EMAIL SIGN UP - Week 2 Bealls Dec 22
So as I started to interact with my three test sites, I realized when I signed up for the email newsletter with Bealls, like with Pulte, that I hadn't really created an account. So, I went in and did so for both my personas. At this point, they did include the email opt-in with an "opt-out" option in case I don't want them talking to me.
Now is where things will get interesting. In the account creation, Bealls is starting to learn more about me. In addition to asking for my address and phone number, they are asking my birthday, gender, if I am a full time resident and how I like to shop with them - online versus in store or both. I'm going to alter this a bit between the personas to see what happens:
Gmail - Dec 19x7, female, seasonal and online
Yahoo - Feb 19x4, male, full time and both
Having fun now!
Since signing up with Bealls, I have also been looking at different content under my two personas and based on what I originally input. For my gmail persona, I have visited deals and pajamas as well as capris. In Yahoo, I'm looking at men's Columbia gear and shorts. I even added some camo size 34 shorts to my cart. One thing that happened on my initial click is they prompted me to enter a ZIP code and attach my account to a store which I did. They then presented me with circular deals for that store including holiday items.
All my home screens are exactly the same regardless if I am signed in or not at this point, so it appears Bealls is not using any web personalization to change my experience based on what they know about me and my browsing behavior.
I have also been receiving emails from them since I signed up last week. In my Yahoo account, after that initial sign in, I've received 13 emails (since 12/13), about 1-2 a day. I know it is the holiday season, but as I've said in previous posts, how much is too much and what impact will that have on unsubscribes?
Sadly, in my gmail account, all the emails from Bealls are landing in my spam folder - I had to go look for them. I also have received only 3 emails in this account since the sign in. So my question here is did Bealls purposefully send me fewer to that persona or is there some problem with deliverability. Given that the three I did find landing in my spam folder, I suspect there is a deliverability issue.
Good news is some the emails are recognizing my browsing behavior and presenting me with relevant content when I open the email after I have browsed particular content on the website. I went in and opened my special offer email that I received the day after I created each account and under the offer, each email presented me different product content based on what I looked at: capris for Google and men's shorts for Yahoo! NOT SOUR email - good job Bealls.
Another good thing Bealls is trying to do is to get to know me more, so a week after that initial email, they offer an email thanking me for being a part of their "list" - could be better wording, how about "the Bealls shopping family" instead? They also offer me a discount on my next order for answering.
Bad news and a really simple fix - neither subject lines or body copy are using my first name or recognizing me personally in some way.
So here we go - my answers for both personas below:
Yahoo:
Departments of interest: mens, deals (remember they already know I am a guy - should they have pre-checked that?)
Subjects of interest: new arrivals and offers
More complete contact information - I'm using my Orlando area information, but not providing my phone number which they want for text messages. Now I'm wondering if they asked this because I didn't provide it on my initial sign up, but given they also ask below about my residence status, which I know I did provide, I'm wondering why they are asking the same thing again.
They also asked for my residence status, a piece of information I already provided -SOUR - doesn't look like they have systems fully integrated. They should only ask for additional new information unless they want to re-verify it in which case, they should pre-populate this field.
Gmail:
Departments of interest: women's, markdowns and shoes
Subjects of interest: style, comfort and offers
More complete contact information - I'm using my Tampa area information, but not providing my phone number which they want for text messages.
Now I'm also making things a little interesting and seeing if I can confuse them, so I am looking at shoes under my Yahoo account (even though my preferences don't ask for that and I have told them I am a guy). I will at least look at guys shoes to see where that goes.
Next week we will look at the other emailers I am watching, but some lessons so far:
- Use the information you have and don't be repetitive
- Extend your presonalization to the web experience
- Deliver-ability is a big issue that needs to be watched and addressed and is clearly a missed opportunity if you aren't careful. Bealls needs to go talk to Google and see why their emails are getting lost as well as tell their customers what to do to make sure the emails come through
- Use browsing history to impact what is in emails. Good practice here from Bealls, although some of the sale emails don't appear to be using this
- Create an ongoing dialogue with your prospects and customers and use that to offer even more personalization as you get to know them better
- Use members first name in subject line and body - a simple best practice that way too many emailers fail to do with regularity.
Overall so far, we will give Bealls a "C" for their email programs, mainly for the deliverability issue with Google. While they are doing some good things, there is definitely opportunity for improvement and when the email doesn't even reach the inbox, all those good things have no impact.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
EMAIL SIGN UP - Anatomy of an Email Inbox Dec 13
EMAIL SIGN UP - Anatomy of an Email Inbox Dec 13
I have talked in this blog about email strategy and why businesses send emails and how they make them timely and relevant. There's plenty of evidence about the value of email marketing and the ROI. I often wonder however, if we did it really well, how much better could it be. eMarketer's 2016 survey found that on average email delivers 122% ROI - in the top 5 revenue driving channels. That's good and well above the others in the study. I think we can do lots better.
So today, I'm picking three companies I am currently not subscribed to and signing up for their emails using two different email addresses. The goal will be to see how well they get to know me and what they use to build the relationship with the two different mes. This will be a series of blog posts over the coming weeks and months so that we can watch what transpires and what we can learn.
I am purposely picking marketers who I think will be a mix of more or less sophisticated in this area to show the contrasts and oppoortunities.
Pulte Homes - Tampa - I am establishing my winter home in the Tampa area, so will be looking at what area I want to live in and what the properties are that might meet my needs.
WFLA - Tampa - Our local NBC TV affiliate. I will want to know more about what is going in my local comunity and things I can do for the winter, so these emails from WFLA to these personas will help me stay in tuned with my new community. I am hoping that they will be watching my behaviors as I visit the site and consume content and use this to send me relevant emails.
Bealls Department Store - New location and home mean I need more stuff.
Today we will begin with just the initial sign up.
Pulte
I started with a search for "new homes Tampa." Didn't find them in paid listings on the first page, but they did make it to the last organic listing on page one. So I clicked on their listing. This led me to the home page which had a nice lifestyle photo, description of what they deliver and map of where their communities are. Other than a small "envelope" icon for "contact us," there was no call to action for signing up or getting information, so I clicked the envelope. That did lead me to a page with options for signing up: financing, information, homeowner questions and repairs. I'm clicking on "information." This led me to a form that is clearly a national form. I'm going to sign up with two slightly different addresses and emails in Tampa area. I left a brief message of the price range of homes I am looking for and that I only want emails at this point. So after I hit enter, which I thought meant I was signing up, I now went to a second screen that told me to create an account and why I should:
- save design ideas and inspiration to your favorite
- create a design board with favorite items
- save home models you love
- follow Pulte communities and get notified about opening
Upon creating my account, there was another page of benefits. My initial impression is that this all sounds good, so why are you hiding it behind a tiny icon at the top of the page and taking several steps to tell me why I should engage with you. And, by the way, the benefits were redundant between the pages. Did you think I didn't get it the first time? SOUR?
My second sign up (Gmail) used a more specific search for Pulte specifically and a different first and last name and email address (so I can distinguish future personalizations). I'm also asking for slightly higher priced homes (in the $300's).
Slightly better presence with a paid and organic listing when I searched for "Pulte homes Tampa."
WFLA
Searching on Tampa TV station, I quickly found the local NBC affiliate - WFLA. The organic listing took me to a very busy home page. This is typical of most media sites, but I guess they think they have to serve everyone, so lots to consume.
There were a few engagement calls to action within the content including a sign up for weather newsletter and a free download to stay connected on the go. I presume that was for their app. The contact us link in the footer was more for a specific department or question.
I signed up for the weather newsletter with my two personas. This was a double opt-in, so I have to go verify my sign up in my email address. Good news, my gmail verification showed up quickly. Still waiting to see something in my yahoo mail account and it isn't in the spam folder either. SOUR when you lose someone before you even have them! Once I confirmed my email through my gmail account, there was a second step to "confirm humanity" and insure I wasn't a robot. Now there are two funnel steps to stop me from getting subscribed. While I get that companies want valid email addresses and real people, can we find a better way? At least combine the steps to reduce friction.
Another interesting thing happened with WFLA. Under the sign up was a "manage subscriptions" option, so I clicked on that. This led me to a page to tell them more about me and sign up for a whole host of other emails (8 in total), none of which they had yet to merchandise or tell me about (at least from the home page). They also asked me to pick my delivery method (html or txt). I'm going to sign up for breaking news from this account and 8 pm news update from the other (that is if my email validation ever shows up - no sign of it yet). Interesting too is they have a "breaking weather" and "daily weather" list - who thought of that? Could these be combined? They will definitely be keeping their content team busy!
Bealls
Started here with my standard generic search and did find Bealls in the organic listings mid-page. The listing took me to a Tampa store locator page given I searched in a particular area, so that was anticipating I was looking for a specific location.
They did have an email sign up about mid-way down the page with a quick sentence telling me why I should sign up and minimizing the initial ask to just my email address. I'm signing up with both emails. Upon sign up, they told me what to expect and how to add them to my safe senders list so I don't miss out on the deals. Generally pretty good. The question will be how will they try to get to know me better and communicate differently. Again, I will visit their site under the different personas to see how well they get to know me and build that relationship.
None of the three email marketers in our experiment specifically included opt-in permissions in compliance with standard CAN-SPAM email opt-in requirements. WFLA did offer a privacy link which seems not to work as it doesn't go anywhere when I click on it - so definitely SOUR.
More news next week when we see what kind of communications I am receiving and how specific these are as I begin to interact with the sites in different ways.
Still no WFLA validation in my Yahoo account now either, so I guess I'm just not going to see any news from them. Wonder if anyone at WFLA even realizes this is happening! SOUR!
I have talked in this blog about email strategy and why businesses send emails and how they make them timely and relevant. There's plenty of evidence about the value of email marketing and the ROI. I often wonder however, if we did it really well, how much better could it be. eMarketer's 2016 survey found that on average email delivers 122% ROI - in the top 5 revenue driving channels. That's good and well above the others in the study. I think we can do lots better.
So today, I'm picking three companies I am currently not subscribed to and signing up for their emails using two different email addresses. The goal will be to see how well they get to know me and what they use to build the relationship with the two different mes. This will be a series of blog posts over the coming weeks and months so that we can watch what transpires and what we can learn.
I am purposely picking marketers who I think will be a mix of more or less sophisticated in this area to show the contrasts and oppoortunities.
Pulte Homes - Tampa - I am establishing my winter home in the Tampa area, so will be looking at what area I want to live in and what the properties are that might meet my needs.
WFLA - Tampa - Our local NBC TV affiliate. I will want to know more about what is going in my local comunity and things I can do for the winter, so these emails from WFLA to these personas will help me stay in tuned with my new community. I am hoping that they will be watching my behaviors as I visit the site and consume content and use this to send me relevant emails.
Bealls Department Store - New location and home mean I need more stuff.
Today we will begin with just the initial sign up.
