The Email Wars

With the online only brand of Piperlime created by the Gap company, they have been attacking email marketing with deeper links in email campaigns. I was actually excited to see that when I clicked on the SIZES in the email that it actually took my deep into the shoes by size. I know that this might sound logical, but so many times I have seen links that take me into a category and then have me make another selection. It only makes sense that they are taking you right into the action.

But here is another thought… now they have more info on me even if I have not purchased yet. Now they have the data to target me based on sizes that would meet my needs when they have products to clear out. I am interested to see if this will actually be data that they use only for the fact that so often in ecommerce emails I click through only to find that what I was interested in is no longer available in my size.

Whether it is size or anything else, you need to live up to the end users expectations of the offer.

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With all the hype this year on GREEN marketing showing up in email marketing examples I have covered, I got to thinking… Is there really an impact directly tied to email marketing vs other forms of marketing. I did a search in Google tonight on a variety of terms like “green email marketing”, “environmental impact of email marketing” and “energy impact studies on email vs direct mail” and found a lot of results that were inconclusive. I can understand that using email as much as we do now changes the immediate impact on natural resources from a standpoint of paper, fossil fuels to deliver mail in planes, boats and trucks, but what is the real trade off? If you think about all of the servers, computers plugged in and mobile devices using power, does it truly reduce the use of energy? I mean as I type on a laptop right now while not plugged in I could argue an immediate savings on energy, but in the end I need to charge this battery again and I am on a wifi unit that is plugged in while connected to the cloud of servers running the web and this blog software.

So did it really make a difference?

Here is a pitch I read on an email web site this week, does this really tell the truth or is this an example of “green washing”.

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“Help Save Our Trees. Make a GoldMail.”

Every year billions of greetings cards and newsletters are sent all over the world, whose manufacture means millions of trees are destroyed.

It occurred to me that if I could encourage some of us who care about our environment to switch to GoldMail when sending greetings and newsletters, maybe we could save some of these trees.

This seems like something that lots of us could easily do, as GoldMail messages are actually more personal and fun, and easy to create.

I also like the fact that they are free!

So if you don’t mind, do me a favor and give GoldMail a try, and let’s see if together we can do a little bit to Help Save Our Trees.
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Has anyone seen any studies out there on this issue? I can find a ton from the DMA and DM News citing the impacts of DM, but nowhere can I find the impact of email.

Just a thought tonight as I think this is something we should investigate this year before all the marketers herald email marketing as sustainable and green.

What are your thoughts?

Ever since I covered a few emails from Diesel, Coors Lights, FHM it seems that people are open to trying the wide format. This one was forwarded over to me today from David Baker at AveA (thanks David) and shows another brand giving it a try. It was very good.

BUT, here is where it went wrong (sorry to bash it)… the links in the first part of the message that have the arrows aimed right should be active links to take you across it using anchor tags. Clicked, but no action. Even when I opened the message in a view as web page window they still did not work.

Well can’t fault them 100% as they tried dammit. And if you aren’t trying and testing you are not growing an email program. Props to Samsonite to giving it a whirl.

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I have reached out to quite few luminaries in the email marketing industry and asked for what they see coming in 2008 in email marketing.

Keep you eyes peeled for posts written by them for this email blog.

Cheers and love to hear your thoughts on what they are predicting.

Shouldn’t I Have Some Gray Hair? Maybe some nice silver wings at least?

I just realized that I have been working in email marketing for 10 years this year. Wow how everything has changed, well for most of us. So does this make me a gray hair in this industry? Feels like dog years to tell you the truth as I don’t know any difference between one year to another now. Things just move faster and ideas flow better.

Have we really seen improvements in the approach to email marketing? I think as a whole we have seen a massive shift in the past 3 years to people and brands trying to do the right thing. But are we taking it as far as it can go? Not yet. This is still an opportunity for all of us to try to do better and do bigger things. The focus on reputation, frequency and relevancy are still gaining ground and should continue to be your focus in 2008.

