Be Relevant! Email Marketing Blog

Must-Watch: Adobe Keynote at SES Chicago (video)

Take some time to listen to this inspiring keynote presentation by Adobe's Senior Director of Marketing, Mikel Chertudi at SES Chicago this week. You won't regret it!

What is it about?

Are you or someone you know, guilty of knowingly or negligently wasting marketing dollars? Odds are you have been and probably still are guilty and don't even recognize it despite best intentions. In this keynote, Mikel Chertudi uncovers the reasons for our guilt and wishful thinking when it comes to where and how we spend marketing dollars - he also points out that when it comes to marketing investment, "Hope is not a Strategy."

As future heads of marketing, he helps us understand how to ask the right questions to avoid the pitfalls associated with "mis investing" our resources across channels and tactics. He discusses how we can rise to the top by taking control of the marketing mix, creating proper attribution models, and viewing marketing as an investment portfolio where we optimize greater and greater returns as opposed to viewing it as the old marketing cost center of the past.

Enjoy!

Why The Position Of Your Email In The Inbox Is Unimportant

On the EmailVision blog, Tim Watson explains why you shouldn't worry too much about the best time to send an email.  

The answer as to why timing is not so sensitive lies in how people engage and process their email inbox.

In a small poll the folks over at EmailVision ran, 94% of people said that when returning to their inbox they scan ALL new or recent unread emails. This means your position in the inbox is relatively unimportant.

Your email will be scanned for a delete or read decision regardless of whether it's the top email or number 25. Your email will live and die by much stronger factors than time of day such as:

• Subject line and from name 
• Content relevance 
• Previous experience of your emails 
• Brand loyalty and engagement

Trying to time an email to a 2 to 5 hour slot is relatively unimportant. Your email will be deleted based on the above factors and not whether it was first seen at 10am or 2pm.

More important than time of day timing, is timing with regard to the customer lifecycle. Right message, right person, right time is often quoted. However, time doesn't mean 9am or 10am.

Perfect timing is reaching the customer when they are actively:

• Identifying a need 
• Researching options to fulfil a need 
• Deciding which offer to choose.

Read more here: Campaign send time isn't important 

The Best and Worst Times to Send an Email (infographic)

50 Simple But Highly Effective Email Marketing Tips

50 simple but highly effective email marketing tips

View more presentations from Tamara Gielen

Why I choose a qualified email address over a single Facebook like.

In her post "Best Choice: Facebook LIKE or Qualified eMail Address?" Pam Moore asks the question: "If you had to pick one, what would it be? A Facebook “like” or an email address? "

Her answer (and also mine) is this: If I have the choice of a qualified email address or a “like” of my Facebook business page, I choose the email address.

Why? Here are some of her reasons:

“Likes” are good but the real value comes in your ability to inspire them to action past the “like”.
Just because someone “likes” your page doesn’t mean they have ever looked at anything you’ve posted since the first day they clicked “like”.  The majority of Facebook “likers” will never visit the page they liked again. It’s up to you to inspire your Facebook fans to further engage and join your community.

It is more intimate. 
It helps us nurture client relationships. We know who’s opening what content. We know what they like, what they don’t like. We are then able to better serve them up entertaining content on the Facebook page, Twitter feeds and LinkedIn conversations.

eMail builds trust and thought leadership. 
Obviously the email subscriber has more skin in the game than a simple “liker”.  From first click of the “subscribe” button they are making a silent statement of trust. It’s up to me what I do with that trust.

I can easily get my email subscribers to my Facebook page. 
Not always so easy to get a Facebook “liker’s” email address.

It works. 
Bottom line, every time I send out an email to our audience, the phone rings. Can’t say the same thing for every time I post on my Facebook page or get a Facebook like. We are seeing good results with integrating email to our marketing and social media efforts. I can’t imagine our business without our automated email nurturing system integrated into the DNA of our audience communications.

Read the full article here.

Do you agree? Disagree? I look forward to your comments!

Update: I just came across this interesting article from Loren McDonald on this subject. Check it out!

How to make email look sexy to the the C-suite

To make email marketing look sexy to the C-suite, Loren McDonald provides these 8 tips:

1. Never talk opens and clicks with other departments or the management suite. They don't or shouldn't care.

2. Talk loudly about revenues and cost savings.

3. Talk up the percentage of total company revenue that comes from email (assuming it's good). If you don't know, figure it out.

