Six Steps to Easier E-mail

By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Jun 3, 2009

At a recent e-mail forum, a group of moms made it clear that e-mail must be fast, easy, and useful for them to continue using it as a communication and marketing channel.

For these mothers, e-mail is one more chore they have to take care of in addition to family, housekeeping, outside jobs, and so on. Relevance and targeting mean nothing if your e-mail makes the chore more onerous. The faster they can deal with their daily load of commercial e-mail, and the more useful the content in them is, the more valuable e-mail will be in their lives.

On the other hand, if you waste their time with vague subject lines and content that doesn’t spell out your promotion’s costs and benefits, you’ll quickly become history. Remember that women in general, and moms in particular, are the family purchasing agents. Don’t disrespect them with messages that waste their time, even if they gave you permission to e-mail them.

The following six steps will help you make your e-mail program more mom-friendly. The payoff? You’ll make your e-mail easier to use for all your readers, even those who aren’t time-pressed mothers.

Make the Open-or-Delete Decision Easy

Can your e-mail answer these questions in two seconds or less?

• Who is the e-mail from?
• What’s in it for me?
• What do you want me to do?

Actions: Write clear, not cutesy, subject lines. State the value proposition there, and build on it in the snippet/pre-header text (the first line of text in your message).

State All the Details in the E-Mail

Moms (and other shoppers) want to know prices and final costs up front, both the discount and the amount of money saved, not just the percentage off. Some said they were frustrated to find out how expensive shipping was after clicking on the offer and going all the way through the checkout process. That builds distrust in your future messages.

Actions: List conditions, such as eligible products, minimum purchase requirements, eligible payment channels (credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, etc.), and whether the promotion uses a rebate or immediate discount. Provide shipping cost estimates upfront, if possible. Remember, "free shipping" means more than cost savings, it means I don’t have to spend the time to drive to the store and purchase. And be sure to send your messages in plain or HTML text, so readers can see them on a mobile phone or with images off.

Make the Deal Easy to Close

It’s bad enough that supermarkets force shoppers (moms and others) to the far corner to get the gallon of milk or loaf of bread they need. Don’t make them do it on your site, too. Help them with easy site navigation and payment processes.

Actions: Spell out in the e-mail if the promotion uses a rebate instead of a discount and how to redeem the rebate. Link directly to the promotion landing page instead of your home page. Test the link before sending to be sure it works.

Be Clear About Frequency and Volume, and Stick to Your Promises

Moms on the panel said they suffer from e-mail bombardment. They are interested in your promotions and are willing to sign up for them, but they often don’t know how much e-mail to expect. They don’t have time to organize or wade through a crowded inbox, so they turn to Mother’s Little Helper: the "delete" button.

Actions: State clearly on the sign-up page, in the message itself, and in the newsletter name how often you send e-mail. Provide options to lower (or even raise) frequency. Offer options for customizing subscriptions, which can also affect frequency.

Encourage Sharing E-Mail With Social Networks

Mothers are champion networkers. Friends’ referrals give compelling reasons to check out or even purchase a product, the panel moms said. However, sharing with a social network (where you have one person referring to 50 or 100) is more powerful than forwarding to a friend (1 to 1 or 1 to 10, maybe).

Actions: Add functionality that lets users click a link to post your e-mail on their social networks. Always include your subscription information to take advantage of this expanded audience. If an offer is only for the original recipient, state that clearly in the e-mail.

Make Subscribing and Unsubscribing as Simple as Possible

Some panel moms also said they use the "delete" button on permission e-mail as well as spam, while others appeared uncertain about how to stop or reduce unwanted e-mail. Unclear, complicated, or missing instructions might be at fault here.

Actions: The easy subscribe is a long-standing best practice: Use a Web form, minimize the number of clicks and required information at the start, and send a confirmation request immediately.

CAN-SPAM mandates an easy unsubscribe for U.S. commercial e-mailers, but not clear instructions to support it. So, review your unsubscribe process, both where you place it and how you word it in your e-mail, and the procedure you use on your site to implement it. Don’t require a password to access subscriber information or a confirmation to implement the unsubscribe. Use a Web form rather than an e-mail message, unless the user can generate it automatically in her e-mail client and click to send.

As usual, mother knows best. Until next time, keep on deliverin’!

 

 

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Biography

As senior strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to increase clients’ ROI. Most recently, Stefan led the e-mail consulting program for Lyris clients, frequently speaking at industry events on best practices. Prior to that, he managed the audit process and consulted with clients to improve their e-mail delivery challenges for Habeas. As an e-mail marketer, he spent several years building and executing acquisition and retention campaigns at E-Loan and Cybergold.com.

How Social Media Influences E-Mail Marketing

By Jeanniey Mullen, ClickZ, Apr 13, 2009

This week’s column is dedicated to seven e-mail marketing geniuses you need to know. If you haven’t friended them, followed them, or bought them a drink yet, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working with seven Email Experience Council (EEC) members on a new whitepaper, written in response to a ClickZ Webinar a few weeks back about e-mail’s future (registration required). The topic, one of four the EEC will write about, addresses how to identify and reach social influences in e-mail. The whitepaper includes hands-on methods tested in today’s market. This is a cannot-miss paper. I was so impressed with the comments and strategies these experts have implemented that I wanted to share some of them with you this week.

