The Email Wars

Back in January Mark Brownlow from Email Marketing Reports reached out to me to ask me a series of questions for an upcoming series of posts for his blog. I took some time to read through his questions and responded back a few days later.

Well some time went by and I all but forgot about the questions and answers I provided. Well this past few week it seems that he published them, along with the thoughts of a few others in the email marketing world.

The result is a good read and I wanted to share the links with you. Enjoy.

Part One: Working with email marketing consultants #1 When?

Part Two: Working with email marketing consultants #2: Who?

Part Three: Working with email consultants #3: How?

This year was a special year for the eROI team. Instead of SIX people we sent FIFTEEN of the team representing all of the specialized groups to the SXSW Interactive event in Austin, Texas. Five Days, 15 people, 1000s of ideas, and 30 helpings of Ribs.

With this many people passionate about everything digital but with different views and agendas for SXSW, we decided that we would be able to cover more of the event, panels and sessions (as well as parties) by setting out to follow our own individual plans and paths to learning. The sum of the collective is more powerful than that of the individual right? The plan was for all of us to recap lessons and new ideas learned whether we could find usable ways to employ them in our projects or lives or not. By covering more we could ingest more. There was an implied “ROI” in the whole growth of the attendee plan and we would share our knowledge with the entire team when we returned.

But why stop just at our team, why not share it all with you? If you read our other blogs (notice them in the top header of this blog) you will find that everyone is openly recapping sessions, conversation and ideas that they brought back with them.

Here is what we learned from the event:

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This question has been on my mind this past week as I worked with one of our banking clients on a new project. What entered my mind was not what they were doing, but what others deem the difference to be.

Now my understanding, and I would love your thoughts, is that a transactional email is one that:

1. Confirms an order or action that you need a confirmation email

2. An alert in a change in status or account

3. A change in relationship, privacy policy or access

Now there is a fine line in transactional emails where you can (using best practices) allocate 20% of the message to allow a marketing message. Apple does this well with iTunes transactional email receipts. They do not lead with it, nor does it interfere with the transactional email message. Subject lines are clear, copy is clear and the message can be easily scanned to know what is occurring.

But then this weekend I got this email from Technorati. I had to pause to understand if this was a transactional email OR a marketing email. My first thought was that it was alerting me to changes at Technorati in regard to features and my account. But as I read through it more, it seemed to be a straight marketing message.

So then why would they not add CAN SPAM compliance to this message? No unsubscribe, no address footer, nothing. I was a a total failure. The subject line was deceiving to me in that it made me think that it was a service message about Publishing Content on Technorati. Take a look and tell me your thoughts.

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I am not going to go on a rant on adding a share this, follow me, digg this, or another technology to your email programs in order to drive cross channel adoption of your email strategy. What I want to do is show you how others are using email as the delivery vehicle to drive adoption.

We are “jumping the shark” on things used as more clutter in email to try to move email past the inbox. Now I am not against these other mediums, heck I use them all as well, but what I am against is the Nascar like efforts to add more things to do in email.

Instead of rushing to add the next new thing to your email marketing programs, take a step back. Look at your audience and see if adding these things are valuable to your subscribers. Are you trying to just add a feature for the sake of staying up with the comp? You need to make sure that they will work for you before you go system wide with implementation.

Look at taking small groups of people from your lists and test some ideas. I have actually looked at taking these people and looking across social media and community systems to see if they actually exist with profiles or accounts in these locations. You are not going to be the driver of new technology adoption, you are going to be the one to leverage existing places that they might “live”.

Let’s move away form the Nascar badging stategey of more and more and think clearly about the How and Why. You will find that your subscribers will thank you and your efforts will work better. You need to have a goal and just adding “social” features will not be an means to the end.

At the end of last week I was working away when I took a moment to scroll through TweetDeck to see what I had missed while my head was down. I noticed a promotion from Time Magazine Inc that was giving away 5 issues of personalized magazines either in print or digital format. Well since eROI works with so many publishers (Inc., Fast Co., Maxim, Business Week, CBS Watch, Mediapost, Smithsonian, and a host of others) as well as with a client Zinio that is the leader in digitizing magazines I had to take a look.

Now the personalization of print and digital magazines was my the lead for my interest, but when I got to the landing page I noticed some great ideas as work. Now I would typically look at this landing page as asking for a ton of information, but you need to give to get remember, until I saw the “personalization” fields. They were not the typical questions I would have thought of myself in order to target someone with content later on, but they were good. Even great in my opinion as they asked personal information based on tastes and preferences rather than just do you A or B.

