New Study: The Email Experience for Online Buyers

I’m proud to announce the launch of a new study on email experience: Increasing Revenues by Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers. You can download it now and also sign up for our March 19 webinar.

For this study the Professional Services Group bought merchandise from 45 retailers to see what type of promotional email they would send to us as buyers. Then we also signed up for the same retailer email programs using a different email address and not making a purchase. This allowed us to compare the first promotional message sent to a buyer with the first promotional message sent to a prospect – would it be different? Would the retailer use purchase and demographic data to target the buyer promotion and make it more relevant, or would buyers and non-buyer be treated the same?

In most cases we found that the email wasn’t different and wasn’t targeted based on that initial purchase. The study also reveals interesting findings about …

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How Non-profits Can Profit from Email Marketing Even in a Down Economy

With the global economy in a tailspin, marketers are increasingly being asked to do more with less. As a result, email has never looked better when it comes to delivering a high ROI for your marketing investment. Why? Minimal sending costs, instantly available performance metrics and the potential for huge revenue, relationship building and branding gains.

There may be one industry in particular where email could and should, play an increasingly important part of the marketing mix: charitable organizations. After all, nonprofits have always relied on the generosity of others and are now doing so in an environment where people have less and less to give.

In fact, a recent article in the NonProfit Times cited a study by the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation (DMANF) showing that more than two-thirds of non-profit executives plan to change their marketing strategy because of the economy. Why? The study showed that …

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Report from the Email Marketing Forum in Brussels

I had the opportunity to speak at the Email Marketing Forum in Brussels last week where I presented five strategies for improving revenue and response by breaking free from the batch-and-blast model once and for all and giving subscribers what they really want: relevant and targeted email.

In addition to learning how to say “Good morning everyone” in French and Dutch, I really enjoyed meeting some very smart marketers who are struggling with the same challenges as their U.S. counterparts: how to stand out from the inbox clutter, get delivered and get a return on their email investment.

The 90+ marketers in attendance were a fairly even mix of mostly Belgian-based B2B and B2C companies, with some marketers just in the beginning stages of launching an email program and others looking for more advanced strategies and innovative ideas to take back with them. Also in attendance were marketers representing the European offices of some fairly large international companies, including DHL, UPS, BMW, Novartis, Pfizer and D&B, in addition to top Belgian email service providers, such as EmailGarage and Emailvision.

Below is a summary of four of the day’s best presentations …

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IN Panel: The Future of Messaging Moderated by Matt Blumberg

[Ed note: This is the final blog on our IN Conference sessions. Do to some technical issues -- and a late night on Thursday -- it's a little later than the rest.]

The last panel session of the day was moderated by Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg and included Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. Fred has been in the VC space since 1987, was the founder of Flatiron Partners and was recently recognized as the #1 most influential insider in the New York tech scene by Silicon Alley Insider.

Also on the panel were Tom Evslin, the inventor of the “Blok” which delivers books in serial format via blog postings, and Phil Hollows, the CEO of Feedblitz, a leading independent RSS to email alert service.
The session really took the form of an informal chat between four messaging gurus and it was fascinating to hear them talk about email: its past, present and future.

Matt kicked off the discussion by stating that email isn’t just evolving – it’s “turbo-evolving.” Over the last 20 years, new forms of messaging and communication have rapidly expanded. So where does that leave users, subscribers and marketers?

Before the gurus answered that question, Matt posed some questions to the audience using the Perception Analyzer tool. Those included …

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How to Leverage Reputation

Stephanie Miller kicked off the afternoon session of IN: The Email Reputation Conference by stating that the only way marketers can leverage ROI and harness the power of the email channel is to send email that will make subscribers happy. How? By respecting the subscriber experience and sending relevant emails. Unfortunately, many marketers simply aren’t doing this and continue to send the same messages to everyone (the opposite of relevancy).

