Archive for Trends
5 Steps to Spelling Out E-M-A-I-L
Source: www.blog.hubspot.com with Guest Poster Jim Ducharme, a social media professional and online marketing consultant who helps companies use an integrated approach to their online marketing. You can read more of his thoughts on social and marketing at: www.hugehead.ca.
There’s nothing I love more than a good acronym and so a while back I set out to create one for the word “email” in order to help people remember some of the key points to an effective email marketing campaign. I hope it offers a little inspiration for your integrated email marketing efforts. continue reading »
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posted in: Email for Mobile | Social Media | Targeting & Planning | Trends | Writing Effective Copy WHITEPAPER: Top 10 Mobile Design Tips for Email
So many smartphones, so little time to design an email template that works for them all! The team at V12 Group has compiled the 10 top best design tips that can turn your everyday email design template into a mobile-friendly version to help solve most of those stubborn rendering issues. Download the FREE Whitepaper here
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posted in: Creative | Email for Mobile | HTML Creative Best Practices | Industry | Resources | Trends | Whitepapers Five Fundamentals To Great Email Marketing In 2011
This is a higher level thinking to email marketing with some strategies to consider this year and beyond.
Source: David Baker, Media Post
The essentials of great email marketing programs have not changed a lot over the years, but the number of options at your disposal has definitely increased. Let’s map out a few fundamentals that can help tell how we’ll adapt for success tomorrow.
It’s the experience, not the product/service or other values. Brand connections are made and formed based on experiences — and the simple goal of email in brand building and brand relationship marketing is to help connect the experiences while reinforcing why people buy from you. Today’s marketers have to look past the promotional calendar and traditional segmentation to understand engagement, not simply conversion (which will only define a small subset of the population).
Targeting at scale is the key to great contextual marketing. Targeting and personalization aren’t just about right offer and right timing — for email marketing, it’s about doing this in scale.  Your goal in is to minimize the “wrongs” while making real choices about where you spend your resource time. You spend time assimilating “look alikes” that help magnify the opportunity and you continually look for reach factors that extend multipliers to your programs.
M-Email – According to Forrester, the mobile commerce space will exceed $10 billion by the end of next year. While this is a small chunk of the ecommerce sales (>7%), it is growing rapidly. As the utility of the device and consumer content demands prevail, MCommerce will be vital, and WAP to APP to MCommerce will need to be a seamless design. The conversion will emanate from two sources: email and on-premise prompts.  You need to begin to isolate the new mobile consumer and think strategically about where email can be a notification agent for the channel.
The dashboard is only so big; make the best use of it. Making sense of reports can be a very difficult and valueless effort if not done with a sense of purpose. If you craft the email experience properly to transcend cross channels, with great hypotheses specific to program, campaign and customer level goals, then how you dashboard results should follow this logic. This should naturally interpret decision points, not just aggregate views. It should have point-in-time comparisons that help shape opinion and it should represent cross-functional sources that lend credibility. This is still a challenge to operationalize, and will become increasingly more difficult going forward. I believe the future dashboards will be a linear view more congruent with the experience, and KPIs that drive decision points that are important for the organization (discounting/promotion, lifecycle, COS, etc..)
Artificial intelligence is exactly that – artificial. We want to be as predictive as possible, and AI offers the opportunity to apply marketing intelligence into a self-fulfilling instrument. But be cautious. With all the unstructured data that is becoming available, this can be a distraction without great result. If you remember how hard it is to operationalize the front-end of the efforts, adding complexity through AI can dramatically challenge resource drain. Be cautious about value props centered on AI as the center of marketing insight.
Verizon Killing Unlimited Data Plans Soon
They’ve been saying it for over a year, but Verizon is finally pulling the trigger on limiting their data network so customers will feel that punch. This will impact today’s email marketers in that consumers checking email on mobile devices won’t want to use up their data plans with useless and unnecessary emails eating up their paid-for data plans. This means marketers need to be targeting better and producing more relevant offers, emails and websites. They’ll need to be smart with optimization, file sizes, and downloads in order to be effective.
Source: Amy Lee, Huffington Post
No more unlimited data for new Verizon customers: The wireless carrier will begin to roll out tiered data plans for new customers beginning July 7.
According to DroidLife, the new plans will begin at $30 a month for 2GB of data. Other packages will include $50 for 5GB, or $80 for 10 GB.