Understanding the impact of social media on our targeted e-mail campaigns opens up a new set of segments to leverage. Consider how you can split your list, not according to dollars list members individually spend, but by the collective dollars they influence others to spend (on top of their own spend). These new measurements follow the impact of a combination of reach and response.

In the past, people who responded marginally or not at all to your list were typically the people you’d remove from your list. Today, though, those people might not individually respond but may tell others about your offer, news, or sale. They could very well become your best ambassadors.

Who are these experts, and what else did they have to say?

• Wendy Ackland, director of BurntToast Marketing. Ackland and her team generated a higher response from a typical nonresponder. They realized that though an invite e-mail may not have gotten response from the intended recipient, it could generate four times the number of responses when that person passes it along to others.
• Sheryl Biesman, manager, Internet division, Nature Made’s Pharmavite. Biesman adds links to her e-mail messages that encourage people to share them on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
• Amy Bills, director of field marketing, Bulldog Solutions. Bills advocates using partners and vendors to help identify social influencers and get them engaged in your brand.
• Nicholas Einstein, director of strategic and analytic services, Datran Media. Einstein says savvy e-mail marketers use various conversion metrics and lifetime value formulas to segment and target high-value subscribers.
• Hugo Guzman, director of SEO and social media, Zeta Interactive. Guzman is a fan of e-mail surveys asking list subscribers to give feedback on their level of social media engagement.
• Stephanie Jackson, strategic marketing solutions, Zinio. Jackson e-mails requests to Facebook lists, asking them to help reach company goals.
• DJ Waldow, director of best practices and deliverability, Bronto Software. Waldow had a lot to say. My favorite was using tools like Twitter Grader (created by HubSpot). I checked my grade and (phew!) got an A, although I’m still at 70,443 and want to get a better result. Thanks to these tips I’m sure I will.

Thanks again to all the social e-mail geniuses who took part in this paper. The next paper will be focused on new e-reading devices you need to know about. Stay tuned!

Biography

Jeanniey Mullen is the chief marketing officer for Zinio and its sister company, the exclusively digital magazine VIVmag. Jeanniey is recognized as a pioneer and visionary in the digital marketing and advertising space, with an expertise in e-mail marketing.

Prior to Zinio, Jeanniey was the senior partner and global executive director of the e-mail marketing and digital dialogue practice at OgilvyOne Worldwide. She worked with such clients as IBM, American Express, and Yahoo. In the mid-2000s, Jeanniey founded the Email Experience Council, the world’s largest e-mail marketing trade organization. She currently serves as the executive director of the EEC, which is now owned by the Direct Marketing Association. Before that, Jeanniey ran her own advertising agency. And in the late 1990s, Jeanniey created the global e-mail marketing division inside an advertising agency at Grey Direct.

Jeanniey is a frequent speaker on a variety of topics including e-mail and digital marketing, brand development, and publishing. She is also a published author with two books in her portfolio, including "Email Marketing: An Hour A Day." She sits on the advisory boards of a number of innovative organizations, including the Social Media Advertising Consortium and the Online Marketing Summit.

E-Mail Marketing History Lessons

By Derek Harding, ClickZ, Apr 9, 2009

When my company was founded 10 years ago, we believed the future for direct marketing was in highly integrated, customer-driven, one-to-one marketing and that e-mail could enable that future in a way no other medium could.

Fast-forward to today: I’ve been reviewing and updating my company’s mission statement. While we’re gratified that our vision holds up today, it brought to mind some wisdom gleaned over the past decade.

In 1998, there were two pieces of conventional wisdom in e-mail marketing.

"Batch and Blast"

There was a massive land grab going on among venture capital funded startup e-mail service providers (ESPs) to gain as much market share as possible. This was driven by the new economics of the dot-com bubble. Obtaining market share was considered far more important than being profitable and building a solid business.

This has had several effects, some of which are still being felt today. The fire sale prices and constant undercutting have resulted in e-mail being highly commoditized to the extent that many ESPs struggle to maintain profitability (a concept that regained importance after the dot-com bubble burst).

This is perhaps most evident in the constant stream of industry luminaries bemoaning how undervalued e-mail marketing is.

The land grab also led to volume-oriented systems. It was an approach that mimicked Jack Cohen’s "pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap" mantra. Send as much e-mail as possible as often as possible to as many people as possible. List hygiene, deliverability, segmentation, personalization, and recipient preferences were afterthoughts.

Deliverability troubles continue today, even among the largest service providers. Companies that should have impeccable reputations as standard bearers are still viewed as spam enablers by many in the industry due to past indiscretions.

Well-targeted, personalized e-mail communications are only beginning to gain traction. Many organizations still don’t do even minimal segmentation of their "blasts." The constant barrage has also reduced the efficacy of the medium and increased e-mail fatigue.

