Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.

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

Tuesday, March 2nd: Read Across America Day – Dr. Seuss’ Birthday

It doesn’t have to be a book does it? How about blog posts, white papers, or customer reviews?

Thursday March 4th: March Forth – Do Something Day

I’m sure there quite a few things you have in mind for your subscribers to do, don’t you? This day is also used as a celebration of goal achievement.

Sunday March 7th: The Academy Awards aka The Oscars

Lots of folks getting together on this Sunday night, if your site or product or location can enhance their experience, get out in front of it.

Monday March 8-12: National Make a Referral Week

A perfect opportunity to ask and engage your loyal audience to refer you to their friends, write a review, or send a gift to a friend from your store or site. Make sure to make the process easy using forms or social sites. The official hashtag on Twitter for the week is #marw10.

Wednesday, March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day

Green Email. ‘Nuff said. (more…)

For the last Tip Jar Podcast of 2009, I had the pleasure of talking with Dave Delaney, Social Media Coordinator of Griffin Technology (the company that makes those killer gadgets your iPhone, iPod, Blackberry, Stereo, etc…).

I met Dave at SXSW last year and jumped on all of Griffin’s social media streams. I have been really impressed with how they run their Social Media efforts, so I thought having Dave on the Tip Jar would be a good opportunity to take a look inside how a Consumer Product company like Griffin got into Social Media and how Dave keeps up with and manages the community and voice of the company on the web. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Griffin is on the road to CES right now in a bright Orange VW bus for their CES Bound campaign. Keep an eye out!

You can follow Dave on Twitter at @griffintech

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I got together with Chad White who runs The Retail Email Blog, a tactical daily guide to what’s going on in the world of retail email marketing.

In this podcast, Chad & I discuss his annual “Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season” for 2009. Our goal is to give you the tools that will help your email marketing program end the year with a bang!  Even if you aren’t a retailer, this guide gives great information on planning, trends, strategies and more.

Listen: 

Howdy folks, and welcome back.  Today we are going to attempt to increase the amount of people signing up for your email list through a little bit of testing using Google’s amazingly intuitive (and free) Website Optimizer. To execute this, you need a Google account, and you must be able to both make visual changes to your site and add code to your HTML. If you have an internal web team, work with an interactive agency (like us), or a freelancer, the changes shouldn’t be too difficult to for them to execute.

A/B Experiment Checklist

There are many elements of an opt-in form that can dramatically affect the conversion rate. For sake of this post, we will choose placement on the home page of the opt-in box. The theory is that if you give more promance to your email opt-in, you will get more sign ups. Following thse steps will allow you to find out if this is true for your audience.

• Choose the page you would like to test
• Create alternate versions of your test page
• Identify your conversion page

To test our thoery, create an alternate version of your exisiting home page, with the opt-in box in a different location. For the page variation, use a name like site.com/index2.html. The page will not be accessible to users unless it is served up by the page loader script.

The conversion page is very important in the process, as this is the validation of a successful visitor. You want to make sure that your thank you page is strictly for your email marketing and not also used by other forms.  Also, if you have a double opt-in process, make sure that you idenitfy the first confirmation page as your conversion page, not the page a vistitor goes to from the confirmation link in an email.  Getting them to opt-in is the point, not email confirmation.

Installing and validating JavaScript tags

This is where things stop getting polite and start getting real technical.  If you are unsure about adding code to your website, forward this link to your web team and they should be able to do it in minutes.

There are 2 scripts, - a control script and a tracking script. The control script should appear immediately after the opening <head> tag of the original page.This is the script that communicates with Google’s servers to retrieve alternative page information, and ensures that individual users are tracked properly, by showing them the same variation each time, and by not double-counting their visits should they come back to the page at a later time.

The tracking script is pasted on all 3 pages directly before each page’s closing </body> tag.  This script sends pageview information to Google, so that visits will be recorded in your reports.  The nice thing about this tool is that it validate the scripts before activating the test and also gives you links to send instructions directly to your web team.

