Cool Email Idea: Re-Engagement Email Series

It's always tough to know what to do with email addresses that haven't shown any click activity over a long period of time, especially for publishers. Is the person at the other end happily reading each issue, but...

Categories: Response

New Case Study: What do you do when you don't know what to do?

By Bonnie Malone
Director, Response Consulting

Think about when you were a child - it was nearly summer break and you couldn't wait to go to the pool! You were looking forward to spending countless hours splashing around with friends and the freedom of being out of school. There was just one problem: you didn't know how to swim. So, what did you do? Did you dive right in and hope for the best? Or, did you sign up for lessons with a swim instructor?

When it comes to email marketing, many companies dive in head first, only to realize after the fact that email is much more complex than clicking the "send" button. The smartest companies, like CIG, look to industry experts for strategy advice and education on email basics and best practices before they put the first toe in the water.

Return Path's Response Consulting team had the great pleasure of working with CIG recently to strategize and launch a brand new email marketing effort centered around ...

Categories: Response

Episode #9 of Reputation Radio is LIVE!

Our new episode of Reputation Radio is available now on iTunes.

In our first segment we interview Return Path's Margaret Farmakis and Stephanie Colleton about their study of email practices by some top US retailers. Then, in our Cool Email Ideas segment Margaret shares a great example of fun (and funny!) transactional messaging from CD Baby.

Is there someone in the email universe you think we should interview? ...

Categories: Response

What's In a Name?

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

One of the great promises of email marketing is to have a one-to-one dialogue with your customers and prospects. Unfortunately, not many email marketers in either the U.S. or Europe today are actually delivering on that promise - most email marketing is mass marketing, with the same message going to everyone. However, since technology makes it easy to insert a first name salutation, some marketers and publishers try to give the appearance of friendliness and a personal touch.

Generally, I caution against using personalized salutations in broadcast email marketing. There are several things to consider:

1. Consumers know that you don't know them. Assuming too much familiarity too early in the relationship may have the reverse affect intended. Consumers may be off put by the forwardness, and tune out this message and all others to come. This is especially risky early in the relationship. Be careful with personalized salutations ...

Categories: Response

We Are All In the Digital Publishing Business

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

At this week's DPAC III event three hundred publishers, brand advertisers, agencies and technology solution providers gathered to discuss the state of the digital publishing industry. The content was great and the conversations very thought provoking.

Key takeaways for me, along with links to the Digiday Daily blog posts that I wrote from the show floor:

The new consumer priority is saving, not spending. Marketers must adjust our messaging and channel strategy to engage with consumers who value savings, quality and collaboration when buying. The "I want" culture is shifting to a "We need" mentality. ...

Categories: Response

Cool Email Idea: Email Welcome Series

What: Email Welcome Series

Who: HMV UK

Why we love it: We've been evangelizing on the power of a welcome series to introduce new subscribers to your email program for a long, long time. But it's still relatively rare to find a great example of one in action. HMV sends a three-message educational series about using their UK site that is really top-notch. The first message is a true welcome and gives the subscriber important information about their account. The second message is aimed at helping the subscriber navigate the site more efficiently by highlighting the search functionality and the recommendation features. Finally, the third message includes additional information about their pricing and return policies, a pitch for their "jukebox" feature and information about their email alerts program.

What would make it better: That email alert feature mentioned in the final email could be ...

Categories: Response

Live from the Email Insider Summit: Tactics that Work Now

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Despite the fact that Bear Stearns had already collapsed, the recession was not even discussed at last May's Email Insider Summit. This year, the world looks a bit different, and many marketers here are telling me that they've had to change their practices significantly in order to adjust to the new reality. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as it seems many of us are more focused on subscriber satisfaction, retention and keeping ISP complaints low.

A panel of smart email marketers on Monday that was moderated by Mediapost editor David Goetzl, highlighted some great strategies that are working for them right now. Bottom line: email is now the rockstar of the marketing team. Bravo! Good for us. Um ... uh oh. Now we better perform! I've tried to summarize some of the panelists key strategies here.

For more live blogging from me and others at the event, check out the Mediapost Raw Blog or follow all of us on Twitter using #MPEIS. (My Twitter is @StephanieSAM).

Brian Jaffe, Director, eCommunications for Nationwide said, "Retention is the new acquisition for us ...

Categories: Response

Assumed Permission

By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services

One of the key data points from our recent research study, Increasing Revenues by Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers, was the number of retailers who assumed that by placing an order, a customer would want to receive promotional emails. Thirty-one percent of the retailers in our study did not mention promotional emails at all during the checkout process but then immediately began sending promotional emails anyway. Five percent mentioned that promotional emails would be sent but gave the customer no way to opt-out.

Is this practice illegal? No. Is it a good idea? Not necessarily. We understand the temptation here. Customers are providing their email address in order to receive the transactional emails associated with their order. And retailers know that if they add a pre-checked opt-out checkbox, some customers will uncheck the box. By not asking for permission, more subscribers will be added to the list. But marketers must first ask themselves these questions before adopting this type of permission strategy (or maybe we should we call it non-permission strategy): ...

Categories: Response

Optimizing Your Transactional Messages

By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services

Now more than ever, marketers need to make sure they are optimizing their email messages across the board. Every contact point with customers and subscribers needs to be seen as an opportunity. While conducting our latest research study, we noted that many marketers are not taking advantage of their transactional messages by using them to engage their customers.

Of the retailers in our study only 40% have promotional content in their transactional emails. We defined transactional as all messages related to the customer's purchase. These included order confirmation emails, shipping confirmation emails, product review requests, customer service surveys and emails related to the item's return.

Customers anticipate transactional emails. They know the email contains relevant information regarding their recent order. They want to make sure that their order is correct and find out when the package will arrive. This high level of engagement with transactional messages makes them an ideal place to cross-sell and up-sell to current customers....

Categories: Response

UK Retailers Still Not Hitting the Mark: dotMailer Study

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Despite the global recession, online retailing is still hot in the UK, with Christmas 2008 generating more than 15.2 billion GBP in the last quarter of the year. (Source: CapGemini, Interactive Media in Retail Group). Email marketing was a big part of this, as retailers continue to use email to build the brand and drive traffic to ecommerce and High Street locations. Looks like some top brands may be leaving money on the table, however, by not using email effectively. A new retail benchmark report from our partner dotMailer (www.dotmailer.com), part of the dotDigital Group PLC, found that the majority (65%) of retailers surveyed failed to score more than a 70% grade.

The dotMailer "Hitting the Mark" 2009 (free registration required to download) reports on the email activities of 41 High Street retailers - measuring them against 14 best practices in four key areas: sign up/permission, technical, email effectiveness and design. Marks & Spencer and H Samuel took best of show honors, scoring 81 out of 100 points. Last year's winner, Topshop, slipped to a joint third place and a score of 78 this year. Of the 29 retailers featured this year who also ranked last year, only eight have increased their total score, while 21 earned a lower score.

In particular, I was saddened to see the low scores on ...

Categories: Response