E-mail Integration

The incredible ROI (define) of e-mail was supposed to turn it into the medium of choice and essentially replace traditional direct marketing almost entirely. Clearly, that was a shortsighted perspective.

However, that thinking has caused a significant siloing of e-mail. Systems often weren’t developed to integrate effectively (why integrate with something you’re making obsolete?). Separate teams grew up to support e-mail. Integrating the online and offline marketing specialties remains a challenge in many organizations. The need for, and value of, integration can be clearly seen in the purchase of so many e-mail service providers by direct marketing and database companies.

Why the History Lesson?

We must all keep in mind what philosopher George Santayana famously said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." As we move into new online media such as SMS (define), instant messaging, RSS, social networking, and others, let us not forget the past but learn from it.

Unfortunately, it looks like some are making the same mistakes again. Even though the telecom companies are working hard to enforce good list practices for SMS, we’ve already seen some companies blasting marketing messages to millions. Also, I keep seeing claims by proponents of RSS that it will replace e-mail rather than complement it, just as 10 years ago there were claims that e-mail would replace direct mail.

It never should’ve been about batch and blast. Any new medium is highly unlikely to replace either traditional direct marketing methods or e-mail.

We must take the time to study and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each new medium, learn how people use each medium, and the social dynamics involved. Only then can we understand how best to use it to augment and enhance the user experience by providing highly integrated, customer driven, one-to-one communications.

Until next time,

Derek

Three Tactics to Manage List Inactivity

By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Feb 25, 2009

Given that at least half of your e-mail address list can probably be classified "inactive," the question of what to do with this silent faction is highly relevant to e-mail marketers, especially in these tough days when you’re being asked to make more sales with less budget.

This issue came up at the recent Email Evolution Conference, where attendees were asked to vote whether purging or retaining inactives should become the e-mail industry’s best practice.

However, the solution goes much deeper than "always purge" versus "always retain."

I support removing some classes of inactive addresses after identifying and attempting to reactivate them (details in my earlier ClickZ column, "The Right Way to Trim Inactives").

This doesn’t mean you should dump anybody who hasn’t acted on your first few e-mail messages, or even everyone who hasn’t opened or clicked in two years.

Presumably you collected those addresses through reputable means, so they represent a considerable investment. Replacing them can often cost more than you spent to acquire them.

Why Target Inactives?

Your inactives probably aren’t generating spam complaints or bounces. So why stir things up? Here are four reasons:

• They aren’t helping you reach your business goals, which mostly means you aren’t making any money from them. Instead, you’re spending money to send them e-mail they’re ignoring.
• They depress your true list performance, in both campaigns and any prelaunch optimization testing.
• ISPs are beginning to watch how often commercial e-mailers send to nonresponding inboxes as an added reputation factor.
• Long-inactive addresses can be turned into spam traps. Sending to them can get your messages blocked or filtered.

Three Tactics for Managing Inactives

Whether you choose to segment out inactives or let them slumber in peace, these three tactics will help you manage inactivity to improve list performance:

• Segment out inactives in optimization testing. If you conduct optimization tests before launching e-mail campaigns, your inactives might be watering down your responses and making it hard to determine the actual lift of your tests. Have you ever done an A/B split test on, say, the call to action where the difference was small, like a 29.4 percent CTR (define) on one version and 28.6 percent on the other so the test was inconclusive? One likely culprit is the denominator (audience selected for the test) is heavily weighted by inactives, suppressing the response rates.
  If you have a strategy for determining active versus inactive subscriber status, you can run your tests against each segment as well as against the whole list and compare the active segment’s performance to the full list. In some cases, this testing could wake up a portion of your inactive file. But if you look at the test only across the whole audience, you might find the winning strategy is more difficult to see.
• Separate your former clickers from your never clickers. Experts regularly debate about how long a subscriber has to go dark before you can consider the address inactive, but what about those people who signed up with you and never acted on any of your e-mail? You shouldn’t have to wait six months to a year before moving your never clickers to an inactive program, assuming you’ve done all you can to entice them into acting.
  This is an excellent argument for conducting a systematic welcome program, one that invites action by clicking through to fill out a profile, claim a special offer, or answer a short survey. (It’s also an argument for double opt-in instead of single opt-in, because it demands a little more action from the subscriber to get on your list, but that’s an argument for another time.)
  Somebody who never acted has a lower value to your e-mail program than somebody who stopped acting. With this latter group, you can at least try to recover them with a reactivation campaign. You gain nothing by continuing to send messages to those who ignore every mailing from the minute they opted in.
• Use inactives to hunt down problems with collection sources or processes. This strategy is a must if a significant percentage of subscribers have never acted on your messages. You most likely collect e-mail addresses from multiple sources (your official Web opt-in page, affiliate sites, coregistration programs, offline sources, etc.). Review your inactive file by source to determine if one collection method contributes a larger share of inactive addresses. You might find that a source delivers addresses that never engage. In that case, investigate the sign-up process after you remove inactives who never clicked.