Just waxing poetic on the year ahead as I think it is going to be a good one for not only us as email marketers, but for the consumer and subscriber to start getting what they want out of email marketing.

We spend so much time trying to educate and pull the email marketing industry to the top, internally. So why aren’t we all working to educate the public about what we are all doing? Do you have some local, regional, national, or even trade opps to get the word out on what we are all doing to try to make this this best experience ever for people. What we are doing with clients to force compliance, best practices, and even education.

Most of us are trying so hard to do the right thing, to get the emails in our customers inbox that we would want to get in our own inbox.

If you have any ideas on how to get the word out, we need to focus on this message. We are not the bad guys, but the brands that people have ASKED (aka Opted in to) to hear from.

Love to get some ideas brewing for 2008 of what media opps the industry could focus on to tell the story to the consumers. I think proactive public education is the way we all need to work in 2008.

Bill McCloskey is concerned about email marketing. Why?

It is a hard thing to do to look at what the industry is doing financially as a whole? Services, Agency, Analytics, and other systems that make email campaigns successful. And how much revenue are the campaigns generating. What is the REAL impact financially of email marketing? Some studies show 10-15% of all online revenue is driven by email. BUT we need to get the CEOs reading this type of news.

The attention that email gets is easily pulled away from whatever is hot or sexy this week, month or quarter. Why aren’t we getting the story out there, defining the industry and growing the people in this industry? It needs to all be done. The EEC is driving alot of this, but we need to all drive it in 2008.

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Morgan Stewart and Matt from Agent Silver Fox:

Search drives incremental email programs. Many search campaigns drive new leads and registrants.
Lining up the destinations on the site with the search ads (custom ad landing pages) has a higher lead capture and conversion metric.

How can we use a search budget to drive goals and revenue? The challenge is if core keywords are not converting, then you have some issues. Long tail keywords need to be tested as well. They don’t belive that brand keywords are a marketing tactic, rather a desired result of other marketing tactics. These are a result of other advertising efforts and other mediums.

Email campaigns actually caused a lift in search traffic during and following email drops to in-house lists and partner lists. 3% of people will search by brand keywords after an in-house email campaign. 20% CTR… partner or sponsored lists are strong but not as good. Email impacts immediate traffic from search, which makes brand keyword ownership of PFC programs very important.

Important to work on your SEO/SEM around the times of email campaign drops. Maybe look at the increase in PFC spend during a campaign window.

Case of a customer with a 1 million person partner email drop resulted in 5000 additional brand searches when compared to other times.

David Baker presented with a panel of long time software guys to talk about should you build, rent (ESP) or buy a email marketing platform solution.

Dave Hendrix, Datran Media
Ryan Deutsch, StrongMail
Cliff Seltzer, puresend

56% of people are using “in-house solutions”
33% are using ESPs
39% are using an advanced ESP (dedicated IP Address)
15% utilize a hosted service and outsource full service
46% are using in house and also using hosted service
36% of marketers using in house are considering shifting to an outsourced service.

APIs are an issue with some ESPs and some don’t integrate as they should

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Just a little gift to all of you from the team here at eROI. There is more to the story than the game.

1. We hate spam and junk just as much IF not more than you do.
2. We partnered with a vinyl toy company we LOVE, UNKLBrand.com to produce these versions of their HazMaPo Character for us based on our designs. Took a few months to design and have manufactured, but it was worth it. We sent out this weekend 100s of them to people we work with (aka customers), partners, and friends so that they can add killROI to their desk or shelf to remind them to keep fighting the battle to send out relevant and opt in emails.
3. We love games.
4. We wanted to not make another pen, mug, note pad etc, that you see all over the place.

This entire game was produced in-house with our design team. Even the voices are on the team as well as the original sound track that was inspired by those catchy little tunes of the 1980s video games.

