Manhattan Marketing Maven

Facebook Courts Direct Marketers

Facebook Exchange,  FBX the ads in the News Feed -- the primo real estate on Facebook -- is a year old and vying to become an indispensible partner to direct and CRM marketers.

The pitch directly addresses the needs and anxieties of brands that want consumers to take action on social networks. Facebook, in a new deck circulating to advertisers, argues that they can find, mirror and more accurately target audiences, simultaneously access desktop and mobile users on a broad range of devices, leverage search and display ads across the Internet and do better ROI metrics.

There is nothing subtle in Facebook’s move to curate, qualify and market audience segments. Absent is the long-standing claim that Facebook is strictly about relationships, sharing, engagement and saving the world.

Most of the magic is a three-stage data mining process. By taking data from brands and combining it with demographic, psychographic and behavioral data from third party sources like Epsilon, Acxiom and Datalogic, marketers can get a tighter bead on likely buyers.

Then by matching combined brand and outside data with Facebook profiles, the platform can deliver a specific message to large numbers of individuals meeting very narrow criteria eliminating waste and optimizing the likelihood that consumers will opt-in, share, sign-up, download or buy something. Like traditional publishers or broadcasters, Facebook claims to offer seamless and measurable targeting, reach and delivery.

Facebook claims a 50% accuracy advantage over the average online campaign. This is the Holy Grail for direct marketers; maximum response with minimal waste across channels at efficient costs. For brands without a direct marketing or CRM infrastructure, Facebook potentially is a plug-and-play solution since brands can potentially find and reach their best customers, find more prospects that look like best customers or create new target segments virtually on the fly. But while Facebook will deliver a branded message to targeted users and tell you what percent of your database are on Facebook, they won’t share the details or trade data with brands.

With massive reach and strong frequency, based on the fact that people check their newsfeed as much as fourteen times each day, Facebook is looking to take serious market share away from display advertising, search and email marketing.

The social network’s leading mobile posture is a second strong direct response argument. With zillions accessing Facebook everyday on smartphones and tablets, a brand can reach their customers and prospects and finesse all the costly, complicated and confusing device, rendering and carrier issues with one partner.

Tight targeting and mobile access when combined with links to branded websites, pixel tracking for retargeting and internal databases, gives a brand continuous exposure to people who have shown any sign of interest. This is, depending on your perspective, is either super-targeting or super-stalking. Either way, research shows that it delivers more, faster response.

It also explains how that pair of shoes you looked at on Zappos follow you around the Internet and appear on your Facebook page. Newsfeed or Timeline units, a 154x154 pixel image and several lines of copy, were created precisely to enable precision targeting and pixel tracking to enable retargeting on Facebook and across the web. Consumers can like, share and comment on FBX ads, so virility is baked in. 

My clients using these units are reporting strong cost effective results. And even though many have been extorted into buying ads since Facebook choked off access to the fans they accumulated by manipulating the Edgerank algorithm, the guys paying the bills now can find out how many fans, followers or likers are actually buying products.

Facebook is aggressively addressing direct marketing fundamentals and focusing on critical ROI concerns. Many of their social network peers are following suit. It will be fascinating to see how and how quickly traditional direct response partners respond. Stay tuned. It’s about to get very interesting. 

6 Killer Email Tactics

E-mail is the strike force medium for online and offline retailers because 95% of online users get it and receive an average of 416 commercial messages per month. 91% check their e-mail at least once a day and 70% say they always open e-mails from their favorite companies and 84% say its their preferred channel for engaging with retailers. Don’t let the social/mobile crowd fool you.  Social media gets the buzz, but email delivers the traffic. 

Nearly one in every three e-mails gets opened. More than half open on mobile devices and as much as a third of openers act on the offers. In general, for every dollar spent on e-mail marketing, retailers get $44.25 in return. 

The big tactical decisions are about frequency or cadence and offers. Some form of free shipping and a minimum of a 10 percent discount are table stakes. And at least weekly for most of the year, except for holidays seems to be the norm. 