One Final Thought

If your goal as an e-mail marketer is to send your messages to as many people as possible because you believe your messages have value whether your recipients act on them or not, then by all means, never remove an inactive e-mail address.

However, if deliverability is important and if you want to ensure your active recipients get the opportunity to engage with your e-mail, then list pruning should be a ritual.

Until next time, keep on deliverin’!

Join us for Search Engine Strategies New York March 23-27 at the Hilton New York. The only major search marketing conference and expo on the East Coast, SES New York will be packed with more than 70 sessions, including a ClickZ track, plus networking events, parties, training days, and more than 150 exhibitors.

Biography

As senior strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to increase clients’ ROI. Most recently, Stefan led the e-mail consulting program for Lyris clients, frequently speaking at industry events on best practices. Prior to that, he managed the audit process and consulted with clients to improve their e-mail delivery challenges for Habeas. As an e-mail marketer, he spent several years building and executing acquisition and retention campaigns at E-Loan and Cybergold.com.

Increasing Readership for Your E-Newsletter

By Karen Gedney, ClickZ, Mar 18, 2009

Those of us who publish e-newsletters spend a huge amount of time writing content for a small amount of people who actually read our articles — or at least that’s the way it can seem at times!

Here are two ways I found to increase the readership for my weekly e-tips focused on one part of my practice — the fundraising industry.

Post Articles in the News Section of Relevant LinkedIn Groups

Each week, after we broadcast the latest issue, my assistant posts it to fundraising groups on LinkedIn, such as the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association. Each group is like a mini-newsstand for these articles — and the members are almost all in my target market.

Within a week of posting my first issue, a consultant contacted me about working for one of her clients. After reading my e-newsletter, she could see that we took a similar approach to fundraising. Within minutes of our first phone call, we were chatting like old friends.

Display Links to Past Articles in Your Current Issue

I got this tip from a recent article in Mark Brownlow’s excellent e-newsletter, Email Marketing Reports.

He has a section in his e-newsletter called "What You Missed in the Previous Issue" where he features links to previous issues. He shares how he got "bonus clicks" for past issues here.

I’ve had a similar experience. While I get great CTRs (define) for my current issues, it’s really interesting to see how many new subscribers read every past issue as well. I list the previous e-tips in a sidebar next to the current content.

What’s most rewarding to me about this is when I first started publishing my e-newsletter, I led off with my best content — but my readership was small. I felt that I was going to put a lot of effort to write for just a small circle of people in my target audience. But now I see that the ROI (define) for those first articles is very high — because as my readership grows every week, the new subscribers are going back in the archives and reading the "charter" e-tips like mad.

Biography

Karen Gedney is an award-winning creative director and copywriter. She has a successful track record of achieving high e-mail response rates for Fortune 1000 companies and leading organizations. She also conducts corporate training and business coaching. Her Web site is karengedney.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two very active young boys.

Look Who’s Still Not Tracking E-Mail Campaigns

 

By Enid Burns, ClickZ, Apr 6, 2009

In a survey of over 500 e-mail marketers, online marketing agency eROI finds almost 20 percent of the respondents fail to track e-mail campaigns. The report provides insight into trends and use of analytics in e-mail.

"I thought the number would be much lower than that with all of the options out there," Jeff Mills, director of sales and strategy at eROI, told ClickZ Stats. "There’s no legitimate excuse for it."

For typical site conversions — which may include a click-through, watching a video, or another activity — the reasons for using analytics included: don’t know how (42.9 percent); other (38.1 percent); don’t have time (14.3 percent); and don’t have budget (4.8 percent).

For e-commerce conversions responses included don’t know how (44.4 percent); don’t have budget (38.9 percent); other (11 percent); and don’t have time (5.6 percent).

" ‘Don’t have a budget’ and ‘don’t know how’ are no longer excuses," said Mills. "There are providers all across the board, it’s less of ‘I don’t have a budget’ and more of ‘I need to re-prioritize the budget."

The survey asked participants to place the e-mail campaign "lifecycle" events in order of importance.

The open rate remains the most important event in e-mail campaign tracking — a trend that surprises Mills. With image blocking, people reading on mobile phones, and other factors, he feels the open rate is less important a metric when looked at alone. The click rate, he feels, is a better barometer of an e-mail’s effectiveness. That is when you take the number of clicks, and divide it by the number of opens.

What’s the Most Important Event in an E-Mail Campaign Lifecycle?

