Return On Email Subscriber

Woot.com has built a great business and brand using great copy and a unique business model.  The following personalized email they sent to me really illustrates this.  I will let you read for your self:

WOOT, INC. INTERNAL EMAIL 
STAFF EYES ONLY 

Attention Woot employees - 

We are now entering the final phase of preparations for the Woot-Off planned for midnight tonight. This is when we depart from our usual deal-a-day model and sell one product after another, offering a new deal as soon as the previous one sells out. For some reason, Woot members like my name continue to have high expectations for this event. We must make every effort to ensure that they feel disappointed and betrayed. 

All workers should be physically and mentally straining to make this Woot-Off a success, like every muscle in a wolf’s body strains to capture and devour its prey. We expect total compliance with the following objectives: 

• Make sure the stables are thoroughly cleaned and the horses properly groomed and shod. As you know, Commander Rutledge prefers to lead us on horseback during Woot-Offs. (more…)

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).

View Full Version

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.

So, today is my birthday. The older you get, birthdays start to go from exciting days to not so exciting days (”damn I’m getting old!”).

That being said, it is still nice to get a happy birthday message - from anyone.

Aside from my friends and family, I received quite a few from brands and companies. They were all a nice touch. From coupons for a free Ice Cream cone (Coldstone Creamery) to just “Happy Birthday” (My Coke Rewards), they are a great tool for to pat your subscriber on the back and make them think you care, even if you don’t.

Most ESP’s have an automated tool to trigger birthday messages. If you can capture that birth date on Opt-in, try to send out a personalized b-day message. It is just an additional opportunity to get an email out and get people remembering what a great company you are.

Segmentation based on form data is a great start, but what do you do with those individuals that are not responding to the emails based on your segmentation rules? Most marketers stop their segmentation once the form is filled out, but one of the key attributes to effective email marketing is making sure that the content is relevant to your subscribers over time. People’s preferences change, a married couple might have children, the offers they respond to are going to vary once they do, a college student graduates and gets a job and now has purchasing power. Someone that was not previously a purchaser or was not responding are likely to respond to different content as long as it is valuable.

How do you create your segments, how do you know what will work? Initial surveys are valuable here to get an understanding of what segments to create. Get a good comprehensive survey put together to get a real understanding of demographics, preferences, product/service categories, etc. and compile the results to understand that if you have an average household income of under $35k that is subscribing and a fairly equal split of gender with an average age of 25. You know that you are more likely to direct those products that fit within the budget and lifestyle of your subscriber base, but beyond that is understanding what products to market, what sells to this group. This survey is going to help you move people between segments and test those people that are not fitting into the “bucket” they originally came in as.

I just got this email from Faucet.com. They normally do a typical job of their emails, show me product tells me what to buy, gives me some offer, and gives me a link - The major faux pas that home improvement brands do is try to push product that is totally off the mark from my tastes. As a homeowner it is valuable to get a helping hand from home improvement brands. The biggest help is telling me what I need to fully complete the job. So with this ensemble email, the use of the diagram is perfect. It shows you what you need (without assuming your style preferences) using the wireframe as well as links to each individual product category.

Many retailers go for one of two outcomes, get them to buy one thing, give them a very generic offer good on anything. Now both have their place, but this is targeted while being broad enough to cover the topic. Home Depot, Lowes, Bellacor, etc. Take note, this is an a great way to talk to the customer.

Clothing retailers are some of the worst offenders of “missing the mark”. Over the last couple years that I have been on Banana Republic, Nordstrom, and J. Crew email lists, I have yet to receive an email that is about men’s clothing. While I don

I recently was asked the follow question by a partner of ours “What are the most common email clients used?” It sounds like a pretty simple question, but after looking hard online, and not wanting to drop $1000 on a “certified research study,” ( it became clear that not that many people know. I posed this question to a number of industry experts, no solid answers came back.

The likely answer is Outlook and Hotmail. What version of Outlook, Hotmail or MSN or Yahoo, or AOL (and again what version of AOL)? We recently set out to get a good understanding on what email client people use for work and personal email, what email addresses they use to sign up for email and a few other burning questions.

We will be releasing this in our Q2 study that looks at day of the week, hour of the day and the aforementioned questions. Keep an eye out because some of the answers are astonishing.

This email from Shop.org blew me away. It is done by a technology that creates personalized images and adds them to emails or ecom sites based on the database information. Now this is just my name, which rocks in lights, but I have seen it done in many other ecom sites lately. Really connects the user to the experience.

Something to think about, the impact of your name in lights.

View image

Now this isn’t a true example of personalization the in real sense of the word, but they did follow some ideas we mentioned in our last meeting. We talked about putting the idea together so that someone could get an idea of what they could create when combining all the elements together instead of just showing all the items alone.

I like this as it should result in a higher sale per transaction by showing what a complete outfit could look like. Anyone could see this layout with thier own head at the top.

Lucy.com has done a good job lately in mixing up the looks of the emails from simple sale emails, to multi product emails to this that brings it all together.

View image

If you have been living in a cave there is a chance that you don’t know who Jack Baurer is yet. This does not mean that he does not know who you are….

This campaign is one of the best examples of personalization I have seen in a while. Although simple in execution, it was very well thought out as to how to draw the invidual into the experience.

Try it for yourself. But don’t think that Jack now does not know where you live.