14 Things to Completely Rethink about Email Marketing in 2011

14 Things to Completely Rethink About Email Marketing in 2011

partners & clients Email Service Providers Clients

Why we need to rethink email marketing

the impact of facebook | social +/= mobile People on Facebook More than 500 million active users 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day Average user has 130 friends People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook Mobile Usage of Facebook There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. Source: Facebook | Experian Hitwise Report

where people spend their time / read their email 1 Webmail Usage Down Mobile Email Usage Way Up 2 Ranking of Webmail Visits: (1) Yahoo! Mail, (2) Gmail, (3) Windows Live Mail, (4) AOL Mail “Despite such declines … email remains one of the most popular activities on the web, reaching more than 70 percent of the U.S online population each month*.” 3 4 Sources: Experian Hitwise Report | *comScore

Email Usage on Mobile Source: Nielsen

email marketing then and now WHAT HAS CHANGED: WHAT HASN’T CHANGED ,[object Object]

Using email as a broadcast/reach medium still happens but short-changes the channel’s full potential to learn and optimize over time

Email communications powered by customer data is a great way to nurture customer relationships and reciprocate value for customers’ permission & loyalty

Permission, relevance & reciprocity are the three key ingredients that drive success in email campaigns.

If we say that by opting in people get access to special/exclusive deals, but never get anything exclusive, then there is no value to our customers

If I opt in for Gap email, Gap gives me 40% off an item, I give them $30 for something that cost $3 to make, it’s a WIN-WIN,[object Object]

“best-practices” defined “Methods and techniques that have consistently shown results superior than those achieved with other means, and which are used as benchmarks to strive for. There is, however, no practice that is best for everyone or in every situation, and no best practice remains best for very long as people keep on finding better ways of doing things.” - BusinessDictionary.com “The idea is that with proper processes, checks, and testing, a desired outcome can be delivered more effectively with fewer problems and unforeseen complications.” - Wikipedia

1. pay closer attention to your subject lines BEST PRACTICE: 30-40 Characters Include your Company Name Descriptive of the contents of your email Primary cue the recipient sees when considering whether to even bother opening your email Factors into whether the email gets flagged as spam by firewalls/filters Gmail Priority Inbox takes its cues from a variety of behaviors that include which emails are opened or replied to. TEST IT!

2. personalize your subject line Assuming you have a First Name associated with each email address, simply inserting a merge field in the subject line makes it feel like you intentionally sent the email to the right person TEST IT!

3. add preview text to your design BEST PRACTICE: Preview text consists of the first HTML text that email software or webmail environments detect in any email. Can be an impactful complement to the subject line in order to convince the reader that your email is worth opening Counteracts impact of Priority Inbox (which prioritizes emails on a variety of behaviors that include emails opened/replied to) Ignores any images that are present; Most commonly placed at the very top of the email Great way to include a text link to your primary CTA that will work even if images are off.

example of subject line + preview text (Gmail) Why shorter is sweeter TEST IT!

subject lines & preview text (iPhone) Another reason to rethink how long your subject lines are and what appears as your preview text.

4. identify your primary call-to-action BEST PRACTICE: Draw the reader’s eyes to the desired action you want them to take which, very often, is a button and keep it above the ‘fold’ Example: Modified to work in both Outlook and mobile environments Primary CTA: Download the UPS Mobile App TEST IT!

5. balance your image/text ratio BEST PRACTICE: 50% image, 50% text CONTENT: If your big message delivery is embedded in an image, and images are off, your message will never arrive at it’s intended destination LINKS: Make sure that your primary call-to-actions are presented as both buttons AND HTML text links so that the recipient can take

Subject Line: Visit Sonny's for Big Deals for the Big Game Subject Line: Streamline Your Shipping with UPS

Subject Line: Get Your Smokin' Hot Deal from Sonny's 33% Open 23% Click TEST IT!

6. analyze past campaigns by days/time of send BEST PRACTICE: More emails are opened on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; Do not send on Mondays, Fridays or weekends if you can avoid it. Every business and every campaign has different goals so test different days Theory to test: More people will open, click and purchase/donate something online if you send the email During lunch hours ? After work when people come home from work ? On the 1st and 15th of each month after paychecks arrive ? TEST IT!

7. segment your list and send fewer emails Stop sending every email to every contact and select distinct customer targets leveraging ANY data you have. By Gender By Lifestage By Geography (City, State, Zip) By Preferred Store By Product purchase history The more you segment, the less email you may send, but the more REAL your engagement statistics will be. TEST IT!

8. focus on your engaged audience If you send a weekly/monthly email, refine your list to only communicate to your ‘Active’ audience People who have opened or clicked your email People who you know have purchased a product or interacted with you in a different channel like social, direct mail, telephone Make the distinction between your ‘contactable’ and ‘valuable’ email address Establish sensible definitions for what constitutes an active/inactive contact Example: Active = Has opened/clicked an email in the last 6 months; has purchased a product within the last 13 weeks

9. provide appropriate level of attention on unengaged Just because they are ‘inactive’ doesn’t mean you are throwing them out. Set them aside for Special promotions or sweepstakes where there is an incentive to reactivate them General holidays greetings If you have any particular date-based information (birthday, anniversary, first purchase, opt-in), set up triggered emails to try to passively re-engage

10. mitigate but embrace the unsubscribe Set up a preference center up-front as part of your opt-in process Work with your ESP to set up a custom unsubscribe landing page that allows people to modify preferences around frequency and content Silverpop: Snooze’ Feature Unsubscribes happen, but that’s better than spending time and money sending emails to someone who never opens your emails, watering down your campaign engagement results.

11. reset your metrics around conversion/ROI goals TRUE or FALSE: There are marketing benchmarks for email open and click rates ,[object Object]

Opens and Clicks are only scratching the surface of engagement metrics for your emails

Get the data you need to tell your CEO/CMO that your email program drove incremental conversions/revenue

Once you determine how much incremental value your emails are driving per contact, you can assign a dollar value to your email addresses

Also enables you to set appropriate budget for email acquisition campaignsSources: Epsilon & Email Experience Council Q4 2010 Email Trends And Benchmark

12. identify your mobile email audience first Determine how many people are actually opening your emails in a mobile environment before you rush off to create mobile versions of your emails Complement this with web analytics data to see how many people are visiting your website on mobile devices. IBM Unica

13. let analytics guide optimization Integrating your email and web analytics enables you to test and quantify differences in email creative, subject lines, offers. For Bottom Dollar Food, we produce a weekly flyer email where we had named our links using Google UTM tags and noticed a trend that the most popular links were to view the flyer online and to get coupons. We simplified the content to focus around those two calls-to-action, maintained the same subject line and saw a 92% improvement in the unique click-through rate. TEST IT! 50% shorter in length

14. leverage social content for email content The conversations and questions around your brand/product that abound in the social realm (blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter) are very likely to be relevant to other customers that are not following/fans. The added benefit is that your customer will feel even more valuable because we took the time to listen, respond and share their ideas/opinions/concerns

14 Things to Completely Rethink about Email Marketing in 2011

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14 Things to Completely Rethink about Email Marketing in 2011

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