Tethering will be another $20 for 2GB more. For those who hit the cap, Verizon will charge $10 for each GB over the limit. The plans are priced the same for both 3G and 4G plans. Unlimited plans had been offered at $30 per month. Verizon confirmed the change to All Things Digital.
Customers already on unlimited data plans will not be affected by the change. Verizon has long planned to turn to tiered plans, and has already started to throttle speeds for heavy data users.
DroidLife also says it could be possible current customers will be able to upgrade to new devices even after July 7 and hold onto unlimited data plans, though it’s not yet been confirmed. For tablet users, data plans will increase to $30 per 2GB each month, up from the $20 for 1GB now offered.
Verizon joins AT&T, which already implements tiered plans. AT&T, however, offers plans at lower levels of data, including $15 for 200MB. For 2GB, the plan charges $25 a month and $45 for 4GB — less than Verizon.
Verizon’s minimum data plans for each month reflect an understanding that consumers are using more data than ever before. Average data consumption on smartphones has risen 89 percent in the past year.
“Our legacy data pricing structure was designed to address a somewhat different customer need profile than what we are seeing and can expect in the future,” Verizon wrote in a letter to employees. “As a result, we are evolving our approach around how we package our data solutions and pricing to our customers.”
Image credit: Ambro
Make Coupons Work Better in Your Email Program
Many of our clients are turning to traditional coupon offers via email, but this post (and the available slides and recordings) cover tips and tactics to optimize redemption and tracking. For prospecting email, coupon offers are one of the top ways to increase in-store and online traffic, toss in the #1 recommendation of personalization and you’ll certainly see a lift in your email campaigns.
Source: Loren McDonald, SilverPop
Are you thinking about adding or revamping a coupon program in your email marketing efforts? You certainly aren’t alone.
The almost overnight success of local coupons via daily-deal sites such as Groupon or LivingSocial and the potential offered by mobile coupons are prompting more retailers to go back and look at this popular revenue and traffic driver in a whole new light.
Jonathan Treiber, Co-Founder and CEO of RevTrax, a leading provider of coupon security and cross-channel analytics, and I discussed important success factors and challenges for email coupons and covered specific examples of successful coupon programs in our recent webinar, “Key Techniques for Maximizing Results from Email-Based Coupons†(download the recording now or view the slide presentation here).
Below, Jonathan lists some best practices to use with email coupons to help you realize the greatest success from your coupon program.
Best Practices for Email Coupons
1. Use personalized coupons.
“This makes a coupon specific to an individual, with their name, the nearest location and other details. Personalization has two effects: It typically drives higher user engagement and redemption because it’s more relevant. And, because the coupon is personalized to the individual, it can deter that individual from any type of fraudulent behavior, such as Photoshopping it or reposting it.â€
2. Don’t deliver the coupon via a downloadable PDF.
“We always recommend against that because it’s not secure, promotes uncontrolled virality, and makes it very difficult to track and measure redemption,†Jonathan said. PDFs can be altered, uploaded as files and shared without authorization.
3. Deliver the coupon on a landing page rather than in the email itself to avoid fraud.
“It’s really best not to show the entire coupon in the email,†he said. “Show the coupon only when the user prints it. Also, limit the number of times a coupon can be printed.â€
4. Test coupon values.
“This affords marketers with a way to constantly refine different strategies,†Jonathan said. “They can identify whether a 20-percent discount offer is necessary to drive business goals, or is 10 percent off enough?â€
5. Measure and track the right coupon activities.
“If a consumer prints a coupon, only 20 percent are likely to redeem it,†Jonathan said. “A lot of merchants think that if someone prints a coupon, they’ll automatically redeem it, but half of the time, they lost it or forget about it, or it sits on a counter and expires.â€
Many merchants don’t track any coupon activity, he said. “They can’t do it, or they don’t have the time or resources. We encourage our clients to measure as often and as much as they can, because it’s a key benefit. It provides a level of measurement not available or possible without a coupon.â€
What to measure? “Look at the number of redemptions, but also measure back to the particular marketing tactic. If you had 100 coupons redeemed, did these 100 coupons get redeemed from a marketing program on Facebook or from your email marketing activities, more specifically, from specific subscribers to your email rewards list?â€
“Did redemptions come from a Google search on a particular keyword? What was the rate of redemption for each promotion? Those are the kinds of insights that clients want, but have not been able to get historically.â€
You’ll find more of Jonathan’s best practices and insights into email coupons when you download our webinar recording and slide presentation, which includes examples of coupon presentations run by Silverpop and RevTrax clients.