When asked what is the most important event in an e-mail campaign lifecycle — in order of importance — here is what survey respondents said, along with definitions and pointers for each stage:

• Open rate: Not supported by many e-mail clients due to HTML blocking, open rates can appear lower than they actually are.
• Click-through: Relevance and personalized content is the key to increasing click-throughs. Segment recipients in e-mail lists by demographics, geographic variables, and other groupings.
• Open-to-click ratio: Arguably a more accurate assessment of an e-mail campaign’s success. The number of clicks divided by the number of opens.
• Specified link clicked: The link a user clicks on an e-mail.
• Delivery rate: The ability for mail to be received is challenged by spam filters and reputation, and bounced e-mails are not always fully reported.
• Conversion rate: Encourage action: a purchase, a newsletter sign-up, a white paper download, or a phone call. "Your conversion rate is a measure of relevancy," the report said.
• Unsubscribe rate: Take the total number of unsubscribes in an e-mail campaign and divide it by the total number of delivered e-mails. The unsubscribe rate is an indicator of list health and cleanliness.
• Track campaign source: A holistic way of looking at what campaigns people come from.
• Drill down into segments: List segmentation targets individuals rather than sending the same e-mail to the entire list.
• Positive vs. negative clicks: Marketers might assign a positive click to a call-to-action, and a negative click to an unsubscribe. It allows marketers to break down the value of clicks into further detail.

Knowledge sharing is an area where silos still exist in e-mail marketing. Of those surveyed, 74 percent said they share e-mail analytics data with their bosses or other executives. Within the marketing organization, 61.3 percent share data with the corporate marketing department, and 42.5 percent share with advertising, marketing, and their public relations agency. The sales side of the business loses out the most. E-mail analytics data is shared with direct sales groups by 30.9 percent of e-mail marketers surveyed, and 23.8 percent of those surveyed.

"A third of people are sharing with the direct sales group, and [add in e-commerce], a combined half of people responsible for driving revenue, it still shows a disconnect between marketing and sales somewhat," said Mills.

Ten Resolutions to Make 2009 a Better E-mail Year

By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Dec 31, 2008

Maybe the best thing we can say about 2008 is that it’s over today. Was it a dismal year for you and your e-mail program? There’s no time like the present to resolve to do better, starting tomorrow.

If you don’t know where to start, any one of the resolutions on the list below will help you get your e-mail efforts back on track in the coming year.

Need more information to help understand any of them? Most of these resolutions come with a link to advice in a related ClickZ column. Nothing could be easier, and after you celebrate tonight, maybe that’s the best gift of all.

Here are the top 10 resolutions for e-mail marketers:

I Will Listen to Feedback

Feedback helps build better programs. When you understand what your audience wants, and what they don’t, you can deliver on those items.

These initiatives will generate more feedback. Don’t forget, though, to read what people tell you, and to respond:

• Sign up for all ISP feedback-loop sources.
• Monitor replies to inboxes, even those you tell readers not to e-mail.
• Solicit and read reader comments.
• Send surveys for direct comments on specific topics.

More information, go here.

I Will Give My Subscribers More Control Over What They Receive

Subscribers engage better when they get the e-mail they want. How to achieve this?

• Provide meaningful choices during the subscription process (avoid all conjunctions).
• Use a preference center to make personalization or customization easier.
• Collect only data you need to complete the process at opt-in. If you want additional information beyond a name and e-mail address, explain why you need it and why your subscriber should give it to you (birth date for special savings, street address as a back-up, Zip code for finding a nearby store). Collect it later, such as during the welcome period. Keep it optional, too.

I Will Monitor More Than Open/Click-Through Rates/Revenue

Measurability is e-mail’s great advantage over other channels, but you have to measure the negative as well as the positive to get a true picture about how your e-mail program is doing.

Track unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints as well as open and click rates. Optimize your entire program from opt-in to opt-out and all the actions in between.

I Will Practice More Segmentation for Increased Relevance

Set aside one day a month as "segmentation day," where your goal is to "do incrementally better e-mail." Don’t overhaul your program. Instead, make small changes that add up over time.

For example, identify a subset of your list and tell an incrementally better story to it. You shouldn’t need complex data integrations. It can be as simple as dynamically changing a graphic or offer based on a profile field or click behavior.

For more information, here.

I Will Practice Good List Hygiene and Trim Inactives

Optimize your sign-up process to collect more accurate data. Accept that recipients tune out after a while and no longer want to receive e-mails but won’t act to unsubscribe. When addresses go dormant for longer than six months, let them go.

For more information, go here.

I Will Pay Attention to the ISPs

Visit ISP postmaster sites regularly to learn about changes that affect delivery and get information to make you a better e-mail marketer. Knowing that AOL plans to change its report cards, and what those changes mean, can reduce your anxiety if you suddenly get an unfamiliar notice about your e-mails.

For more information, go here.

I Will Work to Send Great Content

Not "great" as in "exciting," although that would be nice. Instead, write content that works: no broken links, correct spelling, punctuation, and word use and images used properly. Content filters are not your key challenge. It is what readers think of your content and how they act on it.

For more information, go here.

I Will Make it Easy for Recipients to Know Who I Am

While authentication helps ISPs, it happens behind the scenes. Here, you want recipients to recognize you immediately in the inbox. No, simply having it in the "from" line is not enough.

More information, go here.

I Will Be More Careful About Whose E-mail Efforts I Emulate

Everybody does it: assume that companies with top brands, or brands we admire, also do e-mail marketing right. So, we copy what they do. However, you don’t actually know if an initiative worked or if their goals match yours. Honestly, most of them aren’t doing great e-mail, either.

