The Email Wars

The twice annual gathering of the Email Insiders is rapidly approaching again. It will be held in Park City, Utah December 7th to the 10th. It is one of the events in the email marketing space that I always look forward to. Now not only because it is where some the great minds of email come together in a Fight Club type of dialogue, but more ideas are advanced and shared at this event than any other event in the email marketing space. 

Here are just a few sessions that I am looking forward to hearing: 

Keynote: Email and Politics - Case Study of the Obama CampaignVoter Advocacy, Social Advocacy and building communities were the keys to Barack Obama’s campaign.  Stephen Geer from the Barack Obama Campaign will talk about the campaign experience and how digital channels were used to build communities, for fundraising and keeping advocates connected during this year’s presidential election.

Stephen Geer, Director of Email and Online Advertising, Obama for America

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Email as a Social Media Tool

As social networks such as Facebook and MySpace continue to grow at mind numbing rates, email marketers are trying to understand the role and relationship of email and social media and networks. This panel will look at real-life examples of how companies are integrating email into social networks, incorporating user-generated content into their emails and leveraging user data from social networks back into their email program – and explore what portends in the future.

Moderator: Loren McDonald, Vice President, Industry Relations, Silverpop

Jay Stevens, VP, Online Marketing, International, MySpace 

Karla Venell, Manager of Database and Email Marketing, General Mills

There is still time to book your flight and head on over. But if you are unable to do so look for daily wrap up posts from me as well as some live Tweeting/Blogging from the email industry leaders.

I have been writing up the sessions today that I will be editing and posting during the week. But Tamara Gielen is covering it LIVE on her blog. so take a look. It is a full house and some great panels thus far.

http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/2008/05/live-from-the.html

So about the time you are reading this, my plane should be landing in sunny FLA. Once again it is time for one of the best and most intimate email marketing events, the Email Insider Summit. I hope that many of you will be there this time from the East Coast. It is one of my favorite events and I was not at the last spring one. So watch out Insiders as it is going to be a blast.

I have heard from many of the players in the ESP world that will be there as well as from some people going for their first time. I will try to keep you updated during the week of what is going on and keep you in the loop.

Mojitos should be involved and we have decided to do an A/B split and test whether a little umbrella OR a plastic monkey enhance the take rate of the mojitos.

If you have not mentally packed your bags for sunny FLA for the Email Insider Summit then get on your horse.

Friday is the last day to save $500 on the event. I can personally tell you that this is the event (Spring and Winter) that we look forward to each and every time. It is small enough to be intimate, allowing you to meet peers and brand marketers, while at the same time large enough to bring some of the top minds together.

It is in line with Fight Club as what is shared between rivals, brands, and ESPs tends to stay in the room. It is a real event of collaboration and openness.

Get your act together and meet me there. I will buy you a drink with an rainbow umbrella….

Register TODAY - Save $500
Early Bird Pricing Ends Friday
http://www.mediapost.com/?fa=rsc.form&showid=45

Learn more after the jump…

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Bill McCloskey is concerned about email marketing. Why?

It is a hard thing to do to look at what the industry is doing financially as a whole? Services, Agency, Analytics, and other systems that make email campaigns successful. And how much revenue are the campaigns generating. What is the REAL impact financially of email marketing? Some studies show 10-15% of all online revenue is driven by email. BUT we need to get the CEOs reading this type of news.

The attention that email gets is easily pulled away from whatever is hot or sexy this week, month or quarter. Why aren’t we getting the story out there, defining the industry and growing the people in this industry? It needs to all be done. The EEC is driving alot of this, but we need to all drive it in 2008.

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Morgan Stewart and Matt from Agent Silver Fox:

Search drives incremental email programs. Many search campaigns drive new leads and registrants.
Lining up the destinations on the site with the search ads (custom ad landing pages) has a higher lead capture and conversion metric.

How can we use a search budget to drive goals and revenue? The challenge is if core keywords are not converting, then you have some issues. Long tail keywords need to be tested as well. They don’t belive that brand keywords are a marketing tactic, rather a desired result of other marketing tactics. These are a result of other advertising efforts and other mediums.

Email campaigns actually caused a lift in search traffic during and following email drops to in-house lists and partner lists. 3% of people will search by brand keywords after an in-house email campaign. 20% CTR… partner or sponsored lists are strong but not as good. Email impacts immediate traffic from search, which makes brand keyword ownership of PFC programs very important.

Important to work on your SEO/SEM around the times of email campaign drops. Maybe look at the increase in PFC spend during a campaign window.

Case of a customer with a 1 million person partner email drop resulted in 5000 additional brand searches when compared to other times.

David Baker presented with a panel of long time software guys to talk about should you build, rent (ESP) or buy a email marketing platform solution.