Six e-mail marketing best practices separate the winners from the losers: 

Write Telegraphic Subject Lines. For one-third of recipients, the subject line is the only criteria for opening. Put the offer and the CTA in the SUBJ line but understand that less is better. Subject lines with fewer than 10 characters have a 58 percent open rate and better than a 2.5% CTR. Shorter is always better. If you can work in the customer’s name and/or location, you can spike open rates. Everybody immediately responds to his or her own name. 

Short & Sweet Content. Focus on the offer. Aim for 4 paragraphs maximum. Limit the possible CTAs. Click rate degrades with the number of links, so focus your customers on seeing a single powerful offer and direct them to click on a big colorful link or button or two. Avoid the urge to load up on logos and taglines. Present the product or service clearly. Find a stand-alone illustration or image to make your point and ask for the order.

Like a letter, adding a personal signature, evidence of human interaction, can increase opens by 5 times and clicks by 3.5 times. 

Since everyone already knows the potent proven retail words your offer has to pay it off in a differentiating and motivating way to deliver a decent CTA or CTOA. 

Time Your Send. Most e-mail is opened during business hours (10a-4p) and the majority of response happens in the first hour after delivery. More than half of mobile e-mail is opened from 5p till 8a. Consider these cycles and what peole normally do during these time periods as you craft content and offers. 

Open rates peak mid week, on Tuesdays and Wednesday, though the highest click through rates are on Sunday.  The most e-mail is sent on Wednesday so the burden to stand out midweek is greatest. Saturdays draw the lowest volume, maybe an opportunity to flank the competition. 

There is a lot of click through action early in the AM.  That’s why so many retailers transmit overnight to catch consumers when they check their e-mail first thing in the morning. Open rates generally peak at 10am and then gently slope downward throughout the business day. 

Be Transparent on the FROM line. Twenty-four percent of recipients only open e-mail from names they recognize. Transparency works best. Use your brand name. The higher your brand awareness; the better your open rate. 

Optimize for Mobile. More than half of all e-mail is opened on mobile devices. Too many render badly and drive customers away. Design for smartphones with clear calls-to-action and big buttons for fat fingers. Aim for more elegant rendering on tablets, but expect buying actions to take place from home in the evenings. 

Keep Sending. Consumers want options and choices. They are not bothered by hundreds of e-mails in their inboxes because, for the most part, they’ve asked for them. The more e-mail they get, the more control they have. High e-mail volume generalkly doesn’t annoy opted-in customers and prospects. 

They won’t open or read everything you send. But they don’t want to miss out on a great deal. Consumers are expecting lots of offers and will eagerly sort them out and cull the ones that are most attractive. This is one instance where more is more.

Optimizing Holiday Email

The holiday email frenzy is in full swing as Black Friday offers clog everyone’s inbox.Email is becoming increasingly formulaic as marketers test, learn and apply lessons learned from responders. 

This is troubling to some creative types who don’t want to be confined by research or constrained by conventions developed by left-brain analytical wonks. But the reason email is so widely accepted, used and effective is because we have shared learnings collectively and continuously found new creative ways to illustrate our offers and craft our language.

Here are seven new findings from Marketo, MailChimp, Pamorama, MarketingSherpa  and the Center for Media Research who looked at billions of emails to help make holiday email more effective at engaging and converting customers.

1. Visuals matter. 65 percent of people are visual learners so communicating with images is critical. People scan email. They don’t read it. This explains the explosion of infographics. Maybe this is why video on landing pages increases conversion by 86%. Email should be visually stimulating and telegraphic. 

2. Add social sharing buttons.  They increase click-thru rates by 158%. People mix and match their media and share things broadly. If you make sharing easy, consumers will reward you with pass-along impressions. 

3. Personalization counts. But surprisingly the use of both first and last name is 3.5 times more effective in driving open rates than first name only and twice as effective as using just the surname. Psychologically we are less casual than we think we are. People bridle at brands or strangers addressing them in too familiar a way. 

4. “Freebie” tops “free” in subject lines for prompting more opens. The difference in value perception drives more than 10X more opens. Free is abused, overused and burned out in medical, retail and travel sectors. 

5. Urgency matters but threats of loss don’t fly. Words like urgent, breaking, important and alert resulted in open rates way above normal. Invitations and announcements (and all the variations of these words) still trigger curiosity opens. But consumers hate being told they are missing something or it’s their last chance. These messages yield widespread ambivalence and opt-outs. 