4. Don't talk about deliverability and rendering problems.

5. Remind executives that an email address is the core of most social and mobile relationships.

6. Show how a tiny percentage of email volume generates a massive amount of your email revenue via automated emails. (Hint to the C-Suite: Adding automation is like printing money.)

7. Cite strategic metrics that will wow executives, such as revenue per email, email revenue per worker hour, call center deferral rate, etc.

8. Document and communicate email revenue opportunities. As I write this, a client just emailed me to point out several missed opportunities she noticed when purchasing from another retailer, which could add up to millions of lost dollars.

via www.mediapost.com

5 common reasons why readers aren’t turning into buyers

1. They don’t want what you’ve got. 

If this is your problem, you have essentially two choices. 

1. offer something that more people want
2. think about how you can build a bridge between something they want and something you offer. 

2. They’re confused

You may have too many different options for them to choose from. If they have to make a choice that’s more complex than “Silver, Gold, Platinum,” you run the very real risk of losing them.

3. Your message is not clear. 

Your sales copy should contain at least these three things:

• This is what I’ve got. 
• This is what it will do for you. 
• This is what you should do next. 

4. You didn’t ask

If you explicitly ask your reader to click the link, dial the number, or whatever other means you use to get that sale, she’s much more likely to do it.

5. They don’t believe you

Build up that trust by creating great business relationships with killer content.

This is just a (short) summary of a (long) article on Copyblogger. Go read the entire story here.

How to get the attention of inactive subscribers

One of the most cost-effective email marketing programs is outreach targeted to recapture the interest of disengaged subscribers. 

These are customers who subscribed to your email list but lost interest, and stopped opening or clicking your emails. They're still on your list and receive email, but they're no longer purchasing from you. 

It's not uncommon for 40 percent or more of a brand's list to be inactive. 

Recapture programs have the best return when they're made a permanent part of your email marketing mix. 

A persistent, ongoing recapture program has these ingredients: 

1. Define "inactive subscribers" 
2. Establish baseline statistics of their email (email service provider) and site (web analytics) behavior: click and open rates, conversion rate, revenue per mailing 
3. Generate an email list of inactive customers 
4. Send recapture offer email 
5. Measure response 
6. Feed results back, repeat

 Continue reading here.

How to segment & target prospects to deliver great results if you have a small Email Marketing budget

To do the basics well, you don’t need to be an email marketing or CRM expert, and you don’t need a big budget. To really increase performance, you just need a pinch of patience and some common sense. 

Philip Storey explains how to do this with an example case study here: How to segment & target prospects to deliver great results if you have a small Email Marketing budget.

Signs Your Email Program Is Behind The Curve

Here are a few signs that despite "good" results, your email program is getting lapped: 

1. You rarely, if ever, A/B test anything.
2. You don't review performance metrics. 
3. You don't segment. 
4. Transactional messages are the only triggered emails that you send.
5. You haven't updated your sign-up form, opt-in confirmation page or any other such pages since launching them. 
6. You don't make it easy for customers to sign up for your emails. 
7. You're totally preoccupied with the day-to-day of getting emails out the door. 

 Read the full article here: Signs Your Email Program Is Behind The Curve.

Running an International Email Marketing Program

Yesterday I spoke at a B2B email marketing event organized by the UK DMA – it was the best email event I attended in a long while. Great speakers and great content, so well done DMA! :-)

Here are the slides from my presentation. When I get approval from the other presenters, I’ll post their slides here as well.

Running An International Email Program

View more presentations from Tamara Gielen.

Winning back inactive subscribers in 7 steps

Your inactive subscribers don’t necessarily represent dead wood, uselessly clogging up your database. They are past and future customers who were once engaged with your program.

Chances are, it will cost you less to reach out and re-engage with these subscribers than it will to acquire new ones, so don’t leave good money on the table.

In this article, Margaret Farmakis provides these simple steps to win them back:

Step 1: Dive into your data and find out what portion of your database is inactive and how many non-responders you have.

Step 2: Break the inactive segment into smaller sub-segments. You’ll need to create a win-back strategy for each.

Step 3: Test a variety of content and offer strategies. Some subscribers will respond better to discounts, others to information on new products.

