Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

In email marketing, if you aren’t planning a week or two ahead, you’re too late. To plan a timely and relevant campaign – and avoid “blasting” - you need to give yourself some time to let an idea “marinate”, create unique content, creative, landing pages and the like. We’re here to help jump-start that process.

Below is an Email Marketing Calendar of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in August and September that you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email campaigns

August 13th – International Left-Handers Day

If 7-10% of the world is left-handed, there’s a good chance your email list is the same way. Have you ever watched a left-hander use a pair of scissors? If you have, you know that the world is designed for us righties. Even if you don’t have any products for lefties, such as Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton, a simple shout-out would probably go a long way. If you do, that would be an amazing and rare segmentation opp.

August 15th – National Relaxation Day

Cue the massage music and fire up the black tea! It would be hard to make s case that reading email is relaxing. It’s more like the exact opposite – except for maybe Inbox Zero. Because the holiday is about unplugging and recharging, maybe you can leverage this before the 15th, and let your subscribers know they won’t be hearing from you that day, out of respect for National Relaxation Day.  Then go ahead and queue up a great email for the 16th or 17th. Namaste.

August 16th – Roller Coaster Day

The Roller coaster was patented on this day in 1898. See if you can beat this splash-worthy email from Beach Park in Brazil.  If ever an email embodied the spirit of the Email Marketing Calendar, this is it.

August 19th – National Aviation Day

There are less than 1 million pilots in the USA, but over 1.5 million people take a flight each day in America. If you ever had a chance to make a case that your products or content are worthy of those mostly miserable hours packing, traveling to, waiting for, flying on, waiting for, traveling to, unpacking…today might just be your day. (I personally couldn’t do without my Bose Noise Cancelling headphones, almonds, and an Esquire.) If you have some great advice on traveling, don’t be stingy!

August 21st - Wilt Chamberlain’s Birthday

There are 3 numbers that spring to mind here you may be able to tie to pricing or creative:

- 7′1″
- 100
- 20,000

August 26th - National Dog Day

“Spoil your dog on this day and always.” If there is no relation to dogs with your services, how about connecting with your audience on a more personal level?  Create a gallery on Facebook of all your employees dogs and ask your audience to head there and Become a “Like” (this “Like” thing is hard to work into a sentence, maybe stick with “Fan”).  A good opportunity for Email Marketing and Social Media collaboration.

August/September – Back to School!!!

Let’s be honest, there are very few “school kids” on your email list. You need to connect with parents. You can do so in 2 ways – sell them on things for their kids, or sell them things to pamper themselves.

Things for the kids: You’re really going to have to connect with a budget-minded parent in this economy. A sale isn’t enough, you need to resonate with their state of mind.  Here’s an example: “The last calculator you will ever need to buy…for 30% off!”. A sale is not enough right now. Go deeper and connect with the emotional and long term side of buying. If the hand-me-downs are going to keep your audience from replacing or upgrading, you better change their mind. Or, go for retro/nostalgia connection and remind them of how much they loved their Trapper Keepers and new duds. Connecting with their memories might be a better approach.

Things for the Parents: I don’t have children, but those I work with are ready to get their kids back-to-school. A week night dinner or mid-day lunch might be the perfect gift offer right now. From a B2B perspective, late afternoon webinars and marketing events will see more attention. If you are doing heavy Back-to-school messaging, you may want to mix in an option in your preference center for a subscriber to specify if they have children or not. If they don’t, a nice offer for a non-parent would stand out with all of the other kid related messaging.

August/September – Labor Day (Sept. 7th)

With the lack of economic growth, it looks like another Staycation weekend for Labor Day. Anything that can be used for fun at the house or at a park is good to promote, make sure the shipping options are clear and the items will arrive on time. Sometimes, people need more than a product, they need a reason to use it. Give them a reason, then sell them your product. This weekend also marks the beginning of the holiday email marketing season, and competition is going to be fierce. As I said with Back-to-school, discounts aren’t going to be enough. Your going to need to do better. Stay tuned for next months Email Marketing Calendar where we’ll talk about how you can cut through the noise this holiday season with your subscribers.

Here it is, the original Email Marketing Idea Calendar for June. We’ve had some copycats recently, but no fear, you are in the right place.

“Summertime, the livin’s easy.”
- George Gershwin

Nothing frustrates me more than getting sent irrelevant emails from clothing websites. For a store that sells to both men and women, you need gender to provide relevancy. Some stores have the data and don’t use it out of laziness, others don’t ask for the information or don’t have it.

