Archive for the ‘Email Marketing Strategy’ Category
Posted by Dave McCue on November 16th, 2009
Evidence is the difference between theory and fact, and—as it relates to email—between saying email marketing is valuable and proving it. Any organization using email marketing is going to want to see evidence that results are being produced, and if you are the individual in charge of producing those results, your best friend in such situations is your data. If that word strikes fear into your heart, don’t worry, a term as all-encompassing as “data” can be intimidating in the big picture. But if you break it down, attaining the data you’re after is as simple as answering three questions:
1) What do I want to measure?
2) How am I going to measure it?
3) How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
What do I want to measure?
Answering the first question is a good exercise, because it requires you to step back and define exactly what sort of results you need to see in order to consider your email program a success. Are you using email as a way to drive sales? If so, you’ll want to track visitors who arrive at your site via email to see what percentage of that traffic results in conversions. If your emails function mainly as a vehicle to sell advertising, keep close tabs on any factors that could contribute to higher/lower response to those ads—day of week, ad format, newsletter content, time of day, etc—and adjust accordingly to drive the results that will keep advertisers coming back.
How am I going to measure it?
How you measure your data is largely dependent on the resources available to you. Using an email service provider such as SubscriberMail will provide you with a reporting toolset that makes it easy to track and organize your email performance data. However, the data provided by your ESP can only tell the story up until a recipient clicks one of the links within your email. From that point, you’ll need to rely on your web analytics platform (whether a paid platform or a free service such as Google Analytics) to track visitors’ activity on your website. By adding the proper parameters to the links within your emails, you can make sure email traffic is tracked separately from regular web traffic in your web analytics platform. Once both of these systems are in place, and working in tandem, you’ll be able to create a variety of filters and funnels that make it easy to track the data that is most important to measuring the success of your program.
How can I make sure there is actually something to measure?
There are a few things you can do to make sure you have data to measure. First of all, don’t be so excited about the idea of running reports and seeing the results of your hard work that you forget to spend the necessary time on the “nuts ‘n bolts” beforehand. Assuming you are using both an ESP and a web analytics platform, take time to double-check (and test!) that the steps have been taken to enable proper tracking. Are the right parameters being added to all links within your emails that you want to track? Do all pages of your site have the appropriate web analytics tracking code installed (including any sub-domains)?
Once you are sure that data from your campaigns will be tracked the way you would like, optimize your emails to give recipients a “nudge” in the most important direction. If your goal is for recipients to fill out a registration form on a page of your site, make sure an enticing link to that page is the main call-to-action of your message. Include a link to the page in your pre-header. Some recipients will have your images blocked, so use ALT text behind images to persuade these recipients to visit your page as well. Point email links directly to the page with the registration form (i.e. not your homepage), and try to design the landing page in such a way that it is easy for visitors to take the next desired action—why add a hurdle so close to the finish line? Lastly, be sure to set up some sort of confirmation/thank you page that displays once visitors submit the registration form—it’s this confirmation page that represents the point of conversion you’ll want to measure in your analytics platform. Give your “goal” the best chance to be realized by making the conversion process as quick and easy as possible for visitors.
Check back for Part 2 in the coming days, where I’ll look at different types of email data.
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Posted by Drew Miller on October 8th, 2009
Nobody can argue the value of segmentation in email marketing campaigns. For those marketers that are blessed with rich customer data and the wealth of segmentation opportunities it provides, the real issue is choosing what to segment (lucky them). But for those whose data is thinner than a deli slice of black forest ham, the goal is to fatten up just so the opportunity to segment can even exist. If you happen to fall in the latter group, you need not to worry. Here are 4 steps that can help fill out those loose pants (your customer database):
1. Make Time
Segmentation sounds easy enough in theory, but building a more robust database doesn’t happen overnight or by simply snapping your fingers, it takes time. Make a schedule and stick to it. Need some motivation? Learn reasons why you should find the time for email marketing segmentation.
2. Determine What Data to Use
This may be pretty cut and dry for some, and a challenge for others. You need to have a firm grasp on who your target audience is and the capabilities/resources you have to market to them. Check out 5 ways to discover key data fields for segmenting your email marketing campaigns.
3. Capture Your Data
There are several ways to go about acquiring more data on your customers, and it’s important to take the right approach that doesn’t lead to remorse or abandonment. Learn 3 simple ways to capture data for email marketing segmentation.
4. Test Your Data
Testing is an important component of all successful email marketing campaigns. For instance, if you are a lawn equipment company, you might try geographic segmentation using zip code to vary your message depending on where someone lives. If you are a shoe retailer, gender might be a good segmentation tactic to use. Learn more about the benefits of testing in this quick video.
Building a more well rounded database is no simple task. The real key is taking a baby step approach and exercising patience. By planting the right type of seed under the right conditions, you could be well on your way to “fatter” customer data.
