What is acceptable in regards to the time that goes by from an in store register, hand written sign up or kiosk to send a Thank you or Welcome message? Is it immediately, one day, 2 days 3 days or one week? I would go out on a limb here and say all of them are acceptable based on what the companies systems are best suited to handle. I mean as long we are not not talking a 2 plus weeks to a month we should be happy as email marketers, and more importantly consumers at this time frame.

Why? Well with quite a few years of experience and experiences with programs like these I know that there are still systems that are not connected, legacy systems still in place that batch at certain times, list management that must take place in one or multiple systems that make immediacy something that does not exist, or even manual data entry in smaller companies that must take place.

Chad White talked about latency diminishing effectiveness even after 24 hours when Thank You or Welcome emails are not sent. Now I can totally understand and get behind this idea when the actions take place in an online environment. I would be the last to tell you that delays longer than 24 hours really are poor practices and do impact a program. When you have someone online signing up for anything these programs should be in place to move fast and keep the conversation going forward. But when you combine offline events with the systems that are in place you should understand that there are going to be some issues retailer face that are going to lead to some delays.

As email marketers we all wish things could be better, faster and perfect. But when you put on the shoes of your clients, customers and IT admins you begin to realize that we are okay with a little delay.

I can tell you that if I was checking out from a retailer at a mall or store and I did not get an immediate email I would be okay with it. And I can speak from a consumer side and state they they are okay with it as well. Do what you can to move the ball forward if you are in an organization or company that does offline opt ins and try to get the window of time to be shorter. If we don’t get your email before we have stepped out of your store, got in our cars, or pulled into our driveways we are not going to be upset with you nor will we have a negative view of you and your brand. Some delay might actually be healthy for all of us.

What are your thoughts? Or do you face some of these challenges?

Love to hear from you and your experiences on this.

Now this is not very marketer centric, but in the end it should not be. It should be about the subscriber giving them the instant ability to pause a relationship for 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, etc. Microsoft flirted with this ability back in 2008 with a pause plugin for Outlook that never really went anywhere. It did not actually pause emails, but simply placed a delivery delay on them. Now that is not truly the direction I think benefits anyone. Why? Well the consumer is still going to get emails that might have expired items, codes, deals, or information that is now out of date. That only creates frustration and a bad user experience. What I would like to see the industry explore is really investigating how to pause a relationship placing all communications that the individual has opted into on a time based pause.

It is really a short term opt out. So as an email marketer and someone that works on email programs why would I want to advance this notion? Well it is in the best interest of both the marketer and the consumer. We are not always in market for products, information or open to reading every email that comes into our inbox. It dramatically hurts open, click and conversion rates as people at times simply do not have the time nor the reasons to engage. So could you do this?

I can hear some C-level execs saying “are you crazy?”. Well no I am not. I think that we would see a direct increase in goals if we allowed people to have greater control in emails while at the same time it could reduce list churn and unsubscribes due to the fact of being overwhelmed in life and not having the minutes in a day to engage. So how could you present this to them and make a case for it?

1. Testing this could prove to keep the health of your list in good shape.

2. Giving greater control could reduce your acquisition costs of always making up for those that are disengaged or unsubscribing.

3. Allowing people to tell you when they are engaged or “in market” might increase the conversion rates of your programs.

Now all of this is simply an idea that I don’t think anyone has truly tested yet. But it is something that I really want to explore with some programs I am working on. Being selective in an “X” subscriber presenation of this offer could allow a program to adequately test this while placing short term periods of time as an option. I would actually present this to those that are not converting or interacting with the past X campaigns. Not those that are always engaged, shopping, or displaying interest through actions.

Do you think it is an idea worth pursuing? How would you test it?

Well I assume that most don’t ask or have not thought about it. Would we willing give birth date information if asked? A majority of people would not and might even shy away from it if there is not an explanation of why you are asking. But what if you show and tell them why you want to ask it? I would think that if it was clearly presented from a personal win/benefit perspective that you would find more people opting in to this type of information.

