When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke. He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King! The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.
Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season. I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year. The flow of the movie and the soundtrack fit with how email marketing happens during the holiday season. It happens every year.
There's a dramatic uptick in all email marketing, be it legitimate email marketing or spam, that starts when the weather gets cold. Some years, it triples or quadruples normal email volume. And that means slower mail servers, more filters, more complaints, and slower response times. It also means overworked, cranky mail and abuse admins. I know. I've been one of those cranky abuse admins.
The rules surrounding email deliverability, which are confusing enough, get more complicated during this time of year. It feels like every company you have ever driven past and every partner of theirs is vying for your attention. There are a lot of little things that you can do, from holiday ramp-up strategies to promoting special holiday-only marketing campaigns that draw customers in.
I'll leave you for now with this very important thought.
Engagement is more important than ever. If you don't get the attention of your recipients, you'll find your email in the spam folder or blocked during your most crucial sales period.
As I've been writing this, the song "Making Christmas" has been running through my head. It makes me want to ask which mindset do you have for your email campaigns, going into this holiday season?
"Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider legs and pretty bows.
It's ours this time."
(Your focus is on your ideas of what your recipients should want. You reach years back into your subscriber database. You send out email to people who didn't give you permission.)
Or
"This thing will never make a present. It's been dead now for much too long.
Try something fresher, something pleasant."
(Your focus is on what your customers are really interested in. You're interested in actively engaged subscribers rather than the number of subscribers on your list. You use dynamic content to create a one-to-one experience for your customers.)
He starts by introducing the first segment:
Beyond Deliverability: Consumer Choice & ControlAuthentication, Privacy, and Policy
by Craig Spiezle
https://otalliance.org
The Online Trust Alliance is concerned with security in online activity, especially financial services. Spoofed email, phishing, and online exploits are a major challenge for financial organizations that operate online.
Craig said that government regulations are likely to come about in the next few weeks as a result of the identity theft incidents that we've heard of recently. Craig said that the United States is actually behind other parts of the world in consumer production.
Craig discussed extended validation certificates. In order to get one of these certificates, the business must prove that it's registered with a local tax authority. While this can't verify that the business has good business practices, but it does require that the business be a real business. When a business has this certificate, it turns the address bar in your browser green when you visit their site. If the address bar isn't green, you know that it's a spoofed site.
He continued to talk about the business value of authentication. Not only does this help protect your business from being spoofed, but also improves your deliverability.
Of the top 100 financial institutions in North America, only 43% have protections in place for consumers.
Craig talked about the problem with unsubscribe: an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is required by CAN-SPAM, but consumers are warned not to click links in emails they don't want for fear that they'll alert spammers that they're a real person. An unsubscribe header allow ISPs to render an unsubscribe link in their client so that people can unsubscribe without clicking the "report as spam" link and degrading your reputation. About this time, someone from ExactTarget piped up to mention that ExactTarget email already does this automatically.
Addressing Email Security ConcernsMatt Burton - GMAC/Ally Bank
Matt talked about Ally bank and the fact that its customers were receiving more spoof emails that were pretending to be from Ally as they were receiving from the real bank.
Ally Bank, like many places, would love for there to be a "silver bullet" that would solve the problem, but in fact the best way to protect consumers is with a combination of proactive monitoring, excellent deliverability of your legit content, and customer education.
Governance, while unpopular, is critical. If your company has multiple business units, ALL of them have to have successful security.
Some financial institutions do not include links in their emails, instead telling consumers to go to the website. This is problematic because it requires more copy and results in fewer site hits. Also, this doesn't prevent phishing emails from including links in their emails.
Security tools, such as ISP Phish Blocking and Certified Mail, are available to help prevent risk and increase confidence in your message respectively.
Education of consumers can be tricky. Sending emails that tells customers how to tell whether your email is real might make it look like you're a spoofer trying to set them up to trust fraudulent email in the future. Better to just remain consistent in your sending so that consumers become accustomed to your style and learn to identify spoofs on their own.
To wrap up, Matt recommended proactive risk diminuation rather than waiting for a problem happens and only responding then.
Technology Solutione-statements at Nationwide
Brian Jaffe - Nationwide Insurance
Nationwide was facing a "statement challenge"--sending statements to customers on email. The address this issue, they created an elegant solution.
- Governance - As part of this process, they codified their program for sending emails.
- Preference management - allow customers to specify their preferences. Brian recommends double opt in.
- Billing format - recreate view of paper statement
- Send mode - bulk or single send. You probably batch up your bills, but some might do individual sends.
