WHY DON'T MARKETERS LISTEN - Anatomy of an Email Inbox 8-31-2017

I've been working on my next presentation for the Club Industry Show in Chicago in early October. This is the National conference for the Health Club industry.  Not one I have focused on before for emails, so have been hitting websites and seeing what is happening in this space.  
In my past blogs I have spoken much about the customer journey and the content needed throughout the funnel, but unfortunately, a large portion of marketers across many industries continue to use email to only deliver messaging at the end of the funnel.  Even if the funnel is short, there is opportunity to deliver more value and be less promotional.  This helps build trust and consideration early in the relationship and primes action later.  This is a long term strategy, not short term sales and ROI focused.

As part of my research, I signed up on a handful of fitness sites to see what they would do and how they would communicate with me.  Big surprise, they didn't try to "court" me, they went straight for the "marriage" trying to get me in their door with a free pass. And even when they sent me their "free pass" they didn't try to inform me.  This would have been a great opportunity to add some valuable content about health and fitness to reinforce why I should be going into their club. Instead, this was all about operations and getting "married" before I even am sure I like them!

Another thing I speak a lot about is customer centricity and the importance of listening to our customers.  That is how you win, both short and long term.

If there isn't enough evidence out there, here's a great statistic from an article this week in AdWeek.

40% of Consumers Want Emails From Brands to Be Less Promotional and More Informative

In spite of this, still 61% prefer email (as compared to other mediums such as direct mail) as their method for receiving promotions from brands.  But, can't we find a blend of both?

So why don't we listen?  Here's my thoughts.

1. Its Easier to create promotional messages and they can be directly tied to revenue.  Marketers still have to serve their finance and leadership masters.  Their job is to drive revenue and reduce costs/improve profits.  It takes enlightened leadership and progressive and sometimes brave marketers who can tell the story of why and how early journey content and emails drive success both long and short term.  Hopefully the above statistic can help tell that story.

2.  They don't know what content they need or don't have it. Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) may seem like an activity that isn't needed or too time consuming or difficult to do.  The reality is this is a strategic tool that will help you focus on what is important:  the right customers, their motivations and what they need to move into and through your funnel.  Don't short change your strategy and execution by missing this vital step.

3.  Email marketing isn't strategic enough.  Often these team members are technical, creative and executing members of the team. There isn't enough conversation about strategies around email marketing within the organization.  CMOs and marketing heads need to outline the overarching strategy for email and direct these team members to deliver more than just the same old promotional content. You need to provide resources and insist on CJMs for your core segments and content procurement that meets customers needs.

So the net is, we don't listen - SOUR because we are failing at:

- Being team leaders and visionaries

- Championing strategy and insights about the customers needs

- Being customer centric in all things

- LISTENING!

Want help with CJM, email strategy or more, contact me.  And, if you are in the health care industry, look for me Oct 6th in Chicago at the Club Industry Show where I will be speaking more about "Turning SOUR Email into Sweet Marketing Success."

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.

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!

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.

EMAIL STRATEGY for BUILDERS Jan 11

EMAIL STRATEGY for BUILDERS Jan 11

I'm moving on to a topic that is relevant to my week this week.  I had the opportunity to spend some time at the National Association of Builders International Builders Show (NAHB-IBS) in Orlando this week. This is the biggest conference for builders where you can find virtually everything related to building and companies who support builders and the construction industry.

There are lots of booths for products like balconies and patios, kitchen and bath, estimating and production and lots more. There are also marketing providers and lots of content sessions for education and growth.  There is content for 55+ building, custom builders, design, multi-family and lots more.

And there were some marketing topics like "A Builders Guide to Killer Content," "Analytics for Builders...," and "Extreme Makeover Live:  Social Media."  However, there were no sessions on email marketing or strategy and how to use this simple tool to drive sales.  There were a few sessions that danced around email like "The Builder Sales Machine:  Focus on Leads to Capture and Convert More Sales," but email strategy does not seem to be top of mind.

The Direct Marketing Association says the ROI of email marketing is 38 to 1 and others say it is even higher.  I found a good article from Chad White that explains why marketers tend to under invest in this proven tactic.  So while not good news, it appears the building industry is not alone in the lack of focus and investment in email marketing and strategy.

So why is the building industry so SOUR on email marketing?  I find it interesting how little builders even focus on this important tool.  Many of them appear to have no strategy and simply place a "contact us" often hidden or not strategically placed with no compelling reason for people to engage.  I spoke of some of the challenges of the Pulte sign up and communication that I've been tracking in recent weeks and am not impressed.  While the volume of emails (in the account I am actually receiving them) is not overwhelming, there appears to be no personalization and all the communications are about them and not me.

So on my quest to better understand this, I have a meeting next week with a member of the local home building community and I will be asking her for thoughts.  I will provide an update after that and will also be compiling a questionnaire and checklist of email marketing practices to see if we can get to the answer and start helping this community become SWEET, not SOUR email marketers.

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?

EMAIL SIGN UP - Anatomy of an Email Inbox Dec 13

EMAIL SIGN UP - Anatomy of an Email Inbox Dec 13

I have talked in this blog about email strategy and why businesses send emails and how they make them timely and relevant.  There's plenty of evidence about the value of email marketing and the ROI.  I often wonder however, if we did it really well, how much better could it be. eMarketer's 2016 survey found that on average email delivers 122% ROI - in the top 5 revenue driving channels.  That's good and well above the others in the study.  I think we can do lots better.

So today, I'm picking three companies I am currently not subscribed to and signing up for their emails using two different email addresses.  The goal will be to see how well they get to know me and what they use to build the relationship with the two different mes.  This will be a series of blog posts over the coming weeks and months so that we can watch what transpires and what we can learn.

I am purposely picking marketers who I think will be a mix of more or less sophisticated in this area to show the contrasts and oppoortunities.

Pulte Homes - Tampa - I am establishing my winter home in the Tampa area, so will be looking at what area I want to live in and what the properties are that might meet my needs.

WFLA - Tampa - Our local NBC TV affiliate.  I will want to know more about what is going in my local comunity and things I can do for the winter, so these emails from WFLA to these personas will help me stay in tuned with my new community.  I am hoping that they will be watching my behaviors as I visit the site and consume content and use this to send me relevant emails.

Bealls Department Store - New location and home mean I need more stuff.

Today we will begin with just the initial sign up.

Pulte

I started with a search for "new homes Tampa."  Didn't find them in paid listings on the first page, but they did make it to the last organic listing on page one.  So I clicked on their listing. This led me to the home page which had a nice lifestyle photo, description of what they deliver and map of where their communities are.  Other than a small "envelope" icon for "contact us," there was no call to action for signing up or getting information, so I clicked the envelope.  That did lead me to a page with options for signing up:  financing, information, homeowner questions and repairs.  I'm clicking on "information."  This led me to a form that is clearly a national form.  I'm going to sign up with two slightly different addresses and emails in Tampa area.  I left a brief message of the price range of homes I am looking for and that I only want emails at this point.  So after I hit enter, which I thought meant I was signing up, I now went to a second screen that told me to create an account and why I should:

- save design ideas and inspiration to your favorite
- create a design board with favorite items
- save home models you love
- follow Pulte communities and get notified about opening

Upon creating my account, there was another page of benefits.  My initial impression is that this all sounds good, so why are you hiding it behind a tiny icon at the top of the page and taking several steps to tell me why I should engage with you. And, by the way, the benefits were redundant between the pages.  Did you think I didn't get it the first time? SOUR?

My second sign up (Gmail) used a more specific search for Pulte specifically and a different first and last name and email address (so I can distinguish future personalizations).  I'm also asking for slightly higher priced homes (in the $300's).

Slightly better presence with a paid and organic listing when I searched for "Pulte homes Tampa."

WFLA

Searching on Tampa TV station, I quickly found the local NBC affiliate - WFLA.  The organic listing took me to a very busy home page.  This is typical of most media sites, but I guess they think they have to serve everyone, so lots to consume.

There were a few engagement calls to action within the content including a sign up for weather newsletter and a free download to stay connected on the go.  I presume that was for their app.  The contact us link in the footer was more for a specific department or question.

I signed up for the weather newsletter with my two personas.  This was a double opt-in, so I have to go verify my sign up in my email address.  Good news, my gmail verification showed up quickly.  Still waiting to see something in my yahoo mail account and it isn't in the spam folder either.  SOUR when you lose someone before you even have them!  Once I confirmed my email through my gmail account, there was a second step to "confirm humanity" and insure I wasn't a robot.  Now there are two funnel steps to stop me from getting subscribed.  While I get that companies want valid email addresses and real people, can we find a better way? At least combine the steps to reduce friction.

Another interesting thing happened with WFLA.  Under the sign up was a "manage subscriptions" option, so I clicked on that.  This led me to a page to tell them more about me and sign up for a whole host of other emails (8 in total), none of which they had yet to merchandise or tell me about (at least from the home page).  They also asked me to pick my delivery method (html or txt).  I'm going to sign up for breaking news from this account and 8 pm news update from the other (that is if my email validation ever shows up - no sign of it yet).  Interesting too is they have a "breaking weather" and "daily weather" list - who thought of that?  Could these be combined?  They will definitely be keeping their content team busy!

Bealls

Started here with my standard generic search and did find Bealls in the organic listings mid-page.  The listing took me to a Tampa store locator page given I searched in a particular area, so that was anticipating I was looking for a specific location.

They did have an email sign up about mid-way down the page with a quick sentence telling me why I should sign up and minimizing the initial ask to just my email address.  I'm signing up with both emails.  Upon sign up, they told me what to expect and how to add them to my safe senders list so I don't miss out on the deals.  Generally pretty good.  The question will be how will they try to get to know me better and communicate differently.  Again, I will visit their site under the different personas to see how well they get to know me and build that relationship.

None of the three email marketers in our experiment specifically included opt-in permissions in compliance with standard CAN-SPAM email opt-in requirements.  WFLA did offer a privacy link which seems not to work as it doesn't go anywhere when I click on it - so definitely SOUR.

More news next week when we see what kind of communications I am receiving and how specific these are as I begin to interact with the sites in different ways.

Still no WFLA validation in my Yahoo account now either, so I guess I'm just not going to see any news from them.  Wonder if anyone at WFLA even realizes this is happening!  SOUR!

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

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

UNSUBSCRIBES - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - SOUR eMail Oct 26, 2016

The unsubscribe process is another one of those elements of email marketing that just makes me SOUR!  Too many marketers do not take into consideration my desire to leave them and the difficulty of doing so can sometimes be infuriating.

First, the law actually prescribes how unsubscribes should work.  Here's the exact wording:

"You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request."

While this allows for some latitude, it is clear that the actions I need to take should be limited and brief.

Some do this extremely well and even brand it via the "SafeUnsubscribe" that Constant Contact users experience.

Others bury it in very small type or with other options to make it harder for you to find.  While I get that they don't want you to leave, I would suggest they do a better job with what they send.  Then I wouldn't be tempted to want to quit receiving these emails.  I'm leaving these the way they were in my email to demonstrate how small they really are.

It also makes me SOUR when they make me go to a web page and then I have to re-enter my email address.  Hello!  I just came from an email you sent me and dynamic programming allows you to easily pass the email address to the page, or even better just say thank you for unsubscribing and be done with it.  You have already made me unhappy to the point of not wanting to hear from you.  Do you really think it helps to make it hard for me to say good bye?  What brand value does that drive?

So here's a summary of 10 of the emails in my inbox today and what is good and bad.

Anything in Stained Glass - seems that smaller companies using Constant Contact have it made as they benefit from the platforms method for unsubscribing.  The unsubscribe is just one click and the platform thereafter insures you don't receive emails without the sender even having to think about it, so kind of idiot-proof.  Congratulations to Constant Contact!

World Market - unsubscribe was buried in the footer and very small.  They did remember who I was so I didn't have to re-enter my email address, but they did make me check and uncheck preference boxes to keep getting some, all or none of what they had to send.  While this isn't necessarily bad, it should be part of a preference center and not combined with the simple act of unsubscribing.  Remember once I get to this step, I'm not happy - don't make it harder for me.

Eventful - they make me read to figure out where I even need to click to unsubscribe (the link is "click here" within a sentence that says "to unsubscribe from other deals...")  Once I click, they make me tell them again:  "are you sure you want to unsubscribe?"  Really?  I'm checking yes just because you made me even more SOUR.

Hampton Inn by Hilton - the unsubscribe link is one of several options.  Once I clicked, they gave me the option of what I was unsubscribing to - just these special offers or all of Hilton communications.  They also populated my email address for me - see I knew it could be done!  They also tell you how long it will take - good - by law, they have 10 days to discontinue sending you emails.

Coffeeforless.com - grouped with other options of "preferences" and "forward to a friend."  Once I clicked, I did have to reconfirm with a second click and they also gave me the option of changing my preferences with another link.

Hotwire - by the way, I love these guys and always use them for personal travel for hotels and cars.  Always get good deals where I want and I like getting to try hotels I might not otherwise find.  Staying at the Gwen in Chicago over Thanksgiving which I booked through them.  So, even though I won't unsubscribe, they again have the unsubscribe grouped with other options and are a bit busy once I click combining preference changes with the unsubscribe process.  They try to be a bit subtle and dray your eyes away from the "unsubscribe all" in an attempt to keep you on the list.

First America Home Warranty - I included this one here to make the distinction between transactional and promotional emails.  I received this email in response to a service request I placed for my home. Transactional emails do not require unsubscribe options and this one did not have one.  While some might include as a courtesy, it is not required via the CAN-SPAM law.

Younkers - the emailer I put at the top of my SOUR list.  They provide the unsubscribe option within a long list of choices, almost purposely to hide it from me. On the landing page, they bury the unsubscribe in a preference center, long form that asks if I want to change my frequency (actually good), change my email address (not sure why that is there) or select from a long list of content types that might be in my emails (also good, although I don't have any evidence that they are using this).  But most SOUR - I have actually unsubscribed from their emails many times over the past several MONTHS and they still keep sending me emails.  I did it again today, so after I scrolled down through all those choices and clicked to unsubscribe, they added insult to injury by asking me why.  I ask - if you were monitoring your database and had a good handle on your email statistics, wouldn't you know what was working or not?  Actually, I would really like to help these guys and even sent a LinkedIn message to their CMO.  Sorry you aren't listening!

CMO.com (Adobe) - I don't put many B2B email samples in my posts, and this is part of future conversations as in general I think B2B marketers do a better job at email marketing.  One click from the unsubscribe link at the bottom and I was done.  They told me who I was receiving the email from and once I clicked, I was done - no re-typing my email address, no questions, no preferences, just done.  Now I didn't really want to do that, so now I will go back in and resubscribe, but it should be really that simple.  The only improvement would be a link on the confirmation page to re-subscribe. 

CNN Breaking News - I'm surprised that an organization like CNN is doing such a poor job. Now, I like getting my breaking news emails, but the unsubscribe mechanism is just SOUR.  They actually don't include a link but only a long URL that I have to cut and paste into my browser.  When I do so, they make me type in my email address to unsubscribe.  All I can say is "wow." 

Unsubscribes

Today's Sample: 10 emails
Overall Grade: C
Top Performer:  Anything in Stained Glass (Constant Contact) and CMO.com (Adobe) - Grade A

My rating is based on the unsubscribe process itself and the ease of unsubscribing.  If you are doing a great job of email marketing, making your messages relevant, timely and of interest, very few of your subscribers will want to go here.  If they do, then you should happily and easily let them go and look at your practices to see how you can improve.

Today's Tips to Improve Your Inbox Anatomy and not be a SOUR eMailer:

-  Make your unsubscribe as simple and easy as possible with only one click required.
-  Allow people to manage email preferences for type of content and frequency of emails, but keep that as a separate option in a preference center.  AND make sure if you ask for this that you use it to make their emails more personalized.
-  Don't bury the unsubscribe with other options and in long sentences.  However, do place "preferences" in close proximity so they can see that they can change if they don't want to be completely gone.
-  Make the word "unsubscribe" be the link, not "click here" and certainly not a URL.
-  Use a preference center to allow people to select what they want and when; make this part of the subscription process (future post topic).
-  Make sure you abide by the law and honor the unsubscribe request within 10 days.  There are financial implications of not doing so - you can be fined up to $16,000 for every infraction.
- Don't ask for reasons why they unsubscribe - use your data to figure that out.
- On the unsubscribe landing page, thank them, let them know how they can opt back in (with a link directly there) if they want and how long it will take for the changes to take effect.

Use these unsubscribe process tips to make sure you meet CAN-SPAM requirements and to manage a process that is required but undesirable.  Don't be a SOUR emailer and you will minimize these clicks.

TOO MUCH EMAIL? - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - SOUR eMail Oct 18, 2016

As I mentioned last week, I took a short vacation over the weekend so for the most part was away from my email with any regularity.  Now that I have returned, I took a look at my inbox and it got me to thinking about the topic I covered two weeks ago related to timing and frequency.

So, I asked myself and I ask you, how much email is too much for you?  In that time frame from 10/10 through 10/17, I received 525 emails.  That equates to 75 emails a day.  Given this is a personal account, it seems like a lot.  Here's some mind blowing statistics:

-  205 BILLION emails are sent a day (as of 2015)
-  average U.S. desktop open rate is 18%
-  42% of  Americans check their email in the bathroom

We have a love affair with our email almost as strong as that with our phone and given that 66% of emails are opened on a mobile device, that makes sense.

Given all this, are we getting too much email?  My vote is yes.  Just in my one post a few weeks ago, I identified some of the egregious uses of email marketing and where people are just doing "spray and pray" - something that should be long gone in this day of predictive analytics, big data and dynamic targeting.

Why do marketers send too much email?  I can think of all kinds of reasons like lack of strategy and focus, lack of talent, lack of tools and more.  But, we can do better.

What I find interesting is the differences between industry and genre of email.  Here's a good summary of email statistics by industry.

This summary tells you something about the psyche of email recipients and perhaps why we continue to send too many emails.

Daily deal emails have the lowest open rates at 13.87%, but also the lowest unsubscribe rates.  We don't want to miss a deal even when we don't engage.  How can we deliver fewer emails while still serving the consumers need for a deal?  We know that when people are ready to transact, they will first search for a "deal."  Just check your brand name in a search with the word "coupon" or "deal," or look at the sites that make their living offering deals like ebates or coupons.com to name a few.  We send thousands and thousands of emails with deals, take a look at just a few from my inbox this week.

These all came within the past week without regard to my purchasing history:  what I purchase, when I am likely to purchase again or what I might purchase.   Does the deal drive me to take action?  While it might if I had already been thinking of purchasing, it is more likely the trigger is something else.  What if instead of receiving these unwanted emails that are not in alignment with my need for the product or a deal, I could get the deal when I am in the transaction process?    Would that increase my conversion during that time?  Would that keep me on the site and not distracted by other searches to find that deal?  How would I feel about the company if they made it easier for me to purchase with a discount when I want to purchase?

I don't propose to have all the answers, but it does seem to me that as marketers we should be asking these questions and finding better ways than sending millions of unwanted emails.

I would like to see my inbox filled with 20 highly relevant and compelling emails than the 75 I averaged this week of which very few did I open and even fewer did I take action on.

We can do better.  SOUR eMail can and should stop.  What are you doing to improve your email performance?  What is good performance for you?  Is it getting better each week, month and year?  What are the right metrics to even use?

We will answer some of these questions in our next post on email metrics and what you should be using to measure your success and how to continue to improve and evolve your email marketing.