Cool Email Idea: Special Election Day Edition

What: Super-Customized Content

Who: McCain/Palin

Why we love it: Since we previously praised the Obama campaign’s list-building efforts, it’s only fair to give a little “Cool Thing” shout-out to the GOP. Check out this super-relevant, highly-targeted email aimed at getting voters in swing-state Colorado headed to the polls early. The email includes the address of our polling location, driving directions, poll hours and more.

What would make it better: Branding is important …

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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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Making the Case for Email Marketing

I’m on a plane, and the gentleman next to me on the plane is the CMO of a large multi-brand retailer. After exchanging introductions and pleasantries, I ask him if he’s happy with his email marketing program. The resulting conversation was fascinating, and typical of those we have with our clients while trying to help email program directors make the case to executive management about investment in the channel. I’m hoping that this particular CMO goes back to his team and engages.

That would be just one small step for email marketer-kind.

SAM: How is email marketing working for you?

CMO: Well, it sure generates a lot of revenue for us. I can think of three or four months this year where we doubled up on email messages and that helped us make our month.

SAM: So it’s a really important part of the marketing mix then, eh?

CMO: Sure. It’s in there.

SAM: And, you have a lot of people working on email to optimize all that revenue, then?

CMO: Oh no. (Laughing) We have one junior guy. He reports into my head of ecommerce. I think his name is Steve. Yeah, that’s right, it’s Steve. …

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Cool B2B Email Marketing Idea

At the DMA Annual event this month, I spoke with many B2B marketers about the particular challenges they face in these rough economic times. Basically, the economy is a mess, budgets are squeezing, our clients are all afraid to make investments.

The good news is that email marketing is a great tool for building relationships and adding value to your customer relationships. Instead of just sending more product announcements, send “Recession Buster” ideas to your clients and prospects every week (or, if appropriate, every day for a limited time). Create a simple design and …

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Report from Shop.org #1: 7 Ways to Increase Your Email Marketing ROI

There are so many elements to a successful email program, that often when asked for our “secrets to success” we pause in a quick effort to prioritize the various factors. Thus, it was great to lead a panel at Shop.org last month of extraordinary retailers who are doing smart, creative things with email in order to drive higher return.

During our prep, we had long, rambling conversations about what works, what doesn’t and what seems to still resist taming. We had various perspectives from these pros, which certainly helped the conversation. Anne Ashbey, Director, eCommerce, Harry & David has a customer experience viewpoint finely tuned to the seasonal gift products she sells. Angela Caltagirone, Director, Email and eMarketing & Customer Acquisition, Williams-Sonoma, Inc. manages multiple brands with limited customer crossover. Rob Gallagher, Email Marketing Manager, Overstock.com has a highly segmented file and still sends more than 140 million messages a month. And Doug Williams, Director of Marketing, Lane Bryant Catalog, Charming Shoppes, Inc. is managing the launch of new online brands and expanding the email channel.

The panel debated a number of causes and effects of various strategies and agreed on seven ways to increase email ROI …

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An Email Study Compendium

While the title sounds a bit like an existential crisis, Mark Brownlow’s “Why do email marketing” is a must-read post for anyone involved with email today. It is stuffed with stats from …

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A Lesson from The Onion

In a recent article featured on The Onion, Presidential candidate Barack Obama expressed his personal frustrations in receiving an onslaught of emails from the polictical association MoveOn.org. He subscribed to the organization’s email program 4 years ago, but continues to receive email after months of deleting it without reading a single message. He finds the content uninteresting and not valuable, and the frequency (3x a week) highly irritating. Of course it’s immediately obvious why this is so funny – MoveOn.org has gained a reputation as a very aggressive email marketer.

But, aside from being so funny, The Onion spoof offers a good object lesson for marketers. Because it’s all too easy to think, what’s the big deal if people delete your email daily without reading it? But this piece hits a nerve because it articulates …

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Email ROI – How Good Results Today Can Mask Big Problems Tomorrow

Email works. In fact, email is the highest ROI channel by far. Email marketing returns $57.25 for every dollar spent, more than 150 percent greater than the ROI for non-e-mail online marketing (Source: DMA, 2007).

But perhaps email works too well for our own darn good. The revenue that we generate every time we send out a generic, non-segmented blast mailing masks a lot of missed opportunities. For too many marketers, email revenue per subscriber is not growing and more and more subscribers are simply ignoring our messages.

That is because most email marketing today is pretty terrible. It’s irrelevant, poorly timed, creatively uninteresting and completely generic. The vast majority of us still follow a batch and blast broadcast approach that will never make our email messages relevant to most of our subscribers most of the time. The opposite is true. …

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The Importance of Minor Body Parts

Having recently experienced some health issues that caused a variety of challenges in my daily life, I’ve come to abruptly realize the importance of minor body parts. For example, when your entire foot is numb, attempting to wear a shoe with a heel strap is more challenging than you would imagine. Since you cannot feel whether or not the strap is secure around your heel, you are left feeling terribly insecure and checking to be sure your shoe is still on your foot rather frequently. This unfortunate (although sometimes amusing) experience lead me to think of the important, often neglected, minor parts of an email. Naturally, we marketers focus on optimizing subject lines, headlines, creative design, and content – - these areas typically return the most for our investment. However, there are some rather “important minor body parts” that we should examine more regularly …

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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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