Manhattan Marketing Maven

The E-Mail Blizzard Will Continue and Intensify: How Will Your Brand Stand Out?

Everybody loves e-mail because its cheap, its fast and it works. That's the conclusion of a survey done among 2000 online marketers by Datran Media.

More than 80 percent of those surveyed are ratcheting up their e-mail efforts because it works better than other online media and has the best return on investment. 80% send newsletters, 78% use it to drive direct sales and 70% say it enhances customer relationships. The same 80% target e-mail. The targeting criteria are based on demographics or geography, actions, or psychographics and stated interests (in that order). Twenty percent don't target. They carpet bomb using e-mail and this doesn't include the spammers who carpet bomb as well.

Most think that e-mail works best in-tandem with search engine marketing and direct marketing. Half think it complements display ads and very few think it works well with broadcast or cable TV. Almost 25% think e-mail and mobile media might work as a messaging double play. Two-thirds of those surveyed are pretty sure that e-mail also drives sales in other channels and 3/4s plan to do some kind of A/B split or optimization testing.

The survey validates our conventional wisdom. It acknowledges that when something works (think retail circulars) it really works. And for e-mail, like those annoying circulars, consumers are willing to cope with blizzards of them because they serve a useful purpose. and because so many of them end up in harmless junk boxes.

In most cases e-mail serves as a stimulant for customer networks. Rarely does the merchandise in a particular -mail message fly off the shelves. More likely an e-mail prompts or reminds customers to buy the item they've been thinking about or mulling over or cues them to something happening with a brand they relate to or care about.

But if you hope to optimize e-mail for marketing, in this environment, you need to stand out from the crowd and take concerted action to get attention for your brand and your message. Try these tactics:

1. Create a distinctive look or feel. Experiment with subject lines and with Personal URL's in the subject line. Use the same template and be sure it instantly cues brand recognition.

2. Build a Consistent Delivery Schedule. Train your customers to expect certain messages at certain times (Tuesday = Bargain day). Consider a value-oriented TO address to re-inforce the content or the value implicit in a consistent series of offers.

3. Segment and Target Customers. Test the criteria that suit your marketing objective. Communicate the criteria in the subject line. Be sure the value-add is apparent in the subject line.

4. Send Less Better. Rather than do one blast of a million names, do 5 blasts of 200,000 names. Make each segment a different offer or relate the offer to something you know about the behavior of customers in that segment. Focus on behavior its the only reliable predictor of future action. Forget demographics or psychographics, they won't help you target anything other than brand awareness; a task much better suited to other advertising channels.

5. Remember RFM Rules. Peg e-mail basts to frequency of action. People who take a desired action are much more likely to do it again and much sooner than someone who blithely signed up to get on your list.   

How To Use E-Mail Marketing to Kill Off Your Customers

I live in Army/cargo pants.So the 10% Thanksgiving sale offer from Gr8gear really resonated. Until I tried to make a discounted purchase.

I got the e-mail, noted the times when the coupon was valid, pre-shopped for my pants and waited 24 hours. I get to the site, click in my stuff and quickly rack-up more than $50 dollars in goods to qualify for the discount deal. I put in my info and the shopping cart won't take the data. I try again and again. No deal.

Then I notice a red sentence peeping out of the black background that reads -- "Coupon code cannot be used on specials or closeouts."

I check the cart. Both sets of pants we're marked down from 29.99 to 22.99, I check the offer e-mail. Not a peep. The right nav bar tells me my pants are to sellers -- not closeouts. I'm stunned. I'm shocked. I'm really pissed off. I've now invested 20 minutes to buy stuff I crave and my warm feelings have turned to anger and resentment.I've gone from repeat customer to angry antagonist with zero sympathy for the marketer that didn't do his/her job right.

Wanna kill off your repeat buyers? Send them e-mail offers that they can't cash in on !   

When Frequency Becomes SPAM

Ziff Davis either loves me or hates me. I can't decide which. They sent me 5 promotional e-mails today.

I guess because I subscribe to a punch of their publications, sites and conferences that I must be among their favorite campers.But this isn't feeling like love. Its feeling like SPAM. It's also feeling like they really don't have their marketing together. Carpet bombing reveals several problem areas.