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I just got back from SXSW last week and took a lot away. I am planning on typing up and sharing the things with those of you that might benefit from the ideas shared there.

But in leaving Austin and looking at the world from afar it seems that everyone now believes themselves to be a social media strategist. Just take some time to look at community profiles, blogs, twitter bios, etc and you will see that every marketer that exists wants to add the title to their bio. Why? Well is it hot and everyone wants to jump on the band wagon to find the money that is quickly leaving the budgets of other mediums.

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I don’t normally use an email marketing competitiors emails to show failures, but this one is a good one to have a discussion with you. When is personalization needed and not just something that gets thrown in. As you can see when you personalize and you do not have the data point in the CRM, it is simply a FAIL.

Now personalization can be a powerful medium, but when used as simply as “FIRSTNAME” it is weak sauce in my opinion. Would it really lift this newsletter by using my first name in a “Dear Dylan” (oops they did not have my firat name) scenario? Not likely from tests that I have tried before.

What would have been better was if they knew a releavant article or subject line to engage me with instead of JV personaliztion. This is a good example of why you can get into trouble with using it. When you have a small list it is easy to check and see, and even more relevant is that you need a back up plan for any data point that could possibly not exist in just one record. We often use a tactic of coming up with a generic word that would be inserted into any field or rule set that would populate data/elements if none exists.

Do you think that simple personalization works in a scenario like this? It is a newsletter. Something that you send to everyone, so why would my name make it better opened, read and clicked on?

Something to think about before you engage in your next campaign with data elements.

For as long as I have been in interactive marketing (circa 1996) I continue to read articles (and now posts) about what is going to kill what. Portals to kill message boards. Text messages to kill email. Video to kill email. Community sites to kill email. RSS to kill email. Facebook/MyScace/Bebo/insert social media site name here to kill email. Viral to kill email. Twitter to kill email. INSERT ANY WORD HERE to kill email.

Notice a trend here? Right everything to kill email. But the reality is that nothing is killing email. Well let me rephrase that. The only thing that is killing email is when marketers do it poorly. Sure if you keep sending out poor creative, image only email, too much email, not segmented email, or just thoughtless email, you will kill your own programs. But folks… email is not dying. Not even close. It is still (no matter the latest study issued from another online medium) the best performing channel in marketing that exists today.

But then why do we read this over and over again? Well it is the medium to beat. Other mediums want to kill it off or make marketers think that they need to spend money somewhere else. And those that do will suffer.

Why is this? Well I can tell you as a strategist that works at an ESP and interactive agency that other mediums will perform. We use all the above mediums in our campaigns as they can all provide lift when done right. But what always kills me is that when I see great campaigns that use another medium to drive traffic, sales, and opt ins and never use them again. What? You have not seen this? Well maybe because you are doing it right and the fact that you read this blog is due to the reason that you know its power. But so many other people fail at using it before, during or after a campaign. I know foolish, but trust me when I tell you that I see it every week.

My belief is that good campaigns start, use, or end with email. If you are not using it to engage with your audience no matter the campaign today, you are doing yourself an injustice. You are not just doing it to yourself, but hurting the relationship you just spent money to foster.

Don’t be so fast to dismiss what people want to use to hear from you. You are not your audience, you are the alpha end user that lives in this space. Pull yourself away from the campaign when you create and execute it.

I thought it would be nice to share with you an internal email that goes out every Thursday to the eROI team. We are fortunate to have a Yoga class on the 4th floor each and every Friday morning for anyone at the company to participate it. Now what do email and yoga and eROI have in common, well we even market to ourselves.

That’s right. We drink the kool aid on all internal events. We send out emails to promote Brews and News on Friday at 4pm, Yoga, Team Building events, and even ALL new employees are trained on our emailROI platform and must send their first email campaign out to the entire company to show them that they know how to use it. Our passion goes past the point of selling it. We use it.

So this past week was St. Pats day and being the resourceful team that we are the event was applied to the weekly email for Yoga. That is right we use a calendar event to drive participation in our yoga class. I thought it was a great example to share. Notice even the Pre-Headers at the top of the email where we use the event and the time so that it is clear. Putting the event and time at the top are paramount in the early AM hours to drive folks to get in the Warroir or Downward Dog.

Email is a medium that can be used for about anything, when it is relevant.

Twitter, Yammer and Other Social Media Still Subservient to Email

I read this article posted at Mediapost this past week and it just makes me happy that others share my views. To be clear I am a HUGE fan of new media and new media distribution methods. You might find a series of posts this week that back this up as I have this running though in my mind and started getting it out into writing in some posts.

