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

In looking through some recent work our team has been busting out I wanted to share a few examples of how we have been using social media in email marketing. Now I know I have busted the chops of others lately, and I am sure that we have things to test and learn still as well, but here are three examples that I find to be well executed from our team.

Why not use it in a Welcome campaign? What an ideal point to introduce it. If social media is a prime part of your overall digital marketing you need to make sure it is out in front of them. And adding not forcing social media introductions in a welcome campaign work well. These touch points are going to be one of your highest performing campaigns EVER so choose your focus wisely. If you have other goals do not make social front and center, but do introduce it in.If you have read this blog for any time at all, seen me speak, or worked with me on your campaigns you know how important I find welcome emails to be in a program.

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I am sharing this story as a way to encourage all of you to step back and find new approaches to common challenges; to go after success by breaking down conventional barriers. This particular story centers around the very common RFP process, and how we here at eROI took a nonconventional approach to a response. Now this could be for any type of RFP as the overall process is something that has simply been used over and over again and it is time for a change. Change is not going to come from companies (except in this case) but it is going to be driven by you.

How many times have you either submitted a RFP or received a RFP to answer? We all know the drill right?

Client Side:

Gather the troops, accumulate the collective needs, frame the problem, identify the questions you need answered in order to make an informed decision, narrow the list, begin the courting process.

Agency Side:

Receive the RFP (if it was sent to you somehow these people feel you are qualified either from work, past relationships, or the word of others), review it, decide if your company is suited to respond, spend 40-100 hours answering questions, prepare work samples, foolishly create new work or ideas to give away, pray you make it to the selection round, cry when you do not make the cut OR begin the courtship ritual.

These are such antiquated rules, and both sides complain equally about the process, so why have we all continued to be bound by it? Simply because it’s mandated by prior experience or by archaic corporate guidelines? Are those really good enough reasons to keep this painful process in place? In my option, absolutely not. It’s time for a change; time to take this process in a new direction.

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Some of you might be unfamiliar with the fact that at eROI we not only are focused on email marketing but our team works extensively in web development, strategy and idea execution across many areas.

I wanted to share this latest case study from eROI as I personally worked on all of these projects. It has been a 2 year journey from when we started testing what community could mean to where we ended up for Wacom. Along the way we learned so much and continue to learn more each day still. Community can mean so many things. It is not simply building a stand alone community site. In the case of Wacom it was a journey of storytelling, sharing, listening and testing. In the end we did end up with a strong and still growing active community site that is built into the Wacom main North American site, but also ended up being a solid and continued use of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Hopefully you can gleam some of our learnings from this study and see how you might be able to approach your outreach and conversation efforts.

In the end it all comes down to commitment and non stop engagement by not only the members of the Wacom team but also from those participating in the communities as well.

eROI Case Study: Wacom Community: Mastering the 5 C’s

What goes into building the most engaging and successful online communities? Follow along as we take you through the journey and progression of the communities built by eROI for Wacom Technology Corp. Learn all about how to harness the power of your audience to create a successful online community.

What’s Inside:

The three main goals for almost any brand community

Discovering what your customers really want

Trying new things and learning from what works

Building exponentially with social media-to-community connections

5 C’s – Commitment, Conversation, Conversion, Community & Collaboration

Get the full case study today.

eROI Case Study: Online Strategy for a Successful Product Launch (Get the full study)

To support the launch of the Intuos4, Wacom Technology Corporation worked with eROI to put a new twist on the product launch with an effective integrated online campaign. This case study outlines the integrated online strategy used by Wacom, including results of the multi-pronged campaign; email, microsite, and offline channels working together to seamlessly promote the unique aspects of the new Intuos4 tablet.

Enjoy exploring the site and learn how it all came together to support the introduction and sales efforts.

“We’re absolutely happy with the number of visitors. We believe we’ve received a 70% awareness of our target audience. I mean, that’s really good. Not many companies are going to achieve that kind of awareness for a new product launch.”

~ Marketing Director, Wacom

Get the full study

So these past 7 weeks (July 17th to August 27th), I have been reporting and tracking the email campaigns from Abercrombie and Fitch on the use of WIDE, horizontal email formats. I have seen 12 in total over this period of time and have been fascinated with the results that they might be getting from these tests. It is not very often that retailers, or anyone for that matter, use this format and as I saw more and more come out I was sure that it was due to great results.

Why? Well they are a smart marketing machine. After hypothesizing on my own and with others in the industry, I thought it was time to reach out to their team and ask. Since we had placed our “Spy” KillROI (the eROI Spam fighting Robot) into the AF offices some time ago we had an in. I reached out at the end of last week to see if they had some details that they would not mind sharing publicly with the rest of us to learn from. Now what I can share is not going to be the top secret results. As there are others out there that they compete against that would love to copy what they are doing (actually I have now spied American Eagle ripping off, I mean testing, the same WIDE idea) and we don’t want that.