1. Data Systems Don't Talk.  Evidently these ZD guys either don't know much about merge/purge or don't have the systems to implement it. And since they all came within a 3 hour window on a Friday afternoon, should I assume that they batch blast this stuff or that there's only one guy who knows how to work the e-mail machine and he never read any research about how people mentally and physically check out early on Friday afternoons during summer.

2. No Governing Contact Strategy. They also seem to be down a quart on contact strategy since nobody I know would allow a single customer, even a cash cow customer, to be hit five times in one day.

3. No Brand Portfolio View. If somebody was watching the master brand, they'd figure that bombing a poor slob like me signals either that they are desperate, disorganized or don't really care if they annoy me. I'm not sure a brand can afford any of these perceptions much less all three,

4. Limited CRM. I'm a management and Marketing guy. I state that clearly on all those bingo forms and online subscription forms. So why I'm I being pitched About Remote Support, Training Programs for Windows and other technical stuff that I have absolutely no interest in. They haven't thought about asking for my preference nor have they inferred it from either my data set or my online behavior.

So remind me again why I should believe Ziff Davis offers me, as a marketer, valuable resources for targeting, parsing and sequencing marketing campaigns?

12 E-Mail Copywriting Tips

The Marketing Experiments Journal released a two-part series of test results on what determines effective E-mail marketing copy. Effective e-mail marketing is when the recipients take the desired action. Here is the take-away as I understand it:

1. Body copy drives action. It is among the factors with the greatest impact.

2. An appeal to trust beats an appeal to greed. Establish your credibility first.

3. Familiarity and tone build trust and establish credibility. Knowing you, feeling comfortable with you and believing you are not a crook or a spammer is crucial. Without it you are dead.

4. Different targets get different messages. In mailings to the house list, assume they know you and put the offer first. In mailings to prospects the sequence should be credibility/familiarity language first, offer second.

5. Specificity increases credibility. If you can refer to previous order numbers or other personalized data, the recipient will instinctively understand that you are not a spammer and be more inclined to act.

6. Shorter is always better. Eliminate every extra or stray word, link or graphic you can.

7. Police your identity. If you market using a brand name use that name consistently. Don't mix brand or product names with corporate names or business unit names because it confuses and scares people. Recipients don't care about your company structure or politics. Present yourself as something they know and stick with a single identity (name, logo, tag line) throughout the messaging in the initial e-mail, on the landing page and in the follow-up e-mails.

8. Urgency drives behavior. People only act if they have to. You can establish this sense artificially (e.g. 25% discount ends at midnight) or naturally (e.g. The Webinar is tomorrow). Both work equally well. But inertia rules. If people don't have to act, they won't.

9. People read the PS. Its true in direct mail and its true in e-mail. Reprise your offer in the PS. And it doesn't hurt to add an 800 number in the PS to give prospects a second channel for response.

10. Timing counts. Response is a function of frequency. Its always better if customers or prospects indicate their preferred frequency and channel. a steady stream of messages will yield a steady stream of results. Keep your expectations low, if they only hear from you once in a blue moon.

11. Use plain standard typefaces in 10 point type or larger for older audiences. Reversed type is almost always a mistake. Default to plain vanilla. Don't get cute.

12. The SUBJECT line must communicate why you are mailing and what the recipient can hope to win by interacting with you. 

    

Top 5 Ways to Improve E-Mail Effectiveness

Retailers are amassing lists and bombing customers with e-mail. But their embrace of the bread-and-butter marketing medium has not been as effective as it could be according to a recent survey conducted for Internet Retailer.

Two-thirds (64.7%) are conducting more campaigns than a year ago, Sixty percent run one to three campaigns per month and 32.8% run 4 to 15 campaigns per month. Yet less than 5% convert more than 10% to sales. A sixth (18%) don't know their open rates.Half (52.5%) have click thru rates of 10% or less. And a third (29.5%) can't measure what happens as a result of these willy-nilly campaigns.

E-mail has become the new Roto for retailers -- cheap, frequent, ubiquitous.and done by rote..