6. Thanking drives extraordinary response. Asking them to sign –up has the opposite effect. Aggressive opt-in requests are counterproductive. Similarly asking for donations and charitable actions fall on deaf ears. Aggressive fundraising language is a turn off. 

Email marketing is a hard working tool for all marketers. Almost half of consumers cite email as their preferred form of communication with brands. Applying lessons from on-going research insures that consumers will continue to rely on email for ideas, offers and purchases. 

7. Forget Weekends. Email response is the least on Sunday and Saturday. Consumers aren’t glued to email on weekends. They actually do real stuff. Midweek --Tuesday and Wednesday – are your best bet for optimizing opens and clicks. The jury is out on the best time of day, though there are several vocal advocates for 6am to set the day’s agenda. 

Almost half of consumers cite email as their preferred communications mode with brands. Applying the lessons from our collective research will maintain and expand that preference.

Big Data Meets Programmatic Buying

The pace of automation, interconnections and change in digital media buying is staggering. And while there’s still considerable blabbing, handwringing, stalling and excuse making about programmatic buying, reality is way ahead of the rhetoric even if media firms and their clients aren’t leading the charge. The days of armies of young media planners and buyers wielding spreadsheets are being replaced by a business rules that instruct computers to buy and optimize in real time.

Think about it. Americans are spending much more time online than on TV, yet most of the ad dollars flow to TV. Similarly people are using mobile media extensively yet there’s just a trickle of brands experimenting with mobile advertising. The likely reason is the continuing need for efficient reach, measured in gross tonnage of eyeballs, mixed with 6 ounces of conventional wisdom and 2 tablespoons of inertia. 

As social and mobile media ascend to dominance, advertisers will be looking for transparency (who saw their ads) and performance (who clicked, signed up or bought) according to Sephi Shapira, CEO of Massive Impact. These rough equivalents of general and direct marketing will become increasingly important as smartphones and tablets merge into Phablets, which in Q2 2013 have 25MM units in market. 

Ultimately everything on the phone/phablet will talk to each other and be available to marketers to enable ad serving. Consumers will be targeted by device, by apps installed, by the games they play, by names in their phone book, by browser or even by the pictures they take. And while this has a 1984 feel to it, the concentration and mining of data will make messages more relevant to each individual. 

To accommodate these needs real-time bidding (RTB) is accelerating and becoming more sophisticated. In terms of inventory control and access, auction style bidding puts each unit and each potential customer up for bid. Prices are determined moment by moment in relentless auctions managed by demand side platforms (DSPs). 

In terms of targeting or retargeting, by using contextual data rather than demographics as the principal targeting criteria, brands can track what consumers do and where they go in order to direct the messages served to them.  Ads can be directed by device, by location, and by collaborative filters that, like Amazon, infer what people want based on what they’ve done or what their friends do. 

“For a generation that live their lives entirely online, there’s no such thing as TMI,” in Sephi’s opinion. “And while this may feel creepy to some, younger consumers appreciate the behind-the-scenes filtering that delivers information and offers about things they actually like and care about.” 

Facebook, on the strength of FBX units, has gone from zero to sixty in record time transforming both the timeline and the right column ads into direct response and pay for performance vehicles. With the number of Facebook users accessing the platform on mobile devices now approaching 50%, real time mobile ads are likely to play an increasing role for brands. 

Ninety percent of the automated inventory is now being sold on a cost per action basis. Publishers display messages as often as necessary to drive a guaranteed number of actions. Brands pay only for performance; less for a click and more for a sale.  But with guaranteed performance and predictable costs, there’s very little risk. Automated performance based ads, which can course correct on their own like heat-seeking missiles, are transforming eCRM which enables repeat sales, upsells and cross selling. 

Data swapping is a refinement on its way to the US, says Shapira. In Europe and Asia it’s not uncommon for a telco to share data with an insurance company in order to mutually enhance databases and improve segmentation, targeting and conversion. 

Sephi’s message to brands is “Don’t miss the revolution. Social and mobile platforms, games, apps and real time bidding are emerging tools that savvy marketers are embracing and mastering to gain first-mover competitive advantages.  If you are buying banners and hoping for the best, you’re not really in the game.” 

