EMAIL SIGN UP - Week 3 Update Jan 3

EMAIL SIGN UP - Week 3 Update Jan 3

Happy New Year to all.  Hope the holidays treated you well and all the gifts and new year cheer are in order (or at least returned for something you want!).

We are now in about week 3 of my email sign up tracking.  I'm working my personas with Bealls to see what is happening.  More on that below.

Pulte

Pulte still hasn't sent me anything since my original sign up for my Yahoo account, so I guess they don't want to sell any houses to that person or they have some deliverability issues with Yahoo that aren''t being addressed - SOUR email either way!  Although I did see a sponsored ad - more SOUR email.  Not only are they not using the information they have, they are paying even more to put ads in front of me when they could be talking to me personally!

They have sent me two emails to my Gmail account, but both are generic with no personalization. One was for a design center open house.  It was mailed 12/14 for the event on 12/15.  They probably could have provided a bit more notice.  Wonder how that open house did.  The second was for new homes in Fish Hawk Ranch.  I believe I did look at this community, but not sure and my profile doesn't capture the information I provided them (which was homes in the $300k range not a specific community). This community starts at the $200s, so I'm not sure if they just didn't listen or if this is just a generic community email that everyone received.  I did go look at the community again and even clicked on the email to see if I can influence their future emails to me.

Bealls

Under my Yahoo account which is a Millennial male, I've been looking at hoodies and water shoes.

My Gmail persona is looking for sexy nightgowns and sheets for the bed.

Bealls continues to send me at least one email a day, mostly promotional with limited personalization.  I think this is excessive.  I'd suggest some testing of timing and frequency to see if reducing frequency can impact performance in terms of unsubscribes, click throughs and ultimately revenue.  Check out this test from July 2015 where the overall winner was a promotional email sent once a week versus twice.  The learnings:

- always test
- know your customers and prospects
- segment for differing behaviors

They are sending abandon cart emails, so that is good.  They also are using some level of site behavior in emails, but it is not working properly as when I clicked on an email within my Yahoo account, it showed me the nightgowns I looked at when logged in under my gmail account.  I also looked at the sheets after the nightgowns, so not sure why it defaulted to the first thing rather than the last, or better yet, how about showing me all the items I looked at.  It appears the system is using cookies rather than a CRM that knows more about me specifically (at that email address) rather than just watching the computer clicks.

WFLA

Still no emails at all to my Yahoo account - boo for you!

Gmail is receiving emails, also delivered to my promotional folder.  Funny thing is that I am getting the weather alerts - two per day.  I can't tell why I am getting two and the headlines seem to be different in each.  Didn't think weather would change that much and that I needed to be updated twice a day.  Not sure what is up with that.

Also, couldn't they just add "Sharon, here's your forecast?"  Wonder what impact that would have on their open rates?  I know I would feel better that they are addressing me personally.

It is also problematic to manage my content from their website.  Unlike most sites that you can log into, the "manage newsletters" link is in the middle of the page by the sign up instead of a universal log in at the top.  When I click on that, however it only shows me the newsletter I'm signed up for and doesn't allow me to edit it.  I can edit it from the emails I receive, but since I am not getting them in my Yahoo account, I don't have any way to see that.  Definitely SOUR email!

We should be MUCH smarter about how we run our email programs!  I'm just amazed that these companies aren't doing the simple things that are equating to lost revenue and opportunities. These are not small, unsophisticated organizations either and have the resources to do better.  Is it organizational structure, focus or lack of management vision and direction or some of all.  As a marketing leader, how much time and focus are you putting into the details of these programs?