Dec
18
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
No doubt that Old Navy will receive a large amount of consumer data in its "Wish It, Win It" Instant Giveaway which encourages visitors to create an online wish list of up to $500 for a daily chance to win everything in it. Similar results may be in store for FabulousSavings.com which prompts visitors to enter for a chance to win $50,000. In exchange, all you have to do is register. Despite the number of sweepstakes this season - and the predictable traffic boost they create - it's still hard to hear the cash register ring for email marketers trying to use this tactic to build an engaged file of new customers.
No wonder, since our experience suggests sweepstakes-sourced subscribers actually convert less than half as well (40-70% less based on recent client campaigns) than opt-in subscribers. Why? Because entrants are primarily interested in the prize and not necessarily in buying the products or service. That means in order to achieve a positive ROI, you need at least 2x the number of leads, or you need 2x the average order size - just to leave your email file as responsive as it was before you started.
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Dec
13
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
I spent four days this week at the Email Insider Summit in beautiful Park City, Utah. As a program chair for putting together the agenda, I can honestly (and humbly!) say the content was great and the location was sublime. We all left with more contacts, lots of great ideas, case stories to apply to our programs, many intriguing conversations, potentially some great partnerships to explore, and definitely less sleep than we need.
Here are my top five observations and predictions for the industry based on the numerous and insightful conversations I had this week with marketers and industry leaders...
Categories: Response
Dec
06
By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services
According to Prince, there's nothing wrong with partying like it's 1999, but when it comes to sending email we don't recommend it. Unfortunately, many marketers are stuck in a time warp, especially when it comes to their welcome messages.
How do we know? We signed up for the email programs of 57 top marketers representing a wide range of vertical markets and compiled the findings into our latest white paper, "A Welcome Message Study: Marketers Are Missing Opportunities to Pave the Road to Relevancy."
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Nov
19
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
A variety of email strategies are planned for capturing higher share of wallet on Black Friday/Cyber Monday - the biggest shopping days of the year. I'll update you all on results we see with our clients, but would love to hear from you on how your strategy fared this year. Here's a quick overview of what we're seeing planned - maybe some of these ideas will help you make some last-minute improvement to your own strategy.
Categories: Response
Nov
01
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
We've been working with a number of clients lately who are using custom message triggers generated from data pulled from their CRM or web analytics systems. By using a unique identifier in the database such as the login email or sometimes a cookie, we were able to build custom messages that were triggered by specific customer actions. In the end, the result has been a huge lift in response rates.
For instance, we used this data to trigger "abandoned shopping cart" messages to great effect. Due to the nature of these emails, they are usually sent to a small number of subscribers each month. However, the results have been amazing - usually in the 15%-40% lift range.
There are a couple of ways to execute an abandoned shopping cart strategy...
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Oct
22
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
I was delighted to be asked to lead an email marketing session at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum earlier this month in Chicago (check out the sessions and some summaries here and on Paul Dunay's blog).
The theme of the conference was right on point for most of us -- "Driving Sales: What's New, What Works and What Sticks." When it comes to email, the only effective way to drive sales is to create great subscriber experiences. Look at your own inbox. When is the last time you got an email that was timely, easy to digest and relevant? (If you have, please let me know -- I love to celebrate marketers who are doing this well!) If you're like me, it's rare. To help give some perspective, here are some subscriber view stats we shared in our panel - some are surprising and most are helpful when thinking about ways to engage with subscribers. ...
Categories: Response
Oct
16
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Here at the DMA on Saturday, a number of us email wonks (marketers and vendors) were talking shop and I got some push back on what I believe is the duplicity found in so many permission practices -- particularly among ecommerce sites.
Yes, I know that duplicity is strong word. But consider the most retailer email programs are opt-in -- until you buy. Then, the permission practice is either a pre-checked box on the check out form -- easy to miss and decidedly opt-out -- or worse, a buried notice in the fine print. Since these are buyers, they are by nature pretty active with the brand and products, so there isn't a huge penalty for this practice in ISP complaints or unsubscribes. In many cases, these buyers are sometimes the most active folks on the file.
So what is wrong with that? Nothing, if the marketer is clear about it. But quite a bit from a subscriber perspective!
Before I dive into the problems I see here (and an easy solution), let me be clear about how I define permission levels ...
Tell me moreCategories: Response
Oct
02
(... and an upcoming DMA/EEC event to get some for yourself)
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Ever need that one particular number to put in your forecast or executive briefing that proves you are not nuts and your email marketing is actually tracking pretty well? Yep - I can never find it when I need it, either. We all scour all available sources for benchmarks that are meaningful to our business, and yet these benchmarks seem to remain elusive. When we do find numbers, they never seem to accurately tell a story about how email is being used in the real world. I always feel that benchmarks are actually not that helpful - and they can actually be quite distracting. While sometimes they can serve as a guide (and a well timed source can sometimes get you through tomorrow's presentation!), unless you really understand the source of the data and the way it was collected, you will never be sure if it's actually relevant to your business.
Better, measure your success against your own progress ...
Categories: Response
By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services
Does size really matter? It does, but not in the way you think.
When it comes to your email list, bigger is not necessarily better. You may have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on your file, but if a large portion aren't opening, reading and clicking on your emails, where's the value in that email address for your business?
"Finders-keepers" seems to be a common email marketing mantra for growing an email file. Once subscribers have opted in, the assumption is that they will want to receive email from you forever. As long as they don't opt out, you might as well keep sending, despite what the growing number of inert non-responders on your file may be telling you.
That's why it's refreshing to see what happens when marketing mavericks buck trends, challenge preconceived notions about file size as it relates to data quality and scrub the heck out of their lists. We were delighted to see Ken Magill's article for DIRECT about how CBSSports.com recently completed an across the board re-subscribe effort of their email lists. ...
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Oct
01
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Email is the highest ROI channel by far, just ask any marketer managing a house file. Email marketing returns $57.25 for every dollar spent, more than 150 percent greater than the ROI for other types of online marketing (DMA, 2007).
Who's a bigger fan of email than me? Yet I risked getting kicked out of the email marketing club during a panel discussion at OMMA East with OgilvyOne's Jeanniey Mullen, eROI's Dylan Boyd and Lee Sherman of Avenue A/Razorfish when I suggested that the true ROI of email isn't captured solely in that big number. In fact, I believe it's misleading to think about email's contribution without factoring in the risks of batch and blast, complaints, irrelevancy and acquisition costs. ...
Categories: Response
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