Related articles

Why Real-Time Bidding Is Going To Completely Change The Equation For Mobile Advertising

By 2017, it projects that programmatic buying (Real-time bidding) will account for 87% of display, 69% of video and 88% of mobile advertising buys. (U.S.)

Gmail Tabs Don't Hurt

In July, Google unilaterally decided to sort and filter Gmail users mailboxes for them. By introducing Tabs, Google proactively directed each inbound email to one of five tabs; primary, promotions, social, updates and forums. Commercial emailers went nuts. Assuming they were being unfairly ghettoized, they said Google was out to screw them. 

As it turns out, you get what you need and expect. A new study of early responses to Gmail Tabs by Return Path shows that people who frequently engage with commercial email aren’t deterred or bothered by the tabs. Medium users are still medium users and the unresponsive are still unresponsive.  

Tabs have been a convenience for the 11% of Gmail users who love commercial email. They are reading roughly 60% of the emails they’ve opted into. The promotion tab is an easy access door to the shopping information they desire. These people love the idea that deals come directly to them. They want to know what’s going on and what’s on sale. They were never going to be put off by a sorting solution because the content is anticipated and important to them. 

The bulk of Gmail users (88%) are moderately engaged with email. Most have opted in for lots of stuff some of which is no longer relevant and some is top of mind. They are reading email at about the same rate with fewer commercial emails ending up in their SPAM boxes. These guys pick and choose based on From lines, SUBJ lines and offers. 

Not surprising, the people who don’t open, don’t open using Tabs. For them the promotion tab removes email that was going to be ignored anyway. They read less but are less annoyed by irrelevant messages. The goods news for merchants is that they represent just 1% of Gmail users. 

Some vertical merchants, notably airlines, credit cards and daily deals, have seen significant increases in engagement post Tabs. Social networking and dating senders saw a dip which tracks with downward trending engagement rates. 

Gmail Tabs hasn’t hurt retailers or consumers. And since Tabs don’t apply to mobile usage, now approaching 50% of all email opens, any future negative impact can be mitigated. It’s one less thing to worry about during the highest email volume season. 

Related articles

The new Gmail tabs: What conclusions can we draw?

Gmail Tabs: What They Mean for Email Marketing

Getting Rid of the Inbox Tabs

Inside Big Brother

Who scares you more – the NSA, collecting every bit of electronic communication you create on every device in every channel, or Acxiom, collecting and aggregating every bit of data about who you are, where you are, what you do and what you have? 

This week, Acxiom, the nation’s biggest data aggregator, in a pointed move to stave off additional regulation, created a new free data portal for consumers to see, read, process and edit your own data. You can even opt-out. 

Don’t think for a second this is a gratuitous act of kindness or a public service. This is a bold and creative attempt to pre-empt or soften threatened privacy legislation or regulation. By proactively giving consumers a look into the black box, Acxiom hopes to stave off added scrutiny, reporting or disclosures. 

About the data.com offers a free glimpse into what they know about you. You get access in 20 seconds by confirming your name, postal address, email address, date of birth and social security number; the key data points that enable aggregators to find and sort you. These facts are also the critical variables that establish and validate identity in the world of data collection. 

Once you’re in, the site indicates where the data originated – bank records, credit cards, merchants, surveys, government records, telephone books, property records, tax rolls, licensing agencies, website cookies, magazine subscriptions, club memberships, etc. The information is sorted into six categories – characteristic data (demographics), home data, vehicle data, economic data, shopping data and household interests. Some easily collected or inferred facts (e.g. race, religion, alcohol use, heiress, frequent trips to Vegas) are not displayed. Each section can be easily edited/updated in two clicks. 

Looking through each section you can quickly see what your credit cards, mortgage records, driving license and reading habits reveal about you. You can sense how Acxiom and its competitors dice and slice you into sellable segments. It becomes clear why you get mail and the e-mail from the marketers pursuing you. You’re a baby boomer who owns a home, holds a graduate degree, drives a two-year old car worth more than $30,000, lives in a desirable zip code, owns a Mac and buys lots of stuff online. Thinking across categories, you get a relative feel for where you might fit in society and how desirable (or not) you might be to credit card marketers, charity solicitors, packaged tour operators, airlines, live performance marketers, realtors or luxury car salesmen. 

