Not Your Parent’s Old Company Newsletter

At the same time, Aprimo recently reintroduced eNewsletters to our customers, partners and prospects. Why? Anyone who receives information from Aprimo marketing knows we strive to provide useful tools to make marketer’s jobs more strategic and productive. Yet, in our internal marketing meetings, we always came back to a need for an interactive channel that tied all of our nurturing campaigns, thought leadership papers, resources, tools in best practices in a summarized, hyperlinked and easy-to-digest resource. We also wanted to turn up the dial on our listening meter.

I’ve only been married for a little less than a year (my anniversary is Aug. 1st), but I have learned a wonderful trick in communicating with my wife.  I ask for forgiveness and not for permission.  It used to be that if I wanted to do something crazy, such as go out with the guys or wear unmatching clothes to work, I would lovingly ask, “beautiful wife, does this shirt match these pants?”  The response was usually a rolling of the eyes followed by a diatribe about egregious fashion faux pas’.  However, I realized that if I did not ask beforehand and simply wore the black, striped pants with the checkered shirt and brown belt, I would usually hear, “those clothes don’t match” at some point later on.  Period.  No rolling eyes.  No heavy sighs.  No prayers to heaven asking why she wasn’t blessed with a decently matched husband.  I would then respond with a simple, “I’m sorry; I didn’t know.”    

As I alluded to in my previous post, I traveled to Dallas, TX last Monday for an online marketing summit.   These online marketing summits occur across the country in various cities.  The goal is to provide a forum for local business and marketing leaders to gather, share knowledge, and learn marketing best practices.  I was sent there as part of our corporate communication initiative to gather testimonials on video which Aprimo can then use in some of their marketing campaigns.  It is an all day event.  For the entire morning, I would go around to various people, give them my spiel about who I am, what I’m doing, and why I need to put them on video.  Only one person agreed to go on video.

For the afternoon, I changed my strategy.  I started using the forgiveness tactic.  I would simply go up to people and ask them questions.  To my great surprise, no one complained.  After I asked my three questions, I would apologize for intruding on their space; tell them who I am, what I’m doing, and what their video may be used for.  Again, no one complained.  By the end of the day, I had in the neighborhood of 10 testimonials.  I do not know why people are much more receptive to forgiveness than they are to permission, but from a neophyte’s point of view, it was an intriguing lesson for me in the world of communications marketing.

p.s. This is a message to all husbands: the forgiveness strategy does not work all the time.  Please use the method wisely.  I forgot to give my wife a card for her birthday – I’m never living that one down!
 

If you're an interactive marketing professional who uses email marketing software and email deliverability solutions or you work with clients that do, there's a good chance that you've either asked yourself or have been asked:

 What are the email marketing best practices for:

• Subject Line Length
• Day to Send
• Time of Day to Send
• Copy/Creative Length

First, let's get on the same page with the definition of a best practice.  Wikipedia defines a best practice as a technique, method, process, activity, incentive, or reward that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc. when applied to a particular condition or circumstance.  

If you're like me, you know that best practices are those tips, benchmark comparisons and guideposts for which marketers must pay.  No one gives it away free.  And those that you find free in the public domain would suffer from oversimplification bias.  That is, it would likely be simplified from the detail so it "applies" to all or most marketers.  The problem is that going too far to simplify the information distorts the original information.   That's industry research reports cost money. The researchers use representative industry samples for their research.  And the reports often show results by B2C versus B2B, by large companies versus small companies, by organization type (client-side versus service provider) and sometimes by industry.  The details matter.

All is not lost, as the beauty of 1:1 marketing is testing.  Test your subject line length.  Test to determine if action words drive incremental opens, click-throughs and conversions.  If you have a marketing automation solution like Aprimo, you can pre-test on a small random sample and then quickly move to production with the winner(s).  I love data-driven marketing, and in particular, the digital channel for the ability to conduct tests in near real-time.  It's a wonderful thing when a marketer has access to actionable data.   So use your experience and talent and answer those questions for yourself.  They're sure to be applicable to your business without caveat.

So, put these steps into action on your next email marketing campaign. Making even one small change can increase your delivery rates and make a noticeable difference in your marketing ROI.

