Checking In...Updates for Sour eMail February 16, 2018

Email Best Practices and More

Sorry for the long hiatus here.  Been busy with some new clients and work and while I continue to focus on email marketing, I've been branching out into other areas in support of my client work.

I've been working for about a year now with a software company that supplies operational software to RV, power sports, marine and auto dealerships.  Small but growing and focus right now is in the RV space, so I've been focusing my publishing efforts there. Here's some recent posts in one of the major online magazines and news engines for that industry which are relevant for Sour eMail.

December 2017 - Email Marketing Best Practices - 10 Tips for Success

February 2018 - Steps to the Sale - Tips to Improve Sales Conversion

I also have an upcoming speaking engagement in San Francisco on Customer Experience Mapping.  I'll post details of what that covers later, but here's details on that event.  

Stay tuned for more insights and information in the email and customer relationship area.

EMAIL BENCHMARKING - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - 9-19-2017

Email Benchmarks

I love email marketing and that's why I write this blog.  It is one of the most powerful and compelling tactics we have in our toolkit as marketers and for the most part we do a SOUR job of leveraging it to our and our prospect and customers benefit.

Recently I saw a report from Digital Doughnut on Email Benchmarking and I thought it was worthy of a conversation.  

This report was based on a survey of 1,500 marketers, so it is self-reported data on what people are doing, what the trends are and how satisfied they are with their providers.

Here's what I think are the salient insights.

1.  We are SLOW learners.  The first "blast" email was sent in 1978.  Yet today, only 30% of email marketers consider themselves "leaders."  Only 9% rate themselves as extremely mature!

2.  We are still weak at executing personalization.  I've written about this before and did another look at my inbox this week.  Out of 155 emails only 5 companies used my first name in the subject line. My bank didn't even use my name!  I'm pretty sure they know it!  SOUR.

The good news is that as marketers we recognize the need to be more personalized - this is the top trend according to this study.  It just saddens me that we are so slow to embrace this and even though it is considered a trend, only 26% of respondents rank it as most important.

The One-To-One Future was written by Peppers and Rogers in 1993!  That's almost 25 years ago.

Now I know that was visionary in its time and we really didn't have the database and technological capabilities to be as personalized as we can today.  Now, however, there is no excuse. Even the most basic ESPs allow you to do some level of personalization. We can and should be much better.

3.  What do you need to know to be better?  I have spoken and written about all of this in past posts and you can find detailed specifics and best practices by reviewing these.  Now is the time to become a leader and insure you are executing all of the below at the highest level.

One note of caution on the first bullet - while I agree that you should be sending more emails on a regular basis, that doesn't mean more to everyone.  Be sure that the volume of emails is increased only if using personalization, triggering and relevant communication.  Your emails should include content that is delivered at the right time and is truly based on what your prospect or customer needs at that point in their customer journey, not what you want.  If you deliver on their needs you will always win over the long term in your customers minds and hearts and for your business.

Or course, if you need help, contact me!

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 8-2-2017

Conference Speaking Gig

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak about CRM, email and marketing strategy at the Southeast Building Conference #SEBCVille last week at the beautiful Gaylord Palms Hotel near Disney World. My session was focused on customer centricity and how to be the driver rather than the passenger in the customer conversation.  If you would like a copy of my deck, please contact me.

While there, I was able to attend a couple of other sessions and it was good to hear others having the same conversation, even using similar analogies of cars.  I sat in on the session by Steve Coughran at Coltivar Group and I loved his description of how businesses continue to miss the opportunity to focus on customers. He called it the "Me Car."  In essence what he talked about is that in conversations, sales teams and even in marketing materials we tend to focus on the company rather than trying to listen to and understand the customers needs and presenting compelling content that they care about.  

As someone who started out my career on the market research side of marketing, I have always been a big proponent of using those tools to better understand prospects and customers.  Today we have even more! Here's some things to consider doing if you are not already.

Prospect surveys

Either on line or in person, don't let someone out of your sphere without trying to obtain some level of information and insight from them. People are usually happy to tell you things about themselves. Who doesn't like to talk about themselves?  You could do web based surveys to understand the things people like about your site, test different experiences and more.  See a few of these type tools here. Phone surveys are great for customer service insights.  How many times have you heard the message: "Please take a moment to answer a few questions about the call..?"