But what else could you do to gather this information? Well leading from my post yesterday on Open ID the solution might be right within your grasp. Facebook Connect can help you gather this data into your opt in or profile management system in a really easy way. One of the data points that they share is date of birth. Now, there is a caveat here about it. Some people either don’t post it in their profile OR they use a default setting as they are concerned about posting it. Even some will just give you the month and day and that can be used in a simple birthday email campaign. You don’t really need a year now do you to make this work?

We actually have successfully used this Facebook Connect system on a site we built for a customer this past year at Moonit.com. Now we did find some challenges on people not completing it in Facebook 100% of the time, but if you present those data points in the return form once you have used Facebook Connect or another Open ID system you can leave that field blank, present them context around why they should add it, and then move to completion. Trust me as it works.

Let’s look at a few out there and talk about them a bit.

The first to look at it this one from Borders. They do a good job of not only providing a valuable discount amount of 25% but they also did a great job of making it easy to use online OR at a retail location with the bar code. I also really like the personalization in the subject line and in the body of the email. Nice touch. They also left the discount window open for 15 days. Now that should be enough time but I would leave it open for 30 days as people get busy and you could be leaving a sale on the table. I also really dislike it when emails are presented with so many legal rules around the use of a code. Does it really need to be presented in the email? Couldn’t you link to the redemption regulations on a landing page? It would be so better served there than in the email itself right? Just my personal thought as I often see so many companies add so much legal to an email. Not the place in my personal opinion as it takes away from the email itself and adds more copy that competes with the email itself.

The next one is from PiperLime. Now personally these guys own me. Yep I am a guy that likes shoes and they have my number. What I enjoyed about this email was the simplicity of it. It was clear and easy to take action on. The way that they moved the content to simply be about the birthday and left the legal mumbo jumbo out of it is key to me. The Borders one had about 40% of the content on the legal side and to me throwing up a bunch of copy that is generally about what you can’t do with this gift is not needed. Focus on the event and make it easy.

But the last one that I recently got from Alaska Airlines really stood out this year. One I did not expect to get a discount code from Alaska to book my next flight and two they sent it a month before my birthday. What a great idea to get out infront of the event and really stand out. Also it provides incentive to book now and not wait till later. Trust me as a frequent traveler with them that I put it to use fast on a little trip on my birthday this year to Sonoma for some wine “tasting” and relaxation that is much needed. I think the idea that they put into action is a great one as others are sending on the day this tactic really stood out to me. It was timely and relevant while at the same time provided immediate value.

So take some time to think about how you could use this event to your advantage. Even in a B to B world there are applications that you can use the birthday event to stand out. I mean I cannot think of one b to b company that has used it and that in itself provides a good opportunity to stand out. Maybe you should be the one to try it out this year?

So as I head down the path in the coming weeks of tacking on another year to my life I am looking forward to seeing who got in the game for this year and what my hit my inbox soon.

I know sounds too good to be true right? Well we are trying to put our team out there to help you. We look at and work on 1000’s of campaigns across every market niche out there each year, and with 7 plus years of doing this at eROI alone we wanted to allow people to get some tangible actions that they can take that are relevant to their job roles and email marketing plans and not just sit in another session.

Email Marketing – Auditing your Email Workflow

Learn how to engage your target audience through effective and branded emails. The experts at eROI will help you audit your email workflow from creative to deliverability and show how you can turn a dud into a success.

So we hope to see many of you there and make sure to sign up when you arrive to guarantee your spot at our table with us. Make sure if you do that you bring the things you want us to review. As player/coaches ourselves and eternal students of digital/email marketing we are really excited to be in a place to help you out in person.

We hope to see you there. And if you can’t make it for some reason you can always drop us an email or call as we are happy to take a look under the hood for you to make some calls on what might add some horsepower and drive some more RPM into your campaigns.

Well you are only 1/4 of the way there in the right steps. I use Sorel as a good example (even there are some great things they can still add to the process that I will explain) of the steps that come next.

