store. Simple enough as I am sure you would not duplicate the opt in as you already have that record and relationship in place. Or do you. Best idea here is to flag the change in record date and location of subscription again OR at least have a data point in your subscriber record to reflect this secondary opt in. Also at risk here depending on how you have your welcome stream set up is triggering: another double opt in message, not letting them know that they are already subscribed and maybe pointing them in another direction for something else to subscribe to (hey maybe a customer communications preference center?), or making sure that you do not start your welcome or email customer lifecycle string again and quickly make yourself look foolish. Okay easy to handle.

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After a long road of building a new platform for eROI for future application development of our existing products we finally launched the first live release of our eROI Event on demand software event registration platform. Now you might be thinking what does this happen to do with email marketing? Well I will get to that but understand that it ties right into engagement campaigns. What is so awesome about our new event registration software platform is that it is completely open to build on.

Many of you might have used simple things like Evite or EventBrite and those have a place out there, but what they don’t have is the APIs and the ability for a team to rapidly build, write business rules, apply theming, and deploy and event for a company or group in little time that does not feel like someone else’s site. Those have always been my personal dislikes of these event software applications, the non-ability to make it mine. After all it is my event and my brand, not that of the provider that throws ads, upsells and data collection in place that does not benefit me but them. And with eROI Event you even get open data exporting to take the data you collect into your own systems, CRM, ESP or something as simple as Excel if that is what you need. It’s yours not ours and you have control at your fingertips. Take a look at all the features here.

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We all know that content is king. And we know just as well that one of the hardest things to do is constantly create new content in time for all of your email marketing campaigns. What makes it interesting was this approach that Zinio took a few weeks back by looking at the content that they create for their publishers and using it as a way to produce an impactful daily email that not only is cool but really does a great job of exposing their subscribers to the breadth of content available to digital subscribers.

Now how hard was this? Not too terribly difficult from speaking to them. It was something that was readily available and already being produced in the digital publications they worked on every day. So why not leverage what already exists and use it as a source of compelling content to share and drive engagement and exposure for not only their clients but for themselves.

The great part about this idea is that it completely maps back to the business goals… selling digital magazines and publications. WIN.

It makes me think about all of the clients we work with that might have existing content that they don’t realize they might be able to use, driving down the cost of campaign creation and mapping back to success. Are you blogging, Tweeting, posting, writing, uploading images, videos etc in your other business units and marketing activities? If so are you making sure that the time spent doing all of these things are being utilized and exposing them to the fullest in your audiences? So many times I see companies all working hard on siloed content that is only being used by certain teams and being shared with specific people. Why not think bigger and think about how you can share this content across relevant segments of your markets? Who knows you might just stumble on a gem of a email marketing program and end up boosting the bottom line not only of your team but of the company as a whole.

Get out and take stock of what you are doing and what you are producing to see if you too can benefit from content in your companies already existing tasks.

This week I was over on the Washington Post site to read an article that I was pointed to from Twitter (one of the best things about Twitter is the link sharing of relevant articles) and noticed a great new call out on the top left corner for newsletter sign up. Of course being a email marketing student (in the slant of I learn and search for new things each day) I was excited to see them dedicate such prime real estate to the opt in when typically portals like this focus just on the ad placement. So figuring that this was one of the last remaining lists I might not be on, I clicked through to sign up for some emails to keep me in the loop.

Simply enough right?

Well no. What happened was a major let down to me. They wanted me to create an account. Last thing I checked I was just signing up for some newsletters to come to my inbox and not thinking I needed a full blown account to do so. Quite a disconnect IMHO. Well one good thing they had going on was using Facebook Connect to log me in. But yet this did not solve the problem of signing up for the newsletters. It was only to log me in temporarily into the site. Although I am a BIG fan of using Facebook Connect for the log in ability (we use it on many eROI client sites now) it did not close the loop of getting me registered for newsletters.

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We know that an email campaign drives an increase in site traffic during that campaign, BUT does it correlate to an increase in paid search terms and costs? This was an interesting idea that came up in a conversation the other day after a conference that I spoke at. The individual that brought this up to me wanted to know if I had seen this impact as they had seen it over and over again in days trailing the drop of a campaign.

It made me write it down to look at later and see if I could find any correlation between the two. It made sense due to the fact that you were top of mind in the hours, days or week after getting the attention of someone in the inbox. Now they might have not had time to take action on the email but there is sure to be some latent impact to search traffic afterward.

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What a difference a little TLC in updating your email creative can make. Although you might not be overhauling the information that goes into your emails, just working on better information presentation and organization can make a huge impact on the readability of the content itself.

I was happy to see an eROI client take this to task with the updating of their daily news email recently. In applying some simple techniques of colors, boxes, headline copy sizes and the addition of some images it is now such a better experience. What really made an impact to me was the division of information/content in the changes. I can now easily scan and make decisions based on what is important in this email.

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I was excited this past week to stumble upon a new site/blog that one of our favorites is behind. You might know Anne Holland from the days of MarketingSherpa - but she went a little off the grid for a while. Well she is back and brings us a great new site that not only shares with us real world tests of all sorts of creative, but adds some flair to it of allowing you to vote on which test you think won the test.

I love this idea as so many of us think that we know the best way to do everything. I took a few tests on this site and I can tell you I was not 100% in my gut answers. I missed some based on what I thought would have been the best test. That was refreshing not only to know that my gut is not always right, but that I was educated after my guess as to why one test out performed another.

It led me to think more about the importance of testing as what we “know” is not always what works best. It hammers home the fact that if we are not testing we might not get the best result. Sure we might have good results with our campaigns, but if we are not challenging our own concepts of perfect execution than we might be missing out on a a significant lift or impact to our campaigns.

Thanks Anne for popping back onto the old interweb and giving us a place to learn in an interactive manner and test what we “know”. I am looking forward to seeing what weekly tests are up next to help me and our clients at eROI.