For more information, go here.

I Will Banish the Word "Blast" From my Vocabulary

This is a pet peeve among e-mail veterans. When we continue to use this word, it means we pay no respect to our programs or the thought we have put into segmentation and relevance. We simply want to send the message and move on. For every one of the items on this list, this is one every single reader can make happen, no more excuses.

Here’s to a prosperous — and measurably greater — 2009. Until next time, keep on deliverin’!

Biography

As senior strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to increase clients’ ROI. Most recently, Stefan led the e-mail consulting program for Lyris clients, frequently speaking at industry events on best practices. Prior to that, he managed the audit process and consulted with clients to improve their e-mail delivery challenges for Habeas. As an e-mail marketer, he spent several years building and executing acquisition and retention campaigns at E-Loan and Cybergold.com.

How to Make E-mail Campaigns More Meaningful

By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Feb 11, 2009

So often, when I’m talking with clients or speaking at conferences and workshops about e-mail best practices, I feel as if I’m scolding my kids and telling them they shouldn’t do things they know will get them into trouble.

Truth is, showing marketers how doing e-mail the right way — with permission, well-done creative, authentication, and reputation management among other factors — should build a stronger case than all the finger-wagging about "desperation marketing."

Achieving Greater Relevance

If you’re an e-mail marketer, your goals for 2009 probably include driving greater revenue without spending a greater share of your budget. As budgets get scrutinized or tightened, we must be careful not to follow the old-school mantra: "Send more e-mail; make more money."

This tactic doesn’t work in that straight line. Rather, you can incur many negative side effects, essentially wiping out any short-term financial gains.

If you need a mantra, tattoo this on your forearm: Make your e-mail messages more relevant and meaningful to your recipients.

If you don’t know where to start, look at the following three kinds of e-mail programs for inspiration and ideas. Each one is different from the other, and they’re listed in order of content relevance, from highest to lowest, to the subscriber:

Lifecycle Programs

These messages launch automatically in response to specific actions a customer or subscriber takes (or fails to take) over a common product lifecycle:

• Welcome programs
• Browsing
• Shopping-cart abandonment
• Win-back or account reactivation campaign
• Customer satisfaction survey after purchase, customer-support query, or product review invitations
• Product replenishment reminders
• Upselling based on purchases

Most of these can be set up with specific criteria, are highly relevant, and often generate the highest ROI (define) because they speak to actions customers take.

Setting up a lifecycle e-mail program takes some programming time up front to establish criteria and create the message content, but once the work is done, this kind of program will work with minimal effort from you.

This is a key opportunity to drive revenue and e-mail program relevance.

Segmented Campaigns

These replace or enhance broadcast messages where a target audience has been divided into smaller audiences, either with a slightly different message to each audience segment, or with dynamic content that changes portions of the message based on user data, such as purchase history, preference choices, or browse categories.

Segmented campaigns often get overlooked, but actually represent a major opportunity to increase relevance and drive revenue. By taking portions of your typical broadcast audience, and targeting your message to increase relevance for them, you begin to generate higher response rates.

Also, you need not raise frequency, which has its own drawbacks.

Broadcast Campaigns

This sends the same message to your entire list and is likely responsible for most of your total revenue. It’s the simplest of all campaigns, and the one most susceptible to overuse.

Marketers turn to the broadcast campaign to squeeze a few more sales before the end of the year, quarter, or month.

When you increase frequency, you might see some increased revenue (though usually not in proportion to the increased frequency). The danger is that you also tend to wear out your welcome with your subscribers.

Increased list churn, due to unsubscribes and spam complaints, means you have to work harder to fill the holes in your subscriber list and to grow it.

It also means the list churn effect is reducing the audience size for your automated programs, the ones that drive the higher-percentage ROI.

Bonus: List Growth

Although technically not a type of campaign, this is always a challenge for e-mail marketers: how to add new subscribers while retaining your present subscribers and keeping them active.

More so than any other part of your e-mail program, you must review and optimize how you capture addresses to allow for easy additions and changes.

With the high turnover in jobs resulting from the economy’s downswing, marketers can expect to see their subscriber lists decline through no fault of their own. These tactics can help you retain more subscribers:

• Remind subscribers of the value and benefits of remaining on your list.
• Sell them on the benefits at sign-up.
• Survey your list of inactives regularly to see if you can return them to active status before cutting them loose.
• Stay top of mind with subscribers through regular mailings.
• Promote other communication channels to allow your subscribers to follow you in other networks, besides e-mail. One of the newest trends is "Share With Your Network." Include your network accounts (Facebook profile, Twitter ID, etc.) in the administrative footer of your messages and call them out prominently in your welcome programs.

Final Thoughts

As we look to expand the performance of the e-mail channel, be sure to do it with solid programs that increase message relevance to the subscriber and promote true subscriber value. Don’t just increase frequency from two times per month to two times per week.

Until next time, keep on deliverin’.

