Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Here it is, your April Email Marketing Calendar. April is an interesting month. From April Fools to Tax Day to Earth Day, the emotions run the gamut.

Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in April and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Thursday April 1st – April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s Day is the one day of the year you have free reign to play practical jokes and pranks on family, friends, coworkers, and most importantly your email subscribers. I will warn you, this is very dependent on your product or service. If your content is heavy and serious, you will want to consider whether a joke is appropriate. On the other hand, it may be the perfect opportunity for you to loosen up your tie and connect with subscribers on a different level.

Sunday, April 4th – Easter Sunday

The nice thing about Easter is that you have multiple angles you can work from a marketing standpoint. Easter bunny, Easter eggs, Easter basket, etc… One idea to consider is to add a hidden element to your email layout, which is essentially a hidden item that is only accessible by discovering a hidden link (known as an “Easter Egg”). Since users don’t typically spend a great deal of time with an email, you need to make sure the hover isn’t to difficult to locate – think 20x by 20x pixels instead of 5px by 5px.

Wednesday, April 7th – No Housework Day

Think of all the great products, services and locations that can be enjoyed instead of housework. Procrastinators world-wide will rejoice with your No Housework Day special!

Monday, April 12th – Walk On Your Wild Side Day

Push your edgy content on Walk On Your Wild Side Day. Some fun creative of your staff or some of your more eccentric content will do the trick. Lou Reed approves.

Thursday, April 15th – Tax Day

For the procrastinators out there, April 15th might not be the day. It might be the 16th, after a good night of sleep and dreams of refund or less worry about payment just paid. If you want your subscribers to blow off some steam and celebrate, it might be interesting to A/B split the 15th & 16th and see what works best for future campaigns. Stay away from politics and focus on the value your content of offer provides.

Friday, April 16th – High Five Day

National High Five Day originated at the University of Virginia in 2002, and has since spread across the globe. Anything and everything can be high-fived, and gives a perfect opportunity to focus on the social/viral side. The official website gives some great ideas. Can you adapt them to your email?

Monday, April 19th – National Hanging Out Day

The goal of this holiday is not to sit on a couch, it’s to educate communities about energy consumption. National Hanging Out Day was created to demonstrate how it is possible to save money and energy by using a clothesline. Can you come up with a list of ways to save energy with your product or service? If not, maybe just in general?

Thursday, April 22nd – Earth Day

This year is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, and a chance to provide the tools and structure for individuals and organizations to organize around environmental issues. The official website offers ideas and tips to take action.

Wednesday, April 21st – Administrative Professionals Day

We all know how important the administrative professional is, don’t we?  Celebrate them, empower them, reward them, or spoof them (in a fun way). Think about your list…how many of them consider themselves “Administrative Professionals”?

Last Friday in April - National Arbor Day

You can find the official date for your state here. Continuing on the environmental kick in April, how do you reward your subscribers for planting a tree?  How can we prove that they did it?  Easy: through user-generated content on Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube, etc. Sounds like a perfect chance to seed a social campaign through email!

See you next month for the May Email Marketing Calendar… in April.

If someone wants to unsubscribe, just let them unsubscribe.

Making the unsubscribe process difficult or confusing will just aggravate your (former) subscribers and cause real damage to their perception of your business or brand. Don’t make them log-in or make the text confusing. Your not only delaying the inevitable,  your making it worse. And why? If they can’t figure out how to unsubscribe, they might stay and turn into a more engaged subscriber?  Doubtful. The next time your name comes up, that bad experience will be their first memory. Just let them go, it will actually improve your program. (more…)

One of the bread & butter stats of Email Marketing, the “Open”, is really only the beginning of the story. The company Quantivo, who sent me the email that inspired this post,  could never know the damage this “Open” did to my perception of their brand. All they know is that there is a good chance I saw this email and possibly read/scanned it.

But why did I open it?  Because they played a trick on me.

I only do “Name & Shame” posts when I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned. This is definitely one of those moments.

While this was a clever trick to get me to open the email, the ramifications of this action are much worse. (more…)

Watch this post for live updates from Email Marketing Twitterati at the Email Evolution Conference in Scottsdale, AZ.

Do you rent 3rd party email lists for acquisition and lead generation?  Costs are dropping.

Foliomag.com is reporting that the downturn in the economy has resulted in a downturn of CPM rates for both B2B and B2C lists:

“Permission-based e-mail b-to-b, which is the highest priced category, saw a decrease of $12 per thousand to a straight average price of $293 per thousand. The second largest price decrease occurred in the permission-based email b-to-c lists, which saw a decrease of $11 per thousand.

“The findings are extraordinary, yet not surprising, considering this is a mirror of the U.S. economic conditions,” Worldata senior vice president Ray Tesi said in a statement. “It is likely this trend will continue, at least for the next quarter or two until the U.S. economy is stabilized. We are seeing strong usage in the Technology, Small/Medium Business, and HR channels of the business-to-business category, as b-to-b marketers take advantage of this attractive pricing.”

