The Email Wars

I wrote this article for iMediaConnection the other week. Thought you might like it.

Article Overview:

National Geographic asks for your preferences, your profile, your desire for each email type, and, most importantly, your permission
Timberland’s emails stand out due to brand consistency, large calls-to-action, clarity of messaging, and easy-to-measure creative tests
Banana Republic has stepped into its own in testing, experimenting, and being different
Rethinking “best practices”

What is “right”? Is there a correct way? Do best practices always work?
The answer to these and almost every other question in email marketing is, “It depends.” I know it’s a cop-out of an answer, but in all honesty, there is no right answer. There’s no global best practice that makes your campaign stats jump, no design layout that wins every time. It takes constant trying, tweaking, analyzing, and risk-taking. Calculated and meticulous risk-taking, I might add. And yes, in the end there is no “right,” only good job, mission accomplished, and what’s next?
Yet over the years of not just observing thousands of email campaigns but also creating them, I have weeded through the good and the bad to find those brands that are marketing in ways that move audiences and drive results. This isn’t about presenting you with empirical campaign data. This is about what works for me, and why.

Here are seven brands that are doing it right.
Read the full article

Over the years we have seen email marketing change from being a one to all to a one to one medium. Much of this has been not only pushed by the growth in the tools available that email marketers use, but in the tactics and knowledge we apply to bringing communications down to a one to one basis. Now although we would love to see more people using email in this fashion, as it would lift engagement, drive relevant campaigns, and allow people to get emails that they want from companies and brands… the problem always lies in the data.

Now I would state that the challenge does not lie entirely on the tools we use, but in the time that we invest in reading and making decisions based on the data we get back from the campaigns. Communication being taken down to a one to one basis does not rely on the subscriber, they expect it, but it comes down to the marketer doing their job of using what they know.

There are a few things I suggest that you spend some time on in the coming months.

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I have long been a subscriber to Dell emails. Not sure exactly why as I am an Apple user, but I assume it is for market intelligence with some of the clients I work with. This past week as I as scanning my inbox I found it a little surprising as a I scrolled down to the bottom of the Dell emails and found offers for things having nothing to do with Dell or computers.

What I was presented with was FTD, Blue Nile and Brooks Brothers in the footer. Seemed odd to me that a company focusing on holiday sales was presenting non brand merchandise to subscribers. Now I cannot say it is a bad thing to do, but it struck me as odd. It made me wonder if Dell had hit a low point in sales of PCs that it needed to increase its revenues by selling flowers, jewelry and dress shirts. Or could it be a good way to use co-branded or partnership emails that I have not seen used by them before. I would assume that there is either a distribution partnership/trade in place OR there is a acquisition or revenue sharing agreement in place. (more…)

Hotels: Long the source of good and bad experiences, wild nights, hallway yellers, desires to not get up as early as you normally do and just lay in bed a little while longer… places of things that you share.

So why is this relevant? Well we have long seen online retailers focus on driving customer reviews and sourcing their community to rate products they have bought – but pulling it out into a hotel chain newsletter is a great idea. Sure travel aggregators like Travelocity have done it for a while, but rarely do I notice hotel chains doing it. (would love to see car rental companies do it by airport code)

But Tablet Hotels had recently added Guest Reviews next to the view details text call to action. One might think that you would be more prone to asking them to book now OR make a reservation – but the fact is that they are giving their travelers the ability to influence a booking. Great idea.

Also not that when they are introducing their new properties they are taking a different approach to those and leading with price and rates as opposed to starting rate and offers/value prop. I think not using the review on new properties is a safe approach as when opening anything new you need to get your sea legs under you before you have everyone firing on all cylinders. Give them some time to get a collection of Guest Reviews before you open them up to lead with in your email campaigns.

This brings into question if you did a program like this would you be transparent and allow everything to go free on these reviews (answering publicly those that are bad and making amends)? I put this out there as I would say yes but I can see legal and the (more…)

I pulled out an article I wrote recently that was featured in iMediaConnection that you might enjoy. It covers some past posts that I wrote into one article that highlights the things that you should look at to learn from with your email marketing campaigns.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Ultimate Email Fail

The more experience you gain as an email marketer, the more you come to understand the true purpose of an email. It isn’t simply to blast something to subscribers without relevancy or reason. It isn’t to make a quick, dishonest buck off them. It isn’t to pull off a massive bait-and-switch. It isn’t even to release the hounds on the competition. It’s about nurturing, building trust and relationships, and ultimately increasing and solidifying the reputation of your brand.