Since almost half (47.8%) see increasing web sales as the primary objective of e-mail marketing,consider these Top 5 ways to make this medium dramatically more effective:

1. Romance the Subject Line. Put the offer in the subject line. Convey instant value to recipients and identify your brand. You must communicate familiarity and real value in a nanosecond to prompt opens. 22.5% of those surveyed have an open rate from their house list of less than 10%, Another 22,5% only get 10-20% opens from the people who signed up and are eager to hear from them.

2. Segment the list. 43.4% of survey respondents don't. Key sorting factors should be purchase history and frequency. E-mail marketers should embrace the direct marketing RFM concept which predicts repeat behavior much more effectively than psycho-demographic variables.

3. Focus the Message. Limit copy to 150 words or less. Limit links to 3 or less. Think of e-mails like enhanced billboards. They are glanced at and skimmed not read or perused.

4. Limit the Offer. Give each segment a carefully chosen merchandise set. Remember most people are stymied by too many choices. More short offers work better than encyclopedic collections and catalogs.

5. Make Buying Easy. Structure the process so anything can be bought with 3 clicks. Put buttons above the fold. Limit width to less than 600 pixels. Stifle the desire to cross-sell or up-sell everything. Only use light graphics. Don't embed video unless it drives product desire.   

FYI. This post is part of a global group writing project initiated by ProBlogger.net.

   

Not-So-Automatic Automated E-Mail Marketing

A gushy story in last Monday's Wall Street Journal makes automated e-mail marketing seem so "push-button" easy for any business that you'd be an idiot not to buy one of the featured tools and start madly blasting out e-mail campaigns. What the writer didn't write is that many of these tools litter the offices and balance sheets of companies who aren't ready to use them.

In order to make effective use of the evolving set of e-mail software and services on the market, you need to have a clean target list, a database to house and keep track of the list and some baseline sensibility and skill at direct marketing. Generally you need to understand how lists are compiled, who are your most-likely-to-buy prospects, how e-mail gets transmitted, where responders will land and what actions you will direct them to take when they get there. Then you need to be able to track who responded, who didn't, figure out how to follow-up with and qualify each segment and make some generalizations about what happened and why. It helps to have an interest in testing different creative and targeting tactics and to count and measure everything that happens. This usually requires a skilled individual dedicated to the project, if not the process. 

And while e-mail is fast and cheap to create and transmit and, when targeted properly, is still remarkably effective in provoking a quick response not everyone can get these results instantly. These tools and services do NOT do the basic thinking, collecting and counting for you. At even at affordable prices, it only makes sense if you have scale and a commitment to the medium.They automate and expedite a well-conceived campaign plan and in some cases can track responses over time to divergent locations.

But they are far from an automatic silver bullet. Several of my clients have bought these products only to find that they weren't ready to use them, couldn't get plans, processes or content together or didn't have the bodies necessary to use shiny new toy. There is a marketing maturity quotient that drives the real value of marketing resource management tools.

   

 

E-mail Marketing Ain't Easy

Two recent studies indicate that neither B2C or B2B marketers are using e-mail marketing effectively in spite of its massive quantities and inherent qualities. Forrester found 62 of 63 campaigns lacking and E-Mail Data Source found a boat load of issues with 355 retailers they studied.

E-mail marketing is much easier said than done.

Forrester created a 10 criteria methodology to score e-mail marketing programs from more than 60 companies in 6 categories: business services,consumer goods, financial services, media retail and travel. E-mail Data Source looked at 10 retail segments from office supplies, apparel and electronics to HBA and supermarkets. Both assumed that marketers use e-mail to engage and possibly convert prospects and customers from passive interest to action. Both posit a direct causative correlation between e-mail campaigns and website traffic. 

Both analysts are strutting their stuff -- Forrester's crack analysts and E-mail Data Source's E-mail Analyst Database. Neither have spiffed me. But both identified a series of common problems which they reckon degrade the ability of e-mail marketing campaigns to accomplish marketers' primary objectives.

The Common Faults

1. Not in the Game.

27 of the campaigns in the Forrester set and 30% of the retailers did not capture e-mail addresses in the most obvious spot, the upper reaches of their website home pages. So roughly a third either missed their chance to play or consciously passed on the opportunity to engage customers and prospects.