- Data preparation - attributes or data extensions? what is the unique subscriber key? You need to understand your extremes (what happens if you have an extremely large amount of data?) and your data-display issues.
- Deliverability - decisions about IP and Domain. Learn from your deliverability team!
- Feedback - decisions about bounce management, reply management. If people unsubscribe and then try to sign up, you could have technical problems sending emails. Make sure you understand how your unsubscribes are managed. And be ready to monitor replies, even if you tell people not to reply to a message.
- Inserting marketing messages into transactional emails - CAN-SPAM does allow you include marketing messages into your transactional emails under certain circumstances.
Nationwide includes quite a bit of personal information in their emails so that subscribers know that the email must be legit, since a phishing scam wouldn't have access to so much personal information. Watch out for links to log-in pages, since phishing emails like to send very similar emails that direct to their own "login page."
Having a protocol to deal with bounces is wise. In their case, if a subscriber soft-bounces, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream for one cycle and try paperless again for the next cycle. If they run into a hard-bounce, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream indefinitely until the subscriber re-enrolls themselves in the paperless process.
Nationwide's solution is based on the ExactTarget SOAP API. Their OMS (outbound messaging service) is a middleware layer of abstraction that actually sits behind their firewall. Between the OMS and ExactTarget much communication occurs to get the statements out to subscribers.
The content of the eStatement itself uses AMPscript to build the bill by parsing concatenated attributes and dynamically displaying content in appropriate data tables.
Michael Murdza (ExactTarget) took us through the technical aspect of the eStatement data flow. A sophisticated decision tree weave through the Nationwide database and ExactTarget application, using XML, AMPscript, and API calls.
And then the presentation wrapped up, and everyone started getting ready for the evening entertainment. I've really enjoyed live blogging the technology track for everyone today, and I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing it. See you between the lines :)
Manager of the Product Specialist department Dale McCrory returns to the stage for this presentation and starts the session by asking people what topics they would like to see covered today. The first question was on documentation.
YAY! I love when people care about the documentation!
Web Service API Documentation
Dale brings up http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com to demonstrate all of the wonderful web service API documentation that's available there. He takes the group through a technical article on asynchronous processing, the CREATE method, an object, and a property. Bryan Wade, the embedded expert at ExactTarget and emcee of the session, asks how many people in the room have been to the wiki before, and about half of the room had already visited. I think the rest will visit before too long.
Content Management
The second question is about content management and best practices for it. Dale pulls up the AMPscript page in the documentation wiki to find the HTTPGet() function. This function performs a get call against a URL and brings back the content. This tool can be used to interact with an outside system in include the content in the emails.
AMPscript also support XSLT now, so you can interact with ExactTarget with you XML content. The BuildRowSetFromXML() function extends this capability.
Slide Presentation
With the two questions addressed, Bryan prods Dale to get back to the slideshow. The slides cover:
- Security
- Reliability
- Robustness
- Flexibility
- Messaging content
- Stats retrieval - tracking events
Security
Standards-based SOAP security to support authentication
All calls transmit over an SSL connection. The API supports two forms of security:
- Plain text username token. This is what everyone's using right now.
- X509 certificate encryption for the username token will be available in the 135 release.
Reliability
In this section, we're talking about synchronous versus asynchronous API processing again. Asynchronous processing adds all calls to a queue to be processed when the system is ready, which prevents API calls from being lost if the server is unavailable for any reason.
Other benefits include:
- The fact that you get a sub-second response to the fact that the call has been received.
- You have multiple options to receive results: HTTP post, Email, and the RETRIEVE API call.
- The ConversationID concept that's used with asynch API processing allows you to resend the same call without worrying that it will actually be processed twice if the system had already queued the request.
Robustness
Dale quotes Wikipedia: "Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance."
Triggered sends represent the quickest way to get an email sent from the ExactTarget system. Key points help decide whether to use user-initiated (list-based) sends or triggered sends:
- How do you want to aggregate tracking?
List based sends aggregate tracking by job. Triggered sends aggregate tracking over a time period when the triggered send was running. - How will email content be made available to the ExactTarget system?
- How are unsubscribes managed?
List based sends record unsubs at the list level, or at the All Subscribers level. If a person unsubscribes from a triggered send, they can be unsubscribed from all triggered sends. - How large are your lists?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers, you should start with list based. If you are sending individual messages in response to customer activity, triggered sends are the way to go.
- Are attribute sets going to be the same for all sends?
If so, you can use lists because you set up attributes for all lists together. If you need different attribute sets for different subsets of clients, then you want data extensions. - Is import performance critical?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers to import, you can import them into a data extension in 10 minutes versus 1-2 hours for a list (this is an approximation...the number of attributes has a big effect on performance as well). - How will unsubscribes be managed?
