Adventures in Email Marketing

Great conversation in Email Roundtable this week about “how old is old,” regarding lapsed subscribers. An old colleague used to call these “slowboats” which would always start a round of singing, “the slow boat to China.”

My personal favorite method: don’t email them, and then every 3 months or so, send an inactive re-engagement campaign. Also, use that re-engagement to recycle copy (so the costs are low) and subject line test. Be creative and risky with the subject line- and use a lot of subject lines. One client had a 11% response rate on one of his segments, the subject line was the catchiest, wittiest, and most clever. It’s a sandbox, essentially, and the more risks the more surprises.

Other posts on inactivity:
Using Inactivity, and Activity, as a Campaign Idea

Friend is learning to Twitter. I had a special conversation with him the other day. He forwarded me some tools others had recommended, and I teased him on the “1st line of text.” If it says “it’s legal” or it will “increase your follower count,” it’s spam. Just like in email. Doth protest too much.

Quick tips to identifying Twitter spam:
- Woman’s name + some numbers, in the username.
- Follow ratio is way off, they follow lots, nobody follows them.
- “get rich quick” scheme, regarding followers.
- Look at their posts- all plugs for products

Recommended Tools I’m Using Now
TweetDeck - organizes your Twitter followers, includes basic functions like search, recommends, etc.
Topify - sends rich email with Twitter info, and methods to follow via email

I got a great question a few weeks ago (so sorry for the lag!) regarding this:

Anna,
We’re installing a new commerce server, and recently discovered it has no ability to throttle outgoing emails. A stand-alone server outside of this platform has been configured to distribute our marketing emails, but we have been unable to find a throttling solution for the transactional email server.

Kate, at SuppliesGuys

Kate,

Frequency control is managed by some tools using business logic that determines exceptions- “only email this person once per day” or “never email this person with a similar promotion for the last 6 months.” The frequency control software I’ve seen has been either manual SQL scripts filtering each outgoing campaign, or part and parcel of an email marketing software solution.

For transactional emails that are triggered by the customer’s activity, it’s not really recommended to introduce a frequency control. Basically because the numbers are rather low, and real-time triggered emails are more appropriate than scheduled marketing emails. If you do have special events- I’ve seen systems support live pay per view wrestling matches that resulted in a very high volume of traffic, and usually launches, releases, or other time-based online traffic generate unusual loads- then throttling is a great idea.

One thing that is a little bit of a fly in the ointment, is that transactional emails and promotional emails have different CAN-SPAM requirements. So I’ve seen these split up in a few different organizations. One system sends the transactional, another sends the opt-in, “once-a-week” promotional emails.

Strongmail is an inhouse solution that is expensive, but I usually point to it to clients if they do want to have real control over transactional & promotional emails in one system, by one IP. There are issues with SM and it’s not the solution for everyone. You can optionally offput those transactional emails to your ESP, and then they control the frequency and throttle for some domains like AOL. The benefit to this is that you have one IP that your client base whitelists. The downside is that it’s a point of risk for any failure, and transactional emails are usually very key to the operational income to your site.

As for freeware that does throttling, I’m not aware of any. I’d actually recommend that as the best solution- keep it inhouse, and setup a “ticker” to count the number of outgoing transactional emails. when it reaches a recommended threshold, setup a delay mechanism.

Thanks and good luck!

I just saw a new low volume ESP emerge on the scene, and before eye rolling and “not another one!” I wondered just how difficult it is for people who want an ESP to pick one, amongst the myriad of options. So this is what goes through my mind when I evaluate a small volume ESP:
- Do they understand CAN-SPAM
- (if they have a blog) is their advice in line with best practices recognized in the community
- What kind of clients do they have, and are those examples, examples of good email?

Now, as a person shopping for an ESP, don’t get overwhelmed. Think about these questions:

1. Do you need a lot of handholding? If so, check if they have consulting available, or a reputation for good customer service.

2. Are you interested in leveraging templates? Templates are a great way to keep costs down and ensure that your audience, no matter the browser/email flavor, can have a rich experience. Some vendors have better looking templates than others.

3. Do you want a price-per-email, or a flat rate? I personally don’t like per-thousand rates, because it penalizes a prospering business, and there are some ESPs out there that loosely according to the amount sent.

4. If you can admit you’re responding to an ad, do some research before finally deciding. Some of the smaller size ESPs will give you a lot better customer service than the ones that are large and can afford marketing. But also, the ones that are busier will have better persistent systems, failover, etc. But in the negative, they will also have other customers that are spammy which can affect your campaigns.