Pulte
I started with a search for "new homes Tampa." Didn't find them in paid listings on the first page, but they did make it to the last organic listing on page one. So I clicked on their listing. This led me to the home page which had a nice lifestyle photo, description of what they deliver and map of where their communities are. Other than a small "envelope" icon for "contact us," there was no call to action for signing up or getting information, so I clicked the envelope. That did lead me to a page with options for signing up: financing, information, homeowner questions and repairs. I'm clicking on "information." This led me to a form that is clearly a national form. I'm going to sign up with two slightly different addresses and emails in Tampa area. I left a brief message of the price range of homes I am looking for and that I only want emails at this point. So after I hit enter, which I thought meant I was signing up, I now went to a second screen that told me to create an account and why I should:
- save design ideas and inspiration to your favorite
- create a design board with favorite items
- save home models you love
- follow Pulte communities and get notified about opening
Upon creating my account, there was another page of benefits. My initial impression is that this all sounds good, so why are you hiding it behind a tiny icon at the top of the page and taking several steps to tell me why I should engage with you. And, by the way, the benefits were redundant between the pages. Did you think I didn't get it the first time? SOUR?
My second sign up (Gmail) used a more specific search for Pulte specifically and a different first and last name and email address (so I can distinguish future personalizations). I'm also asking for slightly higher priced homes (in the $300's).
Slightly better presence with a paid and organic listing when I searched for "Pulte homes Tampa."
WFLA
Searching on Tampa TV station, I quickly found the local NBC affiliate - WFLA. The organic listing took me to a very busy home page. This is typical of most media sites, but I guess they think they have to serve everyone, so lots to consume.
There were a few engagement calls to action within the content including a sign up for weather newsletter and a free download to stay connected on the go. I presume that was for their app. The contact us link in the footer was more for a specific department or question.
I signed up for the weather newsletter with my two personas. This was a double opt-in, so I have to go verify my sign up in my email address. Good news, my gmail verification showed up quickly. Still waiting to see something in my yahoo mail account and it isn't in the spam folder either. SOUR when you lose someone before you even have them! Once I confirmed my email through my gmail account, there was a second step to "confirm humanity" and insure I wasn't a robot. Now there are two funnel steps to stop me from getting subscribed. While I get that companies want valid email addresses and real people, can we find a better way? At least combine the steps to reduce friction.
Another interesting thing happened with WFLA. Under the sign up was a "manage subscriptions" option, so I clicked on that. This led me to a page to tell them more about me and sign up for a whole host of other emails (8 in total), none of which they had yet to merchandise or tell me about (at least from the home page). They also asked me to pick my delivery method (html or txt). I'm going to sign up for breaking news from this account and 8 pm news update from the other (that is if my email validation ever shows up - no sign of it yet). Interesting too is they have a "breaking weather" and "daily weather" list - who thought of that? Could these be combined? They will definitely be keeping their content team busy!
Bealls
Started here with my standard generic search and did find Bealls in the organic listings mid-page. The listing took me to a Tampa store locator page given I searched in a particular area, so that was anticipating I was looking for a specific location.
They did have an email sign up about mid-way down the page with a quick sentence telling me why I should sign up and minimizing the initial ask to just my email address. I'm signing up with both emails. Upon sign up, they told me what to expect and how to add them to my safe senders list so I don't miss out on the deals. Generally pretty good. The question will be how will they try to get to know me better and communicate differently. Again, I will visit their site under the different personas to see how well they get to know me and build that relationship.
None of the three email marketers in our experiment specifically included opt-in permissions in compliance with standard CAN-SPAM email opt-in requirements. WFLA did offer a privacy link which seems not to work as it doesn't go anywhere when I click on it - so definitely SOUR.
More news next week when we see what kind of communications I am receiving and how specific these are as I begin to interact with the sites in different ways.
Still no WFLA validation in my Yahoo account now either, so I guess I'm just not going to see any news from them. Wonder if anyone at WFLA even realizes this is happening! SOUR!
Monday, December 5, 2016
PERSONALIZATION - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Dec 5, 2016
Today is my birthday. Birthdays are personalizations that are the easiest things to know about someone and use to delight your email members. As part of my topic today, I thought I would do an inventory of my inbox to see who is not being SOUR and using this information about me to catch my attention.
Now granted, it is only a little after noon as I am starting this, so some companies may still reach out to me, but the sad truth is that I haven't seen too many messages recognizing my birthday. Compare this to my Facebook friends who have been pinging me all day; 75+ and counting. If companies want to have a relationship with me, shouldn't they act more like friends?
So who did treat me like a friend?
Overstock.com - said happy birthday and offered me 10% savings. They even used my name in the subject line and in the body copy and thanked me for the relationship.
Southwest Airlines - also used my name in the subject and I liked the engagement - subject line was intriguing: "we brought the party to your inbox." It made me want to know what they meant, so I opened it, then it had a birthday theme and invited me to "take a swing at the pinata for some birthday fun." Again, highly engaging and made me want to click (which I did) to see what I would get. So I actually got a pinata which I could swing at with my cursor. I did and broke it open after several hits for a happy birthday song (in audio - the swinging and hitting of the pinata had audio effects too). I could do it again for more birthday wishes. Only did it twice, but looked like I could go on for a while if I wanted lots more birthday wishes. GREAT JOB delighting me Southwest on my birthday. Now that is a true friend!
UPDATE: A few late arrivals came from Macy's and Best Buy - thanks for thinking of me!
Not so good:
Hilton Honors - offered me a "gift" so made me think it might be about me, but was really just a regular seasonal email related to the holidays.
Starbucks offered me 1/2 off a Frappucino but it had nothing to do with me, my birthday or if I ever bought a Frap from them. I haven't recently, so clearly they aren't using much personalization to talk to me.
And that's it. Everyone else was into their normal "spray and pray" routine - thinking about holidays and how to drive business in this most important retail season. Given that my inbox contained over 100 emails, the fact that only 2 companies took the time to recognize this simple fact about me is just plain SOUR.
What gets me most is that the tools we have available allow us to delight daily with simple and sophisticated marketing communications that show we know and care about our prospects and customers, but as email marketers we fail to do so in a big way. So many of us are so far from being great email marketers, it just makes me sad and SOUR. We can do so much better.
Start today, ask yourself:
- Am I using the persons first name in every correspondence?
- What little things can I do to know my prospects and customers better and use this to show I care? Like Southwests birthday Pinata game or just by simply recognizing what you know about your members?
- How can you use behaviors and engagement to send more relevant emails?
- How can you build and leverage your systems to empower your email marketing and customer relationship management systems to help you have a real relationship founded on familiarity and connections.
Let's be better!
Today is my birthday. Birthdays are personalizations that are the easiest things to know about someone and use to delight your email members. As part of my topic today, I thought I would do an inventory of my inbox to see who is not being SOUR and using this information about me to catch my attention.
Now granted, it is only a little after noon as I am starting this, so some companies may still reach out to me, but the sad truth is that I haven't seen too many messages recognizing my birthday. Compare this to my Facebook friends who have been pinging me all day; 75+ and counting. If companies want to have a relationship with me, shouldn't they act more like friends?
So who did treat me like a friend?
Overstock.com - said happy birthday and offered me 10% savings. They even used my name in the subject line and in the body copy and thanked me for the relationship.
Southwest Airlines - also used my name in the subject and I liked the engagement - subject line was intriguing: "we brought the party to your inbox." It made me want to know what they meant, so I opened it, then it had a birthday theme and invited me to "take a swing at the pinata for some birthday fun." Again, highly engaging and made me want to click (which I did) to see what I would get. So I actually got a pinata which I could swing at with my cursor. I did and broke it open after several hits for a happy birthday song (in audio - the swinging and hitting of the pinata had audio effects too). I could do it again for more birthday wishes. Only did it twice, but looked like I could go on for a while if I wanted lots more birthday wishes. GREAT JOB delighting me Southwest on my birthday. Now that is a true friend!
UPDATE: A few late arrivals came from Macy's and Best Buy - thanks for thinking of me!
Not so good:
Hilton Honors - offered me a "gift" so made me think it might be about me, but was really just a regular seasonal email related to the holidays.
Starbucks offered me 1/2 off a Frappucino but it had nothing to do with me, my birthday or if I ever bought a Frap from them. I haven't recently, so clearly they aren't using much personalization to talk to me.
And that's it. Everyone else was into their normal "spray and pray" routine - thinking about holidays and how to drive business in this most important retail season. Given that my inbox contained over 100 emails, the fact that only 2 companies took the time to recognize this simple fact about me is just plain SOUR.
What gets me most is that the tools we have available allow us to delight daily with simple and sophisticated marketing communications that show we know and care about our prospects and customers, but as email marketers we fail to do so in a big way. So many of us are so far from being great email marketers, it just makes me sad and SOUR. We can do so much better.
Start today, ask yourself:
- Am I using the persons first name in every correspondence?
- What little things can I do to know my prospects and customers better and use this to show I care? Like Southwests birthday Pinata game or just by simply recognizing what you know about your members?
- How can you use behaviors and engagement to send more relevant emails?
- How can you build and leverage your systems to empower your email marketing and customer relationship management systems to help you have a real relationship founded on familiarity and connections.
Let's be better!
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
DELIVERABILITY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Nov 22, 2016
Last week I talked about email metrics overall and some of the things to think about and how to decide what to measure and what it tells you. I've been doing some fall cleaning lately and came upon some old printed reports in my files and thus my post today.
The report I happened upon was titled "The State of Email Metrics and Bounce Management" dated Mar 5, 2007 and published by the Email Experience Council. What I thought was interesting is how little has changed in the industry. One of the main tenants of the article was a need for industry standards around email metrics and the disconnect between email providers and e-mailers themselves. While there have been attempts to create some standards, there is still no enforceable and commonly used set of definitions.
I took a look at the conversations going on around the topic of deliverability to see if we can gain more insights beyond what we discussed last week.
Last week, we provided a simple definition as the total number of emails that actually land in someone's inbox. We also mentioned the issue of where in the inbox an email lands and the need to have a send figure to understand the rate of deliverability.
From the 2007 article, there were several points made that are important and that are still an issue today. Back in 2007 there was inconsistency in how ESPs measure deliverability with 80% using the definition of delivered as total mailed less "all failures" while 20% defined this as only deducting "hard bounces" from mailed. Even more distressing is that 67% of eMailers themselves were uncertain on how deliverability was calculated.
Here's some of what I found:
- The Digital Marketing Glossary defines "classic" deliverability as "the percent of messages delivered to an inbox relative to total mailed." Not too specific, but consistent with the general historic definition.
- The Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition (EMAC) defines it as the total of e-mail deployed divided into the total amount of successfully delivered messages. The amount successfully delivered is then the total amount attempted minus all registered failures, including hard bounce. A bit more specific, but doesn't say what "all registered failures" means.
- Bronto defines this as total sent minus number bounced but do not specify if that includes hard and soft bounces, errors or where the message is delivered to. In fact, they state in their blog that there is "no clear cut method to track every single email and where it landed." SOUR email in my mind.
- MailChimp takes a whole page to not define deliverability: https://mailchimp.com/about/deliverability/. They also refer to the multitude of "standards" organizations just to stay on top of it.
- Comm100 does a good job of covering all the reasons why something might not be counted as delivered: "emails that are not delivered may be email addresses that do not exist and were entered into your system improperly, email addresses that have been cancelled or deactivated since your last send, email addresses where the email service provider is experiencing technical difficulties at the time of your email send, or email addresses where the recipient's email account was full and could not receive further messages. Essentially, any email for which a viable destination account was not found is listed as an undeliverable email."