Dave Hendrix, Datran Media
Ryan Deutsch, StrongMail
Cliff Seltzer, puresend

56% of people are using “in-house solutions”
33% are using ESPs
39% are using an advanced ESP (dedicated IP Address)
15% utilize a hosted service and outsource full service
46% are using in house and also using hosted service
36% of marketers using in house are considering shifting to an outsourced service.

APIs are an issue with some ESPs and some don’t integrate as they should

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This panel could be titled: A Bunch of Smart People Who Like to Talk.

The “f’s” in email marketing:
Focus, Free, Facebook, Feedback Loops, Frequency, … Fundamental Mindshift

What is LOVE in email marketing and how do we think about it?
1. Gain Engagement
2. Drive Sales
3. Build Brand

Rewards:
Content, First Release of news/events/studies
Community: Message Boards, Forums, rating, Product Reviews

Do rewards foster relevance? (my 2 cents is no)
Hal: Asking people what is relevant to them, collect the data and then feed back the offers makes the difference.

Brian: Cisco found that they do not tell Cisco all that often as to what is relevance. They have tied web analytics to the email campaigns to build better relevance, timing and targeting.

What do you focus on?
Relevance? Content? Relationship? Device/Technology

If you are playing in the mobile space, you need to have mobile landing pages and campaigns that can actually work in mobile.

Year in Review for 2007:

Will your budget be higher - same to higher - overwhelmingly budgets are going up from people in the room
Will your team grow? Bigger teams will be added to email marketing in most companies
Did you ROI on email increase from 2006 to 2007? Full MIX on the answer, many are not sure how to exactly measure ROI.
Was email managed on a global basis more in 2007? Enterprise showed more, but mid size said it was coming together more, but still some control challenges.
Was email managed as a part of the mix in marketing plans? YES
Does your boss or CEO care more? MORE are paying attention as they are seeing it more.. One note was that the BOSS is now concerned about the mobile device as they are carrying them now and see the campaigns.

3rd Party Applications are the way.
They are 100% opt in and can be removed JUST as fast in FB.

You could actually build an app that uses RSS from emailROI and feed those messages into the Facebook application. You need to manage the interaction within the screen. Not the inbox.

Right now FB is a proprietary network. Right back to the old Myspace/AOL.LinkedIn days. We ended up back in the position of where we were 5 years ago. Where are the open networks? Why can’t port the systems we need into these networks. Why not IMAP or POP3 integration? Why not a webmail account?

FB has also added this past week the message in the email alert instead of driving you back to read them.

This is an interesting session as it is more about building a FB app and using your email content to populate the app and use the Newsfeeds to trigger alerts. Issue: Newsfeeds can fall off your screen as only X amount stay on your page. Offering some value is more important to me. I think actually NOT crreating a FB app is a better strategy and instead creating a FAN page and use that to message.

Others in the audience agree that using RSS from an email campaign is an EASY way to get this integrated instead of needing to build a custom app.

David Daniels is always entertaining to talk with and hear speak. He injects comedy into his presentations to keep it engaging. He presented some numbers that we can chomp on and digest that helped me see the picture from a broader perspective in a few areas.

How are people spending time?
Email 87%, Search 70%, Research 64%, Purchase 60%, IM 37%.
These are the top activities by online consumers, not consumers in general.

We no longer “surf” but we search and research. The days of just surfing the web looking for things has long past. We are now using it as a vehicle to find and learn.

The average person gets 274 emails a week in personal email. 304 emails a week at work email. 74% of people have 2 email accounts. 8% triage emails with handheld devices. (Growing) 18% of heavy email buyers use mobile.(Those with patterns of buying more frequently from email). Meaning that they use the mobile device to deal with emails prior to reading them in the inbox. What this tells us that mobile is important and the message needs to be clear. If they decide to delete it at the hand hand level and have the handheld in sync with the inbox client, you might never get that trackable read.

Spam is down and 26% of the inbox is OPT IN email campaigns. I know it seems that spam never lets down, but it is slowing. And the fact the 26% of the inbox is opt in marketing campaigns means that 74% of the emails are typical personal or business correspondence.

Devices are building more choice. Also building more push back on control and time in people’s lives. Mobile saves me time… but mobile is taking over my life. There have been a few people that are taking back control by getting off email entirely. Now this demo is small, but worth considering and keeping tabs on.

What have you used instead of email?
27% Texting more - easier, instant, gratifying (34 and under)
44% are 18-25 / 49% are 25-34
38% are social
Skews Male in TXT use
This group gets 8.5% more email than the average person.

