The Email Wars

I have long been a fan of Diesel. They are in our face, original and always ready to take a risk with a new marketing initiative. Last month I had the pleasure of getting a campaign for the Diesel XXX Party that was celebrating the 30th Birthday globally. I quickly checked it out and summized that I had to get the crack eROI team on finding out how they pulled this off. 

It was early in the effort but this email made me wonder how it was going to unfold. Scanning the cities that were going to be used to stage this event I noticed NYC. VOILA. We are there with our office in Manhattan… quick call to Chris Masagatani to bring him into the plans. 

Chris and I talked about the email, the landing page and the campaign. I set him off with a Flip camera to document the campaign from start to finish. What I wanted eROI to learn is how email was used as the first touch point and how it caused the event to unfold with little to no other media around it. 

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“Dear Email Industry, 

We, the DMA, have decided to launch an email opt out site on your behalf. And yes there is also a mail opt out site. Did we forget to tell you? We asked all the ESPs and brands about this right? Well maybe you did not get the post card or voicemail… those things happen sometimes. “

Funny thing that I was at the DMA conference in Las Vegas last week with a handfull of the top email marketers and ESPs out there and non of us knew about this. Can anyone tell me how they are going to represent or misrepresent my clients? And how they are going to get the data back in a way that is both real time and in the format we need? 

They are building the Do Not Mail and Do Not Email list all on their own. Is the eec aware of this? 

Read the story after the jump>

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Much has been written about social media and email. Most people that have “created” an email marketing system have added features to it that they like to say makes it “social media”. Well I want to go on record that adding a Send To a Friend, or a button that allows you to “digg it” or comment on it does not make it social. Email is social media. It is what the majority of the internet users harness for “social” conversations. It is one to one and one to many. 

But all of this being said above, here are what you need to understand in order to make your email marketing campaigns “social”.

I hope from reading my thoughts around the POST method you can understand what you should be thinking about.

POST: People, Objective, Strategy, Technology

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I have been using this great resource from the email experience council lately. It is a ROI worksheet for retailers that can help measure the cost/return and impact of your email campaigns on your online and offlien efforts. 

I know that some great minds worked on this and it is one of the better tools out there. What I have a loved about it is the ability to create versions to match your channels. What I mean by this is that I have been tweaking the layouts/cells recently to map to publihers, ecom only, software sales, etc. Still needs a little fine tuning to be 100% on the money, but it works. 

If you are looking for a tool to help you with your planning, justification, and one that you can take into a director, vp or CEO for planning… this might be the one for you.

A poll recently released by the Consumer Reports National Research Center shows that 82% of consumers are concerned about their credit card numbers being stolen online, while 72% are concerned that their online behaviors were being tracked and profiled by companies.

Although 68% of consumers have provided personal information in order to access a website, 53% are uncomfortable with internet companies using their email content or browsing history to send relevant ads, and 54% are uncomfortable with third parties collecting information about their online behavior.

The poll revealed that 93% of Americans think internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, and 72% want the right to opt out when companies track their online behavior.

Joel Kelsey, policy analyst with Consumers Union, said “Americans are clearly concerned… the vast majority of consumers want more control over their personal information online… “

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Do any of you ever notice the massive footers that are used in some industries for emails? Now I know that heavy footers are the design rage right now, but not in emails. Often times legal departments mandate that the legal terms for financials/investing, contests and regulatory issues need to be there. But do you think that they either build trust or help the email campaigns in any way? 

When I personally see them they are a turn off. They make me lose a little bit of trust, although legal will tell you that there are there to build trust (CYA here) and make sure that no one has other expectations. But why can’t they live as as hyperlink and live on a page on the website? 

I wanted to use an example of the video game industry as eROI has done a lot of work in this space over the past years. I can tell you from the example here that they are ego plays. Everyone wants to have their brand and organization represented in the email somewhere. What value does that bring to the subscriber? None in my opinion. This footer in the video gaming industry is always the longest to approve part of email creative. Is everyone there? Do they all have enough room around them to make all the stake holders happy? These are the questions that get vetted over and over again. 

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Are you ready for the holiday season? Remember when we used to think that it started in November? Well not anymore. Some brands are already talking in email about the holiday season, jumping Halloween and Thanksgiving. So what are you doing to be ready for the surge? 

Here is a study about shoppers attacking earlier.

Chad White reports : 

17% of the retailers I track have made at least one reference to the holiday season already.

Here is his chart from the last holiday season to show you how early it started last year. 

So what, in light of the market downturn and consumer spending fears, do you have planned. This is not a business as usual year in consumer sales. I am not trying to be a “sky is falling” type of person, but those brands and email marketers that do not have a plan together are in for a bad treat. 

What needs to be done? Here is my list:

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I found this article about web mail stats. Now this is a study of use and totals, but may not be reflective of your own subscriber base. So take it with a grain of salt.

Yahoo Email Dominates Web-Mail Landscape

Yahoo’s email service dominates the web-mail market with the highest number of email users, monthly minutes spent per user and times users check mail, according to data from comScore, writes MarketingCharts (via a New York Times blog post by reporter Saul Hansell).

View chart of the four major email service providers’ total unique visitors, Aug. ‘07 vs. Aug. ‘08.

AOL’s email also appears to be holding its own with its user numbers, while Gmail is increasing its number of users but lagging behind other web-mail providers in how often users check mail and how much time they spend on the site.

Here is the full article on email web client use.

At eROI we have been fortunate to work with some of the best PR firms in the nation. We have worked to help them understand not only why to use email as a Public Relations Agency outreach tool, but also taught them how to use it to get actionable steps out of it. Now I am going to share some of these ideas with you. 

