Targeted Email Sightings: Alive and Well in Cyberspace

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

It's a bit tricky to optimize email in this current environment. On one hand, with all of our marketing budgets under incredible scrutiny, email has taken center stage as an economical and high ROI channel. All that attention means temptation to just send more and more - but of course that has penalties in spiked complaint rates, lower deliverability and exasperated subscribers.

On the other hand, consumers and business professionals are holding tight to their dollars and cents - and retailers, travel companies and even B2B marketers are responding with all kinds of great deals and discounts. "Can we just please send an email for every new deal?" you may be hearing from your brand and product managers. Yikes - that just increases the frequency and lowers the relevance for everyone.

Combined, the effect is that the inbox is even more crowded with great deals. I sorted my personal account by subject line this morning and the first 300 messages started with "50% off." Wow. We aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto.

All the more reason to offer three cheers for Sears Holdings, J.C Penney, Target and Gap (and Sears agency Ogilvy) for sharing their email targeting success stories with the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The Journal reports that ...

Categories: Response

Our Daily Email Challenges

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

It's gorgeous weather (well, except for that nasty, cold snow squall that hit us yesterday afternoon) here in Park City, Utah and the Email Insider Summit is in full swing. Energy is high, especially after the first day of fabulous content that got us all talking and challenging each other. As a programming committee member, I can give huge insider props along with my heartfelt thanks to David Baker of Avenue A Razorfish who put this program together.

Here's some of what we are all talking about.... and you can read my and others' blog posts from the event at Mediapost Live. If you are on Twitter, there are a number of us tweeting throughout the event - just search for #eis (my Twitter profile is SAMRPath).

Stephen Geer of Obama for America reminded us all that we have to balance risk and reward when we make deliverability (and revenue opportunity) decisions every day. No question the Obama team reinvented campaigning in the US. Email was a critical component of both communicating the message as well as driving action. For Geer, frequency and complaints went hand in hand. Frequency seemed to win. His answer, "We knew that we could survive a certain amount of churn (fatigue combined with deliverability failures) because of our list growth."

Same for all of us. How much frequency is too much? ...

Categories: Response

Cool Email Idea: Fun Transactional Messaging

What: Fun transactional messaging

Who: CD Baby

Why we love it: Who says transactional messages have to be boring? CD baby's order confirmation email does a superb job of celebrating the purchase. By using their unique voice and incorporating a bit of humor, they are effectively building ...

Categories: Response

The Risks (and Sometimes Rewards) of Not Following Best Practices

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

My esteemed colleague J.D. Falk highlighted the results of a test done by our friends at MailChimp that shows that emailing to an old file caused complaints and unsubscribe to spike dramatically, and for opens and click rates to drop dramatically. No surprise, right?

Yet, if I was a marketer only focused on results, I'd look at this data another way. I'd say, "Hey - I got 7,688 clicks on the 'bad' list and only 6,925 clicks on the 'good' list. I doubled my bounty! So mailing the bad list was totally worth it! Let's do that again. Party on!"

How many of us have found ourselves struggling with this sort of situation? We know the best practice is to not email old files. We know the best practice is to refrain from emailing that extra campaign this week. However, at the same time we are under pressure to drive short term revenue. "The numbers are down, just send another email campaign." And it works - the extra email campaign drives revenue.

In this case, not following best practices generated a lot of traffic. The MailChimp study doesn't say if the old file clicks converted at the same rate, but let's assume that they were at least comparable. There was some gold in that there old file. Of course there was a lot of shiny rocks, too. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability | Response

Report from the Email Marketing Forum in Brussels

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Strategic Services

I had the opportunity to speak at the Email Marketing Forum in Brussels last week where I presented five strategies for improving revenue and response by breaking free from the batch-and-blast model once and for all and giving subscribers what they really want: relevant and targeted email.

In addition to learning how to say "Good morning everyone" in French and Dutch, I really enjoyed meeting some very smart marketers who are struggling with the same challenges as their U.S. counterparts: how to stand out from the inbox clutter, get delivered and get a return on their email investment.

