The Email Wars

Now how many times you have you seen incentive to win a trip, a book, etc etc. Why not take that sign up for our newsletter and get X idea to something that really matters to most of us? Well we did. And we are giving you a drink. Actually more like one of our clients is giving you a drink on the house. Yes there are some rule around it, but hey why not sign up if you live in PDX, or are coming to visit us and get yourself something ice cold. 

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The other morning I was forwarded the email opt in from another ESP by a co-worker at eROI. Now I am not going to share it at this point as it got my juices flowing. I started to wonder… if all of the ESPs out there are stumping on their soap boxes about best practices, studies, and how people are not doing A-B-C of the basics of email marketing… then are they following these rules themselves. 

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The trend has been growing and I am very happy to see this I might add. The more that I see people asking for you to set and manage your profile, email preferences, and giving you the ability to tell them more about yourself makes me feel that the world is getting to be a better place for email marketing. Piperlime, personally love them, does a solid job each week with the creative but also stands tall as an example for retailers building the trust and admiration of their consumers. 

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I have been watching surveys in email lately as more and more brands are frequently using them. The fact that they are asking is great. How they are asking and the method of taking the surveys are another story.

Many of the things that I found to be issues are:
1. You must log into your account to take the survey. Lost me. Will lose most people
2. You must log into to your account to manage your email preferences. Now this is not unsubscribe, but why can’t you click from a link to do this? They have all the info to pass already.
3. There is no action to take on the thank you pages to get me to go somewhere or make me an offer for the time and information I just gave you.
4. The sender email address is not the brand. The from field is, but everything else is from a 3rd party.

All challenges to goal completion in my book.

Apple:

The creative is nice and clean. Expected from Apple. But the sender email address is from a 3rd party survey company ghosting the Apple name in the sender field. Red flag to me. You?

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I had the pleasure today to get a chart from Michelle Eichner at PivotalVeracity showing some testing of forms in email clients. I wanted to share this as we get questions all the time from clients if they can use a form in an email. Will it work? Will it work “right” is more of the question they should ask.

Forms will display most of the time in email. But will the submit button work properly is another answer. Sometimes and it depends on what email client. I typically steer clients away from forms if they cannot segment out email addresses by known email clients. Now who really knows 100% of where someone reads the email? I would wager no one.

From Michelle: “We conduct a research study yearly to understand which Email clients support Forms. There are two parts to the test, A) Do they render B) Are the operable. Below is a chart showing the results of the major email clients. * These clients allow you to access/send information via a form in the email but warn the user when the submit button is clicked.”

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So what do you do? You drive them to a landing page to complete the form and enter the data where you have some control on how it works. Getting it out of the email client is a much safer route.

As GI Joe always says, “Knowing is half the battle”, so good luck in your own personal email wars.

Typically I would not be even mentioning the two people in these ads, but I noticed these on a political news site the other night. Yeah, I follow politics. Who doesn’t? But ads typically don’t catch my attention much anymore. Just clutter around information in most cases.

But these two were calls for newsletter sign ups, so my interest was piqued of course. So I clicked through the first one which was for good old Newt. I had wondered where he had squirreled off to anyway. The lead capture page was good. It was clear what it was about, offered content to support why I would want to opt in, and then showed me a sample email. Great tactics.

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Every once in a while I come across something that I think is a great opt in form. Clear, simple, helpful, and a little bit of creative copy writing that makes filling it out actually enjoyable. I have been seeing more and more lately in the Web 2.0 space (I personally hate typing the phrase Web 2.0, there I go again, ouch). These forms are well done, and give us some other ideas to look at.

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Notice the following elements:

1. Watch for Mistakes - note by the email address. How many times have you had people enter a bad email address with what I call “Fat Fingering”? More than any of us care to count.

2. Explaination of why they need a valid email address - really this is good. Why is it important for you to give us valid information. Make it clear with the value proposition.

3. Time Zone - If you have the ability to better understand where your people are located, if even by time zone, you are better prepared to message them at the right times globally.

4. Frequency - Want a weekly recap? Asking upfront sets the expectations of when you are going to get an email.

5. Alternate email address. I don’t see this all that often anymore, but you might not want to get emails at the address you use to set up an account. Makes perfect sense. Maybe you want your account set up for business, but the email alerts/recaps/newsletters to go to another inbox.

Just a few simple ideas we can all leverage when we are constructing our account or opt in forms. The biggest take away is don’t ask for more information than you are prepared to use. Asking for too much up front scares people from completing a form. Progressive profiling wins every time. And in this case of an account set up, you can always get the other stuff in their profile or preference center settings/screens at a later time.

To lead off I really like the new look of the Ben and Jerry’s emails. They are much better than past emails I have seen. And being that we are moving into the hot summer ice cream months, it is timely to share this one with you. They have a good use of real TEXT in the image blocks which scores points with me for rendering if the images are off in many email clients, but what stood out to me is WHY do they have a link in the footer to ask me if I want to join the newsletter?

After some thought it became more obvious to me… if this email is forwarded it allows others to use the link to opt in to the newsletter. So is this a good idea? Of course it is. Word of mouth wins you more subscribers. And who does not like ice cream?

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Really it is 30 years today that the first documented spam email was sent. And look where we are today, still fighting the battle that Gary Thuerk started. Interesting history on Wikipedia, but would be even more interesting if we could mark this the year that we killed it off.

Mashable has a good article around it as well.

What can we do this year as email marketers to make it die a painful death?

1. Stop sending to people that don’t want your email. Sure they opted in in 2002, but they have not read it for the past 3 years and you keep them on your active email list. Time to purge them. They are of no value to you and you are of no value to them no matter what you think.

