Posted by Dave McCue on September 24th, 2009
Animation can make your message stand out from the email crowd. But without knowing how to use animation you can easily overwhelm your readers. Find out the do’s and dont’s of effective email animation in an all new Email Marketing Minute!
Posted by Dave McCue on August 3rd, 2009
How easy is it to find an email opt-in on a homepage? SubscriberMail takes a look at three websites to determine how placement of an opt-in box can make or break the success of an email program.
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.
Posted by George Palatine on July 13th, 2009
When is the last time you reviewed your email opt-in form(s)? Are you still asking visitors for their birth date even though your birthday promotion was canceled months ago?
It is a good idea to periodically review/update your company’s opt-in strategy to align with current business objectives. Marketers love having access to gobs of data, which can sometimes work against them. The key is finding the right balance of what to request and what you actually use in your program. Planning for the future is not necessarily a bad idea but asking users to complete multiple fields for data that you currently do not use can lead to lower opt-in rates.
If you are in doubt, use the formula below as guide to determine how much is too much. Your PI, or Personalization Index, is determined by dividing the number of elements (data sources) you use in your email marketing strategy by the number of elements you collect (data fields on your opt-in form). The rule of thumb is that if your PI is less than .3 you are collecting too much. In other words, you are asking for far more information than you actually use in your email marketing efforts.
Let’s take a look at an example of this. Say an online retailer requests 14 fields on their opt-in form. In addition to name and email address they are requesting items like birth date, HH income, zip code, marital status, etc. These are all great demographic data points and can be used to segment and personalize messages, but is it too much? If this retailer only uses first name, email address, zip code and household income in their program then it is too much.
PI = 4/14 = .285
By eliminating just one or two of these fields the ratio would move above the .3 measurement. Understand that this is meant to serve as a rule of thumb and is more of an exercise to get you thinking about the data you collect and how you use it. So take a look at what your PI ratio is and remove any unused/unnecessary elements from your forms. You may soon see an increase in quality and volume.
Posted by George Palatine on July 9th, 2009
Coupons can be an effective way to entice email subscribers when done correctly. Watch the latest Email Marketing Minute for tips on sending out a successful email coupon mailer!
Check out Part 2 of The First 2 Weeks: Arts and Crafts available now only on The Digital Spin! http://budurl.com/2wksarts2 #
