Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Recently I have been testing the new Yahoo! email upgrade, as I am an email marketer and more people use Yahoo! than any other email service. The new version is nice (except for that annoying image suppression).
Anyway, I have been attempting to change some of the seemingly 1356 newsletters I am signed up to from Gmail to my Yahoo! address. What I have encountered is shocking to me. At least 35% of the emails where I look to manage my preferences have NO “update account,” “manage preferences,” or “change your email address.” All they offer me is the option to unsubscribe. They left me no choice but to do just that…unsubscribe.

Here is an example from Major League Baseball:

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If your email client does not have this feature, you need to think about your footer and how your service handles this. I just opted-out without a reason, only because they forced me to.

My wife and I recently had our first child and as we have been watching very closely day by day I started to make associations with how starting a family is similar (note: I mean in theory in no way actual caring) to starting an email program.

May times I have seen clients know they need an email program so they get an account, have us create a template and start emailing. Now it is important to jump right in but you need to take the time to look at the day to day objectives to get a real outline of what is important and what the point of the program is.

Marketers should consider the following:

- What is the potential revenue impact of implementing an email marketing program (and what are the costs)
- What resources are needed to manage the project or what costs are involved in having a full service email marketing firm, like eROI, manage this for me.
- What other marketing channels will be integrated with email (radio, DM, print) and how do we best integrate
- Once I have started my program – my first email – what are my next steps

The last consideration is one that is all too often overlooked, what happens if the email has a low read rate, low click rate, conversion is not as high as you would like, web traffic is not significantly impacted? All of these scenarios need to be considered so when it happens you know what to do. The first days of your email program are vital, similar to a child’s life. You need to study it – closely – and know what to do when something comes up that you might not anticipate.

Turn what looks like a problem into a strength. Help your email program grow and do not just let it sit uncared for.

What do you think are the most overlooked items when a program is first implemented?

This is an email I have been meaning to post for a few weeks, but travel and weather had me behind the 8 ball in many places. I had kep this one as it came into my inbox on Christmas Eve. They were already announcing the sales that were going to hit the day after Christmas. Now not that I would have any desire to run out and buy that night but could it have caused me some buyers remorse if I saw what I just bought that last week already marked down again? Would I driven to now think about taking my receipts to the store on the 26th to get the discount credited back to my account?

This is a tough call as I know being first to mind is important and many people actually buy more at the sales after the holidays than they do leading up to them as the sales are out of this world. BUT it rides a fine line of letting me know I might have just paid to much and I might want to look at how to get some money back now.

Just food for thought… think about those that you are emailing and possibly drive multiple creatives to those that bought online versus those that did not in the weeks leading up to an event. The last thing you want is someone wishing they had waited to spend their money with you as it might cause them to hold out next time.

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One of the difficult things that agencies come up against is being able to calculate a true ROI for clients. We can provide information on response to an email and even conversion, but online sales are only a portion of revenue for a multi-tiered organizations with retail, phone and online outlets. In my experiences, integration of reporting is a difficult undertaking mainly because client IT resources are strained, setup of unique 800 numbers is not implemented, and sales representatives are not trained to ask where they learned about the offer/product.

The email industry is great at being able to provide insight into how the email performed as long as the action is online. What many of these agencies do not do is take all the pieces into consideration to give the client the whole picture. By not being able to see the whole picture, these same email agencies are at risk since they cannot see the true impact email has on their client’s revenue and brand awareness.

Properly executed campaigns are important as we all know, but setting the groundwork for all campaigns and on-going programs is essential and can provide much more of a benefit to clients and agencies. We all want to produce revenue for clients and be able to show a direct ROI.

Now we can take this down the path of “Viral Email Marketing” but in essence this was a simple campaign Nike used to drive awareness through online word of mouth to new people that might not be subscribed to the Nike.com emails. You would think that anyone in the Portland area (where Nike is HDQ’d) would be subscribers, but I am sure they are not. Not everyone, to Nike’s discontent, is a fan or user of the Swoosh.

But as a fan of the brand and what they are doing with their understanding of online campaigns, I found this to be a well executed camaign. I even found myself clicking through to see if I needed a pair of these new Techno shoes to join Sunyi on her 3 mile a month challenge. (we could all use them with the rain, snow and indoor lockdown we are currently in… how many walks from her desk to mine would it take to hit 3 miles? Guess it depends on the week’s work load)

Think about what you can do to create some interesting ways to drive your subscriber base to share your messages and help increase the reach of your campaigns. We believe in ALWAYS adding send to friend capabilities in any campaign site or even web site for that matter as you never know who will help to drive your goals. After all Time Magazine named “YOU” as the person of the year.

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When you opt in for an email, it would be nice if more companies were to educate you on what to expect to get in coming months. We use our Archives to do this before they subscribe, but I was struck by what American Airlines is doing as a good idea. They have create a 4 email series that you get over a few week’s time to let you know where you are in the education process AND what you can expect to need to know or learn to use their site and services better. Now it took me a while to join this newsletter as they don’t have too many flights in and out of Portland but I applaud they way that they brought me up to speed as to why I am going to want to read these emails.

Look in the top right hand side of the email to see that they indicate what step you are on in the welcome/education process. Kudos and maybe a few of us can learn from this idea.

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I recently found myself with some emails from an employee that moved overseas and needed to move him off these lists. Not that I did not like them, but that he had opted in for them and not me. So they were not relevant to me. This one in particular made me laugh at the humor that was on target with the brand.

Think about if you are going to lose someone to let them know that they were appreciated (they may come back later) and if you craft the exit message you might just get some word of mouth out of it.

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With the growth of your email lists comes the need to create more manageable sub-lists of targeted recipients. By discovering some common themes amongst your contacts, you will be able to make your messaging more relevant and you will attain higher quality leads.

Join me as I explore five techniques for segmenting email lists, and five examples of using dynamic content to deliver targeted messaging based on your recipients’ profile settings.

Register here

I get a ton of emails each and everyday. Not that anyone else gets more or less, but I bring this all on myself as it is my job to see what others are doing out there. I scan emails a little close than others to see what they actually say. You know some copywriter out there is happy with that.

I was a little miffed to see that the footer of this email told me that as long as I was an unpaid subscriber that I am open to getting emails from 3rd parties. Now does that sound right? Did I not read the privacy policy closely enough? I appreciate the news I get from this source, but I wonder if they are one of the reasons as to why I get so many other offers and so many people seem to have my email address in this email marketing space.

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Well enough was enough, and my relationship is runied after spying this in the footer. Think carefully about the value of your list. If you goals is to monetize your list, why would you give me away to others to use just because you have not won me over yet? Some best practices to think about.

I know many of you are stilling coming to grips of what RSS has to do with your business. I see more sites offering it each and every week as it gives another avenue into the consumer. With the release of all the new browsers like IE 7, you should know that it is built in now into all the major browsers and will gain some market share this year. I am not saying to give up on email, as it is still the best ROI channel out there, but give choices.

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At eROI we added it to our ecommerce engine some months back with the first idea to use it to feed product information into Froogle and other shopping aggregators. We then saw the opportunity to start offering it as a subscription feature for consumers to take those products and add them to their newsreaders or activate it in the browser. It is slowly growing and I anticipate that we will see it more often in the sites you visit.

Of course we still drive email communications in with our emailROI engine that dovetails into emailROI but if you don’t give them the choice, you may lose the sale.