Each list maintains its own unsubscribes. Data extensions maintain unsubscribes in publication lists. - Bonus point not in the slide: if you are a partner building an application, you probably want to build on lists if possible, because they cost less.
Flexibility
This topic starts with a discussion of data extensions. Data extension are
- The only way to use the API to do "rich" queries of data
- The way you can add relational models of data en masse or row-by-row
- Very fast
- Tables in our database schema that are specific to your account
- Allows the use of upsert
- Ties to the DataExtension by CustomerKey (called "external key" in the GUI)
- Allows specification of Keys and Nulls
- There's also a DataExtensionObject that you can retrieve to bring back a row in the data extension.
Email, images, and files, oh my!
Text-only email will be supported with 135, in addition to the HTML and HTML/Text multi-part formats.
The Portfolio object allows you to host files in ExactTarget. Images and files that you import into our system are hosted by Akamai, so when people hit these files, they are highly available and don't use your company's bandwidth.
Using AMPscript, you can attach files to your email, but you should use this feature with caution. There's a page for the documentation that's going to be published very soon that talks about best practices for attachments so that you can protect your deliverability while using this feature.
Stats Retrieval and Tracking Events
We ran out of time for the stats retrieval, so we went straight to question and answer, which went by too fast for me to keep up, especially while I"m still on this documentation cloud. :)
I was eating dinner this week in a local fast food restaurant in Anderson, IN and they had a giant box sitting on the counter that encouraged customers to sign-up for their email list.
Since I work for an email marketing company: they got me.
I signed up.
What was good about this?
1. Subscribers are opting-in to the communication.
2. The database is going to be subscribers who want regular communication.
How could this be improved?
1. Convert from paper to SMS. Instead of having me fill out a slip of paper with my contact information, have me opt in by text message.
2. Follow-up and engage immediately. I still have yet to receive any communication and it has been 3 days later. By the time I receive their first “welcome email”, will I still want communication?
This type of SMS campaign can be developed through the email marketing software powered by ExactTarget. SMS campaigns can instantly capture and engage subscribers by simply texting a keyword to a short code. The system replies with a confirmation text and then can ask for an email address in step 2.
You have now grabbed my cell phone number and my email address, two valuable pieces of information that can build a bigger and stronger email marketing program.
Have you considered ExactTarget?
Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern
Even if you raised your hand, chances are you're using at least one form of email communication on your e-commerce site; Payment Confirmation. Most payment processing platforms give the customer a receipt via pdf download, confirmation email, or print option.
The premise of this post is to offer some other ideas on how to use automated email in your e-commerce strategy. I encourage you to browse some of my best email marketing agnostic ideas, like those I covered in 7 Awesome Ways to Wow Your Customers Using Voice on Your e-commerce Site. Those are communications that could easily be sent by email, sms, or voice. They include:
- Send-to-a-Friend
- Dynamic Couponing (I'll revisit this one)
- Shipping Alerts
- Product In-Stock Notifications
- Subscription Renewal Reminders
O.K. the title of the post says 11 cool ways and I totally just listed 5 of 'em, but I've already covered how to leverage those using voice, and as is the case with multi channel marketing the concepts remain the same - only the vehicle changes. So hang on, let's stick with the payment confirmation email and see if we can't add some spice to it...
6. Payment Confirmation Email
I haven't met a person yet who doesn't expect to be given a payment receipt after a purchase whether online or in-store. In fact, it's one interaction that the customer needs and values. It's not optional, a receipt must be given.
The disadvantage of a paper receipt in-store is that the interaction ends as soon as the clerk slides the boring little ticket across the counter to the customer. Black and white, OCR text with nothing interesting on it at all.
The advantage of an email receipt is that it can be dynamic and leverage real-time data so that you can upsell and cross-sell more product to a customer who has already chosen to buy from you.
I'll go more in-depth on exactly HOW to do this in future blog posts. But in a nut-shell you can pull in the customer's past browsing data from your analytic provider, marry it with the customer's recent purchase data and show them products that relate to the purchased products and/or the categories for which they have shown an interest in. All within ExactTarget.
We have productized integrations with many analytic providers including Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends and others.
Really, you can use cross-sell/upsell & product recommendations in EVERY email you send. Why not? Some of these next ideas you could easily mix and match into any of your sends.
7. Couponing / Live Offers
Did you know that ExactTarget can render 25 different coupon types including Codabar, UPC, EAN and MSI? Well we can.
