Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Posted by Bill Leming on July 15th, 2009
Several months ago I wrote a post about Re-Touch Efforts and Seeing Positive Results. In it I noted some unexpected success with re-mailing the exact same offer to individuals who neither opened nor clicked the original email they received three to four days earlier. What was surprising to me at the time was the fact that the re-touch effort resulted in the same response rate as the original. And it was surprising because the rule of thumb in direct mail was always that you’d get about half the response rate that you received in the initial mailing everything being equal.
But when you think about it, when are all things ever equal? They never are. Today is not like yesterday; next Wednesday won’t be like this past Wednesday, July 15 this year won’t be like July 15 next year. And that may well be the reason for email re-touches being much more effective than direct mail re-touches. Despite the differences, yesterday is generally more like tomorrow than a day 28 months from now just as an individual’s recent past behavior is more like is/her near term future behavior than their behavior at some distant point in the future.
I don’t have any empirical evidence but I think the reason email re-touches are more successful than direct mail re-touches is that they generally occur so much faster. You don’t need to wait 30 days for results or even two weeks for projected-results to determine which segments are responding to which offers using which creative approaches. Nor do you have to worry about production schedules and print queues. With email your questions are answered in hours. You not only know which segment(s) responded at what rate to which offer using which creative, you know that you can deploy the re-touch email to the right target in minutes with the winning offer tucked neatly into the winning design.
Since April we’ve had the opportunity to use these findings in combination with one another with some even more impressive results. Not only have we managed to equal the response rate’s of the initial offering, in more than one instance we’ve managed to triple it by combining the most responsive list segments with the most appealing creative.
In each of these scenarios we’ve chosen to hold the offer constant for purposes of simplicity and I think we’ve made a mistake in doing so. Inasmuch as the “offer” generally carries more weight in the email success equation than does “creative”, the next effort will be to measure the effect of quickly re-touching winning segments with winning offers using winning creative to see if we can’t raise the response rates even further. The trick will be to do that without getting so narrow and so microscopic that we find the one guy in 100,000 who’s ready to buy and no one else. Will keep you posted on our progress.
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Posted by Nic Winters on June 30th, 2009
Welcome again to The First 2 Weeks, where we analyze 3 competitors’ email marketing strategies when it is most crucial… the opt-in process, welcome message, and first few campaigns as these marketers attempt to establish relationships with subscribers.
In our previous edition we evaluated the opt-in process and welcome messages for 3 competitors in the office supplies retail segment: OfficeMax, Office Depot, and Staples. In part 2 we will now investigate campaigns sent beyond the welcome email and preference editing options.
INITIAL CAMPAIGNS
Both OfficeMax and Staples sent out additional campaigns beyond the welcome email within the first 2 weeks, but there was a vast difference in timing and quantity. OfficeMax capitalized on the interest of a new subscriber by sending 3 emails (days 6, 8, & 13) spread throughout this timeframe while OfficeMax only sent 1 email that arrived on day 14. Both are much more aggressive strategies than that employed by Office Depot, which didn’t send a welcome message until beyond 2 weeks and the first additional message not arriving until day 22.
Emails sent by all 3 competitors had forward to a friend links and view in a browser links. However, Office Depot did not have a reminder to ensure delivery by adding to them to your address book – while their competitors not only had this notice, but also a link to instructions. OfficeMax once again stood out from the crowd, as they had a link to a mobile device version at the top of their messages. Staples also has a great feature at the base of their emails which displays the email address that is subscribed. As noted in past reviews, this can assist in reducing a subscriber’s confusion in cases of old email addresses that have been forwarded, etc.
OfficeMax has done a decent job of employing alt tags on images so that all is not lost when images are off. However, they employed an ever better technique within small sections of some emails (like this pricing section displaying deals on printers) – utilizing text as opposed to relying totally on images. However, in that same email this technique could have been applied to the main content item, using text and background colors/images to achieve the same look and feel without resulting in blank section relying only on alt tags with images off.
Another example of a partial application of this technique was found in the 1 message we received from Office Depot. The have used text and background color in the $20 off $100 section, but this same technique could have also been applied to the left half of the area just below that section to achieve the same look and feel seen here with images on.
EMAIL PREFERENCE OPTIONS
All 3 competitors excel in this area of email marketing. Each of these companies has included links to allow you to update your email preferences. While Staples preference center is very limited (offering only options to update email address and change format from HTML to text) the other 2 competitors offer a wider variety of options. OfficeMax features an “Update your Profile” link in their emails which leads to a page where you can update information such as birthdate, zip code, and most importantly which emails you would like to receive (Special Offers and/or Weekly Store Ads). Office Depot offers both a “Change Email Address” link and another link at the base of the email allowing you to reduce the number of emails you receive (the landing page offers a reduction to 1 email every 2 weeks).
Watch for our next edition in the coming weeks in which we will evaluate the campaigns of 3 new competitors!
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 2nd, 2009
If you have followed this blog you have probably noticed like many things in the digital world, we have evolved. Email marketing, social media, word-of-mouth marketing, video blogging, podcasting and a myriad of other digital communication technologies are rapidly changing, merging, morphing and intersecting. To focus exclusively on email, and disregard all that is happening in the other spaces can create Digital Marketing Myopia (modernizing a great term coined by the great Theodore Levitt) and can cause a marketer to lose track of how these great options can work together.
So today we introduce Digital Spin, the SubscriberMail team’s perspective on the digital marketing space and related world. We hope that you enjoy it, and welcome your feedback and comments. This week, I will also be including insight from the outstanding TED conference in Long Beach. While the conference is not marketing focused (although Seth Godin is one of the speaker’s), it is sure to be filled with nuggets of digital gold from folks like Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and many others (conference details are available on the program page).
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Posted by admin on November 7th, 2008
Just released Email Marketing Minute Video covering creating a good subject line – http://budurl.com/subline
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on November 3rd, 2008
If you are in the B to C email space, knowing what is happening with delivery at AOL is a critical part of your job. AOL recently shut down their blog software service, leaving their postmaster without a tool to update the community on delivery happenings. Fortunately, the blog has moved to a new location. They don't update too often, but it is worth monitoring.
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