It’s ingenious. Consumers get to see their dossier and correct or update the information. Acxiom gets the benefit of the doubt and the benefit of real-time self-corrected data. And, while you can opt-out; the site warns you that opting out won’t stop the SPAM. It merely will insure you get irrelevant SPAM. 

The privacy debate is moot and menacing. Nobody really controls his or her own data. In case after case, consumers willingly and happily give up data in return for coupons, sweepstakes entries or trinkets. The question is who has access to your data and how much trouble or misery can they cause you by using it.  Who is worse  – a faceless government bureaucrat or a faceless marketing bureaucrat?

Related articles

Acxiom gives you a peek at the data it collects about you

Behind the Data Curtain

Acxiom prepares to open its data vault for consumers

6 Ways to Beat the E-mail Onslaught

It’s the dog days of August. Merchants of all stripes are putting the final touches on their plans for fall. As Back-to-School gives way to Halloween and Columbus Day, extreme profit pressure and declining list rental prices, the lowest rates ever in the Worldata Index, will prompt the most aggressive retailers to float Black Friday offers as early as mid or late October. There is a tsunami of e-mail headed toward us. 

E-mail is the strike force medium for online and offline retailers because 95% of online users get it and receive an average of 416 commercial messages per month. 91% check their e-mail at least once a day and 70% say they always open e-mails from their favorite companies. Seventy-four percent say it’s their preferred channel for receiving commercial messages. Social media gets the buzz, but email delivers the traffic. 

During Q1 2013, nearly one in every three e-mails was opened, the best results in recent history. Half open on mobile devices and as much as a third of openers act on the offers. In general, for every dollar spent on e-mail marketing, retailers get $44.25 in return. 

The big tactical decisions are about frequency or cadence and offers. Some form of free shipping and a minimum of a 10 percent discount are table stakes. And 3-4 times per week between November 15 and December 24 seem to be the norm. 

Six e-mail marketing best practices will separate the winners from the losers: 

Write Telegraphic Subject Lines. For one-third of recipients, the subject line is the only criteria for opening. Put the offer and the CTA in the SUBJ line but understand that less is better. Subject lines with fewer than 10 characters have a 58 percent open rate and better than a 2.5% CTR. Shorter is always better. If you can work in the customer’s name and/or location, you can spike open rates. Everybody immediately responds to their own name. 

Short & Sweet Content. Focus on the offer. Aim for 4 paragraphs maximum. Limit the possible CTAs. Click rate degrades with the number of links, so focus your customers on seeing a single powerful offer and direct them to click on a big colorful link or button or two. Avoid the urge to load up on logos and taglines. Present the product or service clearly. Find a stand-alone illustration or image to make your point and ask for the order. Adding a personal signature, evidence of human interaction, can increase opens by 5 times and clicks by 3.5 times. 

Potent proven retail words like – free, coupons, sale, today, news, and special -- resonate particularly well. But since everybody knows this, your offer has to pay it off in a differentiating and motivating way to deliver a decent click through or click to open rate. 

Time Your Send. Most e-mail is opened during business hours (10a-4p) and the majority of response happens in the first hour after delivery. More than half of mobile e-mail is opened from 5p till 8a. Consider these cycles as you craft content and offers. 

Open rates peak mid week, on Tuesdays and Wednesday, though the highest click through rates are on Sunday.  The most e-mail is sent on Wednesday so the burden to stand out midweek is greatest. Saturdays draw the lowest volume, maybe an opportunity to flank the competition. 

There is a lot of click through action early in the AM.  That’s why so many retailers transmit overnight to catch consumers when they check their e-mail first thing in the morning. Open rates generally peak at 10am and then gently slope downward throughout the business day. 

Be Transparent on the FROM line. Twenty-four percent of recipients only open e-mail from names they recognize. Transparency works best. Use your brand name. The higher your brand awareness; the better your open rate. 

Optimize for Mobile. Almost half of all e-mail is opened on mobile devices. Too many render badly and drive customers away. Design for smartphones with clear calls-to-action and big buttons for fat fingers. Aim for more elegant rendering on tablets, but expect buying actions to take place from home in the evenings. 