Did you also know that we can manage your coupon redemption on a global or a per subscriber scale with data provided directly from your payment system? What that means is that we can make it impossible to redeem a coupon more than once if your concerned about sharing, OR, using our social network capabilities help make a single coupon viral.
8. CRM Integration
We have productized CRM integrations with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM that not only allow you to send to reports generated in the CRM platform but allow you to pull in real-time data from the CRM vendor at time-of-send. That means you can pull in purchase data or account data (past due invoices, CRM campaign data) and show content according based on the subscriber.
These integrations have exposed AMPScript functions that you can use directly in the content of your emails to CRUD your CRM data.
9. Follow Up Email Drip Campaigns
With ExactTarget, you can automatically send an email (with dynamic content, product upsells, coupons, etc) on a set number days AFTER a purchase or notable site event. Some ways to leverage this capability are to ask for product reviews, checkout feedback, or to offer a coupon or promo code to return to the site and buy something else.
10. Abandoned Shopping Cart
Another powerful automated email that your ExactTarget system can send on-the-fly is the time tested abandoned shopping cart email. It goes something like this: 'we noticed that you put the following items in your cart, but didn't checkout. Was there a problem with your checkout experience? Click here to finish your checkout with an additional 10% off all the products that were left in your cart.'
There's More
E-commerce sites are perfect candidates for black-belt database marketing because of the amount of transactional and behavioral data they collect. Do you have any ideas on how e-commerce sites can use email in their marketing strategies? Post them in the comments below or come chat with me at our Connections User Conference this fall.
Hey all. Today I'll be discussing how to strengthen your e-commerce kung-fu by utilizing ExactTarget's Landing Page technology.As you might have realized from browsing some of the other posts on our blog, targeted email marketing is only part of the story. A question to ponder is: 'Why personalize a customer's email only to send them to a non-personalized web page?'.
There often seems to be a disconnect in the minds of marketers when it comes to the partnership between email and their website. If you harness the power of one to one marketing for email shouldn't your website also present content to the user in a one to one manner? You've taken meticulous care to present precise product offerings in your email (driven by analytic data, purchase data, engagement data, etc), but when a subscriber clicks through they're shown the same content as everyone else. What?
The gap is apparent, but the remedy isn't always so easy. Each site is unique in both hardware and software, and implementing a true one to one strategy with customized content isn't always an option. There could be high development costs or long production runs associated with integrating this strategy into your current site.
But what if there was a middleware that could be skinned to look exactly like your site and could serve customized content as a stand-alone page or be embedded into your existing pages? Obviously there is or I wouldn't be writing about it:
Enter ExactTarget Landing Pages.
Landing pages are an easy way to spin up dynamic behavioral and/or profile driven web pages tailored to the individual. Often these can be spun up by marketers without involving their IT crew, and since they function as middleware you can consider them platform agnostic.
They can leverage the same Dynamic Content and AMPScript driven content areas that you already use in your emails, including those pre-created and stored in the system. You can even drag and drop them into the page when creating it just like when you create your emails in ExactTarget.
There's also a new(er) Smart Capture tool designed specifically for landing pages. With it, you can easily create forms that talk directly to your ExactTarget data, and optionally, your Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com data as well. You can visually create forms that add users to lists, send triggered emails, modify data extensions, and many other tasks. All of the HTML and required AMPScript is generated for you. All you have to do is drag and drop it into your page.
Landing pages can harness ExactTarget Live Content including Live Offers. With Live Offers, you can serve generic or subscriber specific promotional codes AND track the redemption of those codes so that they can/can't be shared or expire after a certain time.
ExactTarget has a productized Google Ad Manager integration that can also be leveraged within landing pages as well. Integrations like this help bridge the gap between your real site and your landing pages. You could show the same ads on your landing pages that you do on your site, simply by dragging them in, while your impression and click tracking stays intact. This integration can even show different ads based on profile attributes. Talk about a value ad to your advertisers! Real targeting!
Landing Pages as Mini-Apps
The beauty behind landing pages is that the entire ExactTarget platform is at your disposal. Think of a landing page as a mini application that can do almost anything that you can manually do in the system. Not only can you customize layout and content on-the-fly based on who the subscriber is, but using AMPScript and data extensions you could:
- Create an out-of-stock reminder system
- Interact with a user using SMS and/or Voice
- Create a CMS application
- Create a shopping cart with checkout system
- Develop a user commenting system
Flexibility
The true power behind landing pages is that they can stand alone or be embedded via an iframe into your current site. I've even created AMPScript-only landing pages that I'll ping via ajax to do some processing for me and are completely hidden to everyone else. It's a way other than our API to do some really robust tasks and is useful when used client-side.
