May
05
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Despite the fact that Bear Stearns had already collapsed, the recession was not even discussed at last May's Email Insider Summit. This year, the world looks a bit different, and many marketers here are telling me that they've had to change their practices significantly in order to adjust to the new reality. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as it seems many of us are more focused on subscriber satisfaction, retention and keeping ISP complaints low.
A panel of smart email marketers on Monday that was moderated by Mediapost editor David Goetzl, highlighted some great strategies that are working for them right now. Bottom line: email is now the rockstar of the marketing team. Bravo! Good for us. Um ... uh oh. Now we better perform! I've tried to summarize some of the panelists key strategies here.
For more live blogging from me and others at the event, check out the Mediapost Raw Blog or follow all of us on Twitter using #MPEIS. (My Twitter is @StephanieSAM).
Brian Jaffe, Director, eCommunications for Nationwide said, "Retention is the new acquisition for us ...
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Apr
29
By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services
One of the key data points from our recent research study, Increasing Revenues by Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers, was the number of retailers who assumed that by placing an order, a customer would want to receive promotional emails. Thirty-one percent of the retailers in our study did not mention promotional emails at all during the checkout process but then immediately began sending promotional emails anyway. Five percent mentioned that promotional emails would be sent but gave the customer no way to opt-out.
Is this practice illegal? No. Is it a good idea? Not necessarily. We understand the temptation here. Customers are providing their email address in order to receive the transactional emails associated with their order. And retailers know that if they add a pre-checked opt-out checkbox, some customers will uncheck the box. By not asking for permission, more subscribers will be added to the list. But marketers must first ask themselves these questions before adopting this type of permission strategy (or maybe we should we call it non-permission strategy): ...
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Apr
28
By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services
Now more than ever, marketers need to make sure they are optimizing their email messages across the board. Every contact point with customers and subscribers needs to be seen as an opportunity. While conducting our latest research study, we noted that many marketers are not taking advantage of their transactional messages by using them to engage their customers.
Of the retailers in our study only 40% have promotional content in their transactional emails. We defined transactional as all messages related to the customer's purchase. These included order confirmation emails, shipping confirmation emails, product review requests, customer service surveys and emails related to the item's return.
Customers anticipate transactional emails. They know the email contains relevant information regarding their recent order. They want to make sure that their order is correct and find out when the package will arrive. This high level of engagement with transactional messages makes them an ideal place to cross-sell and up-sell to current customers....
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Apr
27
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Despite the global recession, online retailing is still hot in the UK, with Christmas 2008 generating more than 15.2 billion GBP in the last quarter of the year. (Source: CapGemini, Interactive Media in Retail Group). Email marketing was a big part of this, as retailers continue to use email to build the brand and drive traffic to ecommerce and High Street locations. Looks like some top brands may be leaving money on the table, however, by not using email effectively. A new retail benchmark report from our partner dotMailer (www.dotmailer.com), part of the dotDigital Group PLC, found that the majority (65%) of retailers surveyed failed to score more than a 70% grade.
The dotMailer "Hitting the Mark" 2009 (free registration required to download) reports on the email activities of 41 High Street retailers - measuring them against 14 best practices in four key areas: sign up/permission, technical, email effectiveness and design. Marks & Spencer and H Samuel took best of show honors, scoring 81 out of 100 points. Last year's winner, Topshop, slipped to a joint third place and a score of 78 this year. Of the 29 retailers featured this year who also ranked last year, only eight have increased their total score, while 21 earned a lower score.
In particular, I was saddened to see the low scores on ...
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Apr
23
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
There are lots of digital marketing conferences and events. Maybe too many (can I hear an "Amen!" please?!). Here are five reasons why the Online Marketing Summit is a good one to put on your list, especially in this time of tight budgets:
1. It's local. Reduced travel costs. Great networking. There are 19 cities.
2. Great content. The mother of all reasons to go to a conference. Lots of new speakers. Wide coverage of all things digital marketing, so you get ...
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Apr
22
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
So we here at Return Path will readily admit to being biased toward the power and promise of email. But we don't think it's overstating the case to say that email can go a long way towards helping your efforts to be more green. So, in celebration of Earth Day today, we thought we'd share some cool ideas on how to save money and trees by replacing paper with email.