Keep Sending. Consumers want options and choices. They are not bothered by hundreds of e-mails in their inboxes because, for the most part, they’ve asked for them. The more e-mail they get, the more control they have. High e-mail volume will not annoy customers and prospects at this time of year. 

They won’t open or read everything you send. But they don’t want to miss out on a great deal. Consumers are expecting lots of offers and will eagerly sort them out and cull the ones that are most attractive. This is one instance where more is more.

Facebook Goes Direct

From the moment, the first brand on Facebook collected 10,000 fans, marketers have been asking about the relationship between “likes” and sales. Initially Facebook found a dozen ways to deflect the conversation. 

Facebook doesn’t really sell, they’d say. Its about relationships, buzz and engagement. Facebook is a tool for generating comment, creating warm fuzzies and enrolling fans as advocates for products and services and creating some sense of loyalty. 

But the guys paying the bills kept asking. How many fans, followers or likers are buying my products? How many are referring friends? How many are buying repeatedly? Finally Facebook created ad units to address these ROI concerns. 

The latest innovation, launched in May called Facebook Exchange (FBX), is inventory in the News Feed (the primo real estate on Facebook). FBX cannot be bought directly from Facebook. Units must be purchased only through an FBX qualified company. Unlike right hand side (RHS) Facebook ads, which are sold on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) or cost-per click (CPC) basis, FBX inventory is priced as a cost-per-insertion, limited to one each day. 

These units, a 154x154 pixel image and several lines of copy, were created to enable precision targeting, links to outside websites where marketers actually sell stuff and pixel tracking to enable retargeting on Facebook and across the web. Consumers can like, share and comment on FBX ads, so a measure of virility is baked in. 

Adroll, a Facebook retargeting partner and FBX qualified company, looked at 547 advertisers across industry verticals spending between $1000/month and $20,000/month to generate over one billion impressions using FBX and using ad inventory on the right hand side of everyone’s page. They zeroed-in on retargeting, their specialty, and compared results against traditional display and retargeting inventory from online ad exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick, Yahoo’s Right Medias Exchange and AppNexus. 

The research validates FBX alone and in combination with RHS as a potential direct marketing tool. News Feed retargeting had a click-thru-rate (CTR) 49% greater than RHS and 21% better that standard web retargeting. News Feed cost-per-clicks (CPCs) was half of RHS ads and 1/5^th of web retargeting. Conversion fared less well. FBX ads yielded 9% fewer clicks than the web and 16% less than RHS, which are generally considered anemic by direct marketers. 

FBX plus RHS drove more clicks at lower costs, even though combined their reach is significantly less than standard web targeting. Finding the right inventory mix will be our next challenge. In the first seven days of adding FBX to RHS, Adroll discovered a 62% increase in total clicks with an average decrease in CPCs of 30 percent. In the campaigns studied FBX was just 0.5% of the impressions but drove 14.7% of the clicks – promising results. 

Clearly Facebook is trying to create the right inventory to help brands link social activity with sales and loyalty. FBX is a step in the right direction worthy of further testing.

Write Sizzling Subject Lines

Subject lines initiate successful email marketing. The right subject line opens up a conversation or a relationship as quickly as “abracadabra.” The wrong line condemns your brand to die alone in the dark. Great subject lines are like great billboards or great headlines; they telegraph easily understood information to drive immediate comprehension and action. 

Marketers are sending more email than ever. They stack up in an inbox, which may or may not be fully opened. Multiple adjacent subject lines compete for fleeting attention. Faced with huge numbers of emails lined up one after the other, a SUBJ line must signal instant value. 

An open Inbox displaying sequential emails is email marketing’s “moment of truth.”

It’s just as easy to click as to delete. Your 50 characters are competing in real time against genuine friends, family, personal messages and other brands making claims or offers. An open is life.  A deletion is death. 

 Adestra, a UK-based email service provider, looked at 2.2 billion emails representing 90,000 campaigns in an attempt to benchmark the words and phrases that work best. Defined using conventional email metrics, a best SUBJ line contains those words or phrases that drive more opens and clicks, improves the open to click ratio and/or reduces the opt-out or unsubscribe rate compared to industry benchmarks. Get the complete report here. 

Consider four topline results. 