It’s one of our biggest issues as email marketers. It's a 2-pronged problem - Email Marketing. First, we worry about whether or not the email will even reach the target. (Wrong addresses, SPAM-triggering subject lines, filters, etc.) But second, we must take measures to protect our reputation. Junk mail doesn’t simply sit in a bulk folder anymore. It gets reported back to your ISP where they compile a list of your damaging deeds.  Not only that, but some ISPs are starting to grade the relevance of your email and reflect that in your ability to deliver.

So how do you, an email marketer, protect yourself AND reach your audience? First you must ask your provider or your in-house resource these 7 questions:

1. What is our opt-in policy? 
Double opt-in is a best practice required by many ISPs in order to be considered for white listing. To do this, you send a unique link to someone when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested a subscription.  Yes, you will get a smaller list as some people will miss the confirm or change their mind…but you will have a good solid opt-in list that is more engaged.

2. Who handles our email marketing white listing and responses to black listing?
Some large providers such as AOL and Yahoo! have specific white listing programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies in handling your opt-in list. You should apply to these white list services and review any materials provided to make your email compliant. You also need to monitor blacklists and make sure you are not being put on the “bad” list.  Blacklists make it difficult (if not impossible) to contact them and make changes.  However, monitoring them will alert you to the fact that you are doing something wrong so you will look into it and make changes.

3. Do we take advantage of SPF and DKIM?
SPF is Sender Policy Framework and is one of the fundamentals of email marketing best practices. It allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send e-mail. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) allows an organization to take responsibility for a message in a way that can be validated by a recipient.  Both of these are alphabet soup for “things ISPs check to make sure you are a legitimate email marketing”.  It’s one more thing to separate you from the spammers.

4. What is our policy for list cleanup of old addresses?
Be sure to remove all hard bounces that come back as undeliverable. Repeatedly sending to an invalid email will set off red flags with most ISPs. And remove inactive subscribers – they’re most likely to mark your email as junk.  ISPs maintain spam trap email addresses.  If they see you repeatedly sending to bad emails instead of cleansing your list, this will eventually put you on a spam list.

5. How do we handle throttling of big sends?
Send in spurts: Some ISPs have limits as to how many emails you can send in a given period of time. If you’re having trouble sending email to a particular ISP, see if they give you the ability to stage the email over a longer period of time.

6. To avoid being marked as spam, what are some subject line best practices?
Avoid “spammy” words like guarantee, credit card, sex, etc.; (The jury is still out on the word “free.” Some people swear by it, others say it’s a sure-fire filter trigger.) Avoid using all caps as well as excessive punctuation. Always match your subject line to your email content.

7. What is the message mix that works best for HTML vs Image?
Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if possible. If sending HTML, it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format. 

These are just the basic email marketing best practices and there are plenty of additional articles providing tips and information. Being a reputable digital citizen takes a great deal of stewardship and maintenance. Making sure you have a person dedicated to the task is a good place to start.

If you have the data, there’s tremendous value in segmenting. In fact, a recent JupiterResearch study found that engaging your audiences in more relevant communications increases net profits by an average of 18 times more than broadcast mailings. Any bit of segmenting from your data will help. You may have gleaned customer information directly from online forms; or you’re collecting behavioral data from PPC search activity or through your website analytics platform by visiting trending data. Whatever the case, it’s invaluable to the success of your communications – whether it’s your monthly newsletter or an on-going nurture campaign.

Start by making each email count by implementing email marketing best practices. Here are 3 primary steps you can take to increase your email’s ROI:

1.  Be relevant and personal. The basics here are tried and true: Talk to your customers the way they want to be talked to; know their purchase history and timing. 1 to 1 Media’s 2009 Direct Marketing Survey found that Relevancy improved click-thrus by 53%. And for Pete’s sake, don’t annoy by over-emailing.
2.  Try advanced segmentation. While the basics help a lot, try something beyond your comfort zone to see if you can score major lifts. Things to try: gender, location, hobbies, type of company (for b2b). Keep splitting your lists. There are plenty of tools out there to help with this.
3.  Engage new customers. Sounds obvious but many marketers miss this crucial step. You have a very small window of opportunity with new visitors; make sure you give them your best, and most welcoming, shot. Find something that new visitors value – research, analyst reports, intriguing white papers, case studies with real data for example.