1. Financial services organizations can save a ton of money by sending statements and other information by email. Some companies have made this switch (so check your 401K provider or brokerage and see if you have options), but there are still many that send some or all of their information on paper. Switching to digital versions goes beyond saving paper, postage and money. Many customers complain about the massive amounts of paper that clutter up their homes and offices. Switching over to digital documents delivered via email is a big customer service win, too.
2. Due to the recession, cataloguers may find that replacing one paper catalog per customer per quarter with a few targeted email messages will boost ROI as well as conserve resources. It's a win for the marketer ...
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Apr
21
By Bonnie Malone
Director, Response Consulting
When was the last time you went somewhere exotic? Or experienced a different culture? Wouldn't you just love to fly to a faraway country and immerse yourself in new foods, experiences, and languages? Well, you're not alone: your subscribers do, too.
Often, marketers get stuck in a rut sending campaigns that look and perform the same week after week. Why? Because it's the way it's always been, or it's the formula that works, or it's easy to execute. But this kind of routine gets stale quickly both for the marketer measuring performance (and looking at that same creative week after week), and for the subscriber bored with each predictable email campaign.
So, let's take a vacation! ...
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Apr
17
By Bonnie Malone
Director, Response Consulting
I received an email today from a well known bridal company. It wasn't a bad email, in fact, it was rather well designed and sent with an appropriate subject line. The problem is that this is the sixth email I've received from this bridal company in the past three weeks - and I am not getting married, nor do I plan on becoming engaged to be married anytime in the foreseeable future.
How, then, did I begin receiving wedding-related emails? Because my daughter will be the flower girl in an upcoming family wedding, and I was asked by the bride to assist in finding an appropriate dress for my 4-year-old to wear. When browsing this particular bridal website, registration was required in order to save dresses to my "favorites" list. So, I willingly registered and subscribed to receive their email - selecting flower girl dresses as a shopping reason/preference.
As a new subscriber, I fully expected to receive wedding-related email from this company. However, every one of the six emails I've received has been messaged as if I was a bride-to-be. ...
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Apr
15
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
The pressure is on! Now more than ever, the email channel is being asked to contribute higher revenue. Yet, we all must make that happen with existing (or lower) resources. In a session produced for the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing World virtual conference (you can still visit and see some of the great presentations free until July 1, 2009), I discussed this challenge with three very smart digital marketers: Wendy Croissant, Email Marketing Manager for retailer Sierra Trading Post, Sal Tripi, a Director in Marketing with direct marketing powerhouse Publishers Clearing House and Stephen Gilberg, founder and CEO of HappyHours, Inc., a wine and spirits marketing services firm.
Many among us succumbed to the pressure to produce more revenue by increasing email frequency - thus generating some short term revenue gain. But we also churned the file, measured by increased subscriber fatigue, unsubscribe requests and complaints to the ISPs (when subscribers click on the Report Spam button), as well as depressing inbox deliverability and overall response rates. This is what we called the "perils of aggression" during our session. "It's easy to be aggressive, to blast the file and think short term," said Sal Tripi of PCH. "Some may also be tempted to lighten their standards by using older lists, doing append with loose rules, or buying a list from a lower quality source. This approach can leave you with a bloody lip!
"The harder way is to take the high road," he said. "To take a longer term view and commit yourself to improving the subscriber value." ...
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Apr
14
By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting
A recent research study we conducted shows that markets are still struggling with how to make their emails relevant to subscribers. The majority of marketers we studied (in this case, online retailers) were not using the buyer's data they collected as part of the purchase process to inform their future promotional messaging to these buyers. Download the study and the recorded webcast now.
The importance of relevancy is consistently talked about amongst email marketers and in the industry today. Most marketers know that sending the same message to everyone on their file will lead to stagnant or decreased response rates. Targeting and segmentation are proven methods for injecting relevancy into an email program.
When it comes to sending email to subscribers who have already made a purchase from you, the good news is that marketers have a variety of data to work with to do just that. This data includes the buyer's name, location (city, state, zip code), the kind of item that they bought (category, size, style, color), and the price of the item they purchased. Using these data points to inform future messaging can significantly increase the subscriber's level of engagement and prime them to make additional purchases.
Of course many marketers know this already. Why don't they do it? The reasons are ones we all know well ... lack of time, not enough resources, data sources that aren't synchronized, etc. Given that reality, here are a few ideas for injecting some relevance even when your system isn't perfect ...
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