Image credit: digitalart
Fire Up Your Marketing with Mini Campaigns
We love the idea of using mini campaigns to light up your email marketing not just for CRM campaigns, but for prospecting too. Mini campaigns not only support other channels of social media, but are also a great opportunity to test subject lines, imagery and simple target audiences (ie. male vs. female). These campaigns can be impromptu BUT, should also support your brand and messaging especially when used for prospecting.
Source: Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact
Small business owners tell us they’re eager to find new cost-effective ways to engage their customers.
The explosion of social media and other online marketing tools — combined with the growing popularity of Internet-connected mobile devices — means businesses have more ways to communicate with customers than ever before.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs we meet, you have lots of marketing communications options — but not a lot of time to figure out which tools and tactics might work best. The good news is you can try new ways of marketing your business without investing a great deal of time and resources.
How can you accomplish that? With what we like to call “mini marketing campaigns.”
Mini campaigns are short-term bursts of marketing communications sizzle. They can be as simple as igniting a conversation on Twitter or Facebook, targeting an email promotion to an emerging niche audience, sending out a survey, or hosting an impromptu event.
Mini campaigns give you the flexibility to…
- Fill in the gaps in your yearlong, major event, seasonal, and holiday marketing calendar.
- Respond to news and current events related to your business or industry.
- Test out new tools, networks, and tactics.
- Identify new target audiences.
- Create buzz around products or services.
- Get a beat on what matters in your customers’ lives.
- Create opportunities to engage customers right now.
Think about how you engage your customers today. Are there other ways you’ve been meaning to try?
Social media marketing campaigns may catch fire or fizzle out very quickly. That’s a challenge for businesses — and an advantage for those nimble and willing enough to try new ways of connecting with customers. A yearlong marketing calendar is a good anchor, but it shouldn’t hold you back from engaging in other communications activities.
Mini campaigns let you explore new ways to engage customers — around a conversation, a promotion, an idea, or an event — without incurring the costs or headaches of major campaigns or significant new content. Online marketing provides the tools and the channels. You provide the business savvy and passion for helping your customers.
Image credit: Ambro
Why There Are So Few Personalized Emails
Email personalization is a popular way to boost response but is quickly being replaced with upping the frequency that companies are sending emails…this transition is costing companies to lose their most valuable customers. This article dives into the complexity of frequency vs personalization and how to measure the risks and rewards of both strategies. One factor mentioned here is the availability of resources…remember that V12 Group offers a full suite of Creative Services to help with personalized segments, emails and recommendations on frequency. Read on…
Source: Arthur Middleton Hughes, Email Insider
A Direct Marketing Association analysis shows that today there are more emails arriving in consumers’ inboxes, but that the percentage of emails with personalized content has dropped from 38% to 22%. They may say, “Welcome Arthur Hughes,” but the rest of the message is not personalized in any way. A million email subscribers get identical content.
This is not happening because email marketers are stupid, or do not know how to write dynamic content. It is happening because of the economics of creating segmented and personalized message. I have been in the direct and database marketing industry for 33 years. Around 1985, when database marketing was invented, we found that dynamic content based on a database was much more likely to generate a response than sending everyone the same thing. Response rates could go from 2% to 3% — a 50% increase. That’s really worth it, and why so many companies began to use database marketing.
When emails came along, most of us thought, “What a wonderful idea. We have been spending $600 per thousand for direct mail pieces. We can send emails for only $6 per thousand. We can use the cost reductions to create even better dynamic content, and to send more often.” We soon found that sending an email once a week instead of once a month increased our revenue. Going from once a week to twice a week made revenue go up still more. Some email retailers send messages once a day. Why? Because it is more profitable than once a week.
Meanwhile, back in the creative department, we found that it was usually impossible to put dynamic personal content into frequent emails. When we were sending direct mail pieces once or twice a month, we had the time to create four or five different segments (Seniors, college students, young families with children, loyal buyers, etc.) and create content based on their segment and their previous purchases or preferences. With emails going out several times a week, we just do not have the creative talent or time to write four or five versions of each email.
The situation today is this: we can increase response either by personalizing, or by increasing frequency. The lift we get from personalization is not as great as the lift we get from frequency. We can’t do both, so we go with the one that is most profitable.