While at Centex Homes, I instituted a model center survey program that was part of the sign in process for visitors who came to the model homes.  At my session at SEBC, I talked about the insights we gained from this work.  Within only 18 months, across our Divisions we had over 8,000 completed surveys. We analyzed these to understand our segments needs in a home, their motivations for purchase, what influenced their visit and the features of the homes that were important to them.  These insights about the segments helped inform product design and features, sales team scripts, marketing activities and more.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Some think the concept of Net Promoter Score is dead, however, I disagree.  This metric is a good tracking tool over time to understand where you are and to benchmark your performance against industry norms and overall.  It helps you keep a pulse on the sentiment and combined with other survey insights can provide great content.  When I went to the Home Storage company I worked for several years ago, they had great creative and rudimentary understanding of their consumer targets, but hadn't done a deep dive or built a "culture of learning."  I started this CSAT study in my first 30 days and began a process that not only trended the company Net Promoter Score but provided insights that informed product, customer service and much more.  We disseminated the commentary from the surveys to the appropriate departments for continuous improvements in all these areas.  This led to the institution of additional insight collections specific to customer service, our business partner channels and other ad hoc insights that were needed to better understand our customers and prospects.

It was all about being customer centric and understanding the customer and making them core to the way we ran the business. Here's a slide I borrowed for my presentation that I think does a good job of describing at a high level what is needed to be customer centric.

Email Insights

This blog is about email, so I would be remiss in not mentioning how to use email to drive customer centricity.  Email communication should not be one way.  It is a great engagement tool and way to obtain insights in "sound bytes."  This can be helpful to continue learning throughout your relationship.  Also, while at Centex, we implemented a robust CRM communications program that was founded on the customer journey and the understanding that it was a long process.  Central to that was where our prospect was in the process.  We crafted unique communications flows based on this timing presenting content that was relevant for each phase.  We initially asked them where they were in their process and got them to tell us "how long until you plan to make a decision."  We continued to ask this question in every email communication, so if circumstances changed, they could let us know and we could move them to a different communications track.  We also used behavioral triggers to move people into different communications paths.  So for example, if someone asked a very specific question in response to an email, an online consultant was automatically notified and a personal phone call follow up was made.

Every touch point with your prospects and customers should be a learning opportunity.  Being open to the voice of the customer and building tools and processes to learn from those interactions will help you drive a business that matters and is responsive to the needs of your customers which naturally leads to profitability and success.

Your CRM then becomes the repository of this learning so that you maintain the "one truth" of the customer that provides you the insights and tools you need to grow a profitable business.

So, as I said in my presentation, here's the things that you need to drive the customer relationship and build your business:

- Customer focused leadership is key

- Build a learning culture and systems

- Focus on the entire journey, not just the end

- Tell stories and make emotional connections

- Measure and always be improving

Your Journey with the Customer Never Ends!

BUYERS JOURNEY CONTENT - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 7-5-2017

Happy 4th of July. Hope you all enjoyed this mid week holiday to celebrate our independence and what it means for all of us.

I enjoyed it with family and neighbors, but am now back to work and thinking about email content as it relates to the buyer journey.

I think about and spend a lot of time writing about experiential and lifestyle selling and how to better connect with consumers and use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and email specifically to maintain and develop those relationships over time.

Over the years, I have been involved with database marketing and have oftentimes had large databases to tap into to activate and drive incremental business. 

Customer Journey - Awareness and Consideration

Email is certainly a relationship tool, but I think many of us miss the mark in using it for awareness and consideration.  What do I mean by that?  Well, a negative example is a good way to start.  I like to pick on the home building industry for "sour" behaviors because they are an easy target!  They are a very sales and end of funnel focused and if you review just the subject lines of their emails, you can see that.  Here's a snapshot of several weeks of emails from one home builder.  As you can see, they are very focused on SELLING and not so much on understanding where a prospect is in their journey and what kind of things they might want to know.

Customer Journey - Early Funnel Content

I shared some thoughts a few posts ago about customer journey mapping and how this can help you understand the journey, but what I'd like to focus on today is how you discover and develop content specifically focused on the very earliest phases of the journey.

As part of the mapping process, it is important to ask yourself what kind of questions will people ask in the early phases of discovery and consideration.

Some questions that are relevant in this stage need to take you away from the sales process and this makes it hard to get to the right questions.  I've had many conversations with people about what content at this level means and often the responses I receive are still too focused lower in the funnel.

So let's look at some examples.

Home Building 

If I'm not really even thinking about buying a home, how might a builder get some consideration going?  

First, think about people and their homes.  Everyone lives in a home and at times may think about how that home might be better, more livable or something they don't like about it.  What kind of compelling content could help them?