Step 4: Make sure you recognize their inactive status with a special headline in the creative and a customized subject line that lets them know you want them back.

Step 5: Track your performance metrics to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Step 6: Next, remove persistent non-responders from your database. If you’re not quite ready to make the cut, consider sending out a final re-permission message. This email should clearly state that the subscriber hasn’t been opening or clicking on your messages. Include a link to reconfirm that they would like to remain on your file. Be clear about how long they have to reconfirm and what will happen if they don’t; you’ll then be    able to take the final step and remove them from your database.

Step 7: Take proactive steps to identify and reach out to your non-responders in the future. Create triggered messages that will engage with your inactive segments on a methodical basis, ideally after a defined period of time. If the subscriber hasn’t opened or clicked in 30 days, send them your win-back offer. If a customer hasn’t made a purchase in three months, send them a special incentive to get them shopping again.

Read the full article here.

Keys To Great Email Strategy

To be successful in email strategy doesn't start with a communication strategy.  It starts with a framework for how you'll make decisions.  

Here are some elements that should be included in this framework: 

1. What are your monetary goals and objectives for your program, and how do they change by segment and/or product mix? 
2. What are the consumer actions and motivators that drive a purchase decision? Not just, why do they buy? But, what motivates them to buy, what type of information do they need in what part of the lifecycle?  How does it evolve by segment?  What type of support does your site, call center, or sales force play in this?  What are the tasks your customer must take to complete a purchase -- and how does your operations support those?
3. What competitive considerations are important to your business -- and how do they impact the ways your customers make decisions? How will you gather this competitive insight, consumer response and make decisions on this information?. 
4. How you create customer segments is critical to effective strategy. It's critical that you create actionable segments that can be catered to in-program.  Just because you can create dynamically driven segments and event-driven communications doesn't mean you will have the time or resources to truly optimize all the segments. 
5. Lastly, your framework should include simple hypothesis-driven testing. Your strategic testing framework should include how often you'll test, what hypothesis you want to solve, and what are the actions you'll take once you've proven or disproven this thinking.

Continue reading this excellent article by David Baker here: MediaPost Publications Keys To Great Email Strategy 07/27/2009. 

What Would Chef Ramsay Say?

Morgan Stewart claims that we (email marketers) need our own dose of Chef Ramsay (you know, the Hell’s Kitchen guy).

In this article, he translates some of Chef Ramsay’s advice to restaurateurs to advice for email marketers (minus the obscenities, of course). Here’s a summary:

1. “How much money are you losing a month?" 
   Have you spent money on bad list sources and not realized it for months? Failed to cross-sell additional products or services in confirmation emails? Failed to send a welcome message? Sent a message with bad links? These are all common problems, but they are easily avoidable mistakes. Don't make them!
   
2. Trying to get too fancy just messes things up.
   Chances are you have good content and "other" content -- the content that you include to make sure everyone is happy. If it detracts from the good content, don't add it. Apple does a great job of this. The company's messages are focused on the one thing: excellent products.
   
3. If you serve bad food or the service is poor, customers will not return.
   It's bad enough to deliver poorly targeted or irrelevant email to your subscribers. If the program stinks, they may unsubscribe (if you are lucky) or they will simply stop reading your messages. Most customers will ignore you at this point, but some will go to the extreme to discredit you.
   
4. If customers don't like what you are serving, it's not their fault.
   Don't go looking for new customers until you fix the problem.
   
5. Stop making %*@$ excuses!
   Good content and good service positions your program for success. You can't fool your subscribers for long, so don't waste time fooling yourself.

Read the full article here.

Do You, Subscriber, Take Thee, Marketer, to Lawfully Opt-in?

There's a great post over at Blue Sky Factory addressing the fact that unlike the controversial behavioral targeting feature which Google has implemented, as email marketers we are in a wonderful position to use behavioral tracking - as we have permission from our subscribers.

As Nikki says :'Email marketing is one of the best online marketing mediums to offer permission-based behavioral tracking for online users.   Bottom line: it offers marketers a way of establishing relationships, cross-pollinating social media networks and RSS feeds, and it builds your client base organically. Email marketing enables marketers to deliver campaigns specific to the interests and behaviors of their recipients, while giving measurable results to easily track your ROI.'