This has some bad results. By sending too many emails, we turn some people off. We analyzed the lifetime value of customers of a large retail chain with more than 400 stores. The company sent frequent emails to all those whom they could get to sign up. At its request, we analyzed customers who left through unsubscribing or delivery problems and compared them with those subscribers who did not leave. We found that those who left were more valuable than those who did not leave. Here is what we found by analyzing the spending habits of those who stayed and those who left. Those who left had average revenue of $220. Those who did not leave had average revenue of $177. The company was losing its best customers because it mailed too often.  No attempt was made to get these departing customers back. Why not? Because we knew that we could not correct the problem that made them leave in the first place: too many emails with batch-and-blast content.
As we look at the future of database and email marketing, we see this problem getting bigger and bigger. Even well-crafted emails with dynamic content are delivered to email inboxes already loaded with hundreds of batch-and-blast emails from other frequent marketers. It is hard for consumers to tell the difference between them by looking at the subject lines alone.
We did an analysis of how that store chain could turn its situation around by creating a marketing database and writing dynamic content for five segments. The analysis showed that the company would have to spend about $1 million more to do this, but would generate profits of far more than that by keeping its best customers from leaving each year.
Companies using database marketing can do the analysis it takes to determine that using database marketing instead of batch and blast will be profitable for them. They will let their customers know that they will not receive more email than they want to receive, and they will personalize that email with content designed for the subscribers. It will cost companies more to do this, but it will pay dividends. They will lose fewer customers, and gain more friends and sales.
Unfortunately, many companies will not do this. The current trend (was it ever different?) is to say that each quarter’s sales have to reach some given number, regardless of how you get there. Worries about losing valuable customers, giving customers what they want, looking at the long run will all take a back seat to next quarter’s numbers. The profits from database marketing will be impossible for these — and all – companies that seek only quarterly email marketing revenue projections and ways to cut costs. Furthermore, the customers that they will lose through unsubscribes will be more valuable than the ones that they keep.
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posted in: Creative | Metrics & Testing | Resources | Stats | Targeting & Planning | Trends 5 Email Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore (& How to Take Advantage of Them)
Source: Veronica Maria Jarski, MarketingProfs
Email marketing is thriving—especially for businesses who can adapt it to the changing world. In a kick-off talk for the MarketingProfs University email marketing course, Loren McDonald (vice president of Industry Relations at Silverpop) discussed the hottest email marketing trends—and how to capitalize on them.
1. Social Media
As social media’s influence continues to grow, businesses will need to integrate email with social in order to survive. “The reality of ignoring Facebook because you think it’s a fad is truly a mistake,” McDonald says. “It’s the future.” So, what can you do about it? Consider adding social-media footers and icons to emails. Branch beyond the newsletter by letting people “like” the content on Facebook, forward it to a friend, post it to Facebook, or tweet it. And don’t forget to use social media to grow your email database. For example, on Facebook, provide email opt-ins for existing customers (and potential new ones). “Whenever and wherever possible, offer people the opportunity to opt-in,” McDonald says. “You want to touch as many people in your channel as possible.”
Takeaway #1: Promote following and sharing within all your email communication. continue reading »
The Future of Mobile Messaging
Here’s a compelling report on mobile messaging that provides important insights on the impact mobile devices have on email marketing campaigns. However, you can’t ignore desktop and webmail experiences. Come back next week when I’ll be posting some tips on designing for mobile devices.
Source: Return Path, Prologue by Ken Magill
Mobile Email Access Increases 80 Percent From October
Though desktop applications and webmail still account for the lion’s share of how most people read their email, mobile access has surged 80 percent since October, according to a just released study by email deliverability and security firm Return Path.
Mobile access now accounts for 16 percent of how people read their email, according to Return Path. continue reading »
Better preheaders? Six ideas to consider…
The preheader text of any email has a very important function and is considered prime real estate so it should be carefully considered. It can contain anything from utility links to offer text, but for acquisition campaigns it’s like a dangling carrot that appears RIGHT after your subject line. The inbox preview treats preheaders as the first line of text in your email so it should outline your offer and call to action. Keep in mind that the preheader does push your email imagery down and with limited screen displays on hand-held devices, you need to make it count. This post outlines some other points to consider.
Source: Mark Brownlow, Email Marketing Reports
There’s plenty of great info out there on what to put at the very top of your email: the preheader area which typically features one or two lines of text in small font.
So rather than rewrite the wheel, let me invite you to reflect deeper on how you can use that space better.
The very top of an email matters. It matters a lot.
