Manhattan Marketing Maven

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.

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

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.

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.

10 E-Mail Optimization Tactics

E-mail is the Rodney Dangerfield of digital media. The day-to-day workhorse doesn’t get the respect it deserves. But new innovations and technology changes could soon change all that according to a new report from Lyris. 

Ubiquitous, fast, intensely measurable and cheap, e-mail is the go-to medium for almost every marketer. US marketers, according to eMarketer and longtime DM guru Arthur Middleton Hughes will spend $1.5 billion on it this year. 

Surveys of email Q2 2012 performance data from Experian’s Cheetahmail and from Epsilon show total open rates north of 20% with unique opens approximately 15% and click-to-open rates of 15%. More than half of brands reporting e-mail performance saw a statistically significant lift in year-over-year open rates.  Consumers embrace email because it works for them. Getting the subject line and personalization right dramatically increases engagement and yield. 

Consider these 10 technologies and tactics that will continue to enhance e-mail performance. 

List Integrity & Growth. Your list is your WMD.  But at any given moment 15-20 percent of your names have either gone dormant or are dead men walking; customers who are done with you but haven’t bothered to unsubscribe. Monitor responses and opens and build business rules to gauge and preserve the health of your list. Segment the lists by the frequency of opens or clicks or the absence of the same. Start winning back lapsed customers sooner rather than later.

E-mail marketers need to be vigilant in scrubbing lists and in continuous data gathering to insure messaging is personal and relevant. Many e-mail marketers run dedicated Google Adgroups using key words like offers, deals or weekly specials as an always-on low cost name acquisition tactic which generally works. 

Transactional Messaging. These mundane messages that serve as receipts and facilitate the mechanics of transactions can be powerful follow-up vehicles. Use them to cross-sell and to grease the pipeline for the next best offer. 

Triggered Abandoned Cart Messages. A healthy numbers of shoppers abandon their carts for a variety of reasons. E-mail has a two-fold value in this situation. E-mail reminds shoppers about the abandoned merchandise and makes an offer that can save as many as 29% of these otherwise lost sales. Follow-up research has shown that the same type of e-mail can stimulate on-premise sales as well. 

Off-line E-mail Multiplier.  Combining postal and email into a concerted campaign against an existing customer base can yield a double whammy in terms of results A retailer, mentioned in the Harvard Business Review Blog, experimented on105, 000 loyalty card customers and found that those who received both postal and email had the highest response rates and highest average orders yielding the most dollars per name mailed. For every email sale, this retailer also got 3 in-store sales. Beyond the immediate purchase stimulus, e-mail plays an offline branding and traffic-building role.

Mobile E-Mail Use.  More e-mail is read on mobile devices than on PCs or laptops. In a typical day, 84% of mobile users check their accounts at home. 80% check at miscellaneous times including standing on lines, at work, in transit and even in the bathroom. Understand where and why customers and prospects check e-mail to create new persuasion and entertainment opportunities corresponding to predictable need and purchase patterns. 

Improved Targeting & Segmentation. Doing less better is a mantra for continuously improving e-mail performance. The better you know who you are mailing to and the tighter the offer, tone and manner; the better the result. Savvy marketers have abandoned e-mail carpet-bombing in favor of mailing smaller, discrete data-driven segments.  

Priority Inbox and Filtering. Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” filters inbound e-mail and creates a hierarchy of importance for users. Toutapp, Asana, Zigmail and others are refining this process. Effective e-mail communications will have to become more immediately relevant and personal to get opened. Given the high volume of e-mail, not to mention Spam, that the average person gets daily, anticipate filters and use every data point to insure that your messages are sorted IN rather than OUT. 

Social Inbox. Social media is impacting e-mail in three ways. First, the social impetus is to immediately share interesting content or offers with your network of friends. Prepare for this opportunity. Create content and embed links, videos or images to make this easy and to prompt users to share. 

Second, drive e-mail sign ups and simultaneous data capture by using social sign-on as your engagement gateway. Encourage consumers to sign-on and sign-up using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest or other relevant social credentials. 

Third, groups of friends and co-workers are beginning to share e-mail accounts both to create social groups and to productively accomplish tasks. Marketers should not assume one person per e-mail account. Find ways to figure out who’s who.  

Embedded Video.  Video is exploding everywhere and new technologies to compress video make it easier more than ever to embed video into e-mail. Video drives significantly higher conversion. Even the word “video” in the subject line or a key frame with an embedded link in the body copy spikes opens and click-thrus. The smart money is coding video in HTML to render optimally on all devices and to embed video in ways that enhance the e-mail experience.

 

Advanced Metrics. Knowing what they clicked, where they clicked and the lag time between open and click are now possible. Using this data to understand who read and who scanned, to test new approaches or to infer customer preferences in offers or content are the bleeding edge of e-mail creativity. E-mail is the most transparent medium. Customer behavior should be tracked over time and linked to a variety of CRM-relevant variables to improve the experience and the yield.