The fact is this, I am in email marketing so I write this blog about email. But I am not just an email marketer. I am a strategist that thinks about ever medium that best serves my clients and projects.

It was good to read the Mediapost article that hammers home again the point that all media not matter new or old still counts on email as a driver to consumption, use and engagement. Think about it the next time you put a campaign together or make a recommendation to your company of a client and forget to include email. You would be a fool to forget it.

Read the Article

This seems to be an ongoing conversation that many email marketers have each day. Now you will read that so many are okay with cleaning up their lists in order to have better performing email campaigns. But then on the flip side so many of them are nervous to break up with subscribers do to inactivity, poor conversion and even bounces in some cases.

Well welcome to the couch. I will let you know that it is ok. You will be fine. Your campaigns will perform better. You will not be fired.

But is there a better way to approach this as no one really (no matter what they say) is comfortable with the cleansing of a subscriber list. Sure there is. Here is how I might suggest you approach it.

First: Build your Campaign. Focus on two segments to test. I would push you to the win back campaign to get them reengaged. While taking the other approach of letting them know clearly that they can manage their profile or preferences (if you have a preference center) to find things that are more relevant to them. Maybe they only want to hear form you less and you have been pounding them outside of their engagement cycle.

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Well it is that time of year again. No not the setting of the clocks forward. No not the return to spring. No not the time that we clean up our lists and break up with those that are not participating in our email programs…

But the time is upon us to return to South By Southwest in Austin TX. And I am giddy like a school girl the night before the first day of Jr. High. This year eROI is returning not to speak, not to exhibit but to participate in SXSWi. And we are not going into this Spring Break for geeks and marketers lightly. We are taking an army of 15 people from the company to soak up every morsel of noughuty goodness that we can bring back to share the execute some amazing campaigns for our clients.

If you have not ever been to this event it should be on your “fight with every ounce of your corporate travel budget” list to attend. The amount of openness, knowledge sharing, connecting and of course celebrating is enormous. Each time we return we seem to spend the next 11 months planning on how to get back.

So if you happen to be going, come find us. Follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/eROI) to see where we are at. OR you can meet us at a client party (RSVP soon) on Saturday night where they will introduce a new killer app coming to the web this summer. Just in time for all of us to benefit from it.

RSVP at http://moonitdoesroux-invitefriends.eventbrite.com/

Not sure we will be blogging from the event, but for sure we will be tweeting away.

Have you experimented with Coupons lately in email marketing programs? I found this article talking about them used in search but it felt like people might react the same in email. Just yesterday I got an email from the GAP Companies for a 30% friends and family deal. Typically I do not go for the coupon, not sure why really when I love a deal, but I went for this one.

So maybe the idea that I would like to lead with for thought is could search lead email? What I mean by this is could we as email marketers or just marketers take the terms and trends we are seeing in organic search and paid search and build campaigns and offers around these terms/results?

It would not be “behaviorally” based but could be quite relevant to take what we hear when we listen to what the customer is looking for and playing it forward.

Coupon search clicks: Sweet sound for Web marketers By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY

Consumers have a recession message for marketers: Will click for coupons.

As consumers troll online to save money, searches that include value words such as “coupons” rose 161% in December vs. 2007 to 19.9 million and “discount” rose 26% to 7.9 million, reports tracker ComScore.

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I wanted to post this article that I wrote a few weeks back that went live this AM on eMarketing and Commerce Magazine. Love your comments on the article as I think that there is a larger conversation around this thought.

PS the photo below is from Portland, Oregon. Which if you did not know is THE Center of the Universe.

From the Magazine:

Over the past two years, we’ve seen a shift: Marketing messages are no longer based on the timetables of campaigns and the inbox. Instead, they take place anywhere and everywhere consumers have a place to voice their opinions — or lurk and read those of others.

E-mail marketers are trying to embrace this change, but they still seem too limited in their focus. Some marketers, for example, simply add the “ShareThis” or “AddThis” button to the bottom of their e-mail messages, or create Facebook pages to drive their messages into other social media locations. While these tactics won’t fail, they offer a narrow view of how e-mail and online marketing can be effective moving forward.

Read the Full Article >>

I wanted to share with you my article or questions I answered for Marketing Profs last month which they only published a few of my answers. Since it was truncated I thought you might want to see my full answers to their questions.

A) What makes a good subject line?

Are length, brevity and personalization the keys to good subject lines? I have found that it’s not this magic combination, but the constant testing and versioning of your subject lines. Good subject lines are not simply conjured by a copywriter and often can’t be repurposed time and time again. Good subject lines are ones that are in constant state of flux and improvement.

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