The Email Wars

Over the past 10 years, a once little known brand called Zappos has worked hard to build a company based on the principals of customer service and going the extra mile for customers. I have long been a fan of Zappos and what they have accomplished running at full speed, making decisions, embracing the community and having shipments of shoes at my door steps many mornings when I exit the house and head to work. 

Many have faulted the way in which a now major (on track to do 1 billion in revenue this year) brand had approached email marketing. They took an entirely different approach to the task of driving revenue by instead using engagement and community from the start to build a successful strategy. Many of you that have bought from Zappos in the past have seen the Zappos Digest enter your inbox either daily or weekly, and found it to be filled with all sorts of content from customers about shoes, feet and issues that they want to discuss. Now notice it is not an email about selling shoes… or is it? 

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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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I have seen this email “trick” used over the years as a great ploy to make you think that you are part of a secret insiders only group and that this discount is one that only you are privy to. Not this being said it is a good trick that works. 

If you were to just tell me 30% off it would feel like another ploy to tap my wallet. But when you put it out like this we seem to feel that it is something that we MUST take advantage of. To the typical consumer an insider discount that ONLY the employee gets is a great campaign in the making. 

I love that not only did they make it online but also bar coded it so that you could take it in, use it, pass it to others, print it out and make copies for friends, etc. Well executed and well done. And guess what, you don’t need to get that holiday night and weekend job to get the “employee” discount. Now when it fails is when you do it more than once. If this becomes a once a year deal or even twice a year fine, but you cannot run this promo more than once in the same season. It loses it’s implied value. Sure it might drive some more sales, but you are just making it another couponing event that makes us numb. 

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If you have ever tried Fat Tire beers you are most likely a fan. But why do some brand kill themselves with bad email marketing. I have long been a subscriber to many beer email lists (for business reasons only I assure you) but these guys kill me. I think I might need to make a charity phone call soon as these emails continue to hurt my good senses each time I get them. 

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When I get an email that is so beautifully simple it makes me smile. Really I smile. This email was sent to me from the Mini campaign that was IMHO executed so easily that it did a great job. They distilled the information into 3 things. Yes, I love list that are short and 3 is a Magic number. 

This email helped me to know What was going on, Who could participate, and Where those that could take part are located. Now could they have done it different? Sure they could have sent it just to those in the area that are qualified to participate in the event, but why did they not do this? Well to me it has a viral effect with this email. If you were passionate about this idea and knew people in the geographic area that might be candidates for the program then you might be inclined to send it on to those in your address book that could participate. Simple, yes. Genius, yes. Easy, you bet.

When you distill down a program in email into bite sized, relevant information that has clear actionable steps you win. I would wager that this small program (that is a big idea) was forwarded on to many people thus growing their email marketing efforts and reach, with a possibility to grow their qualified list of people that might be future consumers and brand enthusiasts of Mini.

Home Run.

Transactional and Service Emails - They are the most widely opened emails. Why? Well think if you were booking a flight or making a hotel room reservation. You want to see that they got the dates right, that they got the rate right and that they gave you a confirmation. Same with shipping emails, you want a confirmation code. Now the majority of peopke NEVER use this code, but they want to have it. So how can you be using these transactional or service messages in your businesses favor? Think about it.

If these emails are so highly expected and read, why are you not placing opportunities to have a relevant transaction in these emails. So many brands and people just focus on the execution of getting the info to you, not thinking about what lift these emails might be driving to your bottom line. In a time when so many marketers are nervous about meeting their holiday 2008 sales projections it would be the perfect time for your to put these into place if you have not already. 

I wanted to showcase an example of an Apple email as they do one of the best jobs around of making sure to set expectations, tell you what just occurred, and give you an opportunity to learn more, get more, and upsell you against products or services that are relevant to your recent transaction. It is such a simple notion to use this as part of your strategy.