Read the full post

The Only Marketing Rule That Matters

James Myers over on the Ogilvy blog says the only marketing rule that matters is “BE INTERESTING”.

to be interesting you have to all of the following.
(1) segment your market - create personas if we want to get digital about it.
(2) understand your customers requirements
(3) give them the personal treatment
(4) be relevant
(5) get to the point quickly
(6) ignore your (product) agenda until you know what the consumer wants

Read his post here.

Embracing multiple marketing mediums

For me, Matt Blumberg started the 'email is not dead' cry with his brief but elegant post - but in actuality, the 'email is dead' train started back a couple of years ago - and surprise, surprise - not only is email not dead, but it is going stronger than ever.

Recently a couple of friends also took up the baton of defending email and why is email being picked on so much?  - this time around the threat isn't RSS but social media.

I fully support the notion that email is not dead - as Jeanniey Mullen of EEC has said time and time again, email is the backbone of digital marketing and it certainly isn't going away. As I briefly referred to in this post recently; as new technologies come along they cause a bit of excitement - but eventually they all settle down to play their roles in what we know as the 'marketing mix'...RSS is a perfect historical example of this.

The real question I think is not which medium is best - but as marketers, how do we incorporate and take advantage all of these new marketing mediums in order to reach our customers? - not as a replacement to email, but in conjunction with email, so that we reach our clients/subscribers using their currently preferred medium.

One of the main changes in the past couple of years with the internet is the attitude of the digital marketing recipient. Their expectations have changed over the years as they have become very user savvy and so are now accustomed to receiving only relevant, targeted information to be delivered to them - whether it be via search engines, banner ads, email marketing, RSS etc. 

Google has recognised this change with their users and so has implemented the adjustable promote/delete options within their search results according to the users preferences. Another example of a digital company taking customer's preferences into account is Facebook's latest redesign - you can now hide the wall posts of people which  aren't of interest to you - again the keyword here is preferences.

In email marketing we also understand this and marketing via email has now (or should now) be a matter of thinking of what value can I supply  to my client/subscriber rather than what message/product do I want to market. The focus should now be on the client's requirements rather than your own requirements as a marketer.

Assuming customers preferences are taking centre stage in our marketing plans, we now need to look at whether incorporating social media tools such as Facebook, Linked in, Twitter etc into the marketing mix is applicable to our businesses.  

The main aim is to be able to provide your client/subscriber base with a valuable offer (whether it be a service, a product, information etc) via the mediums of their choice. It's not about which medium is best, about whether email is dead, or whether social media is the latest and greatest - it is about which mix of mediums are appropriate for your business and client /subscriber base.

Forget relevance - it's about value!

As usual, Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx has decided to turn things on their head and not accept the 'norm'. In this case he's being irreverent to the holy 'relevance' mantra of email marketing....and he makes a good point.

In the latest issue of email-worx,, he talks about replacing 'relevance' with 'value' - as without value, it is very hard for your email program to be relevant. As he says 'Subscribers expect - and should get value!'

He goes onto say that an easy way to add value to your email program is to offer something which you can only get by being in the mailing list - that is, you can't get it by going directly to the website. This of course can be information, whitepapers, special offers, reduced shipping etc...

Watch the video here

How To Use Pay-Per-Click to Drive Email Signups & Create New Customers

Here’s a simple 4-step technique to grow your opt-in lists, find new customers, and make the most of your pay-per-click budget.

Pay Per Click – The Standard Technique

The most common use for pay-per-click advertising (search advertising) is direct sales. Here’s a vastly simplified picture of a standard PPC campaign:

1. Figure out your target keywords
2. Bid on a bunch of terms
3. Send traffic to your site
4. Measure the results
5. Rinse & repeat

This works really well if you get it right, but it has a fairly large, obvious weakness: The visitors you get from pay-per-click are usually first-time site visitors & it’s much, much harder to turn a new visitor into a customer than it is to sell to someone who’s already warmed to your brand.

As an email marketer you know this. That’s a big part of your job: Get permission to talk to your prospects regularly and you have a much greater chance of turning them into customers.

How to Use Email to Improve Pay-Per-Click Results

Here’s a simple technique you can use to join up PPC & email and get great results. We’ll take a B2C example to illustrate, but this will work equally well (if not better) in most B2B scenarios.

Step 1: Target searchers early in the ‘research’ phase

To do this we’d bid on phrases like “how to buy a tv”, “tv reviews”, “best tv”, and thousands of other much less expensive variations!