Immediately you should be sending out a Thanks for Your order/Order confirmation. Now as a best practice you really need to give people an immediate email showing them what they just did. Now in this example you can see things that I like, they present a clearly written thanks, they present your information and the order number back to you for easy reference, and (not shown) they display photos of the items you purchased. This last one I am always appreciative of as it give me a fast way to visually scan the order to make sure that I did not add anything wrong as well as shows me that their ecom system got my order right. Win right? Yes it is. But at this same point in time they have me as a captive customer and as this was my first order in the system they could have done one of the following.

1. Present me something to use to place another order with them. A unique discount code that I can use for another purchase with a time offer associated with it making me think about using it faster.

2. A way to give someone else I might know that could also be in market either a “friend” code to use, making me take the step to increase their customer base (say 10%) that I can pass on right then. I am a satisfied shopper right now and it is an ideal time to use me as a referral source.

3. Present to me other relative items (say to the right hand side of this email) that might be ones that are complimentary to these items OR things that others that have bought these items might use. A great way that you can do this even if you do not have a system in place is to look at a great and cost effective system called 4-tell to automatically feed this type of data into the email. It does not even need to be nestled into your ecom platform. I have seen in action lately and am impressed with it so far. Take a look.

So now there is going to be some time that goes by from the order confirmation to the actual shipping of this product. We all expect some downtime around now. Depending on how long it takes to pick and ship these products there may or may not be a marketing email touch here during this time.

But then comes the shipping confirmation. This is when we all get excited right? The main point of this confirmation is to project a date of arrival and to present the customer a tracking code that is easy to see in order to know when that door bell will ring. A little Pavlovian but we all salivate for them. Actually from past studies I have read this order shipped email often gets more opens than any other as we tend to keep it and use it until the order arrives. So what can you do here? Well it is another great place to position a cross or up sell around like items, future deals, or even promote something that does not exist in the main marketing messages for your site. Also here is a little trick If you can make sure to not the exact location of the offer image paths you can actually change those every few days to always have a current offer presented. Simply by replacing those images you can continue to present new offers while they wait for that order to be tracked and arrive.

So you are 3/4 to the goal now right? So what is next you might wonder? Isn’t our job done? Well the hard part is, but this is where you really have an opportunity to reach back out and find out the level of customer satisfaction with the experience or with the product. Why? Well knowing what is working and what is not is key to growing a strong ecommerce program and your relationship. A simple survey is one way to get them engaged. How did it go? Where things easy to find? Did you have any issues that came up that we could address better? Would you recommend us to someone else (Net promoter scoring)? But even better is to engage with feedback on the happiness with the product itself. We all know that people look for the recommendation of others and even seek them out when making a purchase. So would you rather have them search those out all over the web OR take advantage of placing this content back into your site and having the authority rest right next to the products? I would choose the latter based on a few reasons. Now the less I have to leave your site to make a decision and the more time I can stay with you then the higher the chance that I am going to make the purchase. Now if you decide to house these reviews you need to allow both good and bad to live here side by side. You need to throw on your tough skin and be ready for a fair amount of tough love. Hiding negative comments are a sure way to lose the trust of those that come to you.

In a recent test we did with an online retailer we tried showing professional reviews from a outdoor gear magazine in one email, while in the other we presented customer scoring and reviews. Which do you think did better? It was an interesting testament to the changes in online trust going on. The email with the customer scores and reviews outsold those of the old line journalistic source. Now this was only one test and should be repeated to make a true call on, but we found it to be a real driver to sales. Are you including testimonials or reviews in your ecom emails? Maybe you should test this.

The other reason I love reviews in the ecom site is that it creates more content. Content is king and from a search perspective I would love to have more juju on my side from a review and content perspective than on an aggregator site. Note that you will want to wait a few weeks to 30 days to follow up on this so that they have had adequate time to use the product and write an intelligent review.