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Pause… deep breath… one week later and 279 emails from the Obama Campaign and now here we are. But where are we with email and communicaitons? CNN reports that the Obama campaign gained over 3 million email addresses and over 10 million contacts (and I am sure of one Mr. Poopypants). So what will they do with them now? Is it over? Will we hear again? Will the idea of a President using email and web communications continue to hold strong as it seems that those that elected him want to have a relationship using this medium. 

The messaging got quiet after the win. I don’t blame them as I am sure that everyone on that campaign deserves a trip to a beach with no wifi for miles. I, not unlike everyone else wanted to know what the plan was. Well the next day Change.gov launched.

So I took a look around, kicked the tires. Solid social media site that is going to be used to communicate as news, ideas and plans shape up over these coming weeks to transition. I was not sure how integrated it was with the old campaign system, so I looked for the opt in method. There is was, top right hand corner but it threw me off as it looked surprisingly like a login form and not an opt in form. I completed it, was taken to a progressive profiling form to get a little more data on me, and then thanked for signing up. But not confirmation email, no double opt in, no welcome email… radio silence. 

Not a best practice at all. I have so many questions around what I am going to get, how, when and from who. It was an opportunity to tee up OUR relationship and set my expectations. But who am I going to call on this… the President?

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I know. You watch the reads and the clicks… and you measure by ONLY that. Rough.

Even when people are not opening and clicking on your emails, they are having a future lift impact due to the branding that takes place in the inbox. Studies have shown with larger travel brands that if they remove the email marketing in controlled selected groups, those groups were less likely to book with them when they were in the market to purchase. It is about being “there” and not just when people are “in market” to purchase. As you might never know exactly when that time is for everyone.

What does this mean or have to do with you? Well it has to do with two things. Frequency and Consistency. Right there they are out on the table for all to see. Well…. do you have them? Does your email program have them? And if you do… are they enough? How do you know?

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I am not sure if you often look at the adwords surrounding your emails in your Gmail box but this one stood out. I saw a post about in in an advertising blog that caught my eye as it was a clever use of the interview with Michelle Obama last week when she stated that she shopped online and her outfit was from JCrew. 

So being smart marketers, or having a smart media buying agency working with them, they bought that keyword (which I bet cost a pretty penny) and used it in the inbox. It is a good example of getting smarter around email marketing and using the social media and behavioral lift that natural or organic terms and search can give you in the inbox. 

I have not seen that many clever campaigns yet but this one is a great example of thinking about the inbox and how you can leverage word of mouth to drive your conversions around relevant and timely content. 

Nice work!

Click on the image to see it full size.

For years I have seen most of us using small fonts in our email marketing campaigns. Now I know we do this for many reasons. We have a lot to say in a small space. (often times too much to say) We have email templates that are set up to use the same size fonts that we expect to get in email. We think that using the same size font in our emails as we use on a web page is right. 

Now all of the above MIGHT be right, but until I got this email I never thought too much about it. Really what made sense to me was just how easy it was to read when it was so big. It gave me this idea, why not start making the most important part of the email the largest font? If I want it to be easily read, quickly scannable and make an impact why not go BIG? 

I am not thinking that 12pt font is the right way, but the conditioned way that we are all used to. This email has me considering trying it a few times to see what happens. Now don’t let me make you think that a font this big should be an image silly rabbits, but font should be text. 

MarketingVox and others seem to think so. And if they are batching and blasting at the increased rates that they report then I think that these marketers are shooting themselves in the foot. I always hate when I get email with the gender focus wrong, emails more than 2 times a week from a brand (unless it is a driven campaign that depends on telling me more of the story each day.

Have these marketers shown that if they send out to everyone as many times as they can produce an email that it actually lifts sales and does not either negatively impact the brand or cause too much list churn?

“In a survey of 174 online retailers, Internet Retailer found nearly half increased the number of monthly emails sent, compared to last year. The DMA reports an 8% increase in the number of emails that stores sent for the week ending October 17, compared to the same week a year earlier.