Biography

As senior strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to increase clients’ ROI. Most recently, Stefan led the e-mail consulting program for Lyris clients, frequently speaking at industry events on best practices. Prior to that, he managed the audit process and consulted with clients to improve their e-mail delivery challenges for Habeas. As an e-mail marketer, he spent several years building and executing acquisition and retention campaigns at E-Loan and Cybergold.com

Three Tactics to Manage List Inactivity

By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Feb 25, 2009

Given that at least half of your e-mail address list can probably be classified "inactive," the question of what to do with this silent faction is highly relevant to e-mail marketers, especially in these tough days when you’re being asked to make more sales with less budget.

This issue came up at the recent Email Evolution Conference, where attendees were asked to vote whether purging or retaining inactives should become the e-mail industry’s best practice.

However, the solution goes much deeper than "always purge" versus "always retain."

I support removing some classes of inactive addresses after identifying and attempting to reactivate them (details in my earlier ClickZ column, "The Right Way to Trim Inactives").

This doesn’t mean you should dump anybody who hasn’t acted on your first few e-mail messages, or even everyone who hasn’t opened or clicked in two years.

Presumably you collected those addresses through reputable means, so they represent a considerable investment. Replacing them can often cost more than you spent to acquire them.

Why Target Inactives?

Your inactives probably aren’t generating spam complaints or bounces. So why stir things up? Here are four reasons:

• They aren’t helping you reach your business goals, which mostly means you aren’t making any money from them. Instead, you’re spending money to send them e-mail they’re ignoring.
• They depress your true list performance, in both campaigns and any prelaunch optimization testing.
• ISPs are beginning to watch how often commercial e-mailers send to nonresponding inboxes as an added reputation factor.
• Long-inactive addresses can be turned into spam traps. Sending to them can get your messages blocked or filtered.

Three Tactics for Managing Inactives

Whether you choose to segment out inactives or let them slumber in peace, these three tactics will help you manage inactivity to improve list performance:

• Segment out inactives in optimization testing. If you conduct optimization tests before launching e-mail campaigns, your inactives might be watering down your responses and making it hard to determine the actual lift of your tests. Have you ever done an A/B split test on, say, the call to action where the difference was small, like a 29.4 percent CTR (define) on one version and 28.6 percent on the other so the test was inconclusive? One likely culprit is the denominator (audience selected for the test) is heavily weighted by inactives, suppressing the response rates.
  If you have a strategy for determining active versus inactive subscriber status, you can run your tests against each segment as well as against the whole list and compare the active segment’s performance to the full list. In some cases, this testing could wake up a portion of your inactive file. But if you look at the test only across the whole audience, you might find the winning strategy is more difficult to see.
• Separate your former clickers from your never clickers. Experts regularly debate about how long a subscriber has to go dark before you can consider the address inactive, but what about those people who signed up with you and never acted on any of your e-mail? You shouldn’t have to wait six months to a year before moving your never clickers to an inactive program, assuming you’ve done all you can to entice them into acting.
  This is an excellent argument for conducting a systematic welcome program, one that invites action by clicking through to fill out a profile, claim a special offer, or answer a short survey. (It’s also an argument for double opt-in instead of single opt-in, because it demands a little more action from the subscriber to get on your list, but that’s an argument for another time.)
  Somebody who never acted has a lower value to your e-mail program than somebody who stopped acting. With this latter group, you can at least try to recover them with a reactivation campaign. You gain nothing by continuing to send messages to those who ignore every mailing from the minute they opted in.
• Use inactives to hunt down problems with collection sources or processes. This strategy is a must if a significant percentage of subscribers have never acted on your messages. You most likely collect e-mail addresses from multiple sources (your official Web opt-in page, affiliate sites, coregistration programs, offline sources, etc.). Review your inactive file by source to determine if one collection method contributes a larger share of inactive addresses. You might find that a source delivers addresses that never engage. In that case, investigate the sign-up process after you remove inactives who never clicked.

One Final Thought

If your goal as an e-mail marketer is to send your messages to as many people as possible because you believe your messages have value whether your recipients act on them or not, then by all means, never remove an inactive e-mail address.

However, if deliverability is important and if you want to ensure your active recipients get the opportunity to engage with your e-mail, then list pruning should be a ritual.

Until next time, keep on deliverin’!

Biography

As senior strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to increase clients’ ROI. Most recently, Stefan led the e-mail consulting program for Lyris clients, frequently speaking at industry events on best practices. Prior to that, he managed the audit process and consulted with clients to improve their e-mail delivery challenges for Habeas. As an e-mail marketer, he spent several years building and executing acquisition and retention campaigns at E-Loan and Cybergold.com.

Why ‘Opt-Down’ Improves on ‘Opt-Out’ for Unsubscribers

 By Stefan Pollard, ClickZ, Mar 25, 2009

 Most e-mail marketers would agree that unsubscribing should be fast and easy. It’s the law, after all, in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere around the world.

One click, and you’re off the list. That’s the best way to do it. Or…is it?