Every email sent must have a purpose and needs to personally relate to the subscriber. If the email lacks personalization or has no purpose, you’re taking a risk that may cause subscribers to not only opt-out of your emails, but also mentally and emotionally opt-out from any future engagement with your brand. When this happens, the recipient immediately becomes emotionally unsubscribed. We in the industry identify it with a very technical term: email marketing fail.

Everyone fails at some point. A recent study by Return Path discovered that up to 20 percent of top brand marketers continue to send emails to addresses on their lists that have unsubscribed — more than 10 days after a confirmed unsubscribe request.

Read the full article here >>

It has been on my mind awhile to start to restrict email addresses from our materials for some time now. I can tell you that I have yet to do it across our site(s) but I am going to start slowly testing it. Why? Well it all comes down to lead quality. In running reports looking at the value of leads, downloads, case study requests, and community those that are signing up with REAL business domain addresses are a higher value AND convert in a relationship/sales opportunity for us more often.

If you look at your own site(s) just how many leads come from hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc that actually end up being good sources or business for you? I know that some people prefer to use these as secondary emails instead of their business email address, but should that matter to you as a B to B company? The point is valid in B to C and I would never consider it for a business that has that audience.

It is a interesting proposition that I have asked many about in this industry. When do you stop allowing people to opt in based on YOUR business rules and when does the value of FREE change the cost to a company? I mean email is free right? So marketing should be too right? Wrong. Email might be “free” but email marketing is not. The costs of analytics, campaigns, design, rules, and developing programs that work cost. So does it cost to target people that are not going to be customers? I am hoping to find out with some simple tests.

This is more of an open thought post now as I don’t have the answers. But I am going to try and figure it out.

Have any of you tried this?

It is funny sometimes that companies just stop their email newsletters cold turkey. Often times it is due to the fact that they are just not sure as to why they are doing them, what the return is, internal resources dry up, the technology platform that they use becomes more of a chore to use than is worth the time, or there is a clear need to step back – take a look – and renew their efforts in a clear manner.

We see all of the above factors play into a newsletter stoppage but what do you do when you bring it back to life? I thought about this not only because a client of ours did just this recently, but I actually had another client make mention of this exact example to me this past week.

For any reason listed above, or one that I might have missed, you need to develop a clear positioning when you bring a newsletter back after some months of down time. I was happy to see our client do just this as they began to re-mail their newsletter opt in list after some time getting the ship back on track.

Take a look at the header article. In the RED box you will see a clear Welcome Back message with a explanation setting the expectations of when you are going to be getting these newsletters. Also as a added bonus they added (YELLOW BOX) a link to their social links on Twitter, facebook and more. But do notice as I think that it is important that they do not try to add every social platform link known to man. Keeping it simple and driving people to the two that they have committed to makes it work. The other box I noted (GREEN BOX) was flagged as after looking at the metrics it drives just as much click through action as the important article areas. This tells me that the readers are big on images when they want their news/articles.

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As I was working today I was forwarded an email from a co-worker that called to my attention something that did not completely shock me, but did surprise me. You would think with all the emails I see and all the articles I read that very little could shock me. But what was in this email threw me a little bit. Could it be because of the “economic downturn”, publishers reaching for revenue, or simply it was just part of our sales plan? Not sure the exact answer to my question really, but Ken Magill’s Direct Mag sent out a third party email. Wait, let me take that back… he rented his “list” to target us with an ESP ad that was neither targeted or wanted. Now I understand the publisher model of driving revenue with advertising, partnerships, exclusives and more… but what kills me is the lack of targeting.

Ken, with all of the things that you write about it throws me for a loop when you rent your list to other marketers to send non targeted offers. Now I know that it is part of the business and a great revenue driver for most publishers, but it just seems off brand for you to allow. I understand that you don’t have control over your publisher and the sales team, but you might want to have some level of oversight on how you are used as a brand for your own reputation. The articles you write slam other people for how they use their lists and as a “beacon of light” for the industry I would think that you would think twice about this practice, OR at best, maybe run a suppression or filter list against it to make sure that it was getting to the right people that might take action. Well maybe I am wrong here as I am not perfect.

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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.

Now I don’t want you to think that landing pages suck. They rock for when you can create a campaign specific one that resonates with the email you sent out. But what kills them is when technology lets you down and does not work.

The reason for this post is a recent email I got from Hilton Honors with a great double your points deal. In order to take advantage of it you needed to hit the landing page and I assume complete something. Now why I assume is that nothing ever worked. As a frequent traveler I gave them the benefit of the doubt and revisited it over 2 days time. Still no good.

So they lost me, or worse to me as a subscriber, I lost out on the deal. So it was a bad experience. I am hoping that they will send this out again to those that did not take advantage of the offer or where unable to do so.