Cell Phone:
79% use it more than email as a communication device
87% are 25-34 that use it as a communication device
21% are social users
Skews female in use
Very active email buyers (more than 4 purchases from campaigns a year)

IM:
67% are 18-24
35% are social users, meaning they use it to talk to friends and peers.
No gender difference
They get 8% more email than average

Life is getting FASTER and the devices we use are getting wider and more part of society.

Facebook:
18% of the online pop have used facebook and others for personal communication instead of email
Massive skew in usage by age.

Question from the Audience:
Maybe this younger demo is using it as they don’t work yet. Maybe once they get jobs they will move to email more. Do you think that people as they get older will fall into using email more than social networks?

Email Marketin is growing from 1.2 billion in 2007 to 2 billion in 2012. this number does not include email agencies, design services and strategy. Just the ESP, Etc.

Why people opt out:
53% of people unsub due to irrelevance.
40% due to frequency
26% unsub using this this is Spam or Junk button.

Targeting:
27% of email marketers actually use click data to retarget and engage behaviorally.
This is surprising to me as it is the easiest way to create new campaigns based on past email campaign behavior.

e-miles: “Miles are the crack cocaine of the affluent”

Loyalty programs with miles work across all niches. Using programs that reward with airline miles show a higher loyalty value than other programs.

Every reward and program is done with email.

Borders Rewards: 20 million participants in the program whom get a weekly Rewards newsletter

105 million emails and click through of 19.8%, Demo is younger or older, but the 40-50 falls off.

Member participation:
Airlines invite their 15 million members, to join you complete your profile, ask frequency rates, send a double optn in email that rewards them off the bat by confirming (as they had some issues with the emails getting read), and then the campaigns start.

Email is used weekly to remind of earning opps. 25% of members respond to earning opportunities.

To earn 5 miles, you need to COMPLETE the action. Now wether that is watch a 30 second ad, take a survey etc, you must do it all. Now to earn 5 miles, that’s the equivalent of $5 on your credit card spend, you need to take 3-5 minutes. I am personally interested to see why I would have additional time each day to answer these surveys for 5 miles. Many others in the audience could not see how 5 miles would be attractive to them.

He reports that these actions lift brand awareness as well as “intent” to purchase. I am always on the fence about the “intent” to purchase factor. I like the measurement of what was the lift on sales as a measurement personally. The ROI….

just pulled in to Deer Valley, Utah for 72 hours of the brightest email minds, 18 degree weather and some great conversations. I will be attempting to blog the events during the day so keep your eyes peeled. Hopefully we gleam some new ideas these next few days.

Cheers

I know I was upset not to be able to attend the Email Insider Summit, but thanks to MediaPost you can watch most of the event online. One thing that does not make it as good as being there is that they only focus on the presenters and not the slides they are speaking to. Maybe next time they can have two cameras on the event to match the slide decks with the speakers.

http://www.mediapost.com/videos.html?bcpid=464120922&bclid=900701308&bctid=900644695

David Baker, Jeanniey Mullen. Loren McDonald, Bill McCloskey - The Email Insiders

Bill: So happy to see everyone throwing the good and the bad out in the open. Why are we, the good email marketing folks here, the ones that are trying to work so hard at creating better programs, better content, better value for subscriber when we have to fight the real bad guys polluting the inbox? When will the C level execs start seeing the value in email marketing as a channel?

Jeanniey: One of the biggest benefits of this event is that people are sharing so much with one another, sharing collective insights, successes, agencies and vendors not acting competively but working to advance email overall and sharing with one another. (Like cats and dogs sleeping together.. is this the end of the world?) the people that are here some some of the most impactful brand marketers in the world and really working hard at doing all of this right.

David: This event has fostered so much collaboration and openess. So many people have said that they are taking so much back with them, and so many close new contacts that they can communicate with after they leave here. ( I personally saw Lenovo and HP having a great conversation). The biggest challenge for us is how we craft our email stories when we walk out of this event. Taking this understanding that we all have and face the same or similiar issues and collectively we have helped to solve a few this week.

Loren: Is part of what we have been talking about is that email does not have that ONE thing anymore? It has so many other benefits and roles now. Acquisition, Relationship, Promotional, Customer Lifecycle Value, etc. We are opening up our eyes to how we can best leverage it and how people want to get it.

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Morgan from ET made some good points about the following:

Bigger lists are better. Cutting dead weight may result in a lower number of total opens/clicks/conversions.

It is not true at all. Keping your DBs cleaner and lists smaller may perform better than just mailing to the same large list.

Example 1: Cosmetics Retailer
Cut lists from 5.2 million to 2.1 million
59% reduction in costs post opt in
30% increase in total sales after opt-in
222% increase in total revenue per email sent

Example 2: Retail Store
67% reduction in email lists size/email costs
5% lift in average number of unique clicks
40% increase in total conversions

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