Here's some topic ideas:

-  Top things I would change about my home if I could

-  How to get more out of less space

-  Popular colors for this season

Each of these has nothing to do with a specific builder or the later stages of the sales process.  However, if you had the opportunity to share this kind of content with a broader audience, either in your email database or not, would it be beneficial?  Would it help start the consideration process?  Would it make people more likely to contact you when they are further into the process?

I'd say yes, if done well.

Clothes and Fashions

This is a much shorter cycle time so the content can drive to purchase much faster.  Concepts are still the same however.  What things can get you into their consideration?  So perhaps content like:

-  Best summer swim suits

-  Summer colors that dazzle

-  Summer dress styles for every budget

Again, there is no "promotion" or offer to come in or visit a website and buy it now, but just something to put people into the thinking process of clothing and fashions for summer that could ultimately lead to a purchase from you!

You can come up with these kind of early funnel examples for virtually any industry and product.  The point is to sell but not sell, tap into an emotion and lifestyle and provide content that is of interest and useful.

And don't forget to ask them to raise their hand once they do engage with the content.  Even though people don't like pop-up windows, they do work to get people to sign up for more content like what you provided (and oh, by the way, maybe a special offer!).  It's all about the sale, its just how you get there and when that matters.  Early funnel content does matter.

Happy 4th and happy early funnel content development.

CJM AND EMAIL - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 5-5-17

Happy May Day.  It is a beautiful time of year in Michigan when all the trees and flowers are in bloom. This weekend starts the annual Tulip Time festival in Holland.  I missed it last year, so am looking forward to attending this year.  I never knew the variety and colors of tulips until I experienced this when I first arrived in Michigan three years ago.

But, that's not our topic today.  What I would like to cover today is CJM or Customer Journey Mapping and how it can inform your email strategy and campaigns.  In some ways I've been doing this for years through my segmentation and customer analytics work.  We just now call it something specific and have a practice and discipline around it. The whole concept is to understand the decision funnel or journey and the content needed during that journey by the prospect with the goal of:

-  Providing the right content at the right time
-  Moving people faster along the journey
-  Getting more people to take the next steps in the journey (with you!)

There has been a lot written about this and the process and there are plenty of examples and options on how to do it, but the most important elements in my mind are:

- Think about it from the customers perspective, not what you want
- Understand that the journey starts well before they know about you
- Leverage research and analytics to understand what the customers content needs really are and what is appropriate at each stage
- Develop compelling content and deliver it in a variety of ways (including email)
- Insure your KPIs are in place and aligned to the experience and phases
- Create separate journey maps if needed for different segments and target populations (where the content needs may be vastly different)

Email, then can become an important and engaging element along this journey and a great way for you to deliver and reinforce this content to the prospect.

Below is a Journey Map I created for my RV industry clients.  As you can see this maps out the phases and marketing steps and where email fits into the journey.  This can be relatively similar for other businesses and industries although the marketing tactics may be different.

The point is:  EMAIL can be leveraged along most of the journey.

The next phase then of the journey mapping process is to think about your content and what aligns to the phases and how you get it in front of people.  For example, in the early funnel phases, general White Papers or articles related to your topic may start consumers down the path.  So in our RV example, an article on the "TOP 10 National Parks to See This Summer" might be early funnel content.  A comparison and evaluation of RV brands and types would be later funnel content.

Sending that later funnel content to someone who hasn't even considered RVing would not be appropriate or productive.

TOP Tips for CJM and Email

-  Build segment specific Customer Journey Maps
-  Create compelling content for each phase of the journey
-  Complete a content audit to find the gaps you have in needed content
-  Develop compelling content and types (video, audio, imagery, copy)
-  USE EMAIL to reinforce and deliver on this content
-  TEST and MEASURE along the way

Need help with your CJM?  Contact CRM Concepts to get started today.

MAIL HOST METRICS - Anatomy of an eMail Inbox 4-10-2017

Wow, time sure flies!  Here it is already April and we are into the second quarter of the year.  I'm excited to be working for this month on a speaking engagement with the Atlanta Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators on the topic of eMail marketing.  As I prepare, I am able to use a lot of the content from this blog to create a primer on what are the important elements of your email marketing program.  If you like what you read here and are interested in having me present at your event, be sure to contact me.


As part of my regular reading and preparing for this event, I came across an article from Return Path that I think is worthy of repeating and discussing.  It is important because it provides some unique and incremental metrics to our marketing tool kit that have not been available until recently.