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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 >>

In our last eROI study, Use of Analytics in Email Marketing Campaigns, we showed email marketers how important metrics are in making decisions and proving campaign ROI. One major opportunity to improve metrics and strengthen brand positioning with potential customers is to optimize email campaigns through consistent, careful testing.

GET The Full Study as a PDF >>

In this, our latest study, we reveal how 623 email marketers are currently using, or not using, testing to improve their email marketing efforts. On the heels of our last study, where we learned nearly one in five are not recording the metrics of their campaigns, it’s not too surprising that this study showed over 1/3 of marketers are not testing campaigns – but why aren’t they? And for those that are testing, what elements are being tested and what can we learn from them? With 73% of marketers planning to increase email as a priority in their future marketing plans, these are the important answers we set out to discover.

TO TEST, OR NOT TO TEST?

WHY YOU SHOULD AND WHY SOME DON’T

A 2006 MarketingSherpa article by Anne Holland proved, through survey results, that testing increases ROI. The responses show that “in every case more than 50% of marketers improved ROI (even if only moderately) by testing.”

The results of eROI’s email testing survey show that 37% of email marketers do not test their email campaigns. With what we know from the MarketingSherpa survey, this is essentially saying 37% of email marketers don’t care to improve the impact, and ultimately, revenue, of their email campaigns. We know that not a single good marketer would purposefully think like this, so we uncovered some of the main reasons for not testing.

Read the Full Study NOW >>

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.

So now it is your turn to give me some feedback. With each quarter the team here at eROI likes to have a conversation with a few hundred marketers around the world to see how they feel about issues that face all of us.

This time we are looking at how those responsible for email marketing either test or don’t test. We are looking for honest answers from all of you about the elements that you have tried to test to make a difference in your results.

Trust me we know that most of us are not always testing as we want to, but most do experiment from time to time.

Thank you in advance for your 5 minutes to help us out with this. You know you will get this time and all the results back in spades in just a few weeks.

Give me 5 of your minutes for 5 years of blog posts…

I came across an interesting study this past week on the impact that images have on heat mapping in emails and the web. The study provided a few examples that they tested but this one in particular stood out to me due to the focus on the face instead of the copy and product.

What they found was that people are conditioned to look a the facial features of people when presented with the image on the left instead of reading the copy as much as they might be inclined to when the person in the photo was looking at the copy or product.

IMAGE from USEABLE WORLD

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Our latest survey provides insight into trends and use of analytics in email for over 500 email marketers. The final results reveal some alarming habits, showing that many marketers are still taking an extremely careless approach to email marketing.

They share with us which metrics are most important to them, and how they use (or don’t use) these statistics to improve their overall marketing strategy.

From this study, you will learn: why the “instant gratification” approach is costing email marketers time and money, how to use email analytics to find the most valuable nuggets of data, how to improve your stats on each metric, tips on using email analytics and behavioral segmentation to maximize campaign success, and much more!

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-study-trends-use-of-email-analytics/

I have long been a fan of the 3 Stripes and decided today to look at opting into their newsletters to see what they are doing and if there is anything to learn from their programs. Here is the “registration” page – note that they do not cal it a newsletter sign up or opt in page, but a registration. Awfully formal if you ask me. 

So the first thing that jumped out at me were so many required fields. Will Adidas really use this many fields immediately as they start to message me for those newsletters I am signing up for? Or am I signing up for newsletters? I was not really sure to tell you the truth. They said eNewsletters but for all I knew it could be anything. Showing me some links to past examples would have been helpful as all I saw were product promotion emails to the left of the page. 

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New Email Marketing Survey: Email Analytics – TAKE THE SURVEY

At eROI, staying on top of the latest in email marketing is always a top priority. In this new email marketing survey we ask you, how do you use analytics in email marketing? 

Have 5 minutes? We would love your thoughts on Use of Analytics in Email Marketing

To show our appreciation, all survey participants will be automatically entered to win one of a handful of iPod shuffles! – AND WHO DOESN”T Need another iPod? Right? You could give it to your neighbor, the mail man, that guy that hands you your coffee each AM as you amble like a zombie to work, or even a co-worker that is doing a great job. Unlimited ways….

This survey should take just a couple minutes of your time, and we will share the results with you after we crunch the numbers. We hope to have it out next week. We like things immediate… just like you. 

Take a moment to take the survey 

I have had the pleasure of spending the last 8 months leading the eec’s Roundtable on email marketing for cause. We choose the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation to assist this year and have learned a lot on this journey to help them have a better email marketing program. 

This last week we presented at the annual conference about our learnings and how other caused based/non-profit organizations can find ways to make their programs better. 

I have loaded up the PPT from the event for you to review and even download if you wish. 

Still 4 months left in this program and I hope that we help them to get to a place where they can have a great program that drives awareness, branding, and fund raising.