May the Most Conversions Win

One thing I love about testing is that no one is right or wrong until the results are in.  You can best practice and benchmark your site to death. But you will never innovate until you test your theories. If you have an idea and a web designer tells you it’s no good – Test it! If you think a different color button will get clicked on more – Test it!  It’s really fun to watch the results come rolling in. The Google Website Optimizer will declare a winner, but it needs at least 100 conversions, so if you don’t get a ton of traffic, you may need to leave it up for a few weeks.

Testing placement is just one area to test.  The goal here is for conversions.  Anything that relates to getting information or purchases from users is on the table.  Do you have any elements you have tested that provided big results?  Let’s hear about them in a comment below!

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.

I have been a loyal Gmail user for along time. Lately though I have been frustrated with Gmail, mainly due to the images in my HTML emails not displaying correctly. Well they have announced some changes that shed some light on the image issue.

From the Gmail Blog:

Now displaying images in messages from your contacts
Monday, July 20, 2009 5:58 PM
Posted by David de Kloet, Software Engineer

When an email references external images, Gmail usually doesn’t display them automatically. Instead we show placeholders and present you with the option to “Display images below” or “Always display images from” that sender.

We do this to help protect your privacy from spammers, who can use images and links to verify that your email address is real.

But often the messages you get with images are from friends or family and there’s no reason to worry about your privacy — you just want to see the photo of your newborn niece or the invitation design they’re sending you. So, in these cases, we’ve decided to start displaying images by default. Now, whenever someone you’ve emailed at least twice sends you a message containing images, you’ll see them right away. Note that we picked this threshold of two messages to start with, but we may tweak it if it doesn’t seem right going forward. And we only display images by default for authenticated messages (using SPF or DKIM). Gmail and other big mail providers usually authenticate their mail, but other services might not, so it’s possible you’ll get an email from one of your contacts where images aren’t displayed by default.

If you prefer to go back to the way things were, you can choose not to display images from certain senders or from anyone. To disable images from an individual sender, click “Don’t display from now on” under the “Show details” link of an email from them with images. To disable images from everybody, select “Ask before displaying external content” under “External content” on the general Settings tab.

What does this mean to Email Marketers?

Gmail will display images by defualt for emails from addresses that are in that person’s Contact’ list. It will also display images if you have sent that address at least 2 emails and that the address in question is authenticating using SPF or DKIM.

What Can I Do in My Email Marketing Program?

(more…)

First off, Happy Birthday! (whenever your b-day is).

Birthdays are great opportunity to mix up your messaging to an email subscriber and give a non-sale oriented, warm and fuzzy to build trust and enthusiasm with your brand and email program.  That doesn’t mean you don’t get to sell and covert though!  Let’s take a look at how to set this up, automate, and also a few content ideas to get you thinking.

Setting up a Birthday Email

First off, your going to have to know their birthday. The best practice here is to capture that data at the opt-in. You can always get this information later through progressive profiling, but I would recommend adding it to the initial email capture so you can automate the email trigger from day one. Making this a required field is also a good idea if you are serious about birthday emails.

Remember, you don’t need the year they were born, unless you plan on sending different content based on their age. It will also make the opt-in process faster.

Triggering the Birthday Email

Your ESP should have the ability built in to capture this in your form generator. In emailROI, one requirement is to choose the format of the date:

Once you have chosen the format, you will have a consistent format in your database to work with. Then, you can assign that birthday event trigger to a specific email message in your email app. This email will either reside independently or within a list or group.

This email should allow for personalization of name and or creative elements and coupon codes or offers. This also gives you flexibility to contiunally edit the message with out changing your opt-in code.

Birthday Email Ideas

Restaurants & Retail are going to have the most flexiblity here, as they can allow for free items or discounts. Let’s take a look at few that provide these:

Here was an email I recieved from Wendy herself. Along with a birthday greeting, it gives me a link to $1 off coupon I can use at any location.  This is effective and trackable outside the online channel.  They use Coupons Inc. to facilitate barcodes and personalized online printing. They also make good use of the preheader space with “Get Coupon” to tease the present.

Here is an email from Adidas that does a technqiue here that is noteworthy.  Aside from the 15% off coupon, they give a secondary call-to-action to join the Addidas Insiders club. This takes advantage of the Birthday message to cross promote their club.  I would be intrested to know how this element performs. Lesson here is that the email doesn’t have to include only 1 item.