2. Questionable Credibility

Many of the campaigns did not have physical addresses, were not CAN SPAM compliant, had no opt-out mechanism or links to set or adjust e-mail preferences. Many had no explicit privacy statements or links to privacy policy. Among retailers less than 5% used double opt-in techniques to validate addresses and subscriptions. Urgency, cheapness and a devil-may-care attitude characterizes companies who flout the established conventions.

Frequently these guys underestimate the impact of their sloppiness or greed on customers who have come to expect certain privacy guarantees and some baseline courtesies of identification and choice. The credible and responsible use of the medium directly reflects on the credibility of the sender and his value proposition. If you act like a SPAMMER you deserve to be treated like one.

3. Doubtful Messaging

More than half of the Forrester subject lines did NOT hint at the value to the user. And in only 11 of the 63 cases could you just scan the e-mail and pick up the basic message. Is it any surprise why opens and click-thrus are generally so low or sell-through is so difficult? Similarly a clear statement of purpose and benefit separated the successful retail e-mailers from the also-rans who found no reason to explain what they were doing, why or how it benefits customers to participate. As if customer confusion was a stated goal, 33% of retailers didn't send anything in the first 30 days of signing up for e-mail and 21% never sent a welcome message.

What's the point of sending out something if the recipient can't instantly understand what it is and why its great? There are no points awarded for anything but customer satisfaction and delight. Clarity is hard to acheive but well worth the investment to get there. If you can't be clear and make a compelling offer don't bother meeting the campaign schedule.

Its clear that any idiot can blast out e-mail or collect e-mail addresses. What's less clear is how to use a ubiquitous, fast, responsive medium responsibly for optimum effect in generating customer awareness, attention and repeated action.

How E-Mail Is Working

Almost everyone gets an offer by e-mail. And enough people find value in the offers to create pay-offs for marketers. That's the conclusion of a December 2006 online survey conducted among 2541 adults 18+ by Harris Interactive for Acxiom Digital.

No earth shattering news here. But the nuanced data gets interesting:

74% of responders see e-mail from favorite brands as desirable and valuable. No telling how many have signed up to receive e-mail. but its clear that having, maintaining and using a house list pays off.

30% said they bought something from an e-mail. It isn't clear whether they bought on-line or in stores, but 1 in 3 is more than enough to validate the value of e-mail as part of an integrated or stand alone marketing effort. Add to that another 30 percent who said they requested information, a bunch of likely prospects, and you'd be silly not to use e-mail aggressively. 

17% think SPAM is valuable. That's more than I would have guessed. Either spammers are making better offers or more people are sorting through JUNK boxes than I supposed. If 1 in 6 people are actually looking at SPAM and doing something about it; it explains why spammers keep at it and keep inventing new ways to beat the filters.

The survey indicates that classic DM rules apply to e-mail. Offers, timing, relevance targeting directly affect response.

Sixty percent say the offer or the discount prompt the action. The same number says timing matters; not so much time-of-day or day-of-week, but rather at any given time X number of consumers are in-market for any given product or service and you have play the odds to hit a bunch of them effectively. The trick, as 55 percent report, is to send them something they care about by targeting interests, lifestyles or expressed preferences. (Okay they paid the bill for the survey, this data point is a fortuitous plug for buying lists.)

Compare that to a tepid response to personalization (21%) as an action trigger. Calling me by name matters less than what you offer, how much I care and if you hit me when I'm contemplating a purchase.

E-mail marketing is alive and well. Its a combination of art and science, much like hunting submarines. But the number and quality of collective learning is increasing in the context of a test-and-learn sensibility.

The news from this survey is that effectively using e-mail to build brands and move product is more about setting,  contextualizing and managing corporate rather than consumer expectations.    

The Personalization Paradox

E-mail should be personal and personalized. Yet the amount and quality of data necessary and the complexity of systems required to deliver on this premise kills E-mail’s ROI. This is personalization paradox that challenges the Web 2.0 premise of substantially increased personal interactivity.