FYI, I built the ExactTarget Extensions Network entirely on Landing Pages.
Kung FuLike I said in the title of this post 'One to One Marketing is My Kung Fu - and It is Strong'. Now your Kung Fu can be strong too by using landing pages to bridge the gap between your emails and website to reach true one to one marketing nirvana.
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Follow me on Twitter: @bobbr
I hate it when events get rained out or planes get delayed because of bad weather. What’s even worse is when I drive all the way there and don’t find out about the delay until I’ve already wasted an hour of driving and $10 in gas money.
Those in the travel industry have a real opportunity to take advantage of the power of SMS campaigns to connect with their customers in a relevant way. From weather updates to checking frequent flyer mile balances, SMS campaigns can be a way to cut through the clutter and build a subscriber database that is engaged.
The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra uses ET’s SMS campaigns to notify ticket holders of changes in events and to allow audience members the chance to vote on the final song of the night. 
Airlines could update travelers on ticket information, boarding times, and weather delays.
I know that when I travel, I take my cell phone (but, honestly, I take it everywhere). To be engaged with text message updates with relevant information can come in handy alongside of a powerful email marketing software, such as the one ExactTarget has to offer.
Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern
Aptera Software is a great example of how a small B-to-B marketer can produce big results by using email for lead generation and brand building. After overhauling its email strategy, Aptera is consistently generating open rates of 30% and click through rates of 10%.
As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Aptera specializes in custom software development and website design. The company serves clients in Healthcare, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and Retail segments and is fast gaining a reputation for its innovative solutions.
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Aptera’s co-founder, TK Herman and Brooke Francesi, who heads up email marketing for company. One of the things that impresses me about Aptera’s email strategy is their “less is more” philosophy regarding the size of their email subscriber database. As Francesi points out, “We’ve learned that it is far better to have a smaller list of highly engaged subscribers who want to hear from us than it is to have a big list of people who are passive.” As evidence of this commitment to list quality, Aptera’s list of subscribers for its quarterly newsletter is a lean 2,600. And the list of subscribers for Aptera’s monthly newsletter for users of Aptera Scorecard, a web-based firm management tool designed to meet the needs of a variety of Professional Services firms, is 15,000.
Both Herman and Francesi are quick to point out that, in addition to keeping their email subscriber list clean, the other big keys to their success in B-to-B email marketing are engaging content and engaging design. As TK Herman says, “If you provide information that is of value to the subscriber, and deliver that content in a newsletter that is attractive, you’ll generate response.”
Karen Bannan of BtoB Magazine recently interviewed Brooke Francesi about how Aptera re-tooled its email strategy after switching to ExactTarget for its email campaign application in early 2008. You can read the full article at BtoB Online.
No matter where I speak, one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is, “What tactics work best for building my email subscriber database?” In fact, in ExactTarget’s 2009 Email List Growth Study, email list growth is ranked #3 by marketers in their list of top priorities for improving email marketing performance in 2009.
Considering the fact that email list attrition averages 25% per year, BtoB marketers need to stay focused on constantly replenishing their email subscriber database. And to attract quality email subscribers, the one tactic you cannot afford to overlook is Paid Search.
Earlier this week, Chris Dawkins, founder and CEO of search engine optimization company Trace Media Marketing, had an excellent article in BtoB Online in which he discussed best practices for using PPC (Pay Per Click) or paid search in combination with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or natural search to attract visitors to your website or landing page.
One of the reasons I’m a big proponent of using paid search is because it allows you to fine-tune your SEO strategy. As Dawkins points out in his article, “testing various keywords and phrases with paid search can be beneficial to your SEO efforts. For example, you can figure out quickly which keywords convert to leads or sales. As your SEO campaign starts delivering traffic, you can back off a little from your paid campaign and focus more on SEO.”
Paid search also allows marketers to lead prospective email subscribers to the desired landing page where they can be invited to subscribe and identify their needs and interests – data that can be used to deliver email content that is relevant and timely.
Still think search is an option? Think again. Forrester Research, in their recently released “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009–2014,” says search marketing spending will total $31.5 billion by 2014 as more marketing budget shifts to interactive media.
If you're using an online method of list signup, track all the variables you request from the person. Name, address, phone number, whatever. Also, make sure you track the IP address they signed up from. If you're really technology savvy, track browser information (Firefox on Linux, for example). All of this data will help prove to ExactTarget that the person opted-in, if there is ever a spam complaint issue.
If recipients opt-in to your mailings when ordering a product or service from you, the transaction details are important. Obviously we're not going to ask you to provide the person's credit card number, but the rest of the details (what was ordered and when, with details) helps to make the case. I used to work for an e-commerce service provider, and that data was always excellent protection against spam allegations.