Step 2: Create something to help these people with their research

We’ll put together an ebook, “Everything You Need To Know About Buying a TV in 2009”. We’ll put this in PDF format.

Step 3: Turn the visitor into a subscriber

To convert the visitor into a subscriber we'll create a 2-step landing page on our site.

Page 1 would be a short sales pitch for your free “Everything You Need To Know...” ebook. The page will also contain an opt-in form, asking for “name”, “email address” and perhaps another key bit of information: “Budget”, “Location”, “Type of TV you’re interested In” for example. All of this along with a checkbox “I am happy to receive emails from ...”. In other words, the visitor is opting in to our emails in exchange for downloading our free ebook.

Page 2 would be a ‘thank you’ page containing a link to our free PDF ebook. Maybe we’ll include a list of best selling TVs, or a call to action back to our homepage to avoid this page being a ‘dead end’, engage the visitor a little more, and perhaps pick up some sales.

Step 4: Turn the subscriber into a customer

We know our new subscriber is in the research phase for buying a TV. Ideally we can then send them an automated series of emails to grow them from an ‘early researcher’ to a ‘customer’. Alternatively, if we don’t have the tools to support that, we can simply move them onto our regular email campaigns.

Either way, the ability to speak to this prospect regularly gives us a much better chance of gaining them as a customer than we would if we just pushed them straight from a search for “TV Reviews” to a page of “Top Selling” TVs on our website.

This is a simple B2C example, but the tactic has unlimited applications and can work far better in the B2B space, using how-to guides, whitepapers and reports in exchange for permission to speak to your web visitors through email.

A Billion Dollar Email Opportunity: Where Are All The Newspapers?

19 years after the world’s first website popped up, newspapers have fully caught up on the web. They have teams of SEOs. Big pay-per-click budgets. Spend millions on analytics.

But - here’s the big question: Decades after the first email dropped into an inbox, where are all the great newspaper email programs?

Newspapers & Email: The Opportunity

With their investments in analytics, newspapers already have a vast wealth of behavioural data about their audiences online. Connecting that audience with relevant content by email is a win:win:win – it benefits the newspaper, the reader, and the advertiser.

Perhaps the newspapers feel like they’re in the business of producing ‘a product’. Translating a whole newspaper into a website is straightforward, whereas translating a whole newspaper into an email is virtually impossible.

Instead, like a good email marketing program, newspaper email could be personalised & relevant.

Here’re 10 quick starter ideas newspapers could pursue through email.

10 Simple Email Ideas for Newspapers

1. There’s a big breaking story today & I want to stay up to date. I want to give you my email address & have you send me hourly updates & breaking changes until the story dies.
2. Every week, I read the whole of your ‘money’ section . Why can’t I sign up to get money articles by email?
3. I’m a big fan of one of your journalists. I read his blog a couple of times a year when I remember to check it. If you emailed his articles to me I’d read them every time.
4. You’ve got minute-by-minute coverage of every football game on your site. Why can’t I get 15-minute email updates on my Blackberry when I’m travelling? Why can’t I get an email alert whenever there’s news about my team?
5. I need to keep tabs on my competitors in the finance pages. Google is sending me alerts, but I only want the ‘finance’ stuff and only about those 3 companies – why can’t you email it to me?
6. I’m really interested in any news articles mentioning my local town. Often I don’t spot them. Can I sign up so you email me whenever we’re mentioned?
7. I’ve been to your site every day for the last year. You know exactly what kind of stuff I read. Can’t you cross-reference my tastes with your other readers and start sending me stuff they like? You know – like Amazon do with “Customers who bought this also bought...” emails.
8. I left a comment about a political issue. I want to carry on the debate whenever it comes up, but I have to check your political pages every day to see if there’s anything new.
9. I don’t have time to read the news, can’t you just send me a roundup of ‘most read news articles’ every week so that I can stay up to date?
10. Let me register all my interests & my location and send me info every time an event comes up that matches.

All of these are totally relevant for readers, with great potential for advertising revenue. Pick anything along these lines and scale it across a big national newspaper’s million+ readers and you can see the huge opportunity. Newspapers make millions today from CPM display advertising, imagine the increased revenue, audience satisfaction & loyalty a great email program could produce.