El Gaucho, a fabulous NW steakshouse, doesn’t waste their birthday email opportunity with a small discount.  They come right out with a $25.00 off discount that is sure to drive visitors. Every business is different, but to me, if your going to give someone a birthday gift, give them something they will remember.  A halo effect will be placed on future campaigns to that subscriber, both online and offline.

Before you Implement Your Birthday Email Campaign – Some Things to Consider

I have been with eROI, in the interactive marketing industry, for over five years and seen the space evolve with email marketing, social networking/social media, blogging, and microblogging, i.e., Twitter. Running campaigns for clients online can be very exciting and stressful – as the Internet is always on. There is no other medium that moves as fast as the Internet and has as many ways that people can consume content. With the onslaught of social media sites and Twitter, information spreads faster than most people realize – people share feeds, sites have open APIs to pull information and post to other sites, Google constantly crawls and indexes these high traffic sites. One posting on Twitter or Facebook can result in hundreds or thousands of pages of syndication in minutes.

The real estate industry has always done a good job locally with information but it never spreads very fast (Sunday paper listings is the “information superhighway” of the real estate industry), which is one area the industry has seriously slacked. I am very lucky with my realtor as Jennifer King is a top realtor in the Portland area, with whom I have bought and sold a number of homes with. She has and is continuing to do an amazing job. Recently Jennifer switched to doing websites for properties and not leaving fliers. Jennifer is traditional in her methodology, so I knew she had all the bases covered. With the current state of the housing market, not many homes are moving very fast, so as traffic was slow for two weeks (during spring break) I reached out to a friend and colleague of mine, DJ Waldow from North Carolina. He was looking for a realtor online to help him sell his home and found his Realtor by asking some questions on Trulia Voices, a real estate Q&A social networking community. After some back and forth, it was a perfect match. He recently had a story published on him about using Twitter to promote the sale of his house. Anderson Cooper tweeted his story which promoted it only more. Soon thereafter, they had accepted an offer to purchase their home. DJ pointed me to Trulia and Rudy Bachraty, Trulia’s Social Media Guru, who helped him socialize his home on Trulia, Trulia’s corporate blog and on Twitter. So I was hoping to have a similar success by following suit.

I had a Twitter conversation with Rudy and he gave me a helping hand. Jennifer became a Trulia Pro to help promote my home up to 7x more on Trulia compared to that of a non Trulia Pro and I tweeted about my home for sale as well as posted a message on Facebook. Using URL tracking functionality by idek.net (written by Adam Covati). I was able to determine there was a major impact on the traffic and interest in my home.

Within two days of Jennifer posting my home on Trulia, my tweeting efforts and the Facebook posting the number of site visits to my property website more than tripled and we increased that again with a spike of page views on Trulia. In addition, due to the social effects of sites like Trulia and Twitter, there are nearly 250 listings on Google for my home. I have personally received a over 15 referrals from friends for people they know to look at the house.

The impacts of social media sites is wide reaching and exponentially effective. Coupled with traditional real estate marketing techniques we have increased not only site visits but also more than doubled the number of showing requests. Hopefully this dual marketing strategy will help us find a buyer for our home more effectively.

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…)

I received an email from Jet Blue today that is great example of how to notify your subscribers that you are changing your “From” email address that you use in email marketing.

Subject Line: We are changing our email address…

This email can serve as a template for you.  Here are the elements that make this a success:

1. Clear Subject Line – No need to get cute with an email like this.  Get straight to the point if you want them to take action.

2. Whitelist the new Address – “Add us to your Address Book” is a clear call to action.  Some brands,such as Travelocity, go as far as to show the subscriber how to do this for each email client.  That choice is up to you.

3. Provide New Email Address – Jetblue provided the address not once, but twice in this email.  I would say the only optimization here is that they sent this email from the new address, not the old one.  This may have missed the inbox for a few folks who had whitelisted the previous address.

There are many environments that do not show your “From” mask, just the email address (see AOL post). It is important to both brand the email address as well as be consistent with the address that you use. If you do need to make a change, due to a new ESP or optimization, make sure you notify subscribers in a fashion similar to this.