If the signup method is an offline signup method like a paper form, record all that information obtained via the paper form. I'd recommend recording it in something like an Excel file or Access database. On the (unlikely) chance somebody would ever sue you for spam, you probably should keep those paper forms, too. Make sure you record the date that the form was filled out.
You don't have to actually upload all of this extra information into ExactTarget. It can amount to a lot of data, and if you're not actually using it for segmentation or personalization, I wouldn't bother. The important thing is that you keep this data somewhere that you can access, in the event that we contact you about a spam complaint. Keep it in an Excel file, an Access database, text file, your CRM system, or some place similar.
Keep in mind that we're going to ask you for this info only in unique situations. We're not asking you to pull this information and send it to us for every single spam complaint received back from an ISP, for example. We have a process wherein specific complaints are escalated when the potential for a broader spam issue is observed, and that's when we're going to reach out.
And thank you everyone who has helped us resolve a spam complaint issue by providing this information upon request. As I've mentioned before, there's a direct tie between resolving these issues and getting your mail delivered. I'm very appreciative of how helpful our clients are in working with us to ensure their deliverability isn't negatively impacted by a spam issue.
During the webinar, we will provide actionable strategies, examples, and tips for growing and nurturing your most precious asset--your subscriber database! We'll also have a time for Q&A. If you have a question you would like to submit in advance, leave a comment or send me an email at mstewart(at)exacttarget(dot)com.
Register here!
Details
When:
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 2:00 pm EST
Presenters:
Tamara Gielen, Founder, Email Marketers' Club
Morgan Stewart, Director of Research, ExactTarget
Duration:
1 hour
Description:
Join ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart and Tamara Gielen, founder of the Email Marketer’s Club, as they present highlights from the 2009 Email List Growth Study whitepaper. Get the inside scoop on developing a successful list growth strategy with examples and insights from experienced B2B and B2C marketers. You’ll learn:
- Keys to developing a sustainable list growth strategy
- How to find the right subscribers for your list
- The hot new tactics you should consider trying in 2009
- What both B2B and B2C email marketers around the world consider the best list growth strategies
- Which list growth tactics you should approach with caution
If you’re ready to create a successful, compliant, ROI-producing list growth strategy, be sure to attend this information-packed webinar. Sign up today!
I received a B2B spam email today. That’s not too remarkable. I get anywhere from four to eight of them a day. The volume is irritating enough that I log them, and I always reply and ask where they got my email address from. (Some day, I might even “out” some of the worst offenders, highlighting their lack of permission for the whole world to see. And to shine an uncomfortable spotlight on those awful “business contact database” selling companies, who sell B2B lists.)
This time, I got a reply back to my query. The sender indicated that I gave them a business card at a conference.
Okay, so it’s somebody I’ve actually met. That’s fine, that’s good. I give out a lot of business cards at conferences. People always want my business card, and often ask me if it’s okay to email me a deliverability question or two at some point in the future. Time permitting, I welcome deliverability questions via email, and answer as many as I can.
But, just because I gave you my email address, how does that mean that I wanted to be subscribed to your company’s newsletter? A competitor company, even. Think of how poorly considered this is, on multiple levels. Wanted mail is well delivered mail. Did I want this mail? No, I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t expect it. Also, do you think it’s wise to obtain competitor email addresses at conferences and sign them up for your newsletter? Do you really want to broadcast what you’re doing, directly to your competitors?
The real issue here is the logical leap (or lack of one) from “you may have my contact information” to “please send me your newsletter.” I stated the former by handing over my card. I did not state or even imply the latter. So how does somebody make the logical leap from contact info to permission? I’m not seeing it, because there’s a step missing: Asking me if I wanted to receive your newsletter. That’s what permission is all about. Ask, don’t assume.
In this case, the guy assumed. And that assumption was a bad one, and it colored my opinion of him, and his company’s permission practices, accordingly.
I’m sure somebody somewhere will take a different point of view and suggest that gosh, this email was really targeted (or should have just been targeted a little better), and then it would have been fine. That’s untrue. “Properly targeted” spam is still spam, and the proof is in the spam complaints. Send mail to people who don’t want it, even if it’s on topic, and it garners spam complaints. It’s that simple.
In this case, I know I wasn’t the only person who received this mailing, and I know that some of the other recipients were similarly unhappy about it. I guess I’m not alone in thinking that a business card exchange doesn’t equate with opt-in permission.