So carve out 5 minutes and take killROI on a mission to battle the forces that hammer your inbox. Maybe blowing off some steam and thinking about how you can make a personal impact on the war on these spammers will set your mind straight in 2008.

Cheers.

This panel could be titled: A Bunch of Smart People Who Like to Talk.

The “f’s” in email marketing:
Focus, Free, Facebook, Feedback Loops, Frequency, … Fundamental Mindshift

What is LOVE in email marketing and how do we think about it?
1. Gain Engagement
2. Drive Sales
3. Build Brand

Rewards:
Content, First Release of news/events/studies
Community: Message Boards, Forums, rating, Product Reviews

Do rewards foster relevance? (my 2 cents is no)
Hal: Asking people what is relevant to them, collect the data and then feed back the offers makes the difference.

Brian: Cisco found that they do not tell Cisco all that often as to what is relevance. They have tied web analytics to the email campaigns to build better relevance, timing and targeting.

What do you focus on?
Relevance? Content? Relationship? Device/Technology

If you are playing in the mobile space, you need to have mobile landing pages and campaigns that can actually work in mobile.

Year in Review for 2007:

Will your budget be higher – same to higher – overwhelmingly budgets are going up from people in the room
Will your team grow? Bigger teams will be added to email marketing in most companies
Did you ROI on email increase from 2006 to 2007? Full MIX on the answer, many are not sure how to exactly measure ROI.
Was email managed on a global basis more in 2007? Enterprise showed more, but mid size said it was coming together more, but still some control challenges.
Was email managed as a part of the mix in marketing plans? YES
Does your boss or CEO care more? MORE are paying attention as they are seeing it more.. One note was that the BOSS is now concerned about the mobile device as they are carrying them now and see the campaigns.

3rd Party Applications are the way.
They are 100% opt in and can be removed JUST as fast in FB.

You could actually build an app that uses RSS from emailROI and feed those messages into the Facebook application. You need to manage the interaction within the screen. Not the inbox.

Right now FB is a proprietary network. Right back to the old Myspace/AOL.LinkedIn days. We ended up back in the position of where we were 5 years ago. Where are the open networks? Why can’t port the systems we need into these networks. Why not IMAP or POP3 integration? Why not a webmail account?

FB has also added this past week the message in the email alert instead of driving you back to read them.

This is an interesting session as it is more about building a FB app and using your email content to populate the app and use the Newsfeeds to trigger alerts. Issue: Newsfeeds can fall off your screen as only X amount stay on your page. Offering some value is more important to me. I think actually NOT crreating a FB app is a better strategy and instead creating a FAN page and use that to message.

Others in the audience agree that using RSS from an email campaign is an EASY way to get this integrated instead of needing to build a custom app.

David Daniels is always entertaining to talk with and hear speak. He injects comedy into his presentations to keep it engaging. He presented some numbers that we can chomp on and digest that helped me see the picture from a broader perspective in a few areas.

How are people spending time?
Email 87%, Search 70%, Research 64%, Purchase 60%, IM 37%.
These are the top activities by online consumers, not consumers in general.

We no longer “surf” but we search and research. The days of just surfing the web looking for things has long past. We are now using it as a vehicle to find and learn.

The average person gets 274 emails a week in personal email. 304 emails a week at work email. 74% of people have 2 email accounts. 8% triage emails with handheld devices. (Growing) 18% of heavy email buyers use mobile.(Those with patterns of buying more frequently from email). Meaning that they use the mobile device to deal with emails prior to reading them in the inbox. What this tells us that mobile is important and the message needs to be clear. If they decide to delete it at the hand hand level and have the handheld in sync with the inbox client, you might never get that trackable read.

Spam is down and 26% of the inbox is OPT IN email campaigns. I know it seems that spam never lets down, but it is slowing. And the fact the 26% of the inbox is opt in marketing campaigns means that 74% of the emails are typical personal or business correspondence.