Since the first commercial e-mail was sent, marketers have desired to personalize every aspect of it; the name, the offer, the language, the imagery. The assumption has been that greater personalization equals greater resonance equals greater sell through. Though there is scant hard evidence to validate this widely held theory.

And since the early 90s, most e-mailers have lacked the data, the systems, the expertise and sensibilities and the cash to either validate the theory or make it all come true. As a result, less than half of all e-mail marketers personalize anything and almost half of those just personalize your name according to a new study from Responsys reported by Ken Magill.

Imagine the fantastic possibilities:

Dear Sally, you get 25% off the grey and white versions of the sweater you bought last month.

Dear Bob, as one of our best customers, on your birthday you can have 50% off anything in the store.

Dear Max, stock up on the components you buy in quantity each month with this special price.

Dear Molly here’s an incentive to buy the belt, boots and the bag that go with the outfit you bought last week.

Dear Kevin you can get a great deal on all the stuff you selected but abandoned if you click here now.

Dear Ralph, based on your spending patterns and total volume you can have your choice of 20,000 air miles, a loan at a preferred rate or a special promotional rate on a 30 year mortgage.

Dear Sue, we noticed you looked at pages on our cruise to Pago Pago here’s a special offer if you opt-in by Thursday.

Then contemplate the realities:

Getting anyone’s name right is difficult. Lists are not reliable and you never know how someone prefers to be addressed. Are you talking to Dan, Daniel, Danny, D. Stephen , or Fatty D?

Data is usually held in silos, sometimes by different and competing organizations. Customer purchase history is often not integrated with credit card or payment data, which is frequently split between major cards and house accounts. Web sight activity isn’t often captured or compared with offline behavior or campaign activity reports or calls to campaign or customer service 800 numbers.

In spite of significant investments in IT and CRM systems many merchants and marketers still do not have a 360 view of customers. And even those who do often can’t aggregate purchases by families or by affinity groups that might drive significant volume.

Too many firms can not justify the cost in resources and cash for an uncertain payoff. Elaine O’Gorman of Silverpop Argues that e-mailers aren’t familiar with data mining techniques and don’t have the in-house expertise to get it or work with data matching services. Though many of these services cannot integrate or match data among media or among sources easily.

Into this void steps Omniture who has created a product called Genesis, kind of a work around to manage this data integration problem. They claim this platform can integrate data sets in ways that internal systems cannot.

Potentially this solves the system issues. But the jury is still out since it doesn’t solve the problem of cash investment, data quality and quantity, data and direct marketing expertise nor does it prove or disprove the baseline premise underlying the personalization paradox.

E-Mail Best Practices

MarketingSherpa released the free summary of their annual E-mail Benchmarking Survey in a way that could teach Jenna Jameson a few tricks. Anne Holland and Tad Clarke have become masters of the tease and the slow reveal as they tout their $247 tome and PDF.

And yet beyond the sales tactics are some fairly interesting and not-so-surprising conclusions.

1. E-mail ain’t so bad. Two thirds of B2B marketers and three-quarters of B2C marketers see it as increasing in impact in spite of the hype generated by the flavors of the week -- social networks, mobile communications and marketing by widgets.
2. Conversion is all about the design of your forms. How it looks and how easy it is to use can improve opt=-ins by 25-40%. Getting the design right means more customer engagement, more data capture and more sales.
3. E-mail is just like postal mail. It is a test-and-learn tool. You can’t just blast it out and hope for the best. And if you are testing, landing page copy, offers and subject lines give you the biggest return,
4. Designers need help. Eye tracking tests show that recipients click all over the place, often in places designers did not plan for usually images and branding elements. You have to try to psych out your audiences without embedding so many links that you get filtered out as SPAM.
5. E-mail filters zap 40% of opted-in mail that people actually want. SPAM filters are a moving bogey. They are generally triggered by words (e.g. free, boobs) the size or number of HTML images, the number of hotlinks, the presence of an attachment, specific IP addresses and other more subjective criteria. Its still a cat-and-mouse game to delivered e-mail that customers request.
6. As if you needed something new to worry about; you have to start thinking about mobile e-mail. On the B2B side Blackberries are ubiquitous and the same penetration and impact will be felt on the consumer side before too long.