An "opt-down" procedure gives potential unsubscribers options to refine their accounts and could help salvage subscriptions without skirting either spam laws or triggering Internet service provider (ISP) delivery alarms. After all, you worked hard to acquire those subscribers the first time, and you should save what you can.

I’m not saying marketers should try every trick in the book to retain subscribers, like obscuring the unsubscribe, forcing log-ins or passwords, surveys, or viewing offers before processing the opt-out.

Those are illegal and unethical, a direct route to spam complaints, blocking by ISPs and, ultimately, a broken e-mail program.

However, an all-or-nothing unsubscribe seldom serves either your program or your subscribers’ needs.

‘Opt-Out’ Isn’t Always the Answer

Yes, an easy unsubscribe helps reduce your spam-complaint volume, for which your e-mail service provider’s deliverability guru thanks you.

However, not everybody who wants to unsubscribe really wants to stop all contact. The top two reasons unsubscribers want off a list, according to Forrester Research, are irrelevant e-mails (74 percent of responses) and too many e-mails (71 percent). Only 26 percent said they didn’t want to hear from the brand or company again.

So, for that 26 percent, provide a barrier-free unsubscribe process that uses a prominently displayed unsubscribe link and speeds them off your list in as few clicks as possible (one click to access the Web page, one click to submit the e-mail address that loads automatically in the address field). For the other 74 percent, the opt-down strategy can place control in their hands.

‘Opt-Down’ Puts Control Back in Subscriber Hands

On the same Web page as the opt-out form, present your multi-option "opt-down" process that lets potential unsubscribers change content, frequency, format, even the communication channel they want to use.

This doesn’t delay your true unsubscribers from opting out, but it can slow down those who just want a change.

When your subscribers can exercise choice, they also help refine your segmentation strategies. This increases message relevance (or, at least, reduces irritation) and doesn’t injure your sender reputation with increased complaints.

Here’s how this can work:

A women’s-clothing retailer sends one message in each of six standard message streams to its entire list each week: regular-price inventory, new arrivals, new markdowns, clearance, accessories and premium/designer fashions.

That’s six e-mails a week total from this company. Its most ardent fans might welcome this, but chances are that’s too much for the average shopper, especially for infrequent buyers.

With an opt-down strategy, a subscriber who clicks the unsubscribe link would be taken to a page that allows her to continue the unsubscribe process but also to consider other options.

She could choose just one or two message streams instead of being forced to accept the standard one-size-fits-all stream. The fashion-forward subscriber will likely choose the new-arrivals and premium categories that the bargain-hunter ordinarily deletes without opening.

The subscriber is happy because she ends up getting the e-mails she really wants, and the merchant has retained a subscriber.

Creating an Opt-Down Strategy

• Use topic choice rather than cadence to reduce e-mail frequency. Limiting yourself to a set number of messages in a specific time period can tie your hands ("no more than one e-mail per week," for example.) Nor does it build relevance, which is your ultimate goal. Also, topic categories will help you segment more effectively.
• Define your message streams clearly. Just as you do when collecting subscriptions, define the types of e-mail you send in consumer-friendly terms. As in the example above, topic names can indicate both content and frequency: "Clearance," "New Arrivals" or even "Special of the Week."
• Start with a survey. CAN-SPAM doesn’t allow you to require unsubscribers to fill out a survey on why they want out (that would be considered a barrier to removal requests), but an optional one, which you present on the same Web page as the unsubscribe, can help you identify options for improving your e-mail program. Keep the survey short, and allow for freeform responses. You’ll be surprised what you can learn.
• Encourage subscribers to update their preferences regularly. This uses the preference form that new subscribers would be asked to fill out after confirmation. The unsubscribe form that includes both the opt-out and the preference options looks similar but places the opt-out more prominently.
  Promote its use in your welcome e-mails, with a special update message, and in your regular e-mails in the same place you put your unsubscribe link. "Click to manage your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe" tells readers they have the power to control their subscriptions.
• Act on what subscribers are telling you. It’s not enough just to solicit information. You need to use it to improve your e-mail program and retain more subscribers, instead of losing them to unsubscribes, spam complaints and inactivity.
  Some e-mail professionals have mocked JCPenney’s practice of e-mailing an unsubscribe survey to people either after they opt out or when they uncheck a prechecked opt-in box during a transaction.
  While I agree, the real shame is that the retailer isn’t paying attention to what people are saying. I made several comments in its "survey" over a year ago about the same problems the experts have been pointing out, and the company never even acknowledged or changed anything. That can trash your e-mail program’s effectiveness just as much as a poor sender reputation.

Until next time, keep on deliverin’!

Biography

As senior strategic consultant, Stefan Pollard is responsible for guiding Responsys clients in developing e-mail marketing and lifecycle messaging strategies to increase clients’ ROI. Most recently, Stefan led the e-mail consulting program for Lyris clients, frequently speaking at industry events on best practices. Prior to that, he managed the audit process and consulted with clients to improve their e-mail delivery challenges for Habeas. As an e-mail marketer, he spent several years building and executing acquisition and retention campaigns at E-Loan and Cybergold.com.