When I did a Google Search on "email deliverability definition," I received 22,800 responses. As an email marketer, it is no wonder there is confusion.
Today's Tips for Understanding Email Deliverability
- Be sure you have a specific definition from YOUR ESP including what is part of the delivered figure and what is not
- Attempt to understand and obtain metrics on where in the inbox your email lands
- Practice good email list hygiene including using forms that force correct formatting of emails, multi step validation of emails on sign up and ongoing clean up of emails removing hard bounces from your database and fixing of emails with typos or other problems that may invalidate them for delivery
- If you compare your metrics to industry standards, be sure you understand that definition
- Review deliverability by ISP and understand differences in how they allow emails into their members inbox and where they potentially land
- Track and monitor deliverability over time and watch for anomalies
- Track by ISP uniquely as the mix by ISP can affect your overall rate
- Stay on top of ISP practices and changes to help you diagnose changes in these rates
- Take some time to delve into specific send and look at each email and it's delivery statistic to see if you can identify some trends on where your issues are
Deliverability is and will continue to be a real issue for mailers, some of which you can control and some you can't. Avoid SOUR deliverability to insure the highest ROI on all your email campaigns.
Sources:
http://digitalmarketing-glossary.com/What-is-Email-deliverability-rate-definition
http://content.bronto.com/stats/delivery-performance/
https://emailmarketing.comm100.com/email-marketing-ebook/email-deliverability.aspx
Last week I talked about email metrics overall and some of the things to think about and how to decide what to measure and what it tells you. I've been doing some fall cleaning lately and came upon some old printed reports in my files and thus my post today.
The report I happened upon was titled "The State of Email Metrics and Bounce Management" dated Mar 5, 2007 and published by the Email Experience Council. What I thought was interesting is how little has changed in the industry. One of the main tenants of the article was a need for industry standards around email metrics and the disconnect between email providers and e-mailers themselves. While there have been attempts to create some standards, there is still no enforceable and commonly used set of definitions.
I took a look at the conversations going on around the topic of deliverability to see if we can gain more insights beyond what we discussed last week.
Last week, we provided a simple definition as the total number of emails that actually land in someone's inbox. We also mentioned the issue of where in the inbox an email lands and the need to have a send figure to understand the rate of deliverability.
From the 2007 article, there were several points made that are important and that are still an issue today. Back in 2007 there was inconsistency in how ESPs measure deliverability with 80% using the definition of delivered as total mailed less "all failures" while 20% defined this as only deducting "hard bounces" from mailed. Even more distressing is that 67% of eMailers themselves were uncertain on how deliverability was calculated.
Here's some of what I found:
- The Digital Marketing Glossary defines "classic" deliverability as "the percent of messages delivered to an inbox relative to total mailed." Not too specific, but consistent with the general historic definition.
- The Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition (EMAC) defines it as the total of e-mail deployed divided into the total amount of successfully delivered messages. The amount successfully delivered is then the total amount attempted minus all registered failures, including hard bounce. A bit more specific, but doesn't say what "all registered failures" means.
- Bronto defines this as total sent minus number bounced but do not specify if that includes hard and soft bounces, errors or where the message is delivered to. In fact, they state in their blog that there is "no clear cut method to track every single email and where it landed." SOUR email in my mind.
- MailChimp takes a whole page to not define deliverability: https://mailchimp.com/about/deliverability/. They also refer to the multitude of "standards" organizations just to stay on top of it.
- Comm100 does a good job of covering all the reasons why something might not be counted as delivered: "emails that are not delivered may be email addresses that do not exist and were entered into your system improperly, email addresses that have been cancelled or deactivated since your last send, email addresses where the email service provider is experiencing technical difficulties at the time of your email send, or email addresses where the recipient's email account was full and could not receive further messages. Essentially, any email for which a viable destination account was not found is listed as an undeliverable email."
When I did a Google Search on "email deliverability definition," I received 22,800 responses. As an email marketer, it is no wonder there is confusion.
Today's Tips for Understanding Email Deliverability
- Be sure you have a specific definition from YOUR ESP including what is part of the delivered figure and what is not
- Attempt to understand and obtain metrics on where in the inbox your email lands
- Practice good email list hygiene including using forms that force correct formatting of emails, multi step validation of emails on sign up and ongoing clean up of emails removing hard bounces from your database and fixing of emails with typos or other problems that may invalidate them for delivery
- If you compare your metrics to industry standards, be sure you understand that definition
- Review deliverability by ISP and understand differences in how they allow emails into their members inbox and where they potentially land
- Track and monitor deliverability over time and watch for anomalies
- Track by ISP uniquely as the mix by ISP can affect your overall rate
- Stay on top of ISP practices and changes to help you diagnose changes in these rates
- Take some time to delve into specific send and look at each email and it's delivery statistic to see if you can identify some trends on where your issues are
Deliverability is and will continue to be a real issue for mailers, some of which you can control and some you can't. Avoid SOUR deliverability to insure the highest ROI on all your email campaigns.
Sources:
http://digitalmarketing-glossary.com/What-is-Email-deliverability-rate-definition
http://content.bronto.com/stats/delivery-performance/
https://emailmarketing.comm100.com/email-marketing-ebook/email-deliverability.aspx
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
EMAIL METRICS - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Nov 15 2016
I am a metrics person. I believe that if you don't know where you are going you won't get there and if you don't measure your successes you can't win. Email marketing is one of those areas of marketing that you would think would be easy to create metrics for. However, I believe we generally do a SOUR job of this based on my experience.
Since these are internal measures, my commentary will be around what these are and should be, what we all should care about and how to set up some good dashboards and metrics to allow for understanding and continual improvement.
First, what are some of the standard metrics that are bandied about in email marketing?
Sent Emails
Delivered Emails
Open Rates
Click Through Rates
Unsubscribe Rates
Bounce Rates (hard and soft)
Other less used metrics include:
Inbox Placement
Earnings Per Email (click or open)
Conversion Rate
Complaint or Abuse Rate
Forward Rate (sharing rate)
Churn Rate (or list growth rate)
ROI
Seems like a lot and some of these are not very well understood and are treated differently in the ESPs. Let's take a brief look at each.
Sent Emails - When you hit the "send" button, the number of attempts or the number of emails in your list. While this metric is important, it is of limited value in understanding the performance of your campaigns and can be problematic if you have poor list hygiene or sign up processes. For example, if you have invalid formats or old email addresses in your list, this metric could be misleading. However, it is needed to calculate a delivery rate and warn you of any problems in that area.
Delivered Emails - This is the total number of emails that actually land in someone's inbox. It does not tell you where in the inbox and without the "send" figure to calculate a rate of deliverability, it is of limited value. It should be tracked and trended however to insure you are not getting caught in spam filters or black listed. Be sure to dive deep and look at this metric by ISP as it can help you diagnose if and where you might have deliverability problems and how to fix them.
Open Rates - While important to measure and trend, this metric can be misleading mostly because quite a few people read emails in preview pane and never open them. Different ESPs may also measure open rate differently, for example based on images downloaded, but if these are done automatically, it may record an open even if the reader didn't look at the email. Text emails may be excluded from open rates also. It is a good directional indicator of engagement and awareness of your communications however. Be aware and be sure you understand exactly how your ESP measures and reports this.
Click Through Rates - This metric is often spoken of as a highly important one, however, it is totally in the marketers control and without context really tells you nothing. If you measure click through rates, be sure to include a metric on click through opportunities. Any one email could have no click through opportunities or ten. If you do not have an understanding of that, you won't have a true measure of success. When creating reporting templates, be sure to include a field for the click opportunities in each email and then you can categorize click through rates based on that percentage versus just an overall percentage that does not speak to if the reader could have clicked. Also look at where the click through was - did they click on your logo, on a particular piece of content, or on more than one occasion.
Unsubscribe Rates - This is a must have metric that does a good job confirming you are not a SOUR emailer. ESPs typically do a good job of capturing this as it is triggered by a direct action from the email recipient. This can be manipulated as well by you based on how you handle the unsubscribe process. If you make it difficult for people to unsubscribe (as I have addressed in an earlier post), you may be under representing the sentiment. Also, if you have failed processes, you may be over counting. For example, my favorite SOUR emailer Younkers, as I mentioned in a previous post, has received numerous unsubscribe requests from me as it didn't appear to be working and I continued to receive their emails even though I asked them not to send. I will report that I have finally quit receiving their emails (for now). I wonder if they saw my post and finally did something about it!
Bounce Rates (hard and soft) - This is another metric that could be different based on how your ESP handles it. Some will count a hard bounce after a send has failed three times, but some may allow you to control how often the fail has to happen to count as a hard bounce. Soft bounce means the delivery was temporarily not available, but again can be altered. Be sure you understand exactly how your ESP handles these and measure appropriately. If you have a high hard bounce rate, you can also put yourself in a position of having your emails blocked by ISPs as being SOUR and on the verge of SPAM, so be sure to watch these rates closely to stay on those white lists and not be a SOUR emailer.
Secondary Metrics:
Inbox Placement - This is a lesser used metric, but as the ISPs get more aggressive at filtering and automatically moving incoming emails (especially Gmail), your well crafted message may never even receive the opportunity for the recipient to see if it is placed into a sub-folder without the email owners knowledge. It is difficult to combat this as well since like SEM algorithms, it can be ever changing and different based on the ISPs practices. At least be aware of this and attempt to understand if you are doing things that are making your emails more likely to land in the wrong place.
Earnings Per Email (click, open, delivered) - Getting to the heart of why we email, we should be measuring what we get out of these programs. While for some, this may be difficult, if you can, try to tie your actual revenue creation to the email function. Use the base metric that works for you (delivered, opened or clicked), but do attempt to do so. This may require extra work in Google Analytics and your CRM system to properly tag and add parameters to your campaigns, but it will be well worth it. Also consider what role emails play in the customer journey and how to tap into that. One thing I saw in my last role is that Google Analytics was showing us huge numbers of "direct" traffic to our website. We knew we didn't have that high brand recognition to warrant this and after digging in realized that we were not fully capturing the impact of our email programs to reactivate and engage our prospects in our products and ultimately purchase. Having the proper attribution allowed us to better prioritize our overall efforts and leverage our resources more effectively to the highest return activities.
Conversion Rate - Like earnings rate, this is another good metric that attempts to tie your end goals to the email function. It can be measured in several ways, but the goal is to understand of those receiving your emails, who is taking the revenue generating action you desire, be it an e-commerce transaction, an appointment or some other metric. It is different from the earning metric as it measures against people or recipients rather than a volume figure such as earnings. Pick the measures that mean the most to your business results.
Complaint or Abuse Rate - Similar to unsubscribe rates, these rates are more problematic to your future as they are signals sent to your ISP about you that can cause you to become black listed. Obviously if someone is at the point of angst that they are communicating to someone other than you about your SOUR email, it spells trouble. ISPs also facilitate this differently, so look at it by provider to see differences and identify opportunities for improvement.