In the end you need to understand that the campaign is not over when you drop your first touch email. It should be continued through the lifecycle allowing to you leverage this relationship to drive more sales, provide goodwill, and keep your engagement levels high. This way they next time they are in market they will consider you before your competition.

I know sounds too good to be true right? Well we are trying to put our team out there to help you. We look at and work on 1000’s of campaigns across every market niche out there each year, and with 7 plus years of doing this at eROI alone we wanted to allow people to get some tangible actions that they can take that are relevant to their job roles and email marketing plans and not just sit in another session.

So we hope to see many of you there and make sure to sign up when you arrive to guarantee your spot at our table with us. Make sure if you do that you bring the things you want us to review. As player/coaches ourselves and eternal students of digital/email marketing we are really excited to be in a place to help you out in person.

We hope to see you there. And if you can’t make it for some reason you can always drop us an email or call as we are happy to take a look under the hood for you to make some calls on what might add some horsepower and drive some more RPM into your campaigns.

Round One: USAA Teen Checking Campaign

Round Two: National Geographic Kids Magazine

Lots of best practices and ideas were brought to the table and the votes were cast. Who won? Guess you will have to watch and see.

Which agency will be the next Email Idol?

Moderator: Lisa Harmon, Director, Creative Services, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company
Panelists: Sam White, Creative Director, eROI
Jim Spence, Designer, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company
Mike Corak, Director of Interactive Services, Mighty Interactive

But to get back on track I wanted to share their opt in and welcome email as I thought it was well done. The opt in does a good job of presenting 3 variations of the emails I would receive by opting in. I am always thankful when I get to see some examples located around the opt in process. I feel that it is a good way to condition people to what to expect. Almost in a way of setting up the experience of when I see them in the inbox for the first time. Adding the birthdate to the form must be a legal requirement for them or even one that helps them to look at age data in targeting. Heck we will see in about a month if they have a birthday campaign as well.

One thing I did notice was that they do have a cause co-registration for the Surfrider Foundation which is is line with their audience and most likely a cause that they support as a corporation. It was a nice touch to use their opt in to support a like organization. Might be an idea for other retailers or even B2B companies.

But it did not stop at the opt in page. They had a very nice thank you page that presented some options to help you engage and move forward. I would have been happy with their efforts right there, but then came a timely (not too delayed) Welcome message. Right up my alley in what I like to see in best practices and lifting the engagement. But they also took the extra step I often see so many retailers miss, they presented right there a 15% off discount code. Now I would wager that a large majority of people use it in the coming days if not right then. The fact that it was quick to arrive was also a good thing as if I had continued and loaded some items into my cart, bought them, and then got this email a few days later, I might have experienced some buyers remorse. So nice job guys. Love to see the capitalization on the increased engagement and hopefully an uptick in sales from this effort.

Overall even with the high frequency (38 emails tracked in the past 60 days) I have remained highly engaged with the email program due to what I attribute to the well done welcome email program. Now looking at this time period might be a little uncharacteristic of the overall program as I am looking at the holiday season, but they are doing it right. Knowing that I am engaged keep them in my inbox and has trained me to expect every few days now to see them there in the AM hours.

The takeaway is to really look at your welcome program no matter what industry you are in. Making the touch points line up and behave in a way that sets the course for a strong program will lift your sales/goals and drive your sales and engagement. What are you doing to say thanks and welcome with your subscribers?

The top things to look are email rendering, email readability, action paths, ability to complete goals, and need for a mobile version of your website, blog, ecommerce site, or simply a paired down mobile version of the content you are presenting.

The good news is most all companies are in the same boat this point in time so you have time to explore, plan and react.

With eMarketer reporting that over 42% of US consumers are stating that they had a smart phone as of Dec 2009 we need to take this seriously. This same study also reports that nearly 13% of respondents are planning on purchasing one in the next 90 days. Tick Tock. I have also seen some recent studies citing that around 17% of smart phone users are already making purchases. Just imagine if we had mobile friendly emails, campaigns, websites and ecommerce. What a difference that would make in these numbers. So what is it going to take 60%? 70%? Most likely it is just going to take time for companies to start making strides to deliver in this fast growing environment.

