The Email Wars

Why Mobile?
It is more frequently on.
It is more likely to be carried “offline”
Larger numbers of consumers are upgrading to mobile devices, not just phones.

Who is using:
25-45 has the highest penetration of mobile
13-17 fairly low still (but I would challenge that they are the ones driving mobile adoption.

Challenges:
Most intimate, most personal.
Rendering on the handheld (how do you send in multipart and deliver the TEXT version to a mobile device that has been sent as HTML OR Text?) Many times we have seen the HTML show up as TEXT Html mix

Know that mobile is already being used. So what are you going to do about it?

NOTE: IF you are slicing your images for your email, KNOW that the email will break apart in images blocks for every slice. Think about chopping your emails into 2-3 parts. Keep the text together.

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One of the hot buttons this year is the growing data integration efforts between email, web, ecom, and marketing campaign analytics. We drink the Kool Aid and are excited to hear this presentation.

Responsys has a VERY deep behavioral analytics system that can set up dynamic individual campaign flows in email.

Can behavior increase conversion and revenue, yes.

Can it be accomplished? Yes, but it wholly depends on what you are using. We have an open XML API for our clients (which a new version was released this past weekend) that you can map email flows into other systems.

You need to select a web analytics platform (like Webtrends) that can allow you to map this data both ways.

The benefit is true analytics driven one to one email marketing campaigns. What is important is finding out WHAT you can drive to email with that data. Cart abandoned? Purchases? Downloads, and other events can be used to create on the fly campaigns.

It is not at this point something I have seen too man small to medium size companies use. Many of those that are doing this are large Fortune 500 companies as it does take some capital and time. It is not an overnight set up and delivery. So what can you do?

What you need to have: email address, campaign identifier, and unique visitor ID tags for return behavior.

Newest Email Test Results: Stop Guessing, Let the customer decide for you.

Christian Busch, Doubleday Entertainment
Barbara Sanchez, Doubleday Entertainment

350 Campaigns a month across the properties

35 Active book Clubs, 7+ million members
Book Club Categories: General Interests, Lifestyle, Male, Specialty Clubs, Professional Clubs
Channels: DM. EM, Internet, Phone

What are the KPIs for email campaigns?

Do you have a good email vendor, strong tracking capabilities and clean lists (they DO NOT buy lists)

Are you familiar with statistical relevancy, tolerance levels and testing-how-to?

IS your test objective SMART-I (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, trackable…. and implementable?

IF you test, make sure to quarantine those subscribers from anyone else in the company. IF you are testing, control who might be able to touch.

REPEAT your tests several times across different brands (if you have more than one)

Make sure that you have good creative samples and quantitative data for all tests

Tests MAY be interpreted in several ways. Finance might want to see them in other ways than you are watching or testing for, or another group that is involved.

Some stake holders can suffer from short term memory loss.. always back your notes and conversations so that you are able to reproduce the notes and results along the way to keep all on task.

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I will be posting some recaps from the Sherpa Summit. Flow might be a little off, but tried to hammer down as many notes as my fat fingers could bang out…

Tad Clarke does the intro, Editorial Director of Marketing Sherpa

Anne Holland and Stefan Tonrquist ( I love this presenting combo):

The Good News: The impact of email across both b2b and b2c is on the rise. It is the main driver of impact across marketing. 3600 people were surveyed on these results from a recent Sherpa Study.

List Growth: B to B 3.9%, B to C 6.0% ad Large Lists (Over 300K) 5.3%
At the same time they are losing: 2.1%, 2.9%, 3.2%
Annual growth rate: 22%, 37%, 25%

The losing rates are more of the hard bounces than they are unsubscribes.

Winning opt in campaign example from Blockbuster Video shown.

Interesting that 39% of Sherpa opt ins sign up for the co-reg on the Thank you page of their own site.

Marketing Sherpa did a test of opting in to all the 435 websites of attendees. AUDIT
15% of show attendees offered sign up on home page
18% offered it on a form on the secondary page
42% used a link on a page to drive to subscribe
25% - NO mention on the home page
They feel that not having it on the home page, even a small form, is going to hurt list growth.

55% of sites sent a Welcome message within 72 hours.
45% of the sites that allows opt in DID not send a help or welcome at all
36% of those Welcome messages get opened SO make sure to send it as that is one that subscribers expect…..

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We have been covering in real-time this AM’s sessions. I will be posting more later on this blog from Sunday through Tuesday’s event, so stay tuned. Until then read www.emaildays.com for this AMs Marketing Sherpa Email Summit 07 conversations and presentations.

We have 3 blogs for those of you that just read this one if you have not visited them, check out EmailDays.com and ReturnOnSubscriber.com.

The Summit is in full force. We arrived today to a great reception from Marketing Sherpa here in Miami. They had set up a Boot Camp seminar this afternoon as well as a great cocktail reception in the Vendor Hall that was PACKED. Seems that this event is coming into its own in the second year.

The EEC had a Membership Welcome this afternoon as well and it was well attended. What was great to see was the amount of people from Europe in attendance at the EEC event. People from Belguim, Italy, and the UK were there representing companies in the email marketing space.

The conversations going on today were good to hear and some of the ideas and questions coming out of those from Europe provided good information about the global marketplace.

What was shocking from all of this were those that actually said that they read this blog. Thanks to all of you as it helps me to realize why I actually pen this blog.

Cheers and I will be sure to write more from sessions these next two days.

Packing up today and heading out on the Red Eye to Miami for the Marketing Sherpa Summit Sunday to Tues and then back. I will hopefully be blogging the event live as I hear great ideas and news. So look for updates next week.

And if you are going to be there, come say hello or join us a the EEC event Sunday afternoon for Mojitos.

Thanks to the companies and individuals that submitted great campaigns the past 2 weeks. And for those of you that did not, your chance is coming…. We will be holding a monthly contest by vertical for best creative emails. Look for the announcements here.