The report is based on "global consumer data consisting of over 17,000 commercial senders, 2.5 million consumer panelists, and over 5 billion commercial email messages sent to Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and AOL users between January 1 and December 31, 2016."

What will be interesting is if the mail hosts will make this kind of data commercially available specific to our programs going forward and at what cost.  But, for this analysis, they uncover some metrics that I think are worthy of thinking about.  The report also provides some benchmark data by industry so if you can get your hands on this data for your database, would be valuable to understand where you have problems and opportunities.

What do they mean and how can they help us as marketers?  Let's take a look one by one.

SPAM Placement Rate 

In essence, they are measuring what percentage of your emails land in the SPAM email box rather than the inbox.  Now, we have to presume that the emails included in the study were from legitimate emailers, all 17,000 of them.  So given that presumption, a bit scary to know that even for legitimate email marketers the 2016 average of emails landing in the SPAM box was 13% (a little worse than the 12% from 2015).

While it wasn't presented in this data, I have to wonder what the differences were between mail hosts and what things we could do.  They do speak to some areas as marketers that we can pay attention to like content, reputation and engagement, but the reality is we are at the mercy of the mail host. I know having worked with mail hosts on black list and other complaint and deliverability issues that this is a big endeavor and one that will require some dedicated resources in your agency or team to really impact.

Read Rate

The percentage of emails marked as "read."  This definition is a bit problematic for me as I don't know if that means read one line, word, paragraph or the full thing and how they can actually tell that I am reading something without eye tracking and intrusive monitoring systems.  So, on this one, I have more questions than answers on whether it is worthy of even pursuing as a legitimate metric that goes beyond Open Rates as they propose.  Generally their benchmark rates look fairly similar to Open Rates as well, so at a minimum if we all become comfortable that this is a valid metric, it would be more of a replacement metric than something new in my mind.

Deleted Before Reading Rate

This one causes me some concern too.  Again, I ask the question, how do you know I read that and how much.  I would like to understand more about this metric.

Reply Rate

This one sounds interesting.  For sure if someone is replying to our emails, then there clearly is engagement, so that is good.  However, many of you may be sending emails without the ability to reply to them.  I also don't see that they have delineated in the study if these emails were transactional or promotional.  This could have a very big impact on the reply rate.  For example if the email is to confirm an appointment, you would expect that a very large percentage would be replied to versus a sales promotion where the company really doesn't want you to reply, but wants you to click somewhere and go to their website or into a store.  So while this metric certainly could be of interest, I don't think email marketers are focused on garnering replies as a goal in their email marketing programs, so may have limited value. This is pretty evident by the minuscule averages for this metric (0.13% in 2016). After all, if they reply, then you need to be prepared to answer!

Forward Rate

This one like Reply Rate has tiny numbers with an average of 0.03% for 2016. However, what is interesting as a marketer is if we should think of this as a goal of email.  There was a time where there was lots of functionality around the concept of "forward to a friend" that you hardly see used at all these days.  Maybe that should tell us something such as perhaps it didn't really work, so why focus on it.  In the world of opportunity costs and trying to find the highest and best use of your talents and resources this seems like a non-event in my mind.

Complaint Rate

We already get this one and certainly want to be aware of it.  The numbers are low, but unless you are really upset, do you even bother?  I do think there could be some insights in knowing the why of this metric.  That would then allow us to figure out how to change.  Fortunately, it appears Return Path has already thought about this and has a white paper to help you out.

This is Not Spam Rate

Like complaint rate, this is something proactive and rare that people do in their inbox.  I know at times when I have done so, it was typically a transactional email or one that I was expecting, not something that was part of a marketing revenue driving campaign, so again, not so sure of the validity or one that I should care about as a marketer.

For me, while these are interesting metrics to think about, really only two of them are material in terms of understanding missed opportunities:  SPAM and Delete Before Reading.  Based on the 2016 average, that cuts over a quarter of our emails off the top right away that we know aren't getting read. On the other hand, the read rate and other metrics give us about another 25% that are getting some engagement, mostly positive, but some negative.  The questions are can we push those in the middle up the engagement curve, how much are we able to impact what goes into the SPAM box and how do we insure we manage our reputation proactively to improve performance.  Certainly working with the Mail Hosts on this is important, no matter what metrics are in play.

For your own copy of the full Return Path article, click here.

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!

EMAIL BLUNDERS - Anatomy of An Email Inbox 2-23-17

Hello again!