There are not many tools out there to report on mobile client engagement (Pivotal Veracity has MailboxIQ that does it) yet but I expect to either see more tools hit the market this year OR marketers getting smarter about testing emails to look at Web Analytics reports from their email campaigns. Either way it is time that you start to pay attention to these metrics in your own reporting and find ways to track and build on these stats. With a recent campaign we ran we had the fortune of already having some of this data which allowed us to build emails, mobile versions of emails, microsites targeted to work on mobile devices and ways to drive engagement via that channel.

So what do you need to know.

1. Odds have it that your emails don’t either don’t work right OR they are hard to read/act. In looking at some samples of some recent campaigns I receive on my iPhone prior to viewing them at the desktop I found that some companies are not really paying attention to the mobile rendering

experience. Now I am not saying that they do not render, but they either are hard to read OR they do not lead to mobile friendly sites. That kills the campaign right there. Take some time to experience your own campaigns on a mobile device if you have not already and try to get to the goals of your own marketing.

One company we have recently found is doing some great things with their emails. The way that they are coding them creates a fluid layout that no matter what size device or where you read it stretches and changes the fonts, images, etc to the right size. I am looking at how they did this so well as I think that is it something we can all learn from. Now I do not think that this approach can work for all emails. Why? Well from this one and others I have tested it looks to only work right with simple HTML copy based emails. Emails that are image heavy might present some challenges.

The image to the left here is an example of how it reworks itself to format exactly on the iPhone. While it sure does get long, it is really easy to read and renders so nice. But take that same email and look at it in a desktop email client (the one here is Apple Mail). It reworks itself to stretch to the environment and can be manipulated no matter what size you change your preview window or the full message to be. Pretty neat I think. It is an idea worth look at more and seeing how you can build your templates or HTML to work for your needs. Extra points to them that is was a list hygiene campaign working on getting their customer database in order.

2. You don’t have the rendering information you need. So you want to make some changes but yet you really don’t have a lot of information to help you craft these campaigns. Well you are in luck. I took some time to test not only preview size but also looked at functionality size when it comes to rendering and ability to scroll not only up and down but left to right. No with most smart phones like gPhone or iPhone we did not see challenges in the left to right scroll as they use a browser type environment, but with other phones we see some limitations.

Here are some shots of the Pixel test we run in some of the clients.

iPhone: Ability in Horizontal to render over 960Pixels (sorry for the sideways shot as this was in horizontal layout mode.)

iPhone: Vertical Layout over 600 pixels.

gPhone: 600 pixels in vertical layout but ability to scroll horizontal to an unlimited length. We actually only tested to 2800 pixels but it looks like it can go indefinitely.

So what does this mean? It means we all need to test. We know that presently there are some abilities to try new things but until we test we will not know for sure. And the wild card is that when new software updates or new phone models emerge we will need to test again.

3. It is not just about the email. Well you knew that right? The email is just the overall experience gateway to what we are tasked as marketers to provide. We need to be looking at the next steps in the mobile web site or simplify it with mobile campaign pages. We have been rolling out new mobile versions of sites lately when we build them for clients, but here is something you may benefit from… we develop a large percentage of websites with custom WordPress CMS platforms. Why would this help? Well if you are doing the same you can leverage many of the development communities plugins to create built in mobile versions of your sites or campaigns. I know that this will not work for everyone and in that case you need to look at creating mobile versions of your site. It is rather hard and can be expensive to do this for large sites, so start small and focus on the experience and goals.

Some recent examples to share would be.

Moonit: Mobile version of core website with Facebook Connect Mobile

Banfield Mobile version of website for core needs.

In the end there are a lot of things to look at and evaluate not only from an external use standpoint but also from an internal ability view. No matter the outcome 2010 is the time that you start to move these projects into your company goals so that you can step up and have an experience no matter the device that drives to engagement and conversion.