In order to illustrate this concept of respecting the subscriber, Stephanie shared some real email examples from marketers who are following best practices, and those that aren’t. She also asked the audience to vote on what they thought of the email examples using an interactive feedback tool called the Perception Analyzer to track results instantly.

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Key Note: No Free Stamps Here!

Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, accomplished his presentation goal at the IN Conference this morning: to give email marketers some interesting thoughts, words and images to take back to their organizations for how to not be average.

How can email marketers achieve that? By approaching email marketing with the goal of promoting ideas that spread, rather than just interrupting people with the same messaging that gets blasted to everyone, day in and day out. This results in the creation of average products for average people – a mass-market distribution approach that calls for the dumbing-down of the marketing that supports it. So what happens?

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BOO! Email Marketing Statistics That Just Might Scare You

Email marketers, BEWARE! Do not press “send” before you read this, or proceed at your own (and your subscribers’) peril. Just in time for Halloween, we have some gruesome and gory email marketing statistics that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and your blood run cold.

While you won’t be inclined to do the Monster Mash, you may think twice about sending another promotional email with the same “buy now” messaging. A recent blog posting by Jason Baer shared some seriously scary email stats that were used in a presentation at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer earlier this month. They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky all right. In fact, they’re all together “ooky,” but not nearly as harmless as the Addams Family.

But fear not brave marketer – even the most devilish of Halloween tricks can be countered with a deliciously yummy and potently sweet treat. So stop repeating “I see dead people” when referring to the inactive portion of your email file, break out the candy corn and read on. …

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Building on Great Transactional Messages

A recent post by Tamara Gielen of OgilvyOne on the Be Relevant blog included a list of 10 helpful tips from Wendy Roth of Lyris Technologies about making the most of your transactional messages. Implementing these tips will go a long way towards ensuring that marketers are “celebrating” a customer’s recent action or purchase. In other words, an optimized transactional message reaffirms that the customer made a good choice by providing them with relevant and useful information that’s personalized, detailed and action-oriented.

This got me thinking about the email customer lifecycle and how marketers can build on great transactional messages. After subscribers have clicked, signed up or purchased (effectively moving from inactives to actives or non-buyers to buyers), what comes next? They’re clearly engaged with your brand, which means they’re primed to receive your follow-up messaging. So how can your next emails keep the momentum going and pave the way for continued engagement and retention?

There’s really a two-part answer to that question. First

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Retiring the Open Rate: Your Thoughts

A few weeks ago I wrote a posting titled, “Is It Time to Retire the Open Rate” and asked you to respond with your comments and feedback on this often debated and somewhat controversial topic. I included a few specific questions to get you inspired, such as whether or not you track open rates, what makes a “good” open rate and what metrics are most important to you. I received a number of interesting and insightful comments.

A handful of readers felt that the open rate continues to serve an important function in tracking program success. Trevor Hunter wrote that the open rate was the easiest metric to use when gauging the overall effectiveness of a list over time, while Karl Kleinbach still found the open rate useful for testing subject lines and commented that “accuracy is less important than relative performance,” especially in the context of A/B split testing results.

Speaking of accuracy, our own Neil Schwartzman, director of standards and security for Sender Score Certified, questioned whether or not the factors that can skew email open rates (e.g., the preview pane, email clients defaulting to “images off” for message viewing) are as prevalent as marketers suspect …

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Is it Time to Retire the Open Rate?

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a method of communication called email. Marketers liked email because it drove revenue, strengthened their customer relationships and provided branding opportunities. It was determined that the success of email should be measured using a few key metrics. And so marketers created the open rate (the number of opened emails divided by the number of sent emails).

The open rate was an indication of how many people “opened” or viewed an email message. In order to track this, an invisible image tag was embedded in the HTML email message. When the subscriber’s email client used to display the marketer’s email message requested that image, an “open” was recorded by the image’s host server. And thus, the number of times a message was opened could be tracked. And marketers were very happy.

Alas, those were simpler times …

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