2. Start segmenting your lists and send relevant campaigns based on their profile, what they tell you, and past behaviors.

3. ESPs need to be more vigilante on the lists that their clients load into their systems. Although sometimes tricky when you are bringing a client onto your email platform that you have no history with, you need to set some guidelines, educate them, and keep your eyes on the feedback loops and bounce reports from an account by account level.

Help us all help each other. No one no matter who they are want spam emails. Really.

As a creative interactive agency, we buy images from online sources for web design and email campaign projects. But we don’t always opt in for the email newsletter from the check out. I am sure that this is also the case for you and even for your own customers. So you can message them around transactional emails, product updates of products they bought and even ones like this that ASK them if they want to get on the newsletter list. If you do it right you can have a good lift into your house list. But automatically placing them on an email newsletter list is not the right thing to do and you will end up losing them or at the worse end of the spectrum, offending them.

So here is a good example of what Corbis did to reach out to me. Does not hurt that it is pretty to boot.

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Over 500 marketers were surveyed about the subscribe/unsubscribe process. While these processes are improving, they have yet to reach what we would call exceptional.

You can get the whole PDF in our resources section (Quarterly Studies tab)/ but the call outs below are not in the PDF.

High Level Thoughts:
- Email marketers are not matching up other marketing efforts like they should. Email, search, DM, Print, Call Centers, and sales teams need to get on the same page.

- Email marketers are not monitoring feedback loops and complaint rates. Are they counting on the ESP to do it? Many ESPs like eROI do this, but some do not. Does yours? Or does your program if you run it in house?

- The thank you page, prime visitor real estate is being wasted. There are so many opportunities to be testing the thank you page with Progressive Profiling and offers. As well as setting expectations.

- Not surveying subscribers at opt out. Remember high school when someone wanted to break up? Didn’t you ask WHY are you leaving? This still holds true. Exit surveys are key to finding out why you have churn.

- Not allowing frequency changes. Subscribers should have access to change preferences of frequency just like they can manage a profile with your programs. Do they want to hear from you monthly, weekly, daily, as things that are important to them change? Listen before you speak.

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According to a new report released by trade group Shop.org, conducted by Forrester Research, online sales excluding travel are expected to hit $204 billion in 2008, an increase of 17% over last year. The top three categories will be apparel at $26.6 billion, computers at $23.9 billion and autos at $19.3 billion, according to The State of Retailing 2008 Marketing Report.

Online commerce is expected to account for 7% of all retail sales in 2008, and will top $300 billion in five years, the report said. In addition, 53% of online retailers’ marketing budgets are spent on customer acquisition compared to 21% spent on retention.

The top customer acquisition tactic for online retailers is paid search, which accounts for 35% of new customers on average, according to the study.

The second highest source, attracting 18% of the new customers, is Organic Web traffic. Affiliate programs and e-mail were tied for third place, accounting for 7% each, according to the study.

Though paid search is the top acquisition tool, e-mail to house files is the top online marketing tactic as 92% of online retailers said they use it. 79% say Paid search will be an increased priority this year.

Nearly half of online retailers said they send print catalogs and 46% said they plan to make them an increased priority in 2008, the study said.

Online retailers report popular promotional tactics in this order of preference:
85% say they use free shipping with conditions, with it, the study said
82% use percent-off promotions with saying they use it
69% prefer dollar-off promotions
68% like gift with purchase
67% support online-only sales

For more information, please visit direct magazine here.
http://directmag.com/news/online-sales040808/

Often a topic when we are building a new campaign or site is just how much data should we be capturing or requiring to let a new customer, prospect, user or lead into a site. Forms are always something that are debated over and over again. Should we ask for 3 fields, 5, 7, 10? Are we creating roadblocks to completion or reasons for someone NOT to complete a registration or sign up for a newsletter or account? Many times clients are trying to ask too much. And how do we know this?

1. Basic rule: Would you complete this form in order to move forward?
2. Do you need this? Are you going to use this information in order to validate or allow them to get/use something?
3. What will you do with the data? Many times they just feel they need to get everything at once without a clear understanding of what they are going to do with it

And just what will they do. 9 out of 10 times they cannot tell us. So why ask? If you are blocking your goal with too many fields that will stop forward progress, get rid of them. Keep it simple and then look at the idea of progressive profiling.

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OpenID is a web standard that is growing fast in the past few months. It has been around since 2005 but now the giants like Google, MSN, Yahoo. IBM, and others are joining up. I talked to Scott Kveton of the OpenID board and Luke Sontag at Vidoop (side note: they just opened a Portland office) to see what impact it could have on lead capture for businesses at SXSW.

My initial thoughts were that it would hurt lead capture on sites and slow the ability to capture data on visitors, leads and customers. If the process lives outside of the site with a 2nd and 3rd party hosting the data on an individual, how would you your your brand grow a list?

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We released a new guide today in our Resource Center.

Customer value — revenue, loyalty, advocacy

Brands preach that they are trying to build a base of customers who will keep coming back year after year, but all of their marketing and sales strategies point to a one-time sale so they can get their short-term revenue up. so, how can you stay away from this poorly designed sales strategy? Build customer value. Value comes in multiple forms — each requiring more involvement from your customer — revenue, loyalty, and advocacy. the following is a brief description of each and some ideas for metrics you can use to measure each.

Don’t just focus on price for the one-time sale to a short-term customer, build customer value. Value comes in multiple forms — each requiring more involvement from your customer — Revenue, Loyalty, and Advocacy. Learn how to make brand advocates out of your customer base.

If you have not visited our new resource center, now is the time. The new center allows a one time registration to keep track for you of what you have and have not read allowing you to focus on growing your knowledge through our experiences.

Get the PDF today