WHY NOT EMAIL? - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 3/28/17

As a long term user of email marketing, it has always seemed like a non-issue to even consider that you would not do it, so I am always surprised and a bit dismayed when I come across businesses that are not including email as part of their marketing arsenal.

So what do the statistics say and why should you be using email?

There are lots of statistics about email marketing and here's some that might surprise you (or not if you are already investing in a email marketing):

- 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis
- 64% of people say they open the email because of the subject line
- 44% of recipients made at least one purchase based on a promotional email
- There are 4.6 billion email accounts
- Email ROI is one of the highest of all marketing tactics (Direct Marketing Association says it is 38 to 1, but I've seen rates even higher)
- For 89% of marketers email is the primary lead generation channel
- Email is the preferred source of business communication for 72% of consumers

There are lots more interesting email statistics you can find, but here's the big one and the subject of this post:

Email marketing strategies are used by 82 percent of B2B and B2C companies. 

That means that there are 18% of you out there who ARE NOT using email marketing - SOUR!

With all this compelling evidence, I have to wonder why.  So, I'm putting a quick poll out on my LinkedIn and twitter accounts to see if I can find out.

Let me know what you think too - if you are not or have limited investment in email marketing, what's keeping you from doing it?

SUBJECT LINE TESTING - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 3/16/2017

The subject line in your email is one of the main reasons people decide to click and engage with your content.  It can make the difference between great or mediocre email performance.

Email service providers (ESP) understand this and many of them build this functionality into their systems.

I have referenced one of my favorite best practices sites, behave.org, for testing before.  See some of their subject line testing results for ideas on things you can test.  Marketers are seeing small and large impacts from these tests, but done well, some have seen more than double the open rates.  So, what does that mean in raw numbers and potential revenue?  Look at the simple example below.  This spreadsheet allows you to input your own metrics and see the revenue impact possible with a subject line test.  Want this spreadsheet?  Request Now.

So how do you do subject line testing?  As I said above, most of the large ESPs have this functionality already built in.  We will use MailChimp as an example to show the process steps.

1.  Create a New Campaign

2.  From the drop down, pick A/B Testing as your campaign type

3.  Pick your list, either an existing one or create a new one

4.  Select subject line as the type of test you would like to do (here and in other ESPs you can select how many subject lines to test, however just be careful on doing too many at once unless you have a very large list since the more you split it, the more difficult to obtain valid results).  MailChimp actually recommends a minimum of 5,000 per test cell

5. Select the percentage split of how many of the recipients will receive each version of the subject line.  This will depend on how many subject lines you have, so for two split 50/50, for 3, 33/33/33, etc. 

6.  Select how long before you declare a winner.  You can select hours or days.  Your selection will depend on the size of your list.  If your list is small, you may want to leave a longer time to allow enough results to come in to have a valid sample

7.  Select the metric you are measuring.  For subject line testing, it will typically be the open rate, but you could select something else if you have full funnel metrics

8.  ALWAYS remember to personalize with the first name if you have it unless this is your test

9.  Enter in your test subject lines, from and what metrics you want to track

10. Select and populate your email content and design

11. Test and send by following the prompts

12. Review your results and add to your ongoing learning

While this is only one walk-through in how to do a subject line test, other systems may work differently including the ability to embed a subject line test as part of normal sends.  This typically works by allowing you to set 10-20% of your list to run through the test in the first wave of sending, then after reading those results, continue with the full list send based on the winning subject line.

Even if your system doesn't have robust, built in subject line testing, you can do it yourself by creating two campaigns with everything the same except the subject line.  While this is a bit more work and can be a bit problematic from a sending standpoint, it still provides you the ability to test and learn how subject lines can improve your bottom line.

Today's Tips:

-  Include subject line testing as a normal part of your email program

-  As always, use personalization

-  Read results, accumulate your learnings and continue to improve!

COMMUNICATION TIMELINES - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - 3/6/17

How long should we communicate with our prospects?

I had the opportunity to speak at a Women in Consulting event in San Francisco last week. Our topic was Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the customer journey, but of course email marketing came up as a part of the discussion.

We talked about what kind of emails these business consultants were deploying for their prospects and customers and what they should be doing in the context of building a strong customer relationship and improving conversion rates throughout the decision funnel.

The specific question that came up was how long should they continue the conversation.  

If you put yourself in the shoes of your customers, think about why they signed up in the first place and what you had to say that meant something to them.  Couch this in the context of their journey in a relationship with you and what information is relevant at what point in that journey.

Also important in the process is determining what you want to get out of the relationship. For it to be successful, there needs to be value on both sides of the equation.  Consider these business goals:

-  To make a connection with your prospects and build a long term relationship
-  To provide the right content at the right point in the customer journey
-  To stay top of mind
-  To improve conversions through the journey (and improve ROI and the bottom line for your business).

So, back to the question of how long to communicate.  As a marketer, we build brand and awareness, drive consideration and conversion.  These are the classic decision funnel steps.  We invest sometimes millions of dollars to do this and our goal should be to give the target customers compelling reasons to "raise their hand" as early in this decision process as possible.  This is important because it allows you to:

- Take prospects out of the market
-  Influence the conversation at an early stage
-  Become a trusted expert and partner in the decision
-  Improve conversions over both the short and long term.

Depending on your product, the buying cycle could be long or short and even if it is a short cycle commodity or necessity product, you still want them to come back for repeat purchases.

If you are not top of mind and there when that trigger point happens that pushes them to the next phase in their decision process or even circles them back to an earlier stage, you will miss the opportunity for the continued conversation and conversion.

Over the past 20 years, I have mostly worked with long decision cycle consumer products.  The businesses spent millions of dollars to build large databases of prospects and often only 1-2% actually purchased in any one period.  Does that mean there is no hope for conversion over the short term? Certainly if you stop communicating, your chances for making this happen are less likely, but what if you maintain a relevant conversation over a long time?

In working with sales teams, they often focus on immediate prospects and complete their follow up over weeks or perhaps sometimes months if they are good.  Still many of those prospects don't convert.  The sales person goes on to richer opportunities and the prospect languishes in the database. Oftentimes they are still actively or passively in the market, but just not yet ready to take the next step.  With CRM and marketing automation systems, we as marketers can impact what happens.  

I have built and replicated tests in multiple industries where simply by developing an ongoing long term communications strategy, I have consistently seen 20-25% improvements in sales from these prospect databases.  Consider a known prospect akin to a nugget of gold.  Would you throw that away and ignore it?  Would it lose value to you?  Obviously, the answer is "no." 

The answer to our question then at the start this post is simple.  I often told my teams: continue to communicate with a prospect until they buy, die or unsubscribe!  And even when they buy, you continue to communicate since then you have the strongest relationship and should endeavor to continue it. Certainly, there is a lot more to how this happens and when, but some simple best practices can get you started.

Best Practices for Long Term Communications

-  Know as much as you can about your prospects and use it
-  Always personalize your communications
-  Create a two-way conversation that helps you learn more
-  Use behavioral data to further understand your prospects
-  Create simple segments, learn from them and build them over time
-  Build a customer journey map and content needs at each stage to drive the conversation
-  Don't quit communicating unless you are asked to do so
-  Treat every known prospect as the valuable gold nugget that it is and be sure you realize the value from the investment you made in it!

If you follow these best practices for customer communication, you will not be a SOUR emailer!