Building on Great Transactional Messages

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

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

Categories: Response

Recession Buster Ideas for Email

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

The news these days from Wall Street and the Halls of Congress could not be worse for marketers already worried about the recession and consumer and business spending in Q4.

Can email help? I think so. In fact, I think now's the time to prime your email program into a powerful revenue channel, before the news gets worse. Come on, we were the "killer app" of Web 1.0. It's well past time we proved our worth in the Web 2.0 marketing mix

Here are three ideas to test now - and use the data to build your program success for Q4 and into 2009. If email doesn't contribute more now, then we can't expect to remain at the center of the marketing mix, or budget.

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Moving to Lifecycle Based Email Marketing - Take this Survey

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

In my ongoing effort to advocate for email marketing wherever I can, I serve as chair of the Email Marketing Council of the Online Marketing Summit, a group of online marketers (email, search, social, mobile, advertising) that aim to collaborate and share knowledge that moves the industry forward.

One of our many cool projects is to ...

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Cool Email Idea: Homepage Optimized for Email Capture

First-time visitors to Barack Obama's website see a simple homepage optimized for email capture. It includes a photo of the candidate and his family with the words "Join the movement" and a form field for...

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Cool Email Idea: Optimized Unsubscribe Confirmation Message

What: Optimized Unsubscribe Confirmation Message

Who: Herrington

Why we love it: Most companies that send an email to confirm an opt-out send a plain text email with one or two boring lines like "You have been unsubscribed." While that is certainly fine - it gets the job done, after all - it seems to us there is a way to make this touchpoint a bit more meaningful. Well, it appears that Herrington agrees with us. Their message is an excellent example of how a great unsubscribe experience can be a brand-building exercise. Their message confirms ...

Categories: Response

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

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

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

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

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 ...

Categories: Response

Retiring the Open Rate: Your Thoughts

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

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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Cool Email Idea: Customized Whitelisting Instructions

What: Getting Into the Inbox with Customized Whitelisting Instructions

Who: Travelocity

Why we love it: Travelocity takes whitelisting to the next level. It's a best practice for marketers to have whitelisting instructions in every email message they send. Typically, these instructions are included above the header of the email message so that subscribers can add the marketer's "from" address to their email client's address book, thereby making them an approved sender. This helps to increase the marketer's deliverability into the inbox and overrides the default "images off" setting (standard for most email clients) so that the marketer's images will automatically render. Travelocity goes one step further by ...

Categories: Response

Want to Engage? Give Subscribers the Edge.

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

File this under "how to really treat your subscribers with respect." This week, Senator Barack Obama's camp invited subscribers to sign up to be "among the first to know" his selection of a running mate. What a smart email marketing (and campaign building) idea! This is well executed on a number of levels:

• A great way to treat subscribers like they are special. They are, of course. Especially for a campaign that prides itself on its grassroots heritage and success.
  
• A once in a lifetime chance to create a super relevant message. The veep selection has to rank among the most buzz-worthy topic among subscribers as the convention countdown begins. Even though it makes so much sense, very few marketers really let the most loyal fans be among the first to know.
  
• A powerful viral tool. Insider knowledge is a proven way
  Tell me more

  Categories: Response