Once you’ve started, take segmentation as far as your data allows.  One motorcycle company used segmentation to create new lists based on riding styles, then further divided those segments into lists based on purchase history and email behaviors. Their new, highly targeted email campaign achieved DOUBLE the open rates (38.6%, up from 18.5%), and TRIPLE the clickthroughs. (20.6% from 6.2%.)

Not only does segmentation allow you to drive a more personalized message that leads to higher performance, by segmenting on previous response history you can reduce your actual email sending costs simply by sending to the smaller, more qualified list.

 A customer who is communicated to in just the right way earns your trust. And that’s the ultimate success. So start being smart about using your data to really relate to your customer. As an added bonus, you’re sure to reduce your costs and increase your ROI.
 

Forrester's recently published study on Interactive Marketing (email, social, dialog, banner, etc.) reveals 68% of survey respondents expect to achieve increased email marketing effectiveness over the next three years.  Furthermore, survey respondents also indicated they would increase interactive marketing budgets by 60% by shifting funding away from traditional channels: direct mail (40%), Newspapers (35%) and Magazines (28%).  The picture that is emerging here is one where marketers have high expectations on interactive marketing and expect to focus less on traditional channels.  A lot will be riding on this reallocation of marketing budget -- so what will marketers have to do right to fulfill their hopes and expectations?  This particular blog will address best practices that must be followed by email marketers.  Future blogs will address social and dialog marketing in detail.

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I can handle more emails coming into my professional and personal inboxes.  I get so many from the same companies that I don't even open them -- not even when they come from companies I opted into.  Companies that email too frequently create so much "white-noise" that it affects their open rates as well as the open rates for other companies.   In addition to white-noise emails, I also get many others that made me think -- "why did I even get this?...I don't smoke, so why am i offered a smart smoker trial?"..."I have only rented mystery and adventure movies from you, so why are you telling me about The Lion King release?"  You experience the same things and feel the same way too.  So, what can email marketers do to ensure success and rise above the noise and mediocrity we see everyday?  It takes only three things -- relevancy, segmentation and testing.  These three tactics are the key building blocks to optimizing your email marketing efforts.

Relevancy - A blog I posted a couple of weeks ago spoke to email relevancy -- that it's about personalizing the email, segmenting your audience and testing your content (copy, images, subject lines, etc).

Segmentation - Your audience will differ by demographics, personality, shopping habits, geography, etc.  Simple segmentations where different messages are sent to each segment can deliver huge marketing ROI.  A recent Marketing Experiments webinar offered a case study on American Greetings.com (AG).  AG's goal for their email campaign was to increase individual Ecard purchases as well as Annual Subscriptions.  They created two segments -- Segment A contained customers that purchased humorous Ecards in the past, while Segment B contained customers that purchased traditional Ecards.  Each segment got an email that spoke to their interests based on this past purchase behavior.  This simple use of segmentation resulted in a 70% improvement in conversion rates when compared to a control group -- that's HUGE!   Just imagine what more sophisticated segmentation schemes might produce!

Frequency - Ok, so I have a real issue with this particular topic.  I  can't begin to tell you how much junk I get in my inbox.  I don't even open emails from some marketers and yet I still get an email every day from them -- please do some analysis on open rates and realize, I'm just not into Chocolate Covered Strawberries -- OK?!  Oh yes, back to the informational part of my message...  The same webinar by Marketing Experiments (I suggest you Google them!) provided another case study on a very large anonymous Ecommerce company.  They segmented their customers into seven segments.  Each segment got a different number of emails over a 60 day period.  At the extremes, one segment got an email every other day, while the other got an email every 15 days.  During the webinar, the audience was polled to see what they thought the optimal number of emails would be.  They chose 3-4 per month based on their own experiences and readings.  Well, the actual results were quite surprising.  Their test showed that customers that received emails every two days produced 3X the revenue of the segments that got 2-4 emails per month.  In fact, there was a significant positive correlation across all segments based on the number of emails they received (see below graph).