Forward Rate (sharing rate) - Another metric totally in your control as if you don't provide the opportunity for the forward, there is nothing to measure. Ask yourself how you can use email, like you use social media, to engage your best advocates in continuing your message. While this is another topic and subject for marketing improvement, if you do this, measure and trend to find easy wins.
Churn Rate (or list growth rate) - Are you adding new net prospects or is your list stale? This metric will help you understand where you sit and what you need to do to continue to grow your opportunities and fill the top of the marketing funnel. If you have a product with a long sales cycle time, this can be an especially important metric for long term forecasting and growth. Measure how many new email addresses are added to your prospect list after you remove unsubscribes, complaints and hard bounces.
ROI - The ultimate goal of all businesses and marketers - how much did you put in and how much did you get out. Email marketing has been proven to have one of the highest return on investments of all marketing tactics. Are you measuring this and trending to insure you improve and grow with this valuable tool? Again, dependent on your business, attempt to tie directly created revenue to costs which include ESP fees, expenses of content and list development and team costs.
Today's Tips for Better Email Metrics:
- Be thoughtful and insure you fully understand the nuances of the metrics you choose to use
- Select the metrics that will insure ongoing success (unsubscribes, ROI, etc.) and allow for insights and actions and relentlessly track
- Be sure to trend metrics over time; watch for seasonality (retailers especially) and other market conditions that can impact these; most ESPs publish standards and averages at least for things like open and click through rates, so reference those to benchmark how you are doing.
- Sub-segment emails by types and categories and understand what the trends are. It is entirely reasonable to expect 90%+ open rates from certain transnational emails, but far less from others. If you aren't creating segments of emails by type and tracking you will miss problems and opportunities to improve.
- When looking at your statistics in totality, think about the blend of types of emails and take that into account. You may pat yourself on the back for a big improvement in open rates in a month where perhaps your volume of promotional emails was lower as a percentage of total emails. It may be that you actually had a problem that was masked because your data wasn't granular enough to obtain a complete understanding.
- Consider a deliverability audit for a deep dive into where and how your emails are being delivered to unmask any issues.
- Watch for any red flags that can get you on a black list. Once you are on, it is very difficult to get off, so make this a top metric.
Overall, email metrics can insure you invest wisely, learn as you execute, continue to improve and drive notable revenue from this valuable channel. Take the time to build a strategy for you email metrics just like you do for marketing and email overall and put the tools and resources in place to support the channel. Don't have SOUR email metrics and missed revenue!
Since these are internal measures, my commentary will be around what these are and should be, what we all should care about and how to set up some good dashboards and metrics to allow for understanding and continual improvement.
First, what are some of the standard metrics that are bandied about in email marketing?
Sent Emails
Delivered Emails
Open Rates
Click Through Rates
Unsubscribe Rates
Bounce Rates (hard and soft)
Other less used metrics include:
Inbox Placement
Earnings Per Email (click or open)
Conversion Rate
Complaint or Abuse Rate
Forward Rate (sharing rate)
Churn Rate (or list growth rate)
ROI
Seems like a lot and some of these are not very well understood and are treated differently in the ESPs. Let's take a brief look at each.
Sent Emails - When you hit the "send" button, the number of attempts or the number of emails in your list. While this metric is important, it is of limited value in understanding the performance of your campaigns and can be problematic if you have poor list hygiene or sign up processes. For example, if you have invalid formats or old email addresses in your list, this metric could be misleading. However, it is needed to calculate a delivery rate and warn you of any problems in that area.
Delivered Emails - This is the total number of emails that actually land in someone's inbox. It does not tell you where in the inbox and without the "send" figure to calculate a rate of deliverability, it is of limited value. It should be tracked and trended however to insure you are not getting caught in spam filters or black listed. Be sure to dive deep and look at this metric by ISP as it can help you diagnose if and where you might have deliverability problems and how to fix them.
Open Rates - While important to measure and trend, this metric can be misleading mostly because quite a few people read emails in preview pane and never open them. Different ESPs may also measure open rate differently, for example based on images downloaded, but if these are done automatically, it may record an open even if the reader didn't look at the email. Text emails may be excluded from open rates also. It is a good directional indicator of engagement and awareness of your communications however. Be aware and be sure you understand exactly how your ESP measures and reports this.
Click Through Rates - This metric is often spoken of as a highly important one, however, it is totally in the marketers control and without context really tells you nothing. If you measure click through rates, be sure to include a metric on click through opportunities. Any one email could have no click through opportunities or ten. If you do not have an understanding of that, you won't have a true measure of success. When creating reporting templates, be sure to include a field for the click opportunities in each email and then you can categorize click through rates based on that percentage versus just an overall percentage that does not speak to if the reader could have clicked. Also look at where the click through was - did they click on your logo, on a particular piece of content, or on more than one occasion.
Unsubscribe Rates - This is a must have metric that does a good job confirming you are not a SOUR emailer. ESPs typically do a good job of capturing this as it is triggered by a direct action from the email recipient. This can be manipulated as well by you based on how you handle the unsubscribe process. If you make it difficult for people to unsubscribe (as I have addressed in an earlier post), you may be under representing the sentiment. Also, if you have failed processes, you may be over counting. For example, my favorite SOUR emailer Younkers, as I mentioned in a previous post, has received numerous unsubscribe requests from me as it didn't appear to be working and I continued to receive their emails even though I asked them not to send. I will report that I have finally quit receiving their emails (for now). I wonder if they saw my post and finally did something about it!
Bounce Rates (hard and soft) - This is another metric that could be different based on how your ESP handles it. Some will count a hard bounce after a send has failed three times, but some may allow you to control how often the fail has to happen to count as a hard bounce. Soft bounce means the delivery was temporarily not available, but again can be altered. Be sure you understand exactly how your ESP handles these and measure appropriately. If you have a high hard bounce rate, you can also put yourself in a position of having your emails blocked by ISPs as being SOUR and on the verge of SPAM, so be sure to watch these rates closely to stay on those white lists and not be a SOUR emailer.
Secondary Metrics:
Inbox Placement - This is a lesser used metric, but as the ISPs get more aggressive at filtering and automatically moving incoming emails (especially Gmail), your well crafted message may never even receive the opportunity for the recipient to see if it is placed into a sub-folder without the email owners knowledge. It is difficult to combat this as well since like SEM algorithms, it can be ever changing and different based on the ISPs practices. At least be aware of this and attempt to understand if you are doing things that are making your emails more likely to land in the wrong place.
Earnings Per Email (click, open, delivered) - Getting to the heart of why we email, we should be measuring what we get out of these programs. While for some, this may be difficult, if you can, try to tie your actual revenue creation to the email function. Use the base metric that works for you (delivered, opened or clicked), but do attempt to do so. This may require extra work in Google Analytics and your CRM system to properly tag and add parameters to your campaigns, but it will be well worth it. Also consider what role emails play in the customer journey and how to tap into that. One thing I saw in my last role is that Google Analytics was showing us huge numbers of "direct" traffic to our website. We knew we didn't have that high brand recognition to warrant this and after digging in realized that we were not fully capturing the impact of our email programs to reactivate and engage our prospects in our products and ultimately purchase. Having the proper attribution allowed us to better prioritize our overall efforts and leverage our resources more effectively to the highest return activities.
Conversion Rate - Like earnings rate, this is another good metric that attempts to tie your end goals to the email function. It can be measured in several ways, but the goal is to understand of those receiving your emails, who is taking the revenue generating action you desire, be it an e-commerce transaction, an appointment or some other metric. It is different from the earning metric as it measures against people or recipients rather than a volume figure such as earnings. Pick the measures that mean the most to your business results.
Complaint or Abuse Rate - Similar to unsubscribe rates, these rates are more problematic to your future as they are signals sent to your ISP about you that can cause you to become black listed. Obviously if someone is at the point of angst that they are communicating to someone other than you about your SOUR email, it spells trouble. ISPs also facilitate this differently, so look at it by provider to see differences and identify opportunities for improvement.
Forward Rate (sharing rate) - Another metric totally in your control as if you don't provide the opportunity for the forward, there is nothing to measure. Ask yourself how you can use email, like you use social media, to engage your best advocates in continuing your message. While this is another topic and subject for marketing improvement, if you do this, measure and trend to find easy wins.
Churn Rate (or list growth rate) - Are you adding new net prospects or is your list stale? This metric will help you understand where you sit and what you need to do to continue to grow your opportunities and fill the top of the marketing funnel. If you have a product with a long sales cycle time, this can be an especially important metric for long term forecasting and growth. Measure how many new email addresses are added to your prospect list after you remove unsubscribes, complaints and hard bounces.
ROI - The ultimate goal of all businesses and marketers - how much did you put in and how much did you get out. Email marketing has been proven to have one of the highest return on investments of all marketing tactics. Are you measuring this and trending to insure you improve and grow with this valuable tool? Again, dependent on your business, attempt to tie directly created revenue to costs which include ESP fees, expenses of content and list development and team costs.
Today's Tips for Better Email Metrics:
- Be thoughtful and insure you fully understand the nuances of the metrics you choose to use
- Select the metrics that will insure ongoing success (unsubscribes, ROI, etc.) and allow for insights and actions and relentlessly track
- Be sure to trend metrics over time; watch for seasonality (retailers especially) and other market conditions that can impact these; most ESPs publish standards and averages at least for things like open and click through rates, so reference those to benchmark how you are doing.
- Sub-segment emails by types and categories and understand what the trends are. It is entirely reasonable to expect 90%+ open rates from certain transnational emails, but far less from others. If you aren't creating segments of emails by type and tracking you will miss problems and opportunities to improve.
- When looking at your statistics in totality, think about the blend of types of emails and take that into account. You may pat yourself on the back for a big improvement in open rates in a month where perhaps your volume of promotional emails was lower as a percentage of total emails. It may be that you actually had a problem that was masked because your data wasn't granular enough to obtain a complete understanding.
- Consider a deliverability audit for a deep dive into where and how your emails are being delivered to unmask any issues.
- Watch for any red flags that can get you on a black list. Once you are on, it is very difficult to get off, so make this a top metric.
Overall, email metrics can insure you invest wisely, learn as you execute, continue to improve and drive notable revenue from this valuable channel. Take the time to build a strategy for you email metrics just like you do for marketing and email overall and put the tools and resources in place to support the channel. Don't have SOUR email metrics and missed revenue!
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
TESTING - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Nov 8, 2016
It is finally here - voting day! I'm sure most of us are glad to be at this point and moving onward, whatever that brings.
How does that relate to our topic of testing? It is early in the day, but I took a look at my inbox this morning to see if anyone was leveraging the day and in fact some are. Of 54 emails that I received since midnight, 6 had some element of the election theme in them:
Builders Designs subject line: "The Polls are Open for cyber Monday!"
Fandango: "Election Day, Movie Style"
IAB Smart Brief: "How tech companies are getting involved on Election Day."
Groupon: "Elect to save on Tech, Home and More Doorbusters."
World Market: "We voted. And the winners are..."
Kohls: "Uniting all sides behind our $10 off."