I have seen wildly different results for email list rental campaigns. Success usually comes down to list targeting and concept execution. If one step of the process is off, you can lose the conversion and waste your money.

If you are considering renting an email list, ask for references and average metrics. If the list broker will not provide these, keep looking.

List Rental Prices See First-Ever Decline

I know that I have commented before on this, but I have been let down again and again but consumer email efforts. Consumer email marketing has moved toward the marketing strategy, which the auto industry affectionately calls, “people moving.” It is all about how can I get people in (or on) my store ASAP. We can worry about next weekend next week. I have had to reduce my frequency or unsubscribe all together for a ton of email I am subscribed to because there has not been any notable value in their email programs. Everything from Nordstrom to Anthropologie to Ruth’s Chris to Circuit City to Ritz Camera is all about SALE, SALE, SALE. Yeah, I get it, you are having an amazing online sale this weekend. What happened to the days of your corner store providing great value and customer service? Because of that, you shopped again and again. You had quality product, quality customer service and always were willing to listen. Email marketing for consumers has turned into speed dating, I miss the days of being wined and dined.

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I come across a lot of email, well all of us do, but I start to get annoyed by the “play it safe mentality”. Especially the blatantly safe images:

• The B2B email with the five way too happy people sitting around a conference room while trying so hard to say diversity at the same time.
• The jewelry email with the excited woman with love in her eyes and a diamond ring on her finger.

It has been a long time since I have seen a unique email come out from a major brand. Is it the direction from the client, trying to be so mass audience that they don’t want to offend anyone? Or is it the agency trying to speak to everyone through one ad? It is probably a little bit of both, but either way something needs to change. Major brand emails need to stop playing it safe and start doing something edgy with their email programs. The most interesting emails I see these days are those brands trying to stand out – t-shirt sites, video games, even text emails from new Web 2.0 companies can be intriguing.

Stop showing the same recycled content over and over. You lose reader interest and soon don’t stand out from the noise, but are the noise.

Brands, ask for your agency to do something more cutting edge, push the proverbial envelope. You pay them for a reason beyond being a production shop, you pay them for ideas. The agency is your partner, stand up for them internally if you like the idea or think they have a good point.

Agencies, show your best work, not always what the client wants. You will be amazed at what they like sometimes. What is the worst that could happen, they say they don’t like it? Actually, no, they fire you but you get the point.

During the EEC event in February in one of the sessions the topic was frequency of email. The panelists had discussed email frequency and how much is too much as well as capping the frequency of your email, i.e., only allow a subscriber to be emailed X times per month. I asked, “If you cap the frequency of email to a subscribe to, say only get 5 emails per month, but you send out 10 a month, how do you determine what email is most relevant to them?”

I watched the panelists skirt around a non-answer as no one could tell me how you determine which emails are most relevant to the subscriber. If the 7th email might be the one that makes me purchase, you missed the boat.

Limiting the frequency by subscriber, in my opinion, is a bad idea. I welcome the conversation about why it is good, any lift in ROI you have seen etc., but I see the practice more harmful that good.

I always found that setting subscriber expectations is much more appropriate than a predetermined number. Tell subscribers that you send your newsletter once a month, promotions weekly, and event announcement every other week. Let them determine what is too much. It would be interesting to see if anyone has seen a lift in overall subscriber activity, as well as revenue and ROI that has implemented a predetermined frequency limit.

I was taking a look at the Adverblog email today and it had a story about the new Halo 3 site. The site is built from an actual diorama. The level of real world detail that went into an online experience to promote a video game is astonishing.

There is great use of images, video, characters throughout your site “travels” – this really ups the ante for storytelling when it comes to videogame microsites. The level of detail that went into the visuals of games has been amazing for a couple years now, but always lacked some real meat to the storyline.

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We all know that our biggest clients are not always our more loyal ones, so the question I am often faced with is, how do you grow revenue long term?

• Make it easy to interact with your brand – Whether I am shopping, finding the information I am looking for, signing up for your email, or creating an account – a website should be simple and clear.

• Ask Me – When I sign up or create an account, so many companies don’t ask me what I like, but a lot of companies the do ask don’t listen.
• Immediate communication – Send me an email right after I sign up. Let me know you are out there and you want to know me. Nothing is more frustrating than making the decision to give you my personal information and for me not to know if you even got it.
• Be Gracious / thank you – My mother always to told me to be polite and a simple thank you can go a long way. If your corporate direction is discounting, send me a coupon, if it is value, reaffirm why I signed up.
• Show them you care – Let me know that you value me and my time. If I am going to spend a good amount of my time with you and your brand, you should show me how important that is to you.
• Don