Moving into our first home has made the last month and a half a pretty busy one for my wife and I, but the process also shed light on what a valuable opportunity movers present to email marketers. Unfortunately, this opportunity was not always taken advantage of.
Here is a sampling of some of the hits and misses, graded A to F:
Using the US Post Office’s website to change our address was much easier than battling the crowds at a USPS location, and it wasn’t long before I received an email confirming that my change of address request had been received. The email explained that I would receive a confirmation letter through the mail at my new address. In addition, much like if I had visited a physical post office to change my address, I was presented with a batch of helpful resources to assist with the move. Everything from information on security systems to census facts about my new neighborhood were available, as well as online resources to change vehicle registration, register to vote in my new town, and several coupons (which any mover can appreciate). Lastly, the USPS included a Quick Poll to solicit feedback about the entire process. Simple, valuable, and well done all around. Grade: A
Once the paperwork was finalized, our realtor emailed my wife a link to an easy-to-use message builder, allowing a non-technical person like herself to put together a simple moving announcement that she could email our friends and family to notify them of our new address and share a picture of our new home. Of course, this announcement was neatly branded with the realtor’s logo along with our agent’s contact information—an easy path to some free publicity. Points were lost, however, because the message’s “From” name defaulted to that of our realtor, resulting in a message that certainly wasn’t viewed nearly as often as it would have been coming from my or my wife’s email address. Still, the combination of value, engagement and potential for sharing made this a strong campaign. Grade: B
Does your company have an online promotion or email campaign that outperformed all the rest? Why not recycle it and see if you can recapture some of that success.
If you sell a durable hard good (products lasting several years) or a service that has a long repeat/renewal cycle (interior design or teeth whitening) you may not necessarily want to get back to those customers who purchased the first time with the same message. In this case, redeploy your campaign focusing on subscribers “post promo”. In other words, lets say you ran a special offer that did great in the fall of 2008. Dust off that campaign and email it to the segment of your list that was not exposed previously. (People who opted-in AFTER the original deployment date or did not open/click the original message).
For the people who did purchase during the last campaign now might be a good time for a re-touch program. You can promote add-on or complementary offerings to the product or service they originally purchased. Items like an extended warranty, touch-up service (as in the case of teeth whitening) or an additional accessory are a few possibilities.
Now if you sell a product or service that has a short re-purchase cycle (consumer products, restaurant, car wash, etc.) then resending this previous campaign to your entire list makes sense. Odds are they may be interested again. Be sure and test to see which group performed better, the people who now saw this offer 2X or the ones seeing it for the first time.
The biggest thing to understand in recycling past programs, is determining why did this program outperform the others? Was it simply a great offer/value, were outside factors like timing involved (a snow blower sale in the middle of an unexpected blizzard), was a unique list segmentation criteria used or was it just luck? If you identify what factors caused this program to perform so well, you can repeat these steps again and optimize your future efforts to improve your overall results.
If you regularly leverage the relationship between your sales and/or support reps in email communications to your clients, perhaps it is time to investigate personalizing your From and Reply-To values. This can make your messages have a more personal touch as they appear in the inbox of your recipient displaying that the email is from their rep, and when they reply to the email the response can be pointed directly to their contact at your company (not just a general mailbox – sales@company.com).
With an email service provider such as SubscriberMail, you can utilize the Dynamic Sender (a.k.a. “Personalized From”) capability – allowing you to set unique From and Reply-To values for each recipient’s message. So, from a single mailing one recipient might see the message arrived from Jane Deere with replies automatically being sent to a Jane.Deere@mydomain.com email address while another recipient would see it arrived from John Doe with replies set to go to John.Doe@mydomain.com. This feature pulls both the From and Reply-To values from data fields that you import along with your list of email addresses.
I know what typically comes to mind when you think about personalization in relation to email – likely a “Dear First Name,” greeting or a “Great ways to save money at Company Name” subject line.
However, I’d like to remind you of two quick and easy uses of personalization that can be incorporated into your email campaigns to assist in increasing the delivery rates of your messages.
1. Include a request to add your From address to the recipient’s safe sender list/address book/whitelist to increase inbox delivery and image enabling. You can ensure that you are asking them to act upon the correct address by utilizing the personalization token related to From address (%sys_fromaddr% in SubscriberMail). However, please keep in mind that having your recipients completing this task will do you no good if you don’t keep a consistent From address (bouncing back-and-forth between From names causing the beginning of your From address to be altered).
2. Consider displaying the email address that you have on file for your recipients within your messages. Many of your recipients may be receiving your messages due to automatic forwarding from an old email address that could eventually expire. Your recipients may also have multiple email addresses on your lists causing frustration when they receive multiple copies of your emails. Including the email address you have on file in your messages boosts credibility and helps recipients receiving multiple copies to resolve this issue. You can ensure that you are including their correct address by utilizing the personalization token related to email address (%sys_email% in SubscriberMail).
Email Marketing Minute – PersonalizationThe opt-in form is a critical component of your email marketing program’s success. At SubscriberMail, we work closely with clients to ensure that the form they create does not gather to much information. Doing so drives down the number of opt-in’s. This Email Marketing Minute presents an easy-to-use formula to calculate whether or not your are asking for too much data.
Moving into our first home has made the last month and a half a pretty busy one for my wife and I, but the process also shed light on what a valuable opportunity movers present to email marketers. Unfortunately, this opportunity was not always taken advantage of.
Does your company have an online promotion or email campaign that outperformed all the rest? Why not recycle it and see if you can recapture some of that success.