Technology as awesome as it is can often fail us. That is the lesson here in one part. Even if you have the best segmentation, subject line, and creative your campaign can still encounter issues. I just hope that they are going to be wise and drop this email again before the deal ends. 

Every once in a while a great book comes along to help people be better at their jobs. Recently a new book from Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels was released that is positioned to help us with our approach and understanding to email marketing. Now I have been working in email marketing and interactive since 1996 and I have seen many changes in how campaigns can be created to be more effective. I am not going to lie to you as back in the beginning we were all just creating the rules of the game as we went along. But over the years we have, as an industry, taken steps to set rules, laws, guidelines and best practices. 

Now this book (Email Marketing One Hour a Day) is one that I wish would have been around when I first got into using email for the companies I worked at. There were not blogs like this, conferences, and a community of email marketers that were so open and willing to help. I have been slowly digging through chapters every few nights (sorry about not following the title rules of not spending an hour a day on it, but I have a few other things going on) and have found some good thoughts and lessons to not only apply, but to share with the team @eROI. 

In taking some time to go back to the basics and learning some approaches outlined in this book I am finding that I am thinking more about the overall approach as opposed to simply the execution of email campaigns. 

I encourage all of you to get either the digital copy or the print copy and not only take some time to read it yourself, but to either share your knowledge or pass your copy over to others on your team when you are finished with it. 

Here is to 2009 and having people that are passionate about what they do, how they approach email, and striving to drive the best results you can for your clients or company.

As I posted past week about becoming a storyteller, I was fortunate to get this great example from Basecamp in my inbox this week. It hit what I was talking about on the nose. What I mean by this is that the email tells a story, uses some video to drive you to a landing page (notice that I don’t think that expecting video in email to play is even worth the test right now), and then continues to tell more stories through the main page. 

Why is this good? Well it connects the brand to user stories, is social media. Now in the true sense of the word it is not “social media” but it uses storytelling to help connect the recipient to the brand story.

I am very interested to see how this continues in the emails they send as the year progresses. I feel that it is well done and makes me want to know more about using this product in ways I might have not thought of through my own experiences. 

Continue reading to see the landing page and the complete story page.

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I had to use that title for this post as I know that many of you out there are always jaded when it comes to list rental campaigns. Now I am not talking about buying lists, but partnering with other like brands or list managers that have double opt in lists where they have allowed subscribers to opt in for emails from like or relevant brands. 

Now here are 4 reasons why I dislike them (yes I changed my mind from hate).

1. They often will not perform to the expectations. Many brands expect these lists that are so well found and segmented to give them the same reach and performance from their own lists. This will not happen, ever. These are lead generation campaigns and if executed right can drive new subscribers to your lists and even sales/conversions. But don’t expect miracles. 

2. They are not from your brand. And they should not be. They should be sent from the brand that has the relationship and contain your offers. Many times they are sent from that brand and the disconnect with the user is bad for all. They can result in more list attrition from the list owner in the end if done wrong. 

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I am always so elated when I see another email marketing agency peer review our work publicly. It speaks volumes to us as email marketers as well as makes our designers stomachs tickle.

It was nice to see that one of our own Drip Campaigns made the rounds into their inbox. But as much as I loved for them to see it, it really should have been better filtered in our CRM so that they did not get it. As why would we be sending this campaign to them? 

I did some checking and it seems that they actually were tagged right with the behaviors that would have caused this to be sent, but we should have taken an extra look. No harm done, but this can go to illustrate how even campaigns that we have segmented to be behavioral can go out based on rules.

So let this show that even the best laid plans can have factors programmed into them that might cause a campaign to go to one person in your entire list. 

Regardless, thanks for the props.

What do you do with those people on your email list that are not converting? They might read over and over again, yet they are not clicking through and buying from you. I have long been a fan of what we term the “Break Up” email campaign. It is a simple one and very similar to a list cleaning, but when done right it has some humor to engage as well as some steps to re-qualify those on your list either into other programs OR taking them off your list.

Many people ask me “Why would I do this?”. Well the answer is a simple one. If you are emailing people over and over again what you want to tell them and they are not taking actions, it would illustrate that you do not have campaigns that are relevant to them. So by continuing to send them your emails you are just reducing the chances you have to engage and convert them into sales. Now they may be past purchasers and not in market. Dell, the example I am using, sells things that to me are not purchases we make all year long. We buy laptops and desktops and we are good for a while. So you need to have a relevant Customer Life Cycle dialogue set up to find ancillary products of which to sell them OR get them excited to move on a new larger purchase down the road.

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