All told, Forrester forecasts over 158 billion marketing emails will be sent this year — expected to increase 63%, to 258 billion in 2013. As volume rises, consumers seek new ways to evade the wave of what they consider to be spam.

The problem, in part, is relevance. “I am a 32-year-old guy who lives in an urban area with no kids,” Porter said. “In other words, I don’t need blouses, high heels, or kid’s juice boxes.”

Less than 20% of retailer emails are tailored to consumers’ individual needs, even though targeted messages are easier to produce than they were a handful of years ago, says VP Stephanie Miller of market development at Return Path.

But Miller also believes this lazy attitude will evolve, because merely increasing email frequency won’t work in an environment this noisy.”

So you have your email campaign designed. You have sorted your lists to target them with the right offers, images, copy and links. You have made more changes and refinements in your testing and pre-testing, but have you written the best performing subject line yet? And HOW important is it? 

Well IMHO in light of the Sender Name of the email the Subject Line is the second most important. WHY you might think? Well because it is either the first or second thing that we read in the email inbox before making our decision to move forward with an open or send it to the trash. 

Here are my thoughts:

1. Does it inform me or tell me what to expect?

2. Does it make me want to find out what is next? 

3. Is it clear and succinct? 

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Many traditional retailers know that ecommerce is important. Many others still want to help the channel and drive sales to the physical stores. This is great on both sides when an email campaign in a retail situation can give the space in an email to make it actionable at either destination. Online or Offline.

I had the opportunity to talk with two people at Nike this past week and learned more about the channel and how the channel is important to support, but at the same time a brand that sells anything MUST have a retail store online OR it actually erodes the brand credibility. What I mean by this is IF Nike.com did not actually have ecommerce and allow you to shop their products they have found that it would actually impact the sales that their channel partners/retailers do in online sales. Funny finding huh?

Also of interest were the numbers which you might find surprising in total sales that the ecom store for Nike drives. Ready… wait for it… wait for it… less than 1.5% percent of total global sales. Now this number is large, make no doubt of that in the case of Nike, but yet it is a little shocking. Less than 1.5%? Wow. I would have wagered that over 5-7% at least. But then Nike did not build their business to be a consumer direct model, but built all design, manufacturing and distribution to handle the large channel sales. 

Back to the email. This email from J Crew gives you a scannable coupon that you can print and take into the store. Me, believe it or not, I am not a large online shopper unless I am shopping for others. I like to still go into the stores and check things out in person. I find it odd for a person like myself that I live online yet prefer to shop offline. I am sure that I am not all that unique, but this email gives me choices and I like choices. Do you?

Jeff Mills @EROI has a great article in iMedia today. Give it a read. 

Maximize your clicks and conversions by following these guidelines for smarter use of your email’s pre-header and snippet text.

It’s time to take another look at how you’re using that very first line of your email. As your recipients are getting bombarded with (and deleting) more and more messages, this small but valuable section of your email marketing pieces can be the deciding factor in whether your message makes it to your intended audience.

The snippet text displays in the pre-header, which is typically the first line of an email above the main copy or graphical content. It is also the very first sentence in a text-only or mobile email (e.g., on a BlackBerry). Email marketers now recognize this as must-use space when it comes to their email campaigns, but just using it isn’t enough to maximize its potential. You can improve email campaign stats even more by rethinking how you are using this space…..

Read the Full Article on iMedia

Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages

Found at : http://www.useit.com/alertbox/confirmation-email.html

Jakob Nielsen has long been one to watch when it comes to web usability and studies that help us make sense of the world we work in everyday. Sometimes his fresh set of eyes point out some things that we take for granted and open us up to a new way of looking at our habits as email marketers.

This is a summary of the two studies that took part 5 years apart. Interesting to see that in 5 years some things have remained constant. Not that they are good things, but they are opportunities for you and you email marketing efforts.

This is a must read for all email marketers.

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