However, the solution is not as simple as cutting or reopting subscribers in after 6 or 12 months. It could be that drastic, especially if your deliverability reputation is already in the tank. But, your actions could be as simple as reducing frequency, changing content, or finding the "hidden but engaged" segments I recently wrote about in the Email Experience blog.
As I wrote there, here's what I recommend:
"First, rather than automatically re-opting in unengaged subscribers or discarding them from your list, try reducing frequency. A recent test of ours showed we were able to get 4 times the number of subscribers to reengage by reducing from weekly to monthly mailings when compared to sending a single re-optin campaign.
Second, entice your offline-only shoppers to use a coupon or other tracking code that will help them identify themselves.
Finally, provide a number of ways that recipients can share their emails with their friends – either standard viral links or via new technologies allowing sharing with social networks."
For the latter, you might want to try our new Social Forward solution we're introducing to our customers via our Innovations Lab on May 1st, and will be rolling out in our summer release.
Hats off to Simms Jenkins of Brightwave Marketing for his outstanding interview with the legendary Stan Rapp that appears in today’s iMedia Connection. The article, “Why Email Marketing Deserves More Respect” should be required reading for any CMO or CEO who is looking for ways to improve marketing ROI.
In 1987, Rapp introduced the business world to the concept of one-to-one marketing with his international bestseller MaxiMarketing. In his newest book, "Max-e-Marketing in the Net Future,” Stan shows how cutting-edge companies are using proven techniques like email to more effectively target, acquire, and maintain long-term relationships with valued customers.
Stan Rapp on the Importance of Email As Chairman of Engauge, Stan Rapp continues to serve as one of our industry’s most prolific catalysts for clear thinking when it comes to improving the way brands use technology to connect with consumers. Among the notable observations made by Stan Rapp about the importance of email are these:
“In today's economic turmoil the new marketing mantra is ‘show me the ROI.’ Email, at 43-to-1 return on the dollar, is the undisputed ROI leader. Get it right, and the ROI speaks for you.”
“The tightest one-to-one link you can have is a relationship in which the consumer invites you to talk to them. The beating heart of the internet is the inbox. Its pulse pounds away as each of us clicks open and sends out our hourly emails.”
“The arrival of broadband in a majority of U.S. households three years ago marked the beginning of the digital age for marketers. The value of an opt-in address reportedly is about $118 for knowledgeable marketers. Coke, for example, has more than 12 million reward program members, which it uses to gather info and deepen relationships. This means Coke has an asset worth more than $1.4 billion in its email opt-in database for MyCoke Rewards.”
An interesting point was how the team tackled what they termed "credibility gaps" between the email subscriber's experience and their desired brand experience. Through an audit of their processes, John & Joe determined:
- Marketing & IT owned different pieces of email process, broadcast & delivery
- Email addresses were spread across a variety of databases and were often not up-to-date
- Proper value wasn't being placed on the email address let alone the communication process
- Locking down processes around email address management
- Instituting re-engagement efforts to clean up their subscriber database
- Formalizing the email marketing production process
- Getting marketing to collaborate to identify triggered and other automated messaging that would deliver quick wins
- Sending email closer to moments of greatest customer influence in the insurance purchase/renewal process
- Improve delivery and response rates for all email marketing communications (triggered or campaign-based)
- Improve acquisition of email subscribers through agents (as they have seen real benefits from the changes and, therefore, what all of their customers/prospects in the email marketing loop)
Several ExactTarget clients and partners will be speaking at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ’09 which kicks off on Monday in Miami.
Leading the pack will be Heather Marsh of Johnston & Murphy who, along with Nick Godfrey of ExactTarget Reseller/Partner Customer Portfolios, delivered an outstanding presentation at the recent ExactTarget webinar titled, Building a Retail Email Powerhouse.
Other ExactTarget clients and partners who will be speaking are:
- Sergio Balegno, Senior Analyst, MarketingSherpa
- Stefan Tornquist, Research Director, MarketingSherpa
- Dan Heimbrock, President and CEO, Hyperdrive Interactive
- Andrew Ecklund, CEO, Ciceron
- Michael Kilgore, VP, Marketing, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center
Following are the session titles and times for each speaker:
Monday, March 16th
10–10:45am
Featured Case Studies: Targeting and Messaging Strategies that Effect Behavior
Rok Hrastnik, Internet Director, Studio Moderna
Heather Marsh, Director of Customer Information, Johnston & Murphy
Tuesday, March 17th
11:30am-12:00pm
Launching and Managing International Email Marketing Initiatives
Sergio Balegno, Senior Analyst, MarketingSherpa
12:00-12:30pm
Email and Word of Mouth Marketing.