I clicked on a link in a tweet recently that said “my favorite website of the moment” which led me to a clothing site called ASOS. They sell to both men and women and used a great segmentation technique I had never seen before. Instead of having a traditional submit/subscribe button, they had 2 buttons – women & men:

The best user experiences on the web are simple. This doesn’t take much thought and is perfectly intuitive.  If you rely on gender to provide relevancy to increase conversions, this is a great first step. I would give it a try – there is no wrong answer.

My only let down was that I didn’t receive a welcome email after opt-in.  This email could have really focused in on the male content and would most likely drive a lot of page views and conversions for ASOS. Maybe it is in the works…

Have you seen other uses of this opt-in technique on the web?  Let us know in a comment below.

The economy is bringing the timeless art of coupons back to the forefront.

A few recent statistics:

34% of female consumers are using coupons more frequently today than they were six months ago, & nearly 70% of the 4,500 respondents said they would print and redeem Internet coupon for products they would be interested in purchasing. - Burst Media

Google searches for the term “coupons” last month for the first time surpassed those for “Britney Spears.” – Ad Age

51% of 18-24 year-old shoppers indicate that they would be very likely to use coupons presented to them online – Platform A & IRA

While historically ambivalent to traditional coupons, younger couples are the most likely life-stage group to use online coupons, indicating an opportunity to influence product choices within this segment – Platform A & IRA

Young couples without children are among the respondents most likely to use a coupon they found online, followed by shoppers with younger children – Platform A & IRA

Like it or not, coupons are moving purchases in the current economic climate. Email Marketing provides the unique ability to hyper-target offers to specific subscribers based on past activity and past purchases.  For example, the Burst Media survey found that three-quarters (75.2%) of women ages 35-54 indicated they would print and redeem an Internet coupon, compared to 62.2% of women ages 18-34 and 67.7% of women age 55 and older. Do you have those segments?  Are you using them? (more…)

It is hard for me not to rage about this email. I have covered My Coke Rewards Email Marketing in the past.  The emails are rendering correctly now, but today we have bigger issues. As always, we can all learn from others missteps, even Coca-Cola.

First off, I have no Coke Rewards points, which is clearly stated at the top of the email. Right next to that zero balance is a note letting me know my points “rollover” into the next year?!?!?  There is a missed segmentation opportunity here. Someone with a zero balance should be notified of all the great things they are missing. The only mention of what these rewards are is “rewarding experiences.”

Second, this email design is very flawed. The copy is too small and the value proposition is not clearly stated.  Always remember to clearly state the expectations with above the fold copy.

Lastly, the long gray sidebar doesn’t seem to have a purpose here. All it does is waste space that could be used for increasing the copy size or show subscriber value of the program. For me, this email misses on all marks.

What would you have done to make this email better?

You’ve all been told how you need to start segmenting your lists and sending more relevant emails to yoru subscribers. Here is an out-of-the-box example from HornyToad.com (who just opened the very cool Lizard Lounge store in PDX).

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How they will determine what to send me from this, who knows.

But I found this to be a fun excerise and break from the same old routine. Think of ways you can get creative to engage your customers this year.

Today I spoke at the Houston AMA on market research and one of the questions that came up is how much should you research your opt-in list compared to going to an external list and qualifying them. Some of the discussion surrounded the purity of market research and how you should focus on blind surveying, “who” should ask for the survey (you or the MR firm), and if you should even consider using your own list.

I worked at Gartner for 5 years managing custom primary research projects for clients like Dell, Microsoft and HP. During that time I did not think even consider in-house lists because of th the “biased” nature of the list. Now running marketing campaigns for similar companies I have found that in-house lists are comprised of those people with interest in your company, so wouldn’t you want to get their feedback first? So why is there such a polarizing effect between marketing and market research? Why can’t they work together? Isn’t the end goal to craft messaging and products to sell more? Aren’t both pieces of information important?

Well we know that gamers love to get targeted relevant emails about the exact title, not a email on EVERYTHING you sell. Creating targeted emails that just focus on the item itself and sending it to the audience that likes a certain genre of game (or item/product) will show a higher interest rate, read rate and conversion rate. This email helped to blow this game off the shelves in record time.

Segementation and targeted emails will convert higher than a newsletter or blanket offer.

Would you like an email that just spoke to you, past shopping, or items of interest? Of course you would. Think of it like when you go to your favorite restaurant and they already know what dishes you might like and start the conversation focused.

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