Skip the Expected. While everyone sends monthly newsletters by e-mail, using the word “newsletter in the subject line has just a marginal impact on open rates (+0.7%) but really hurts your click-thru-rate (CTR) which plummets -18%.  Maybe it’s too pat and too expected. Other expected terms like “report,” “learn” and “book” and  “monthly” trend downward in terms of driving opens and clicks.  Evidently people don’t want to see themselves as scheduled or predictable. They discount standard message cadences. 

Aim for Immediacy. The implied urgency and immediacy of the word “alert” prompts a 38% bump in opens and a 61.7% spike in clicks. People are hooked on knowing what’s going on right now. Words like “daily” get 27.8% more opens and 100% more clicks than the norm. “New” yields +17.2% clicks and 38.2% more opens while “News” drives +34.8% opens and +47.7% clicks. “Breaking” gets +35.4% opens and +77.6% clicks.Present your message as new, exciting and of the moment. 

Present a Deal.  Predictably “free delivery” drives 50.7% more opens and 135% more clicks.  “Sale” has +23.2 opens and +60.7% clicks. “X% Off” has a similar impact. Everybody wants to save money or get more for less. Watch out for generic terms like “save” or “cheap” or “free” and avoid aggressive terms like “buy.” These classic retail words depress opens and clicks. 

Try Multi-Word Headlines. Multiple key words separated by a straight vertical line drive +27.5% opens and 90.7% clicks. The same kind of alignment separated by commas drive +17.8% opens and 67% more clicks.  This newspaper/news ticker approach probably signals the same kind of immediacy and urgency as the immediacy phrases. 

The beautiful thing about email is that consumers vote with their cursors so marketers and copywriters don’t have to rely entirely on intuition or imagination. Research like this helps us engage customers and prospects faster and better. 

Winning the E-mail Numbers Game

It’s not the number of email addresses on your list. It’s the behavioral quality of the names. In email marketing size doesn’t matter. Segments do. 

Too many marketers measure their email program by counting valid email addresses. This is a classic way marketers are evaluated. If you grow the list you’re good. If you shrink it, you’re not. But while this may get you a bonus, it won’t get you results. The ugly truth is that at any given moment 20-30 percent of your list are dead men walking – consumers who haven’t opted out but have stopped caring, opening and clicking. 

Email lists are fluid. Consumers want info and deals and then they don’t. Need, greed, timing, serendipity, promotions, cash flow and personality all drive inflows and outflows. The quantity, cadence, content, subject lines and offers in e-mail incent future interest and clicks or they don’t.  Monitoring these variables is tedious but well worth it. 

The key to continued email effectiveness is to be brutally honest about the list. Focus on these 3 critical tactics.

Recency Rules. People have a huge propensity to re-take a recent action again. They just did something. It feels good. They’ll do it again. Segment your list by recency and you’ll have a proxy barometer for brand health. Make your best offers to the people who bought last and they’ll buy again. If you can factor in purchase history, product cognates or monetary value, you will get even better results. Recent responders are the sharp tip of the email marketing spear. 

Behavior Beats Demography. It’s what they do; not who they are that matters. Separate your list by opens and clicks. Mail more frequently to responders. Remember recency rules. After 6 touches and no response check their pulse. Tell them you are ending their subscription. In the absence of a response, dump them off the list. If you don’t you’ll have a bigger list but lower response rates so your bonus or promotion will be in jeopardy. 

Content is King.  They signed up with expectations of interesting news, deals and offers. If the content doesn’t deliver, consumers bail out. You must constantly test and evaluate the content. Mix up the offers. Test the sequences. Limit the number of items and stories in your email. More than 5 choices generally confuse consumers. Less is more. 

Consumers are paradoxical. They want consistency and surprise. They want to know you are there for them regularly but they don’t want the same thing every time. Factor in offline behavior like average number of store visits, average ticket and average annual purchases per customer into your thinking. Nobody lives by email alone. Your content plan has to integrate into shopping mindsets and practical creature behaviors. Plan on cross-pollinating the experiences and parse your email messages to synch with sales, seasonality or style changes. 

A smaller more responsive email list trumps a monster list with few responders. Assume that the list will wax and wane. Focus on the active participants to drive your business. Don’t get hung up or faked out by big numbers.