Dan Heimbrock, President and CEO, Hyperdrive Interactive
2:00-2:45pm
Strategies for the Long-Term Care and Feeding of an Email Database
Andrew Ecklund, CEO, Ciceron
Moderator: Stefan Tornquist, Research Director, MarketingSherpa
2:45-3:45pm
Long Live Email: Enabling the Continued Success of Social Marketing
Michael Kilgore, VP, Marketing, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center
You can view the full agenda for next week’s Email Summit ’09 here.
- Coupon distribution and redemption was flat in 2008 until the fourth quarter, when coupon distribution rose 7.5% and redemptions rose 15% vs. a year earlier (Promotion Marketing Association)
What if each coupon also includes a call-to-action to subscribe to receive ALL future coupons for that product or company? If coupon distribution and redemption is up in 2009, shouldn't it stand to reason that consumers' willingness to subscribe to coupons via email would also have increased?
Just a thought...and one that may help you increase coupon distribution while growing your subscriber database.
From my boss, Chip House, published in the March 2009 issue of Visibility: The Magazine for Online Marketing Strategies. In the article, "5 Ways to Kill Your Email Deliverability," Chip has this to say about opt-out email append:"The database companies of the world who make money by buying and selling your information will tell you that email appending is a good idea and that “everybody does it.” My advice to you is: don’t do it. If you are not familiar with the term, email appending is where a database company appends an email address by making a match on the postal address. Since most companies have a legacy file of customer postal addresses that is much larger than their email file (often 10 – 100x larger) this allows these companies to have a quick fix to grow their list of email addresses. As you know, if it seems too good to be true it probably is."
Click here to read the rest of it. It's very much all good advice.
Stan Rapp delivered the opening keynote at the recent 2009 Email Evolution Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Rapp’s presentation, appropriately titled “It’s the E-conomy Stupid!” provided a passionate endorsement for email and underscored why email has become the anchor of direct marketing.
I first met Stan Rapp in 1985 when I was working in Philadelphia for Farm Journal and heading up the company’s Marketing Services division where we built and hosted marketing database systems for many of the country’s top agri-chemical, animal health pharmaceuticals, farm machinery, and seed companies.
Stan had come to Philadelphia to interview me and several of my colleagues as part of the research he was doing in preparation for his book, Maxi-Marketing. He was keenly interested in learning how Farm Journal used subscriber-supplied data about the crops and livestock they produced on their farms and ranches to produce thousands of versions of its magazine. Farm Journal used technology called “selectronic binding” to tailor editorial and advertising content to the profile and information needs of each subscriber. (Today, ExactTarget clients do this every day with email using our “Dynamic Content” technology.)
When Maxi-Marketing, co-authored with Tom Collins, was published in 1986, David Ogilvy said: "Everyone in advertising must read this book." His endorsement started the co-authors on the way to bestseller status. Over 250,000 copies of Maxi-Marketingwere sold worldwide in a dozen languages. And the book became the bible for modern era multi-channel marketing.
Stan has become a passionate advocate for email marketing and his keynote served as an enthusiastic reminder of how critical email has become for keeping customers connected to brands, and why email has emerged as the single most effective channel for direct marketing.
As an industry, we could not ask for a better “senior statesman” than Stan Rapp.
"Email? Well, that's just cheap paper."
If you're doing it wrong, it certainly can be. The DMA put out a report in 2007 that said for every $1 spend on email, marketers could expect an ROI of $48.29. I know those gaudy figures are probably tantalizing to business owners and decision makers; so much so that the inclination might be to increase the volume of emails you're sending this year without regard to the quality of the content.
Great email marketing strategy doesn't usually involve sending the same message to your entire subscriber list. The real power of email marketing lies in the power of leveraging your database to target your customers with relevant content or offers - that's how some companies (according to the DMA's statistics) are rubbing dollar bills together and getting fifties back when it comes to their email campaigns.
Now, I know that the "little guy" out there hears me say "database marketing" and they get visions of expensive servers and tune out on such advice in this economy, but it doesn't necessarily mean that at all. Think about the data you're collecting today: obviously email, definitely first name, maybe another random piece of data or two, but you'd be surprised how often that's where the data begins and ends. You just can't do much targeting with that data.
Think about what other pieces of data you SHOULD be collecting. If I own a record store, for example, I'd want to find out who my customers' favorite artists are - that way, when new albums come out, I can let fans of that particular artist know that not only will I be carrying it, but if you buy it on the release date, I'll take 25% off another CD purchase.
You get the idea.
To weather tough economic times, it's important to serve your customers better than the competition. It's far easier to serve your customers well when you know about their preferences - so think of some pieces of data you should be collecting, and start doing it!
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