Devices are building more choice. Also building more push back on control and time in people’s lives. Mobile saves me time… but mobile is taking over my life. There have been a few people that are taking back control by getting off email entirely. Now this demo is small, but worth considering and keeping tabs on.

What have you used instead of email?
27% Texting more – easier, instant, gratifying (34 and under)
44% are 18-25 / 49% are 25-34
38% are social
Skews Male in TXT use
This group gets 8.5% more email than the average person.

Cell Phone:
79% use it more than email as a communication device
87% are 25-34 that use it as a communication device
21% are social users
Skews female in use
Very active email buyers (more than 4 purchases from campaigns a year)

IM:
67% are 18-24
35% are social users, meaning they use it to talk to friends and peers.
No gender difference
They get 8% more email than average

Life is getting FASTER and the devices we use are getting wider and more part of society.

Facebook:
18% of the online pop have used facebook and others for personal communication instead of email
Massive skew in usage by age.

Question from the Audience:
Maybe this younger demo is using it as they don’t work yet. Maybe once they get jobs they will move to email more. Do you think that people as they get older will fall into using email more than social networks?

Email Marketin is growing from 1.2 billion in 2007 to 2 billion in 2012. this number does not include email agencies, design services and strategy. Just the ESP, Etc.

Why people opt out:
53% of people unsub due to irrelevance.
40% due to frequency
26% unsub using this this is Spam or Junk button.

Targeting:
27% of email marketers actually use click data to retarget and engage behaviorally.
This is surprising to me as it is the easiest way to create new campaigns based on past email campaign behavior.

e-miles: “Miles are the crack cocaine of the affluent”

Loyalty programs with miles work across all niches. Using programs that reward with airline miles show a higher loyalty value than other programs.

Every reward and program is done with email.

Borders Rewards: 20 million participants in the program whom get a weekly Rewards newsletter

105 million emails and click through of 19.8%, Demo is younger or older, but the 40-50 falls off.

Member participation:
Airlines invite their 15 million members, to join you complete your profile, ask frequency rates, send a double optn in email that rewards them off the bat by confirming (as they had some issues with the emails getting read), and then the campaigns start.

Email is used weekly to remind of earning opps. 25% of members respond to earning opportunities.

To earn 5 miles, you need to COMPLETE the action. Now wether that is watch a 30 second ad, take a survey etc, you must do it all. Now to earn 5 miles, that’s the equivalent of $5 on your credit card spend, you need to take 3-5 minutes. I am personally interested to see why I would have additional time each day to answer these surveys for 5 miles. Many others in the audience could not see how 5 miles would be attractive to them.

He reports that these actions lift brand awareness as well as “intent” to purchase. I am always on the fence about the “intent” to purchase factor. I like the measurement of what was the lift on sales as a measurement personally. The ROI….

Wednesday was the best day to send email in Q3.

With our new Resources Center Launch, we have built a way for you to return and take studies and materials that will help you with your email marketing efforts. This new center will smartly remember what assets you have downloaded to keep you from mistakenly taking guides and studies that you have already read. Trust us this occurs all the time. With a few simple registration fields, you can easily access the Center at your leisure again and again.

As we look at Q3 2007 email statistics, we present three sets of information, day of the week, hour of the day and consumer-focused industries (perfect for the holiday season). Monday and Wednesday lead the way for users to open email. The weekends, for the first time in over a year, are the low point. Clicks on the other hand see spikes on Wednesday, Thursday and, the highest day of the week, Saturday (however, Saturday volume is so low it is incomparable to the rest of the week).

We have reported for more than three years that opens and clicks do not always go hand in hand, which is consistent with our findings from this study. Volumes drop of significantly on the weekend, but if you are focusing on consumer email, you can see that building up to the weekend comes to a head on Saturday.

Wednesday is the clear leader of the week, look at Wednesday as your target day to send email and
give it a test, see how it works for you.

Get the Full Study in our NEW Resources Center>>