E-Mail Accelerators

Email is the workhorse medium for brands, merchants, associations and advocates of every stripe. Ubiquitous, easy and widely accepted, it is the channel of choice for conveying offers, discounts, new products, plans and intentions. 

Every serious e-mailer has developed templates and control formats that deliver baseline results. Most are routinely testing against their control to improve opens, clicks and conversions. Experian, one of the leading data houses has mined their e-mail business and surfaced a number of interesting e-mail acceleration devices summarized in an infographic that you can get here.  

Here are some of they key findings

• Adding the word “exclusive” in the subject line drives 14% more unique opens
• Using “Top 10” or “Top 5” in the subject line yields 13% more opens
• Asking for reviews or ratings of purchases get 2X open rates
• 85% of welcome e-mails get opened with an average 29% CTR 

Given the constant desire to improve e-mail performance, testing these elements ought to be a no-brainer.

 

 

Email Drives Facebook Engagement

Email is the principle driver of social engagement. New research suggests that the long assumed synergy between the two most ubiquitous digital platforms can be quantified and leveraged. 

Smart marketers are seeing spikes in all levels of engagement (likes, comments and shares) when e-mail blasts accompany or intersect social posts and Facebook promotions. For most of my clients the notion of sequential emails as stimuli for Facebook engagement is becoming a routine part of their communication strategy. 

Frequent use is the key building block of this synergy. Half of all Facebook users check their Timeline and Newsfeed daily. Almost half of social network users check their e-mail more that 4 times a day according to a study done by Merkle. So you can see how the two channels can easily work in-tandem. 

Another dimension of this interrelationship is the direct marketing notion of a multi-channel customer. DMers understand that people who connect with brands in more than one channel are genuine fans. They engage more frequently, buy more often and rack up higher purchase volumes. 

Many marketers suspect that there is a healthy overlap between their e-mail lists and their Facebook fans. This suspicion is confirmed by data indicating that when email drops to support a Facebook campaign or promotion response and engagement spike.

Further evidence are surveys that show e-mail subscribers and Facebook fans both want deals plus early or exclusive access to information, sales or new products. It’s not an accident that savvy marketers embed social sharing icons in their e-mails and explicitly ask subscribers to become fans or access promotional tabs on a branded Facebook page.

YesMail Interactive’s new study, titled Using Digital Market Intelligence to Drive Multi-Channel Success, argues “with each email message a brand sends out, its customer social engagement grows exponentially. Based on a study of email, activity for 20 leading retail brands, “we discovered a remarkable relationship that provides measurable data supporting the claim that multi-channel marketing consistently delivers better results.” 

According to the YesMail, Facebook engagement grew 50% when a email was deployed and 100% when a second email was sent in time and in synch with a Facebook initiative. In response to this finding they recommend these synergistic tactics:

• Deploy a promotional email with share buttons
• Launch on a Tuesday, Facebook’s most engaging day.
• For younger (A 18-34) audiences post at 10p-12a (ET) for maximum engagement
• Include a photo or video to optimize response
• Explicitly tell consumers what they should do and, if possible, offer an incentive. 

Email drives social engagement for brands. It’s not that surprising. Brand engagement in social platforms is not a natural or an organic thing. Social media is about connecting with friends and family. Most brand fans only visit a brand page once; usually to like or sign up for something. Only 9% of all Facebook likes are for brands, so the social relationship is tepid as a standalone channel. And given the fact that no more than 16% of brand posts get through to fan’s Newsfeeds, marketers need a breakthrough-striking tool to activate their fan bases. 

Just don’t tell Zuckerberg who thinks Facebook is everything.

 

10 E-Mail Commandments

To optimize e-mail marketing, you need to stand out from the loud, growing and frequent mailing crowd and take concerted action to get attention for your brand and your message.

1. Start with the end. What do you want the recipients of your e-mail to feel, think or do?  If this is a one-off effort it will need to work differently than if its part of a newsletter, club or continuity program. Clarity on the front end will make measurement and analysis much easier on the back end

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 it’s the only reliable predictor of future action.  

6. Work on the List.  Every list is flawed. Names carefully opted-in by brand loyalists will perform much better than random names gathered by lead generation sites or list compilers. Use list cleaning, merge/purge and integrity tools. Negotiate a “net name” deal.

7. RFM Rules. Peg e-mail blasts to frequency of action. People who take a desired action are much more likely to do it again and much sooner than someone who opted-in but rarely responds.   

8. Tighten the Content   Short directive copy works best. Many e-mails are read without fully opening the browser frame or on mobile devices. Load the core idea and the offer into the opening paragraph.

 

9. Limit Response Options.  Customers or prospects should be given a limited number of response choices. The more choices you offer, the less response you get.

 

10. Be CAN SPAM compliant. Every legit e-mail has to show who it came from, including a postal address, and offer an opt-out mechanism. There is absolutely nothing worse that being a spammer.