I've been errant in my posts as I have been out of the country and traveling back to Michigan from my few months in Florida.  I was fortunate to spend a few weeks with great friends in Panama where I saw some of my old haunts - I lived in Panama many years ago, so it was fun to go back in time.  Was able to dance with the natives as well as attend a Jazz Festival in the mountain town of Boquete.  It was an amazing and restful trip.  The city has grown immensely since I was there and is now an international gem with lots to see and do.  Highly recommend you add it to your bucket list!

BUT, time to get back to business.  I read a lot of what is published in the marketplace as a way to understand what everyone else is thinking and talking about as well as to validate the things that I continue to say in my posts.  I received an email this week that I thought was worthy of sharing and referring to as it aligns closely with my past posts.  

I used Marketo in my past role and have attended their conferences for several years.  They are a strong contender in the marketing automation space and a good tool.  Their recent post spoke of the Top Email Blunders, so I wanted to share this and expand upon their points, which are all valid and worthy of paying attention to. They completely align with my SOUR Email theme as the blunders they outline are all SOUR!  I continue to find it interesting that we are still even having these conversations in this day and age.  Good to see that I'm not the only one seeing these challenges that are simple to fix and should be standard strategic and tactical considerations for all email marketers.

Blunder #1 - Wrong Personalization

In my post on Jan 18th, I provided the example from Pet Meds where I ordered from them and had the product sent to my mom's home and care of her name, Jean.  I even sent them a message that they might have a database problem and that I'm not Jean.  Well guess what, they are still SOUR - my last communication from them is still saying "Jean" even though I tried to help them.

Tips:

-  Use presonalization ALWAYS
-  Insure what you know about your prospect or customer gets integrated into your systems and used
-  Audit your database and emails to make sure there are no oddities and fix them when you are made aware of  them

Blunder #2 - Irrelevant Information

I've spoken about this in numerous posts as well.  Many marketers continue to "spray and pray" with their email programs using no segmentation, sending the same message and not using the plethora of information they have in their CRMs and legacy systems to truly provide relevant content to their customers.  My series of posts reviewing the practices of Beall's, Pulte and the local Tampa TV station highlight some of the good and bad examples of this.  

Marketo makes the point that almost 75% of consumers say they are frustrated with content that doesn't match their interests! We can do better!

Tips:

-  Use CRM and other data sources to know your prospects and customers

-  Leverage the capabilities of your ESP or CRM to use what you know to deliver correct personalized experiences

-  Always evolve - your systems should be learning, dynamic programs that are reviewed and adjusted as you gain insights about your prospects and customers - your job is never done!

Blunder #3 - Failing to Proof Read Your Emails

Really?  I know we are all busy and trying to quickly get things accomplished, but let's get real.  How does it help your credibility as a professional marketer if your emails arrive with errors, broken links, or poor grammar.  One of the cautions offered to identify spam emails is poor grammar and spelling.  Do you want your brand to be put into this category?  At my last company, I was fortunate to have a high "C" (DISC profile) running my email program.  She was fanatical about testing and proofing our emails before they went out and this paid off in quality. 

Tips:

-  Invest in the time and teams to insure you proof and double proof your emails

-  Check them in multiple ISPs for formatting and rendering

-  Check all your links, segments and versions and match to the recipients information

Blunder #4 - Incorrect Cadence

While I was President of .Com Marketing, I did many seminars and training programs on email marketing and one of the topics I always covered was cadence.  One thing I said back then was to ASK your members what cadence they wanted.  Today, I see B2B marketers at times providing their members some choice in when they receive content:  daily or weekly for example, but very rarely do I see B2C marketers doing the same.  More often than not, B2C marketers over communicate, thus becoming irrelevant and ultimately driving away their prospects.

Tips:

-  Ask your members at what frequency they would like to receive communications from you and then comply

-  Rethink and test cadence to see what drives performance, minimizes unsubscribes and engages the consumer

-  Know your customer journey and cycle time and adjust communications to that

Glad to be back in the saddle.  Use these tips to improve your strategy and execution.  Want to learn more? I am available for speaking and seminars.  Here's some of my upcoming events:

March 1, 2017 - Women In Consulting Leaders Network - Managing The Customer Journey 

5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The Van's Restaurant

815 Belmont Avenue

Belmont, CA 94002

April 25, 2017 - International Association of Business Communicators - SOUR Email

11:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Location TBD

Atlanta, GA

July 27, 2017 - Southeast Builders Association - CRM Strategy - Leveraging Contact for Success

Time TBD

Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center

Kissimmee, FL

Here's a few more fun shots from my travels.