Look for some more test and ideas soon or share with me some examples you have come across.

]]> http://theemailwars.com/2010/01/20/investigation-into-mobile-email-marketing/feed/ 7 http://theemailwars.com/2010/01/19/what-does-social-look-like-in-email/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-does-social-look-like-in-email http://theemailwars.com/2010/01/19/what-does-social-look-like-in-email/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:45:37 +0000 Dylan Boyd http://theemailwars.com/?p=2395 With many of you and other brands embracing using social icons in their emails I thought it would be a good time to talk about the ideas and implementation a little. First, there is not ONE way to approach and execute this concept. It is the wild west right now in how and what works best so I would advise you to think about some of the below scenarios and see what might work best for you.

One: Follow/Friend/Fan Me. So really do we need to be friends or fans? An interesting article was written in Fast Company the other day on the topic of “I don’t want to be friends with my butter”. Read it here. I could not agree more with this stance as social media is not for everyone or every brand when it comes to a facebook fan page. What you really need to think about is similar to everything you know about email marketing; is it relevant, what is the frequency and why would I want to opt in. The caveat is that it needs to drive some type of brand value, loyalty or (yes it is an ugly word but it works) rewarding. Some people know that I have a personal issue with the words friend, follow or fan. They are incredibly egotistical and cult like words that really are not what this is all about. It is about connection, impact and value. I know we did not create the words but I think you should think about how you use them in your copy. Look to find other words that are more relevant and meaningful. The good news I have seen is only 30% of major brands have gone the route of a fan page thus far. This tells me that some people are thinking about it.

Two: Commitment and Relevance. Social media is not just about putting your email newsletter into a stream of news. It is about giving direct access of things that are of interest to those that might think that those that they interact with might find value in. I see so many people working on the top level of social media integration in email and not drilling down to enable sharing on a content/deal basis. Think about instead of taking the top level midset of growing followers to deeper levels of enabling sharing of individual content. Test it. See how it works.

The BIG factor here at play is commitment. Email is driven by you as you have a plan for it over time. Social media is driven by you but it is an always on pipe of information that can fall “below the fold” faster than an email on Black Friday. With the average subscriber actually signing up for a dozen or so emails you stand a better chance at engagement than someone with 100, 200, 300, 1000 connections in social media. But then why commitment? Well it is something that needs to occur each and every day and often 7-15 times in order to stay on the awareness and in the stream of those that you are connected with. Are you ready? Do you have the resources to manage this? Who does this fall on as a role? And will you commit to the long run?

Three: WHERE does it go? Now no one knows to a degree of perfection yet where placement works best in an email. Looking at these two examples you can see that blocks are now being created to leverage the placement in emails. The first from a retailer Metro Park places it at the top and does something I like is to add the Blog link as well. Why? Well there is already commitment at the blog content level and from what I have seen they are also feeding content from the blog to social locations. Perfect approach. Now if you have not been to a Metro Park store I can tell you that they are charging far ahead in the use of Twitter as a social vehicle. Each dressing room is equipped with small flat panel screens connected to a custom Twitter follower feed (simple using RSS in Twitter) and then mashed up using a Google map. These displays are bringing in real time tweets as you are in a confined space to present things that people are saying about them. Really cool idea and drives it home that they have commitment to this media and a plan to use it.

The Body Shop is taking a similar approach with the top level use but they are keeping the interaction in the footer. Personally I like to see this at the top of an email and if needed  you can repeat it at the bottom past your content. Each places a different amount of overall real estate value on it but they are both actively using it.

So what does this mean to you? Well it means that there is not a wrong way. Even if you want to say “friend, follow or fan” just make sure that you are in it each day, interacting with those that have decided to join you, responding (yes different from email there is a much higher person to person (brand) engagement rate. So someone at your company needs to own it, or better yet a group of people that are aligned in voice and thoughts as to how to best use them.

We are just at the infancy of these ideas and I know that 2010 will bring some new revelations as to what works for you to make it something that drives ROI (Return on Interaction).