For example, it caps the preview pane that many people use to assess an email’s worth. And it’s displayed in the actual inbox itself by certain email applications, such as Gmail. So it deserves more thought that we typically give it…
Text alignment
Nearly all preheaders you see come nicely centered on the page. Is that because this brings the best results, or is it simply a nod to tradition or a desire for aesthetic symmetry?
I ask because some email software packages (e.g. Thunderbird) and webmail services (e.g. Windows Live Hotmail) allow recipients to use a vertical preview pane. So the preview displays the left hand side of the email and centered text might fall out of view.
Here’s an Amazon email in a horizontal preview pane:
Here’s the same one in a vertical preview pane:
Note how the two preheader messages don’t appear in the second case.
It certainly seems worth testing different preheader alignments and layouts to check on effectiveness.
Think beyond the “web version” link
The vast majority of preheaders contain only one item: instructions on how to access a web version of the email should the message fail to display properly.
This makes intuitive sense, given the trouble we have with blocked images and a lack of standards in how email software and webmail services handle HTML email.
But, again, is it effective?
Or do we have it there because, well, we’ve always had it there?
The “web version” link in my own newsletter’s preheader typically gets less than ten clicks. Not enough to justify dominating the entire preheader space.
Additional options for the preheader are other functional items, including:
- “Unsubscribe” link
- “Edit preferences” link
- “Forward to a friend” link
- Permission reminder
- A request to “whitelist” the sender (add the sender to the recipient’s address book)
- Link to a mobile version
There are good arguments for each, but functional or administrative information grows stale with time and is easily glossed over.
So how else might you use the preheader?
As Stefan Pollard writes in a detailed introduction to the topic:
“You can use this valuable real estate to build value, interest and excitement in your message”
A strong option for informational newsletters is a quick headline alerting the reader to the mail’s content. Like marketing agency eROI do (note also how this snippet is left-aligned!):
For more promotional emails, consider a quick summary of the offer and a call to action. Bronto’s DJ Waldow writes on this very subject:
“Click-throughs on the clear call-to-action in the preheader have shot through the roof”
The final mix of information / promotion / functionality you use in your preheader depends on your audience and email model, of course.
A preheader needs to be short and succinct, otherwise it becomes the actual message, not the preheader. So cherry pick the options that make most sense to you and experiment.
Fewer words, same impact
The preheader is not the prologue to an 800 page novel. Yet many preheaders read like this:
“If this email does not display properly, then click here to view the web version”
That doesn’t leave much space for anything else. Does it need to be so long? In some cases, where the audience is not particularly web savvy, maybe it does. In others, you can shorten it…
“Email not displaying correctly? Click here“
If your audience is very clued up when it comes to online life, how about just:
“Web version“
The shorter you can keep each preheader element, the more elements you can include. Or the more space you can dedicate to more useful features.
Make changes through time
If you have an established preheader format, nothing says you have to keep this constant through time.
For example, some like to top an email with a reminder of why the recipient is on the list:
“You are getting this email because you signed up for it at the ABC website”
How long do you need to keep that message there? After delivering ten weekly issues to an address, could you move that message to the email’s footer and free up the preheader for more impactful messages?
Perhaps the initial emails to a new recipient can contain that lengthy, but clear, “If this email does not display properly, then click here to view the web version” message.
After, say, the fifth email to that address, might we shorten that message to the simple “web version” link, saving space and attention for other purposes?
Dynamic preheaders?
Advanced email marketing systems change content according to what they know about the recipient. Can we apply the same logic to the preheader?
For example, suppose a reader has one of the common webmail addresses and registered an open on each of the last five emails you sent them. We can assume they have unblocked images for your mails and likely see your message pretty much as you intended.
Might the system tag such individuals and suppress the “if you can’t read this email…” message, releasing the space for something else?
If recipients don’t register an open, might you then insert a “whitelist our address” message in the next email, since appearing in a recipient’s address book commonly means images are then displayed automatically in your emails?
And can you serve a different “whitelist” message depending on the domain of the recipient? So @gmail.com addresses get whitelisting instructions specific to the Gmail webmail interface?
Expand the concept to other emails
If you accept the value of the preheader, why limit this to your standard marketing emails? Why not use preheaders in transactional emails, too?
OK, let’s stop there. I have no evidence to hand that any of the above is yet an established best practice. But all are thoughts worth exploring as you work to optimize that critical piece of email real estate.
Image credit: jscreationzs
You might also like this post: http://blog.mailchimp.com/time-to-reconsider-preheaders/
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posted in: Creative | HTML Creative Best Practices | Targeting & Planning | Testing | Trends