You would think this is illogical.  Most email marketers believe we face the tradeoff shown below -- that there will be an increase in revenues at first, but then we'll experience more unsubscribes or non-opens as the frequency increases.



So, what is the disparity between the experience of the webinar audience and the results of this study?  Well, we are simply seeing that each company has a unique customer base and a unique relationship with them.  You can't just assume your optimal frequency should be what is best "on average" or for a specific company they read about.  It means that every company must do segmentation and testing to determine the right frequency for their unique audience.

Caveats? -- there is always one or more:

1) Tell your ESP that you'll be doing experiments and they may see greater volume than normal.  After all, you don't want to be blacklisted.

2) Also look at open rates and unsubscribes during your testing.  The anonymous email marketer in the 2nd case study saw no correlation between frequency, and open rates or unsubscribes per email sent.  But your experience may be different.  Remember, an unsubscribe doesn't just effect revenue from a given campaign, but it also erases expected/future customer lifetime value.

Marketers on the street often come up to me and ask, "How many times can I contact my customers and prospects?"  Actually, marketers do not come up to me and ask me this question, but they should be asking someone this question.  Actually, I decided to write this blog because I am surprised how many organizations do not manage the number of time  customer and prospect communications much at all.  In some cases customers and prospects are being barraged with marketing communication to the point that the communication is becoming less and less effective.

Opt-Outs First
There are customers and prospects that you should not be contacting at all.  These are individuals that have asked to be removed (opted-out) from your marketing communication.  If someone asks to no longer receive your marketing messages by all channels, or by a specific marketing channel of email, mail, or call, then they are probably not interested in your messages or in receiving your offers via that specific channel.  The customer or prospect by providing you this information has just saved you money, increased your response rate, and has provided you a preference. So, you should use that information.

The key to achieving your desired conversion rate is relevancy -- pure and simple.  It's more than using your microsite software to support specific campaigns.  It's about testing and delivering personalized emails with relevant content that drives customers to a personalized and relevant experience on your microsite. 

A few words stand out in the above paragraph that merit additional attention.

Personalize - This means many things to many people.  It can be as simple as embedding the customer's name in the email message.  A recent study by Aberdeen found that personalizing an email with a name increased conversion rates by 200-300% over non-personalized emails.

Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer.  Relevancy can be driven by events,  prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.

• Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call.  A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options.  A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest.  Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.
   
• Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases.  For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters.  Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services.  Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond).  We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.
   
• Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations.  One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time.  For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product."  Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering.  Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.).  While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other.  Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name.  The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant.  If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have.  Let's look at an example.
  
  A large print newspaper in the northeast was experiencing declining subscribers like many of it's counterparts nationally.  The newspaper appended Census data (number of residents, race, ethnicity, age, income, home value, average commute time and many other variables) at the zip+4 level to all of it's subscribers. It then used clustering to create five different clusters of customers based on the Census data.  Their idea was to profile each group and develop editorial zones based on these segments.  Each editorial zone would receive it's own unique newspaper content based on assumed interests as derived from the cluster profiles.  One cluster was comprised of the highest proportion of customers with high home values, 4-year degrees and the lowest proportion of people with blue-collar jobs.  This cluster also  enjoyed the highest penetration in terms of current subscribers.  You can see how the content this group would be interested in would differ from the cluster with lower education and income.  By personalizing the newspaper content, the newspaper reduced the rate of subscriber loss from all segments/zones. 
  
  This information was also used to promote customizable online versions of the newspaper as well.  Subscribers now opt-in/out to various content.  As such, they are directly professing their interests in a topic or issue.  This information is even more powerful from a marketing perspective than what we "deduce" via analytics, and can drive a circular process where we get to know the customer better and better over time.  This increases customer loyalty and ROMI.
  
  Many organizations have even taken this idea farther from a Social Marketing perspective.  Customers can form their own clusters by opting in/out of particular forums or discussions.  Creating customer segments based on the forums or discussion groups to which they belong is valuable low hanging fruit.  Some leading edge companies are also applying Text Mining to customer posts to take proactive steps for customer loyalty/retention, cross-sell and acquisition efforts.  More to come on Social Marketing and Text Mining in future posts.