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
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
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
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