When we think of testing, often subject lines are easy to test and can have dramatic impact and the ESPs do a good job generally of facilitating this. So, first question is: Do you test EVERY single subject line when you deploy emails? You have to think based on the above that at least a few of the people sending these are trying to be relevant. Perhaps not specific to their brand and products, but certainly to what people are likely to be thinking about today. Were these subject lines conceived of and tested with the deployment? Did they win or was I just part of the test cell? How effective were these? All questions we cannot answer specific to these inbox emails, but certainly can and should for ourselves.
And beyond subject lines, what other elements of emails should we be testing? A lot of these answers depend on you, your product, your strategy, brand and goals. The point is there is a lot to learn while deploying your emails and you should be actively implementing a detailed testing plan to insure you continually improve and drive incremental results.
One thing I like to do as well is keep a log of testing results that not only build and pass on that history but allow you as a marketer to demonstrate the impact of your efforts on driving revenue. Consider if you could tie every test to your KPIs and show that via testing you drove incremental results for your business? Summarize these over the course of a month, quarter and year, and oftentimes you will find you have a compelling story. While there will definitely be wins and some losses, the act of driving this accountability insures the wins will far outnumber the losses.
So how do you figure out a testing strategy and what to test? One website I highly recommend for ideas and insights is whichtestwon (now called behave.org). Especially fun to sign up for their emails where they send you a test and let you vote, then tell you the results. And a bonus, in addition to tons of ideas for email testing, there are ones for virtually all your other executions as well.
Here's some general categories of items to think about testing related to email marketing:
- Certainly subject lines as we noted above and go beyond just the words. Simple things like punctuation, capitalization, placement of words, use of emojis and more can have a dramatic impact.
- Body length - I did a test for a client while I was President of .Com marketing. The test had generally the same content but the body copy of one was much longer than the other. When we read the results, we found that while the short copy had more opens, the long copy had more engagement which was what we really wanted. Publishers Clearing House is the king of this kind of long copy engagement with their mailers. That's why there are multiple pages, stickers and things to go through in the envelope. Their testing clearly showed more engagement when they provide more opportunities to do so. This ultimately leads to more entries. We saw those same type of results with our direct mail while I was at Sears Home Services.
- Content type - there are many options here - should you include benefits, pricing, offers and deals, imagery, what kind of imagery, how much, headlines...again, simple things can make a difference. At Stow, we tested extensively and one thing we found was that simply putting people in images increased performance. Pricing is another area of contention oftentimes in business and when and how you should use and embrace it. Testing of course will tell you, but generally my experience has been that sharing pricing too early in the process can reduce your opportunity for engagement.
- Specificity - there are some good tests on behave.org that address this. Should you be more or less specific and when would one work better than another? Should you provide detailed steps or general guides? How should you present those specifics: list, within a box, in bold or another color, highlighted...lots of tests to conceive to impact your KPIs.
- Timing of emails - this is one of the topics that I discussed in a past blog and one of my pet peeves. The reality is timing and effectiveness are definitely tied together, but I wonder how many marketers even test timing. If I look at all the endless, irrelevant, SOUR emails I get in my inbox, I think this is a big opportunity for all of us to improve.
I could go on with more, but the point is, TEST!
Today's Tips for Better Testing:
- Get great ideas from behave.org - one of my favorite emails that I love to read.
- Have an ongoing testing program for emails (and other areas of marketing).
- Set the appropriate KPIs for each test with a hypothesis and expected results.
- Accumulate your testing performance and showcase to leadership your wins and the impact you are having on the business. This makes it very easy come budget season as well to obtain the funding for those testing tools and perhaps new ones.
- ALWAYS test your subject lines.
- Leverage the built in testing tools that your ESP provides as well as Google's testing capabilities or other paid providers. I especially like Optimizely as a tool that is easy to use and allows for fast learning
Change your culture to be one of continuous testing where failure and learning are embraced as an important part of growth and improvement. Leverage the great tools out there to learn: Adobe Target, Optimizely, Google and your ESPs. Take the time to deliver a better experience to your prospect and customers. They will reward you with higher loyalty and bottom line results and you will not be a SOUR emailer!
It is finally here - voting day! I'm sure most of us are glad to be at this point and moving onward, whatever that brings.
How does that relate to our topic of testing? It is early in the day, but I took a look at my inbox this morning to see if anyone was leveraging the day and in fact some are. Of 54 emails that I received since midnight, 6 had some element of the election theme in them:
Builders Designs subject line: "The Polls are Open for cyber Monday!"
Fandango: "Election Day, Movie Style"
IAB Smart Brief: "How tech companies are getting involved on Election Day."
Groupon: "Elect to save on Tech, Home and More Doorbusters."
World Market: "We voted. And the winners are..."
Kohls: "Uniting all sides behind our $10 off."
When we think of testing, often subject lines are easy to test and can have dramatic impact and the ESPs do a good job generally of facilitating this. So, first question is: Do you test EVERY single subject line when you deploy emails? You have to think based on the above that at least a few of the people sending these are trying to be relevant. Perhaps not specific to their brand and products, but certainly to what people are likely to be thinking about today. Were these subject lines conceived of and tested with the deployment? Did they win or was I just part of the test cell? How effective were these? All questions we cannot answer specific to these inbox emails, but certainly can and should for ourselves.
And beyond subject lines, what other elements of emails should we be testing? A lot of these answers depend on you, your product, your strategy, brand and goals. The point is there is a lot to learn while deploying your emails and you should be actively implementing a detailed testing plan to insure you continually improve and drive incremental results.
One thing I like to do as well is keep a log of testing results that not only build and pass on that history but allow you as a marketer to demonstrate the impact of your efforts on driving revenue. Consider if you could tie every test to your KPIs and show that via testing you drove incremental results for your business? Summarize these over the course of a month, quarter and year, and oftentimes you will find you have a compelling story. While there will definitely be wins and some losses, the act of driving this accountability insures the wins will far outnumber the losses.
So how do you figure out a testing strategy and what to test? One website I highly recommend for ideas and insights is whichtestwon (now called behave.org). Especially fun to sign up for their emails where they send you a test and let you vote, then tell you the results. And a bonus, in addition to tons of ideas for email testing, there are ones for virtually all your other executions as well.
Here's some general categories of items to think about testing related to email marketing:
- Certainly subject lines as we noted above and go beyond just the words. Simple things like punctuation, capitalization, placement of words, use of emojis and more can have a dramatic impact.
- Body length - I did a test for a client while I was President of .Com marketing. The test had generally the same content but the body copy of one was much longer than the other. When we read the results, we found that while the short copy had more opens, the long copy had more engagement which was what we really wanted. Publishers Clearing House is the king of this kind of long copy engagement with their mailers. That's why there are multiple pages, stickers and things to go through in the envelope. Their testing clearly showed more engagement when they provide more opportunities to do so. This ultimately leads to more entries. We saw those same type of results with our direct mail while I was at Sears Home Services.
- Content type - there are many options here - should you include benefits, pricing, offers and deals, imagery, what kind of imagery, how much, headlines...again, simple things can make a difference. At Stow, we tested extensively and one thing we found was that simply putting people in images increased performance. Pricing is another area of contention oftentimes in business and when and how you should use and embrace it. Testing of course will tell you, but generally my experience has been that sharing pricing too early in the process can reduce your opportunity for engagement.
- Specificity - there are some good tests on behave.org that address this. Should you be more or less specific and when would one work better than another? Should you provide detailed steps or general guides? How should you present those specifics: list, within a box, in bold or another color, highlighted...lots of tests to conceive to impact your KPIs.
- Timing of emails - this is one of the topics that I discussed in a past blog and one of my pet peeves. The reality is timing and effectiveness are definitely tied together, but I wonder how many marketers even test timing. If I look at all the endless, irrelevant, SOUR emails I get in my inbox, I think this is a big opportunity for all of us to improve.
I could go on with more, but the point is, TEST!
Today's Tips for Better Testing:
- Get great ideas from behave.org - one of my favorite emails that I love to read.
- Have an ongoing testing program for emails (and other areas of marketing).
- Set the appropriate KPIs for each test with a hypothesis and expected results.
- Accumulate your testing performance and showcase to leadership your wins and the impact you are having on the business. This makes it very easy come budget season as well to obtain the funding for those testing tools and perhaps new ones.
- ALWAYS test your subject lines.
- Leverage the built in testing tools that your ESP provides as well as Google's testing capabilities or other paid providers. I especially like Optimizely as a tool that is easy to use and allows for fast learning
Change your culture to be one of continuous testing where failure and learning are embraced as an important part of growth and improvement. Leverage the great tools out there to learn: Adobe Target, Optimizely, Google and your ESPs. Take the time to deliver a better experience to your prospect and customers. They will reward you with higher loyalty and bottom line results and you will not be a SOUR emailer!
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
EMAIL STRATEGY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Nov 2, 2016
Email statistics show that on average 18% of emails are opened. Now we all know that a lot of people view their emails in preview panes and can get the idea of what you have to say without opening them. In fact, Email Labs says that 69% of at-work email recipients read in preview pane.
So why are we even talking about open rates? We need to ask ourselves what is the purpose of our email marketing, the subject line and content and how do we measure the effectiveness of these? Obviously, the subject line is meant to tell the reader what the message is about and to catch attention. But, like those really creative television ads that everyone remembers but no one buys as a result of, there needs to be more than a catchy subject line and more thought put into our emails and why we are sending them.
We spoke in our post on October 6th about email strategy overall. Today, I'd like to focus in a bit on the subject lines, content and what that tells us about a companies email strategy and what we can learn.
So, as we think about our subject lines, let's start with what are and should be our goals and metrics. Obviously open rates can be used as a comparative metric for the goal of gaining attention, but what else should we consider when assessing subject lines? Do you and can you tie your emails to actual web visits (click throughs) and transactions? If you do, how does this fit within the overall customer journey? What role do you want emails and the subjects and content of those to play in your overall communications? Depending on who the person is, what the content is and what your product is, email could be more or less important to the journey towards purchase and play a role in how you manage that relationship and what you want to deliver in this channel.
Let's look at an example from clothing retailers to illustrate.
I have used many of my favorite clothing retailers as examples in past posts, organizations such as Macy's, Loft, White House, Black Market and Chicos. My relationship with them is about need and desire to be fashionable, up-to-date, buy and own quality clothing that will last, be functional and perhaps to fulfill a specific clothing need such as for an event or activity.
When I look at 20+ of my recent emails however, virtually all the subject lines focus on sale messages:
Loft: 50% OFF = love at first bite (we mean, sight)
Macy's: On the ballot: big savings on all your fave accessories!
White House Black Market: Columbus Day Sale Starts Now.
Chicos: A Berry Good Deal: 50% Off Sale
Are they doing this because their data shows that promotional subject lines have the best open rates or do they have data that shows this drives the best immediate sales? Is this the best way to add value and build relationships with customers and prospects or are we as marketers driving less value to our brands by constantly offering deals and selling only based on a deal? Are we even thinking about ways to engage our customers via email other than by offering a deal and trying to drive an immediate sale? Is there something more to the subjects and email communication that we should be considering?
I know as a consumer, I would be interested in reading about latest trends and colors, seeing great ideas on combining tops and pants or what the hot accessories are this month. We buy fashion magazines, so clearly we are interested in that kind of content. However, the retailers we buy the products from don't help us with that type of content via email. I ask, if I was receiving this type of content would I think first of that brand when I had the need for clothing and would I be more willing to buy it at a premium or at least not discounted? Would this be a better way to solidify my long term relationship with that retailer and thus build lifetime customer value for them? Perhaps the answer is "no" and this is not SOUR eMail. There is the classic example of JC Penney and their attempt to become an everyday value retailer. Now I am sure this strategy didn't fail due to a poor email strategy, but it speaks to the challenge for marketers of remaining relevant, driving value and becoming the brand of choice when clothing (or any product or that matter) is needed.
How do we develop a thoughtful, relevant, personalized and timely email strategy that connects our customers and prospects to our brand in a meaningful way and drives value for both of us?
Today's Tips for Better Email Strategy:
- Understand the customer journey and what role email plays and can play for your products and brands.
- Ask your customers what kind of content they care about and deliver it via email.
- Think about how this email content connects to your overall content strategy and how you tie your communication vehicles together for a comprehensive strategy.
- Think about different types of email, what makes them relevant and when and how to deliver them. So for example for our clothing retailers, should they be sending fashion trends content during the debut season for designers? A good example of providing value beyond the sale is from Shaw Industries. They sell flooring products, but do an excellent job of making flooring experiential. Each year they feature a color of the year to show that flooring choices are more than just the carpet or hardwood you buy and giving you a bigger reason to care about their brands.
- Make sure you focus on the right metrics in your emails and consider that you should have different metrics based on the type of emails.
- When looking at email statistics, classify the emails by type and set metrics standards based on those types. For example, promotional emails, transaction emails, newsletters versus sales emails should have different metrics.
- Change the cadence of your emails based on the type of content, subject and based on what consumers desire and what you know about them and their behaviors. A good article was recently published by Marketo and one of the points covered is cadence and the impact of good segmentation and targeting. The chart below shows graphically what this looks like.
- And of course, test and learn on a continual basis.
Use these email strategy tips to create an insightful, actionable and ROI driven approach to email marketing that wins for both you and your customers. Don't be a SOUR emailer with no strategic approach to your email marketing efforts!
Source:
Marketo Email Blunders
Email statistics show that on average 18% of emails are opened. Now we all know that a lot of people view their emails in preview panes and can get the idea of what you have to say without opening them. In fact, Email Labs says that 69% of at-work email recipients read in preview pane.
So why are we even talking about open rates? We need to ask ourselves what is the purpose of our email marketing, the subject line and content and how do we measure the effectiveness of these? Obviously, the subject line is meant to tell the reader what the message is about and to catch attention. But, like those really creative television ads that everyone remembers but no one buys as a result of, there needs to be more than a catchy subject line and more thought put into our emails and why we are sending them.
We spoke in our post on October 6th about email strategy overall. Today, I'd like to focus in a bit on the subject lines, content and what that tells us about a companies email strategy and what we can learn.
So, as we think about our subject lines, let's start with what are and should be our goals and metrics. Obviously open rates can be used as a comparative metric for the goal of gaining attention, but what else should we consider when assessing subject lines? Do you and can you tie your emails to actual web visits (click throughs) and transactions? If you do, how does this fit within the overall customer journey? What role do you want emails and the subjects and content of those to play in your overall communications? Depending on who the person is, what the content is and what your product is, email could be more or less important to the journey towards purchase and play a role in how you manage that relationship and what you want to deliver in this channel.
Let's look at an example from clothing retailers to illustrate.
I have used many of my favorite clothing retailers as examples in past posts, organizations such as Macy's, Loft, White House, Black Market and Chicos. My relationship with them is about need and desire to be fashionable, up-to-date, buy and own quality clothing that will last, be functional and perhaps to fulfill a specific clothing need such as for an event or activity.
When I look at 20+ of my recent emails however, virtually all the subject lines focus on sale messages:
Loft: 50% OFF = love at first bite (we mean, sight)
Macy's: On the ballot: big savings on all your fave accessories!
White House Black Market: Columbus Day Sale Starts Now.
Chicos: A Berry Good Deal: 50% Off Sale
Are they doing this because their data shows that promotional subject lines have the best open rates or do they have data that shows this drives the best immediate sales? Is this the best way to add value and build relationships with customers and prospects or are we as marketers driving less value to our brands by constantly offering deals and selling only based on a deal? Are we even thinking about ways to engage our customers via email other than by offering a deal and trying to drive an immediate sale? Is there something more to the subjects and email communication that we should be considering?
I know as a consumer, I would be interested in reading about latest trends and colors, seeing great ideas on combining tops and pants or what the hot accessories are this month. We buy fashion magazines, so clearly we are interested in that kind of content. However, the retailers we buy the products from don't help us with that type of content via email. I ask, if I was receiving this type of content would I think first of that brand when I had the need for clothing and would I be more willing to buy it at a premium or at least not discounted? Would this be a better way to solidify my long term relationship with that retailer and thus build lifetime customer value for them? Perhaps the answer is "no" and this is not SOUR eMail. There is the classic example of JC Penney and their attempt to become an everyday value retailer. Now I am sure this strategy didn't fail due to a poor email strategy, but it speaks to the challenge for marketers of remaining relevant, driving value and becoming the brand of choice when clothing (or any product or that matter) is needed.
How do we develop a thoughtful, relevant, personalized and timely email strategy that connects our customers and prospects to our brand in a meaningful way and drives value for both of us?
Today's Tips for Better Email Strategy:
- Understand the customer journey and what role email plays and can play for your products and brands.
- Ask your customers what kind of content they care about and deliver it via email.
- Think about how this email content connects to your overall content strategy and how you tie your communication vehicles together for a comprehensive strategy.
- Think about different types of email, what makes them relevant and when and how to deliver them. So for example for our clothing retailers, should they be sending fashion trends content during the debut season for designers? A good example of providing value beyond the sale is from Shaw Industries. They sell flooring products, but do an excellent job of making flooring experiential. Each year they feature a color of the year to show that flooring choices are more than just the carpet or hardwood you buy and giving you a bigger reason to care about their brands.
- Make sure you focus on the right metrics in your emails and consider that you should have different metrics based on the type of emails.
- When looking at email statistics, classify the emails by type and set metrics standards based on those types. For example, promotional emails, transaction emails, newsletters versus sales emails should have different metrics.
- Change the cadence of your emails based on the type of content, subject and based on what consumers desire and what you know about them and their behaviors. A good article was recently published by Marketo and one of the points covered is cadence and the impact of good segmentation and targeting. The chart below shows graphically what this looks like.
- And of course, test and learn on a continual basis.
Use these email strategy tips to create an insightful, actionable and ROI driven approach to email marketing that wins for both you and your customers. Don't be a SOUR emailer with no strategic approach to your email marketing efforts!
Source:
Marketo Email Blunders
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
UNSUBSCRIBES - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - SOUR eMail Oct 26, 2016
The unsubscribe process is another one of those elements of email marketing that just makes me SOUR! Too many marketers do not take into consideration my desire to leave them and the difficulty of doing so can sometimes be infuriating.
First, the law actually prescribes how unsubscribes should work. Here's the exact wording:
"You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request."
While this allows for some latitude, it is clear that the actions I need to take should be limited and brief.
Some do this extremely well and even brand it via the "SafeUnsubscribe" that Constant Contact users experience.
Unsubscribes
Today's Sample: 10 emails
Overall Grade: C
Top Performer: Anything in Stained Glass (Constant Contact) and CMO.com (Adobe) - Grade A
My rating is based on the unsubscribe process itself and the ease of unsubscribing. If you are doing a great job of email marketing, making your messages relevant, timely and of interest, very few of your subscribers will want to go here. If they do, then you should happily and easily let them go and look at your practices to see how you can improve.
Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:
- Make your unsubscribe as simple and easy as possible with only one click required.
- Allow people to manage email preferences for type of content and frequency of emails, but keep that as a separate option in a preference center. AND make sure if you ask for this that you use it to make their emails more personalized.
- Don't bury the unsubscribe with other options and in long sentences. However, do place "preferences" in close proximity so they can see that they can change if they don't want to be completely gone.
- Make the word "unsubscribe" be the link, not "click here" and certainly not a URL.
- Use a preference center to allow people to select what they want and when; make this part of the subscription process (future post topic).
- Make sure you abide by the law and honor the unsubscribe request within 10 days. There are financial implications of not doing so - you can be fined up to $16,000 for every infraction.
- Don't ask for reasons why they unsubscribe - use your data to figure that out.
- On the unsubscribe landing page, thank them, let them know how they can opt back in (with a link directly there) if they want and how long it will take for the changes to take effect.
Use these unsubscribe process tips to make sure you meet CAN-SPAM requirements and to manage a process that is required but undesirable. Don't be a SOUR emailer and you will minimize these clicks.
The unsubscribe process is another one of those elements of email marketing that just makes me SOUR! Too many marketers do not take into consideration my desire to leave them and the difficulty of doing so can sometimes be infuriating.
First, the law actually prescribes how unsubscribes should work. Here's the exact wording:
"You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request."
While this allows for some latitude, it is clear that the actions I need to take should be limited and brief.
Some do this extremely well and even brand it via the "SafeUnsubscribe" that Constant Contact users experience.
Others bury it in very small type or with other options to make it harder for you to find. While I get that they don't want you to leave, I would suggest they do a better job with what they send. Then I wouldn't be tempted to want to quit receiving these emails. I'm leaving these the way they were in my email to demonstrate how small they really are.
It also makes me SOUR when they make me go to a web page and then I have to re-enter my email address. Hello! I just came from an email you sent me and dynamic programming allows you to easily pass the email address to the page, or even better just say thank you for unsubscribing and be done with it. You have already made me unhappy to the point of not wanting to hear from you. Do you really think it helps to make it hard for me to say good bye? What brand value does that drive?
So here's a summary of 10 of the emails in my inbox today and what is good and bad.
Anything in Stained Glass - seems that smaller companies using Constant Contact have it made as they benefit from the platforms method for unsubscribing. The unsubscribe is just one click and the platform thereafter insures you don't receive emails without the sender even having to think about it, so kind of idiot-proof. Congratulations to Constant Contact!
World Market - unsubscribe was buried in the footer and very small. They did remember who I was so I didn't have to re-enter my email address, but they did make me check and uncheck preference boxes to keep getting some, all or none of what they had to send. While this isn't necessarily bad, it should be part of a preference center and not combined with the simple act of unsubscribing. Remember once I get to this step, I'm not happy - don't make it harder for me.
Eventful - they make me read to figure out where I even need to click to unsubscribe (the link is "click here" within a sentence that says "to unsubscribe from other deals...") Once I click, they make me tell them again: "are you sure you want to unsubscribe?" Really? I'm checking yes just because you made me even more SOUR.
Hampton Inn by Hilton - the unsubscribe link is one of several options. Once I clicked, they gave me the option of what I was unsubscribing to - just these special offers or all of Hilton communications. They also populated my email address for me - see I knew it could be done! They also tell you how long it will take - good - by law, they have 10 days to discontinue sending you emails.
Coffeeforless.com - grouped with other options of "preferences" and "forward to a friend." Once I clicked, I did have to reconfirm with a second click and they also gave me the option of changing my preferences with another link.
Hotwire - by the way, I love these guys and always use them for personal travel for hotels and cars. Always get good deals where I want and I like getting to try hotels I might not otherwise find. Staying at the Gwen in Chicago over Thanksgiving which I booked through them. So, even though I won't unsubscribe, they again have the unsubscribe grouped with other options and are a bit busy once I click combining preference changes with the unsubscribe process. They try to be a bit subtle and dray your eyes away from the "unsubscribe all" in an attempt to keep you on the list.
First America Home Warranty - I included this one here to make the distinction between transactional and promotional emails. I received this email in response to a service request I placed for my home. Transactional emails do not require unsubscribe options and this one did not have one. While some might include as a courtesy, it is not required via the CAN-SPAM law.
Younkers - the emailer I put at the top of my SOUR list. They provide the unsubscribe option within a long list of choices, almost purposely to hide it from me. On the landing page, they bury the unsubscribe in a preference center, long form that asks if I want to change my frequency (actually good), change my email address (not sure why that is there) or select from a long list of content types that might be in my emails (also good, although I don't have any evidence that they are using this). But most SOUR - I have actually unsubscribed from their emails many times over the past several MONTHS and they still keep sending me emails. I did it again today, so after I scrolled down through all those choices and clicked to unsubscribe, they added insult to injury by asking me why. I ask - if you were monitoring your database and had a good handle on your email statistics, wouldn't you know what was working or not? Actually, I would really like to help these guys and even sent a LinkedIn message to their CMO. Sorry you aren't listening!
CMO.com (Adobe) - I don't put many B2B email samples in my posts, and this is part of future conversations as in general I think B2B marketers do a better job at email marketing. One click from the unsubscribe link at the bottom and I was done. They told me who I was receiving the email from and once I clicked, I was done - no re-typing my email address, no questions, no preferences, just done. Now I didn't really want to do that, so now I will go back in and resubscribe, but it should be really that simple. The only improvement would be a link on the confirmation page to re-subscribe.
CNN Breaking News - I'm surprised that an organization like CNN is doing such a poor job. Now, I like getting my breaking news emails, but the unsubscribe mechanism is just SOUR. They actually don't include a link but only a long URL that I have to cut and paste into my browser. When I do so, they make me type in my email address to unsubscribe. All I can say is "wow."
Today's Sample: 10 emails
Overall Grade: C
Top Performer: Anything in Stained Glass (Constant Contact) and CMO.com (Adobe) - Grade A
My rating is based on the unsubscribe process itself and the ease of unsubscribing. If you are doing a great job of email marketing, making your messages relevant, timely and of interest, very few of your subscribers will want to go here. If they do, then you should happily and easily let them go and look at your practices to see how you can improve.
Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:
- Make your unsubscribe as simple and easy as possible with only one click required.
- Allow people to manage email preferences for type of content and frequency of emails, but keep that as a separate option in a preference center. AND make sure if you ask for this that you use it to make their emails more personalized.
- Don't bury the unsubscribe with other options and in long sentences. However, do place "preferences" in close proximity so they can see that they can change if they don't want to be completely gone.
- Make the word "unsubscribe" be the link, not "click here" and certainly not a URL.
- Use a preference center to allow people to select what they want and when; make this part of the subscription process (future post topic).
- Make sure you abide by the law and honor the unsubscribe request within 10 days. There are financial implications of not doing so - you can be fined up to $16,000 for every infraction.
- Don't ask for reasons why they unsubscribe - use your data to figure that out.
- On the unsubscribe landing page, thank them, let them know how they can opt back in (with a link directly there) if they want and how long it will take for the changes to take effect.
Use these unsubscribe process tips to make sure you meet CAN-SPAM requirements and to manage a process that is required but undesirable. Don't be a SOUR emailer and you will minimize these clicks.
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
TOO MUCH EMAIL? - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - SOUR eMail Oct 18, 2016
As I mentioned last week, I took a short vacation over the weekend so for the most part was away from my email with any regularity. Now that I have returned, I took a look at my inbox and it got me to thinking about the topic I covered two weeks ago related to timing and frequency.
So, I asked myself and I ask you, how much email is too much for you? In that time frame from 10/10 through 10/17, I received 525 emails. That equates to 75 emails a day. Given this is a personal account, it seems like a lot. Here's some mind blowing statistics:
- 205 BILLION emails are sent a day (as of 2015)
- average U.S. desktop open rate is 18%
- 42% of Americans check their email in the bathroom
We have a love affair with our email almost as strong as that with our phone and given that 66% of emails are opened on a mobile device, that makes sense.
Given all this, are we getting too much email? My vote is yes. Just in my one post a few weeks ago, I identified some of the egregious uses of email marketing and where people are just doing "spray and pray" - something that should be long gone in this day of predictive analytics, big data and dynamic targeting.
Why do marketers send too much email? I can think of all kinds of reasons like lack of strategy and focus, lack of talent, lack of tools and more. But, we can do better.
What I find interesting is the differences between industry and genre of email. Here's a good summary of email statistics by industry.
This summary tells you something about the psyche of email recipients and perhaps why we continue to send too many emails.
Daily deal emails have the lowest open rates at 13.87%, but also the lowest unsubscribe rates. We don't want to miss a deal even when we don't engage. How can we deliver fewer emails while still serving the consumers need for a deal? We know that when people are ready to transact, they will first search for a "deal." Just check your brand name in a search with the word "coupon" or "deal," or look at the sites that make their living offering deals like ebates or coupons.com to name a few. We send thousands and thousands of emails with deals, take a look at just a few from my inbox this week.
These all came within the past week without regard to my purchasing history: what I purchase, when I am likely to purchase again or what I might purchase. Does the deal drive me to take action? While it might if I had already been thinking of purchasing, it is more likely the trigger is something else. What if instead of receiving these unwanted emails that are not in alignment with my need for the product or a deal, I could get the deal when I am in the transaction process? Would that increase my conversion during that time? Would that keep me on the site and not distracted by other searches to find that deal? How would I feel about the company if they made it easier for me to purchase with a discount when I want to purchase?
I don't propose to have all the answers, but it does seem to me that as marketers we should be asking these questions and finding better ways than sending millions of unwanted emails.
I would like to see my inbox filled with 20 highly relevant and compelling emails than the 75 I averaged this week of which very few did I open and even fewer did I take action on.
We can do better. SOUR eMail can and should stop. What are you doing to improve your email performance? What is good performance for you? Is it getting better each week, month and year? What are the right metrics to even use?
We will answer some of these questions in our next post on email metrics and what you should be using to measure your success and how to continue to improve and evolve your email marketing.
As I mentioned last week, I took a short vacation over the weekend so for the most part was away from my email with any regularity. Now that I have returned, I took a look at my inbox and it got me to thinking about the topic I covered two weeks ago related to timing and frequency.
So, I asked myself and I ask you, how much email is too much for you? In that time frame from 10/10 through 10/17, I received 525 emails. That equates to 75 emails a day. Given this is a personal account, it seems like a lot. Here's some mind blowing statistics:
- 205 BILLION emails are sent a day (as of 2015)
- average U.S. desktop open rate is 18%
- 42% of Americans check their email in the bathroom
We have a love affair with our email almost as strong as that with our phone and given that 66% of emails are opened on a mobile device, that makes sense.
Given all this, are we getting too much email? My vote is yes. Just in my one post a few weeks ago, I identified some of the egregious uses of email marketing and where people are just doing "spray and pray" - something that should be long gone in this day of predictive analytics, big data and dynamic targeting.
Why do marketers send too much email? I can think of all kinds of reasons like lack of strategy and focus, lack of talent, lack of tools and more. But, we can do better.
What I find interesting is the differences between industry and genre of email. Here's a good summary of email statistics by industry.
This summary tells you something about the psyche of email recipients and perhaps why we continue to send too many emails.
Daily deal emails have the lowest open rates at 13.87%, but also the lowest unsubscribe rates. We don't want to miss a deal even when we don't engage. How can we deliver fewer emails while still serving the consumers need for a deal? We know that when people are ready to transact, they will first search for a "deal." Just check your brand name in a search with the word "coupon" or "deal," or look at the sites that make their living offering deals like ebates or coupons.com to name a few. We send thousands and thousands of emails with deals, take a look at just a few from my inbox this week.
These all came within the past week without regard to my purchasing history: what I purchase, when I am likely to purchase again or what I might purchase. Does the deal drive me to take action? While it might if I had already been thinking of purchasing, it is more likely the trigger is something else. What if instead of receiving these unwanted emails that are not in alignment with my need for the product or a deal, I could get the deal when I am in the transaction process? Would that increase my conversion during that time? Would that keep me on the site and not distracted by other searches to find that deal? How would I feel about the company if they made it easier for me to purchase with a discount when I want to purchase?
I don't propose to have all the answers, but it does seem to me that as marketers we should be asking these questions and finding better ways than sending millions of unwanted emails.
I would like to see my inbox filled with 20 highly relevant and compelling emails than the 75 I averaged this week of which very few did I open and even fewer did I take action on.
We can do better. SOUR eMail can and should stop. What are you doing to improve your email performance? What is good performance for you? Is it getting better each week, month and year? What are the right metrics to even use?
We will answer some of these questions in our next post on email metrics and what you should be using to measure your success and how to continue to improve and evolve your email marketing.
Monday, October 10, 2016
"FROM" ADDRESSES - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - SOUR eMail Oct 10, 2016
Week two of SOUR email and it's more fun than ever. I'm traveling this week to connect with some of my girlfriends for a weekend in the mountains of Chattanooga, TN, so I thought I would focus today on some of the travel emails I receive and talk about how to best use the "From" address in your emails. It seems like it should be a basic and simple thing to consider and do well and is also regulated by CAN-SPAM laws. What can and should you do to leverage this important element of your email and one that pretty much everyone looks at in determining if they will ignore it, take action or something in between?
The CAN-SPAM act specifically requires that you must accurately identify the person or business who initiated the message. The specific language is:
"From" Addresses
Today's Sample: 12 emails
Overall Grade: C
Top Performer: Steppes Travel - Grade A and Hotwire - Grade B
I decided because of the elements within these two they were both worthy of recognition - Steppes for using a real email address and Hotwire for creatively using the "from" to extend their subject line content.
Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:
- Don't include superfluous words and sub-elements within the email address - be specific and only include your root domain if possible
- Make it personal - send the email from a real person, not a box or technical term; if you aren't making it from a person, at least use the email address to tell them something as Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Lake Leelenau RV park did
- Leverage the "from" line to extend your subject line. This is a really creative way to get more for your money
- Don't make the "from" line too long and don't abbreviate unless it is a high recognition brand abbreviation
Use these "from" line tips to make sure you meet CAN-SPAM requirements and to connect to your recipients and obtain more interest and action!
Week two of SOUR email and it's more fun than ever. I'm traveling this week to connect with some of my girlfriends for a weekend in the mountains of Chattanooga, TN, so I thought I would focus today on some of the travel emails I receive and talk about how to best use the "From" address in your emails. It seems like it should be a basic and simple thing to consider and do well and is also regulated by CAN-SPAM laws. What can and should you do to leverage this important element of your email and one that pretty much everyone looks at in determining if they will ignore it, take action or something in between?
The CAN-SPAM act specifically requires that you must accurately identify the person or business who initiated the message. The specific language is:
- Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
You can use these elements to clearly articulate who you are and to make your from line more personal, relevant and beneficial to the receiving party. The ESPs typically allow you to customize these elements of your email.
So let's look at some to see where we have some SOUR eMail and who is doing well.
First from above, while the "from" name certainly does tell us it is from "Secret Escapes," is it relevant to the receiving party that it is "US?" Do I care that it came from the US part of Secret Escapes and will it make me behave differently by having that there? I venture to say "no."
The actual email of the sender is also not helpful. Do I want to see an email from "support?" Maybe, if this is a support email. Does "support" mean something in the email is about helping me with my order or trip? Given the subject of this email was "Sun or City" I don't know why receiving it from "support" is helpful or provides me with any insight as to what "support" I might get from the content of this email. Is it necessary to include "email." after the "@?" I know I am reading email, so it doesn't really tell me anything I don't already know. SOUR eMail. We can do better.
Several of the emails I looked at had these same type of issues with the email address including superfluous words that really didn't help clarify or improve the address or provide anything of value to the reader. Things like:
"tvtgmail@list.vacationstogo.com"
"postmaster@listserv.crystalcruises.com"
That really doesn't make me feel that these companies care about me. I am simply part of their "list" or "listserv" from their "postmaster" or even worse "tvtgmail." While I am sure these terms had some logic to the programmer or whomever was setting up these emails, I think we could do better. SOUR eMail.
There is also opportunity in these terms to provide some meaning to the message and use this most important content to connect or tell our readers something. Some of my travel sites did try to get a bit better than the above with things like:
"hhonors@h1.hiltonhonors.com"
So at least the words made sense. However given the "from" line before the actual email address had these same terms "Hillton Honors," they missed the opportunity to tell me more and simply repeated the same words in total three times in this space. The actual full line looked like this:
"Hilton HHonors <hhonors@h1.hiltonhonors.com>"
NOTE: Not really sure why they needed the "H" honors, but again, it must have meant something to someone in the creation process, although probably not the recipient.
Here's an interesting way that Hotwire used the "from" to say more even though they were still repetitive between the "from title" and the from within the email address:
"Hotwire Recommended Deals <hotwire@e.hotwire.com>"
They met the requirements of CAN-SPAM by telling people who they were, but they took the opportunity in the from line to reinforce the overall message of the email and tie the from to the subject line which was "3-start Chicago hotel from $90, Ft. Lauderdale rental cars from $23 plus more."
I also liked a few others who used the email address to help clarify the message intent:
"Airbnb <discover@airbnb.com"
"TripAdvisor <memberupdate@e.tripadvisor.com"
"Lake Leelenau RV Park <info@lakeleelenaurvpark.com"
Only one in my inbox this weekend however really made it personal by having the email address be from a real person:
"Steppes Travel <justin.wateridge@steppestravel.co.uk>"
Who would you rather receive an email from, "Justin" or "list?"
Today's Sample: 12 emails
Overall Grade: C
Top Performer: Steppes Travel - Grade A and Hotwire - Grade B
I decided because of the elements within these two they were both worthy of recognition - Steppes for using a real email address and Hotwire for creatively using the "from" to extend their subject line content.
Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:
- Don't include superfluous words and sub-elements within the email address - be specific and only include your root domain if possible
- Make it personal - send the email from a real person, not a box or technical term; if you aren't making it from a person, at least use the email address to tell them something as Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Lake Leelenau RV park did
- Leverage the "from" line to extend your subject line. This is a really creative way to get more for your money
- Don't make the "from" line too long and don't abbreviate unless it is a high recognition brand abbreviation
Thursday, October 6, 2016
TIMING AND FREQUENCY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - SOUR eMail - Oct 6, 2016
People who have worked with me have heard me talk about timing and frequency of emails many times. Some of the culprits that soured me the most were the book stores. What are they thinking? I don't know about you, but I am a prolific reader, both for pleasure and for work but I certainly don't go to the bookstore every day or even every week and sometimes not even every month. However, it would never fail that I would get emails from the bookstores that I subscribed to every single day.
Did they really think I had the time to read these or that I wanted to? With email open rates consistently hovering around 20 to 25% and click through rates far less than that, (2 to 3%), we can do better. What happened, which is what happens I suspect, to a lot of emails is they became disinter-mediated from my attention. I patently ignored them and ultimately unsubscribed from those emails as they were just filling up my inbox with little to no value. No more waste for me and no more money for them. SOUR eMail
I took a look at my email box over the last few days and here's what I see.
Loft
Between sender "Loft" and "Loft Card" I have received 7 emails as of 7 am this morning (I know I will receive one more today!) since October 3rd - that is 2 per day (not counting the "sponsored" email). Now, I love clothes, like I love to read, but do I really need 2 per day? I can't even tell you the last time I walked into their store or went to their website and I haven't been compelled by their subject lines (another topic coming) to open. Even, the "Free Shipping + 50% off everything" one is losing out on my attention because I get too many - SOUR eMail! Loft, you can do better.
I also wonder why they aren't coordinating their lists and emails to reduce both their workload and my irritation. Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) have automated resting rules that let you set a standard of how many emails you send a day, but if you are using different accounts or have different teams working on these programs, this is being overlooked. For all of you Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and marketing leaders, have you developed an email marketing strategy and systems to support this? It appears from my inbox that this is not happening with Loft and many others.
Side note: Look at the image below - this view is from a search in my inbox for Loft - you can see that Loft is not titling their documents, so the content I see includes "untitled document" as the description. SOUR eMail and a big missed opportunity to tell me something of value.
Timing and Frequency
Today's Sample: 291 emails
Overall Grade: D
Top Performer: Discount Contact Lens - Grade A-
Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:
- CMOs and marketers need to have a much more thoughtful and strategic approach to their email programs
- Database structure and where your data resides across business units and channels is critical to success
- We need to do a much better job of using the data we have to send fewer but more relevant emails: collect only the data you need, consolidate it into one database and leverage it to send the right message at the right time to the right person
- Use resting rules to automate the limits of emails being sent
- Make sure any landing pages you use are relevant to the reason you are sending the email and make it easy for the recipient to take the action you want
- Think about your product and frequency of purchase - what is the right communication cadence? Too many of us over communicate through email. Test a change to your cadence and measure against open rates, click throughs and ultimately ROI. Don't forget to consider the opportunity costs of the team members time executing unwanted emails and how they could be better deployed to higher value activities.
The goal of email marketing is to stay relevant, serve our customers and prospects needs when they want and need us and ultimately deliver revenue and ROI to the company. Email marketing is one of our highest ROI channels, but could it be even better? Stop SOUR eMail Let's get smarter about how we execute in this valuable channel before it becomes less so due to our bad practices.
Sources:
MailChimp
MainStreetROI
People who have worked with me have heard me talk about timing and frequency of emails many times. Some of the culprits that soured me the most were the book stores. What are they thinking? I don't know about you, but I am a prolific reader, both for pleasure and for work but I certainly don't go to the bookstore every day or even every week and sometimes not even every month. However, it would never fail that I would get emails from the bookstores that I subscribed to every single day.
Did they really think I had the time to read these or that I wanted to? With email open rates consistently hovering around 20 to 25% and click through rates far less than that, (2 to 3%), we can do better. What happened, which is what happens I suspect, to a lot of emails is they became disinter-mediated from my attention. I patently ignored them and ultimately unsubscribed from those emails as they were just filling up my inbox with little to no value. No more waste for me and no more money for them. SOUR eMail
I took a look at my email box over the last few days and here's what I see.
Loft
Between sender "Loft" and "Loft Card" I have received 7 emails as of 7 am this morning (I know I will receive one more today!) since October 3rd - that is 2 per day (not counting the "sponsored" email). Now, I love clothes, like I love to read, but do I really need 2 per day? I can't even tell you the last time I walked into their store or went to their website and I haven't been compelled by their subject lines (another topic coming) to open. Even, the "Free Shipping + 50% off everything" one is losing out on my attention because I get too many - SOUR eMail! Loft, you can do better.
I also wonder why they aren't coordinating their lists and emails to reduce both their workload and my irritation. Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) have automated resting rules that let you set a standard of how many emails you send a day, but if you are using different accounts or have different teams working on these programs, this is being overlooked. For all of you Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and marketing leaders, have you developed an email marketing strategy and systems to support this? It appears from my inbox that this is not happening with Loft and many others.
Side note: Look at the image below - this view is from a search in my inbox for Loft - you can see that Loft is not titling their documents, so the content I see includes "untitled document" as the description. SOUR eMail and a big missed opportunity to tell me something of value.
Not to just pick on Loft, here's a few more:
- Costco - 1 per day
- Secret Escape - 1 per day
- Rugs USA - every other day (a little better)
- White House, Black Market - 1 per day (plus one from WHBM Outlets - again I ask, CMOs', where's your strategy?)
- VRBO - so far only 1 in 4 days (Yes, I don't take a vacation all the time, not that I wouldn't like to!)
Discount Contact Lens
So who is doing better? There is a dearth of examples of someone doing well in frequency and timing, but I did have one this week that exemplifies the right way to make email relevant and impactful. Here's why:
- I know the brand and they know me
- They know that I am a customer (good connected databases) and it has been about 90 days since I ordered my last supply of contacts
- They aren't sending me emails in between my need period (i.e., running out of contacts)
- They make it personalized by including the exact brand I order
- They are making the title relevant, telling me they know I am running out
- They aren't leading with a deal, but are using it to make sure I convert and buy from them (I normally do check for others with a better deal when I'm ready to order - who doesn't like to save money if we can?)
- When I clicked, it sent me to a landing page with the offer and a reorder button (button could have been higher on the page)
They could be a bit better though:
- They use sponsored emails to find potentially new customers (but appears they likely aren't screening out their current customers from these, so perhaps a waste of money)
- When I clicked on the sponsored ad it just took me to their home page rather than a specific location to make it easy for me to respond and see the promotional details
Today's Sample: 291 emails
Overall Grade: D
Top Performer: Discount Contact Lens - Grade A-
Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:
- CMOs and marketers need to have a much more thoughtful and strategic approach to their email programs
- Database structure and where your data resides across business units and channels is critical to success
- We need to do a much better job of using the data we have to send fewer but more relevant emails: collect only the data you need, consolidate it into one database and leverage it to send the right message at the right time to the right person
- Use resting rules to automate the limits of emails being sent
- Make sure any landing pages you use are relevant to the reason you are sending the email and make it easy for the recipient to take the action you want
- Think about your product and frequency of purchase - what is the right communication cadence? Too many of us over communicate through email. Test a change to your cadence and measure against open rates, click throughs and ultimately ROI. Don't forget to consider the opportunity costs of the team members time executing unwanted emails and how they could be better deployed to higher value activities.
The goal of email marketing is to stay relevant, serve our customers and prospects needs when they want and need us and ultimately deliver revenue and ROI to the company. Email marketing is one of our highest ROI channels, but could it be even better? Stop SOUR eMail Let's get smarter about how we execute in this valuable channel before it becomes less so due to our bad practices.
Sources:
MailChimp
MainStreetROI
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