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Posted by Drew Miller on September 25th, 2009
If you’ve read The Email Newsletter 3-Course Meal, you understand the importance of grabbing readers attention from the appetizer (your email) all the way to dessert (purchase or other desired action). This is an especially important concept when it comes to B2B Email Marketing. There are several ways to improve your Newsletter if you are in this space – Here 4 quick ways that can make a big improvement:
1. People are People
Believe it or not B2B customers are people too. Keep that in mind when you are conceptualizing your Newsletter content and design. Sure you want to keep within company guidelines, but don’t be too formal with your approach or the results could be deletes and unsubscribes. Make your content easy to comprehend and keep the design simple and appealing.
2. Think VALUE with Your Subject Line
With work inboxes flooded with everything from meeting requests from your boss to soccer schedules from your spouse, it’s become even more important to have a subject line that breaks through the clutter and delivers relevancy. Instead of using something passive (”XYZ Company Newsletter: Vol 3. Issue 12″), think VALUE and entice an open by highlighting your most compelling content in the newsletter (”Learn How To Save Money on Office Supplies”).
3. Don’t Make it a Scavenger Hunt
Even if your Newsletter contains some of the best copy ever written, your readers are busy people too. Some might take the time to read through five paragraphs on “How to Choose Better Paper Products”, but odds are they are just don’t have time right now. A better approach is to give them a tease (sentence or two) of why they should click to learn more, then send them off to your landing page where they can read, bookmark for later, or find something else that peaks their interest. This way you create multiple opportunities to connect and interact with your company. Your email acts as the appetizer, and your landing page as the main course.
4. Make it Interactive
The goal of your Newsletter shouldn’t be to solely inform readers with written content – Make it interactive and get them doing something actionable. This could be anything from watching a quick video on a new product or service, interacting on your Facebook page, or signing up for a sweepstakes to win something. Think about your brand and audience and get them doing instead of just reading.
When it comes to Email Marketing and your B2B Newsletter, remember to take steps that align with company goals and objectives, and always think from your customers’ perspective. Is this something you would read if it was sent to you? If you can answer, “yes” to that question, you are on your way to a better Email Newsletter.
What are the biggest challenges with your B2B Newsletter? Would love to hear your feedback.
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Posted by Dave McCue on September 23rd, 2009
There was a time when I was, indisputably, the most feared pitcher in my small town Little League—for all the wrong reasons. Let’s just say that if you were within three feet of home plate, you had best be wearing a helmet, or you might soon be wearing a fastball. It got to the point that umpires asked my coach not to let me pitch, because my taking the bump meant a long afternoon of hit batsmen and/or walking the bases loaded each inning.
But it wasn’t always like that. Early in my Little League career I was a fine pitcher, but one season I got a new coach who decided that I should change my grip on the ball. Being so young, I didn’t know that the grip my coach insisted I start using was a curveball grip. Suffice to say, not everybody can control a curveball.
My being forced to throw wild curveballs is very similar to the situation faced by email marketers who must contend with “coaches” who don’t realize the damage they are causing. It’s a tough situation to be in; defy the authority of someone who could bench/fire you, or follow orders and hope for the best. Marketers are being told to send more often. Marketers are being told to find more people to send email to, permission-based or not. In a survey SubscriberMail conducted earlier in 2009, one reason cited by marketers who were not conducting adequate testing of their messages was “a C-level aversion to testing.” If that isn’t bad coaching, I don’t know what is.
Occasionally I’ll come across an article in my RSS feed or a post to Twitter that says something to the effect of “Email marketing study finds that relevance is key.” My initial reaction is usually to chuckle and think of similar headlines, such as “Drivers report difficulty when blindfolded,” but even though the importance of relevance in email marketing would seem to go without saying, it’s something that can easily be lost when a misguided mindset of “more more more” controls the strategy of an email marketing program.
For a pitcher in baseball, the ability to throw 100 miles per hour doesn’t mean a thing if the ball isn’t anywhere near the plate. The story is much the same in email marketing; the power is only effective if you can control it.
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Posted by Bill Leming on September 14th, 2009
A question came up last week regarding how to best measure the impact of a specific commercial email we recently deployed for a client and which, on the surface, appears to have produced nearly unbelievable positive results. While this endeavor is far more preferable than proving that you’re not guilty of lying, cheating or stealing, it’s nonetheless a challenge.
Anyone and everyone responsible for promoting the offer through the website, or via banner ads, social media, print and email wants to claim responsibility for the parentage of this genius idea and the attendant sales figures associated with it. So how do we “prove’ our numbers?
One suggestion that was offered was the idea of matching the email addresses of actual buyers against our email list to see how high or how low our match rate actually was. The hypothesis here was that a high match rate would indicate that there was a strong correlation between our list and those who bought and that either our email efforts must have been successful or that we had the ability to predict before deployment who was likely to buy.
Conversely, a low match rate would signify that our email efforts were less than successful. Without going into the various scenarios that might explain why this approach is less than logical and therefore less than irrefutable, suffice it to say that statisticians and most non-statistically oriented people will have problems with this methodology.
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