The 90+ marketers in attendance were a fairly even mix of mostly Belgian-based B2B and B2C companies, with some marketers just in the beginning stages of launching an email program and others looking for more advanced strategies and innovative ideas to take back with them. Also in attendance were marketers representing the European offices of some fairly large international companies, including DHL, UPS, BMW, Novartis, Pfizer and D&B, in addition to top Belgian email service providers, such as EmailGarage and Emailvision.

Below is a summary of four of the day's best presentations ...

Categories: Response

Cool Email Idea: Special Election Day Edition

What: Super-Customized Content

Who: McCain/Palin

Why we love it: Since we previously praised the Obama campaign's list-building efforts, it's only fair to give a little "Cool Thing" shout-out to the GOP. Check out this super-relevant, highly-targeted email aimed at getting voters in swing-state Colorado headed to the polls early. The email includes the address of our polling location, driving directions, poll hours and more.

What would make it better: Branding is important ...

Categories: Response

BOO! Email Marketing Statistics That Just Might Scare You

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Strategic Services

Email marketers, BEWARE! Do not press "send" before you read this, or proceed at your own (and your subscribers') peril. Just in time for Halloween, we have some gruesome and gory email marketing statistics that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and your blood run cold.

While you won't be inclined to do the Monster Mash, you may think twice about sending another promotional email with the same "buy now" messaging. A recent blog posting by Jason Baer shared some seriously scary email stats that were used in a presentation at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer earlier this month. They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky all right. In fact, they're all together "ooky," but not nearly as harmless as the Addams Family.

But fear not brave marketer - even the most devilish of Halloween tricks can be countered with a deliciously yummy and potently sweet treat. So stop repeating "I see dead people" when referring to the inactive portion of your email file, break out the candy corn and read on. ...

Categories: Response

Making the Case for Email Marketing

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

I'm on a plane, and the gentleman next to me on the plane is the CMO of a large multi-brand retailer. After exchanging introductions and pleasantries, I ask him if he's happy with his email marketing program. The resulting conversation was fascinating, and typical of those we have with our clients while trying to help email program directors make the case to executive management about investment in the channel. I'm hoping that this particular CMO goes back to his team and engages.

That would be just one small step for email marketer-kind.

SAM: How is email marketing working for you?

CMO: Well, it sure generates a lot of revenue for us. I can think of three or four months this year where we doubled up on email messages and that helped us make our month.

SAM: So it's a really important part of the marketing mix then, eh?

CMO: Sure. It's in there.

SAM: And, you have a lot of people working on email to optimize all that revenue, then?

CMO: Oh no. (Laughing) We have one junior guy. He reports into my head of ecommerce. I think his name is Steve. Yeah, that's right, it's Steve. ...

Categories: Response

Cool B2B Email Marketing Idea

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

At the DMA Annual event this month, I spoke with many B2B marketers about the particular challenges they face in these rough economic times. Basically, the economy is a mess, budgets are squeezing, our clients are all afraid to make investments.

The good news is that email marketing is a great tool for building relationships and adding value to your customer relationships. Instead of just sending more product announcements, send "Recession Buster" ideas to your clients and prospects every week (or, if appropriate, every day for a limited time). Create a simple design and ...

Categories: Response

Report from Shop.org #2: Are You Brave Enough to Abandon Batch & Blast Email Marketing?

By Stephanie Miller
Global Markets Catalyst

One of the key issues for retailers looking to move to a lifecycle-based approach to email marketing is gathering data from the disparate systems that allow us to send triggered messages based on subscriber behavior. Typically this means sending abandoned shopping cart messages or recommendations based on browsing or follow ups after purchase.

In a great panel discussion that I led at Shop.org's Annual event last week (see last blog posting here), Angela Caltagirone of Williams-Sonoma and Anne Ashbey of Harry & David both talked about the need to manage the data across many product SKUs in order to mail a significant number of subscribers each month. When each segment performs at 5x-30x higher than a generic promotional message, the ROI value is clear. But if you can only reach a small number, say 5,000 subscribers with each mailing, the revenue contribution is small. Automating these triggers is key - so that you can get enough scale and reach across your file to make it worthwhile. Even Rob Gallagher of Overstock, with a large file and detailed segmentation, has challenges with data integration.

Several retailers lamented the lack of ability to access website browsing data at all. And all the speakers acknowledge that ...

Categories: Response