1. Develop a communications channel that you own. By using an opt in email list for publications, writers, industry analysts, bloggers and others you can establish a direct channel to get your messages out infront of them when you have news to share. 

2. Design an email template that not only matches the brand, but has actionable elements that they can use. We often construct easily editable templates that not only give a good brand experience, but also have attributes that can deliver high resolution 300 dpi or higher images and other assets. 

3. Use the data in your favor. This is the most important part of the use of email marketing with PR. Now that you have delivered the assets you can tell who has read them, what they have done with them, when they downloaded the assets, who might use them, and identify those that have not taken actions so that your PR team can follow up with personal emails or yes… a phone call. 

When PR firms use email it can grow their distribution, tracking, and follow up call efforts. Which in turn creates better actionable plans to make sure that your message and programs are getting in front of those that you want to make sure are going to use them. 

Now this does not mean that the press release it dead, as we think it only ties in better with a full email marketing strategy. If you can leverage the data or read, clicks, and downloads you are closer to having and intelligent conversation with your target audience of influencers and media contacts.

Learn how eROI works with Agency partners for email marketing >>

Well not really going green, but starting a new weekly email newsletter focusing on “green” marketing and ad campaigns. It is a continuous segmentation and introduction of more email newsletters. I am not sure now how many they have but to me it is news that they could be adding into one of their existing newsletters as content instead of making an entire new newsletter. 

I share this for a few reasons. 

1. Do they have enough weekly content to justify another newsletter? From the looks of this email in this post the answer is NO. Why well look how empty the newsletter is. It looks horrible. Not really “green” to add more media vehicles to cover small news. 

2. I assume that they are just using this as many publishers do to add more ad sales inventory and drive more clicks into their site where more ads can be served and drive more page views. Fine as that is the goal, but it is not a good use of time and space for them or the subscriber. 

3. Look at the ads. Do they support the content? Are they relevant? Nope on both counts. They are just focused towards advertisers and marketers but not focused on the matching the content or possibly the subscriber base. 

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I was driving home last night and thinking about a project I am working on for a client right now. They are having us work on their welcome messaging strategy and it had my brain churning. I am not sure why it was so important for me to think about, but I distilled it down to four things that I think are important when you are setting up a relationship via the opt in with email marketing. 

Identification, Trust, Understanding and Conversion. 

Identification:

You could make this simple: Who is sending this email and what will I know about them. Or you can think it out farther. We all know that you have a short time to capture the attention of the email reciepent. So what are the things you need to focus on? The from line, is it you or your brand. The subject line, what is the action you are intending them to take. If you can make this a Welcome/Thanks/You need to X subject line then you are ahead of the game.

This also lines up with the creative. Will they see your brand instantly? Will the creative match up with the look of the site that they were just on and carry over the voice of where they just came from online? You can focus on thinking about the split second reaction of the WHO to nail this. 

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I am not sure what to think about this idea. I have had messages from other email marketing experts that have started to use this service already. I can understand WHY people might want to use this system, but as an email marketer my thoughts are still out to vote. 

I have set up an account for myself but do not have enough data or experience to tell you WHY to use it. Here is the coverage on it below from last week. 

What still strikes me as odd is that it was created by one of the earlier founders of an Email Service Provider.

“OtherInbox is a service that helps with one of the growing problems of using Web services: e-mail overload. More specifically, services that take your information and sell it to third parties–thus filling up your in-box with decentralized junk.

OtherInbox works by giving you a special address you can use when you sign up for things and it helps you filter them in a central location with tags and layout akin to Apple’s Mail application. Each “subscription” reads like its own in-box.

The service may be most useful for figuring out what services are selling out your e-mail address to other parties, but it’s also good for handling bacn–the messages you may want from a service, but not necessarily filling up your in-box. What makes it special is that users can effectively kill off that special address making the messages bounce back to the people who would be spamming you.”

Now me, I am up to $135 that I OWE the Obama campaign since the night of the DNC election speech. Ryan, he has HOPE that the Obama team will starting using email more intellegently instead of email intellegence.

Feeling like the news paper boy is chasing me down the block 1-2 times a day looking for $5.00. Time to throttle it back guys and stop being panhandlers.

This election is providing us with so much real time data on the good and bad things we need to consider about our email marketing programs. 

The question it continues to leave in my mind is this: IF elected, will Obama continue to use email as a communication vehicle to the citizens of the United States? I would really hope that he would as it would be a great thing for all of us to have a direct communication method to the leader of our country as well as make a statement about the power and acceptance of email.

When I first saw this in another email service providers email newsletter last week, I did not know quite what to think of it. My first reaction was great idea for the small business that adds one or two people a day to their email lists. My second reaction was how in the heck was this a best practice or Can Spam compliant? 

Now since I don’t have all the data on this new widget yet my post here might be a little off. And that being said I welcome anyone from this company to respond and let me know how it works. 

My fear is as follows:

1. You are making it easy for people to add emails of those that have not opted in

2. You are setting an idea in your client’s minds that it is OK to just add email addresses collected from sources outside of a double opt in form THAT they did not initiate.

3. Making is easy does not make it right

Now for the other side of my thoughts. 

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Fingerprint just finished writing their first email client market share report. It’s the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.

It’s exciting for them because it’s the first time they’ve released any of the data that’s been collected through Fingerprint. It shows the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists.

I have been working on deploying it for our own newsletters (have you subscribed yet?), and will share OUR results soon.

Business Email Client Use from Study: 

Read the full report

Consumer Email Client Use from Study: