14 Things to Completely Rethink About Email Marketing in 2011

partners & clients

Email Service Providers Clients

WHY WE NEED TO RETHINK EMAIL MARKETING

the impact of facebook | social +/= mobile

People on Facebook

• More than 500 million active users

• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

• Average user has 130 friends

• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Mobile Usage of Facebook

• There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

Source: Facebook | Experian Hitwise Report

where people spend their time / read their email

• Ranking of Webmail Visits: (1) Yahoo! Mail, (2) Gmail, (3) Windows Live Mail, (4) AOL Mail

• “Despite such declines … email remains one of the most popular activities on the web, reaching more than 70 percent of the U.S online population each month*.”

1

2

3

4

Sources: Experian Hitwise Report | *comScore

Webmail Usage Down Mobile Email Usage Way Up

Email Usage on Mobile

Source: Nielsen

email marketing then and now

WHAT HAS CHANGED:

• The new reality is that we must assess how social & mobile are influencing our existing methods of engagement with our customers. As a result, we must adjust our email marketing practices

• Using email as a broadcast/reach medium still happens but short-changes the channel’s full potential to learn and optimize over time

WHAT HASN’T CHANGED

• Email communications powered by customer data is a great way to nurture customer relationships and reciprocate value for customers’ permission & loyalty

• Permission, relevance & reciprocity are the three key ingredients that drive success in email campaigns.

• If we say that by opting in people get access to special/exclusive deals, but never get anything exclusive, then there is no value to our customers

• If I opt in for Gap email, Gap gives me 40% off an item, I give them $30 for something that cost $3 to make, it’s a WIN-WIN

RETHINKING 14 FACETS OF EMAIL MARKETING

“best-practices” defined“Methods and techniques that have consistently shown results superior than those achieved with other means, and which are used as benchmarks to strive for. There is, however, no practice that is best for everyone or in every situation, and no best practice remains best for very long as people keep on finding better ways of doing things.”

- BusinessDictionary.com

“The idea is that with proper processes, checks, and testing, a desired outcome can be delivered more effectively with fewer problems and unforeseen complications.”

- Wikipedia

1. pay closer attention to your subject lines

• BEST PRACTICE:

• 30-40 Characters

• Include your Company Name

• Descriptive of the contents of your email

• Primary cue the recipient sees when considering whether to even bother opening your email

• Factors into whether the email gets flagged as spam by firewalls/filters

• Gmail Priority Inbox takes its cues from a variety of behaviors that include which emails are opened or replied to.

TEST IT!

2. personalize your subject line

• Assuming you have a First Name associated with each email address, simply inserting a merge field in the subject line makes it feel like you intentionally sent the email to the right person

TEST IT!

3. add preview text to your design

• BEST PRACTICE: Preview text consists of the first HTML text that email software or webmail environments detect in any email.

• Can be an impactful complement to the subject line in order to convince the reader that your email is worth opening

• Counteracts impact of Priority Inbox (which prioritizes emails on a variety of behaviors that include emails opened/replied to)

• Ignores any images that are present; Most commonly placed at the very top of the email

• Great way to include a text link to your primary CTA that will work even if images are off.

example of subject line + preview text (Gmail)

Why shorter is sweeter

ExampleSubject

LinePreview Text

Gmail viewed @1280 x 1024 up to 86

characters

displayed

116-124 characters minus # of characters in subject line

Gmail viewed @1440 x 900

145 characters minus # of characters in subject line

  Preview TextYahoo (Web)  

Gmail (Web) x

Hotmail (Web)  

AOL (Web)  

Outlook 2007 x

iPhone x

Android  

Blackberry  

TEST IT!

subject lines & preview text (iPhone)

Another reason to rethink how long your subject lines are

and what appears as your preview text.

Sample Scenario

Visible Subject Line Visible Preview Text

iPhone30-35 characters

(incl. spaces; depending on letter width)

up to ~115 characters (incl. spaces; depending

on letter width)

4. identify your primary call-to-action

• BEST PRACTICE: Draw the reader’s eyes to the desired action you want them to take which, very often, is a button and keep it above the ‘fold’

• Example: Modified to work in both Outlook and mobile environments

• Primary CTA: Download the UPS Mobile App

TEST IT!

5. balance your image/text ratio

• BEST PRACTICE: 50% image, 50% text

• CONTENT: If your big message delivery is embedded in an image, and images are off, your message will never arrive at it’s intended destination

• LINKS: Make sure that your primary call-to-actions are presented as both buttons AND HTML text links so that the recipient can take

  Images Off by DefaultYahoo (Web)

Gmail (Web) x

Hotmail (Web) x

AOL (Web)  

Outlook 2007 x

iPhone  

Android  x

Blackberry x

Subject Line: Visit Sonny's for Big Deals for the Big Game

Subject Line: Streamline Your Shipping with UPS

Subject Line: Visit Sonny's for Big Deals for the Big Game

Subject Line: Streamline Your Shipping with UPS

Subject Line:Get Your Smokin' Hot Deal from Sonny's

33% Open

23% Click

TEST IT!

6. analyze past campaigns by days/time of send

• BEST PRACTICE:

• More emails are opened on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays;

• Do not send on Mondays, Fridays or weekends if you can avoid it.

• Every business and every campaign has different goals so test different days

• Theory to test: More people will open, click and purchase/donate something online if you send the email

• During lunch hours ? After work when people come home from work ?

• On the 1st and 15th of each month after paychecks arrive ?

TEST IT!

7. segment your list and send fewer emails

• Stop sending every email to every contact and select distinct customer targets leveraging ANY data you have.

• By Gender

• By Lifestage

• By Geography (City, State, Zip)

• By Preferred Store

• By Product purchase history

• The more you segment, the less email you may send, but the more REAL your engagement statistics will be.

TEST IT!

8. focus on your engaged audience

• If you send a weekly/monthly email, refine your list to only communicate to your ‘Active’ audience

• People who have opened or clicked your email

• People who you know have purchased a product or interacted with you in a different channel like social, direct mail, telephone

• Make the distinction between your ‘contactable’ and ‘valuable’ email address

• Establish sensible definitions for what constitutes an active/inactive contact

• Example: Active = Has opened/clicked an email in the last 6 months; has purchased a product within the last 13 weeks

9. provide appropriate level of attention on unengaged• Just because they are ‘inactive’ doesn’t mean

you are throwing them out. Set them aside for

• Special promotions or sweepstakes where there is an incentive to reactivate them

• General holidays greetings

• If you have any particular date-based information (birthday, anniversary, first purchase, opt-in), set up triggered emails to try to passively re-engage

10. mitigate but embrace the unsubscribe

•Set up a preference center up-front as part of your opt-in process

•Work with your ESP to set up a custom unsubscribe landing page that allows people to modify preferences around frequency and content

•Silverpop: Snooze’ Feature

Unsubscribes happen, but that’s better than spending time and money sending emails to someone who never opens your emails, watering down your campaign engagement results.

11. reset your metrics around conversion/ROI goals

• TRUE or FALSE: There are marketing benchmarks for email open and click rates

• The only benchmark that really matters is performance of your own email campaigns

• Opens and Clicks are only scratching the surface of engagement metrics for your emails

• Get the data you need to tell your CEO/CMO that your email program drove incremental conversions/revenue

• Once you determine how much incremental value your emails are driving per contact, you can assign a dollar value to your email addresses

• Also enables you to set appropriate budget for email acquisition campaignsSources: Epsilon & Email Experience Council Q4 2010 Email Trends And Benchmark

12. identify your mobile email audience first

• Determine how many people are actually opening your emails in a mobile environment before you rush off to create mobile versions of your emails

• Complement this with web analytics data to see how many people are visiting your website on mobile devices. IBM Unica

13. let analytics guide optimization

• Integrating your email and web analytics enables you to test and quantify differences in email creative, subject lines, offers.

• For Bottom Dollar Food, we produce a weekly flyer email where we had named our links using Google UTM tags and noticed a trend that the most popular links were to view the flyer online and to get coupons.

• We simplified the content to focus around those two calls-to-action, maintained the same subject line and saw a 92% improvement in the unique click-through rate.

50% shorter in length

TEST IT!

14. leverage social content for email content

• The conversations and questions around your brand/product that abound in the social realm (blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter) are very likely to be relevant to other customers that are not following/fans.

• The added benefit is that your customer will feel even more valuable because we took the time to listen, respond and share their ideas/opinions/concerns

WHAT’S NEXT?

today’s coding/styling limitations

Today, there is a large disparity between what designers and developers can do on the web versus

what they can do in email.

• HTML: Largely limited to structure content on a grid in tables

• CSS: Limited to inline CSS styles and a little bit of embedded CSS revolving around text and

font styling; poor support by ISPs around most other elements

Email Standards Project | http://www.email-standards.org/

Campaign Monitor Guide to CSS Support in Email Clients | http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

new developments & possibilities

there is hope … as a few innovations are available now (or at least, very soon).

• HTML5 support in Apple Mail for Mac, iPhone & iPad

• Javascript support in webmail environments

• GroupVine – Engagement Widgets

HTML5 support

Video*, animation and other capabilities that come with HTML5 are available in a few

environments

Apple Mail* iPhone Apple Mail* iPad Apple Mail*; Yahoo Mail (web), Gmail

(web)Sources: Campaign Monitor | PC World

javascript support in webmail environments

Hotmail Active Views

• Javascript enabled within a web mail environment

• Enables code to be delivered securely based on authentication

• System only allows approved parties to send messages:

• Orbitz, Monster.com, Linkedin

• Conversion activity and goals can happen without ever leaving the web mail environment

Sources: Hotmail | Mashable

GroupVine – engagement widgets

•A new way for customers and community to engage with you and each other in real-time

•Bringing social into email for the first time, enabling:

• Customer insights

• Social awareness

• Relationship building

•Powered by "Engagement Widgets" that are customized and embedded in the email HTML

•Integrates with multiple ESPs

•Customer profiles take shape over time with responses

Source: GroupVine

GroupVine: data capture & matchback

GroupVine survey and engagement data can be exported manually and via API (coming soon) enabling us to build richer customer profiles and thus, refine our segmentation and targeting capabilities.

Sources: Hotmail | Mashable

to wrap it all up

• Social media and mobile adoption are making a significant impact on email marketing

• Now is the right time to rethink, refine and refocus on goals for your email marketing program

• Establish “best-practices” that produce results that are tested, properly valued and that deliver a ROI that will ultimately grow your program and your business

Sources: Hotmail | Mashable

TEST IT!

Q&AIf you’d like to talk more about any of the content presented, feel free to reach out to me:

Jay Jhun | Email Services Directorjjhun@engauge.com | @emailrocks | 404-601-4353