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.

Come on now we all know that black and white is so 2002. What we need to see more of is great colors used to drive the user through the email creative. When you see this email it makes this hotel seem so much more than just a place to lay your head on your next stay. It is selling the experience of travel and the many things you might be able to enjoy.

What some people might immediate feel about this creative though is that it is ALL image based. So little copy that what happens if images are blocked? I agree on this point, but since I did not have my images off nor did I have this coming to an inbox that blocks images I cannot tell you if they had alternate versions set up to render differently in email clients with different settings.

But what I do know is that the visual presentation was enough to make me want to read down to the bottom of the email. It is simple, well organized and easy to navigate. Even the “footer” area with the city names were great links to “save” my scroll and incent me to explore the cities that I travel to often in order to see what might be of interest to me on my next trip.

Why do colors matter to drive action? Well they make us take notice of action. Anne Holland shows us this in a recent test she ran that might help you understand why. I encourage you to try bringing more “life” to your emails and the experience that color brings to action.

Our constant travel schedule is keeping our team on the road this year. We have already logged NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Denver, Scottsdale, LA, SF, Eugene, PDX and DC on our US 09 Tour. But coming up you can find us in a few more cities at different events.

June 25 (SFO), June 29 (PDX), July 1 (SEA) – yes we live by airport codes now.

Designing Your Email Program From Online Outreach to the Welcome Message

So often the basics are missed at creating an experience from the point of engagement of your email practices to the relationship building process. Come learn about how to properly set expectations, develop relationships, and onboard your new subscribers in order to maximize the efforts your online search, campaigns and programs deliver to your online marketing efforts. Learn from real world examples from leading consumer and business to business companies that are doing it right.

You can find Alex Williams in SEA and PDX and Dylan Boyd (me) in SFO. Love to see you there.

Other events we know of through the summer months will be close to home in PDX. In the fall we will be jumping back on the road so stay tuned if you want to meet up with our team.

There are many ways to say thanks and recognize your subscribers on your email file. You can simply say thank you. You can give them something that no one else has access to. You can give them an incentive – or best yet you can combine all of these ideas into an email campaign that drives business results.

Smith and Hawken did just this in their recent campaign from this past week by using the top of the email real estate to tell subscribers thanks while at the same time not only giving them access to save through this email campaign, but using it to extend an offer that lives through the whole month of June. Why do I like this? Well we often use email campaigns to present an offer that is focused on just this specific campaign, leaving people to trash it if they are not interested at this exact moment. But using the whole month as an extension of this one email campaign provides a way for people to keep this email available.

You might not be in “market” today but the idea that you might anytime in a month is a good way to increase the value of the offer. Not only on one purchase but on anything you decide you might want to get over a 30 day period. Smart.

I also love the subject line as from tests I have tried the numeric list (10 things) seems to tell people that there might be something of value besides just the one offer.

Try to think of new ways that you can extend the value of your campaigns past NOW while at the same time making it feel more important by thanking them at the same time. Well executed.

I know that all of you are under a increasing barrage of spam and junk lately, if you are not consider yourself lucky. Personally I have had over 700 emails arrive in my junk folder just in the last 24 hours and those are the ones just making it through. Whew. I have seen others talking about it online and in places like Twitter. So things like this email just put me over the edge on why all of a sudden valid emails are being targeted again.

But I will digress a little on that topic and wanted to share with you this Train Wreck of an email. And why is it so bad for me? Well let me show you.

First it is coming from a valid company but being sent from someone spoofing the offer. Actually I think that it is a third party trying to drum up some business for Vista Print.

Next up is the ENORMOUS header text link to show images. Really is that your main concern ahead of the email offer and creative? So you know you are having issues with images being suppressed when someone gets this stuff.

Then we have the box of copy telling you NOT to respond to this email as this is a email address that is not monitored. That is a great tactic to use with email marketing. Hey we sent you this but don’t bother responding as we don’t read the emails you send to us. Nice.

But is ends with my favorite thing. THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT with a whole footer all about Can Spam compliance and how this email is not a violation of this law. Really if you have to state it, then it most likely is unsolicited email and worthy of a complaint.

In the end I think if you need to use all of these things in your email message and cannot just focus on doing the right thing then it can join my Hall of Fame of crap. Please do me a favor and keep your emails to yourself. After all I don’t respond to junk.

There was an interesting idea at Online Marketing Summit in Chicago last week about mapping the image paths you use in your emails to file locations that you can change IF there is a timely event. What does this mean? Well imagine that you have a time based event or sale going on and your email creative has images in it that give a time based offer or discount code. So what happens to this email if your subscribers open it after the event is over? Should they still get that image and offer? OR could you control the email after the send?

Not at all like this image here in this post, but it is a little tricky and if you do not do it right you could fail. What I mean by this as if you are going to do it you need to be really careful that you are matching the file path location exactly. If not you risk inserting the wrong image or blowing out the creative. They need to be the exact same size.

Well I think that you can and maybe you should. Why? Well to get an email that is now past it’s date could create a bad experience. Maybe you REALLY wanted that offer and it is gone. You can swap out those images when a sale or event is over if you hard map the image locations in the email creative. Then when the time comes you can simply replace those images at those hard coded image paths so that if they get called or loaded they are replaced with new ones. No one ever knows. No harm no foul.

Many email platforms store or cache your email creative from those that I am familiar with so you will need to look into that in your specific scenario. But if possible you could extend the life your your campaigns to have an even greater impact on those that did not open them (due to so many reasons) after your event is over.

It was an interesting idea that was advanced that I thought I would share with you to see if it might help you in your email campaigns.

You have them, we have them, they have them. You might even be one of them. Who are these people I am referring to? Well quite simply I heard them referred to last week as the “emotionally unsubscribed”. I loved this term and I am not sure if I had heard it before last week.

The funny thing is that without any more explanation of these people, I knew who they were. I even knew that I might be one of them for some of the emails that I am subscribed to. I will bet that you could be one of these as well. What do you think? Are you?

The notion of labeling people on your lists are are active subscribers to your lists, but do not read or click your emails for months on end. It is not that they are not interested in you or your emails, but just not lately. These people are not going to break up with you anytime soon. But they are going to have an impact on your results. So what can you do to re-engage them? There are a few things that I thought of (as actually we are going through a 9 month review our our own newsletter at eROI in order to segment and make some changes to the layouts and content) that you might be able to do. What are they?

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