There are a basic set of features to good ESPs:
- Very good sender reputation handling, a relationship with ISPs and feedback loops
- Sophisticated templates that work in all major browsers, O/S, webmail and email clients.
- Recommendations on best practices in email marketing
- Metric reporting on bounces, sends, opens by campaign

There are also new and emerging technologies that some are including (sometimes free, or included):
- Preview of design in various inboxes
- Email to RSS so you can distribute content (and vice-versa)
- Sharing chicklet to leverage social media
- Certification available with GoodMail so you can use video in email
- Response filtering, reusable segmentation
- Integration with web analytics for live, transactional emailing

Friend of mine was complaining about her job, and in this recession, she still wanted to bail from her job. I started thinking about the jerks I’d worked for, and how, if I was in her situation, I’d probably treat it like school. Because when you know something is bad, you can only get better. I’d try different techniques on said boss, to try and figure out the best method. And, when I switch jobs, at least I’d have learned something. In a way bad situations give us a freedom to experiment and test that good situations can’t afford.

Same with email campaigns. Think of how creative we get when things get desperate, when options get slim. You try and spice it up with new copy, invigorating creative, shuffling around send times. You integrate other services in the company, try to get access to more data, and other tricks. Now is the time to try something new.

For that matter, failures are interesting. Looking back at your history, why did certain campaigns, strategies or methods fail? What were the flawed ingredients? Have you tried to recreate things or just run away in shame?

Some of my biggest failures made me realize the risks that I can stomach, and some that I can’t. And that informs the risks I take in the future.

A new Twitter pal, who is a friend IRL (in real life) as well as a very talented food reviewer and author, re-tweeted Mashable. Oh, so wrong. I knew she was new to Twitter, so I cut her some slack. What is wrong with re-tweeting Mashable?

1) Don’t re-tweet A-list twitterers. They have tens of thousands of followers, so popularizing their content simply sends the message that either you don’t know they’re an A-lister, showing naivete, or that you are ass-kissing.

2) Don’t do a simple re-tweet. Contribute. You can get a whole lot out of Twitter if you treat it as a conversation, and that extends to re-tweeting. Add a note before the RT - not just “wow” or “neat” (guilty as charged, on that).

3) Inside jokes. Nobody likes to feel excluded, give back-up or follow-up info to those not part of the exchange.

Louis Gray goes into a lot of detail into the politics of re-tweeting in: “You have entered a No-Retweeting Zone Here.”

Their head of new media, Stephen Greer, responded to an apt question in his talk in December, at the Email Marketing Summit. Someone in the audience asked about the abusive frequency of Obama campaign emails. He replied, “You voted, right. Then we’re not emailing too frequently.”

That truism can’t work anymore, can it, now that core, grass roots activists *have voted* and are still getting, dare I say, spammed. I heard it on NPR, I watched it on TV, dare I say my twitterflock are also complaining. They’re glad he’s elected, but they don’t want to be “asked for money every day.”

Sadly, they’re going to lose that political capital quickly if they don’t listen to the folks that do this for a living, that have tested it out. No more than 3 a week, sir. As we know in the industry, once someone has unsubscribed, it’s very, very hard to get them back.

More reading:
I summarized a talk Stephen Greer, Director of Email and Online Fundraising for the Obama Campaign, gave in December, at Email Insider Summit
Political Spamming

Is FriendFeed the Coolest App No One Uses? I can’t argue- I’ve recruited countless people to Twitter but none so far to FriendFeed, despite crouching in a dark corner of a bar showing some friend the FriendFeed interface on my iPhone because “I can’t describe it”. A recent verbal roll call by Alex Scoble showed 300 over a 24 hour period. Even with double that number, if you take into account people who didn’t care to respond or don’t follow Alex, it’s still paltry compared to Twitter. OK, then dial Twitter back 2 years, and it still doesn’t compare well. Thing is, why are we comparing FriendFeed to Twitter? If you read Arrington’s article and read the quotes by Paul Bucheit- a FriendFeed founder- he tends to also wonder why the services are being considered competitors. In fact, the “raw feed” of Twitter to FriendFeed (in Bret Taylor’s words- another founder)* points more towards Twitter as a feeder to the application than a competitor.

Twitter does not pretend to be a feed aggregator, FriendFeed is one. It’s easy to describe Twitter- You write a message of 140 character word length. I would say FriendFeed’s description is: read your friend’s feeds and comment on them.

OK let me try again: I send my Last.FM, Flickr, Twitter, GoodReads, and Google Reader feeds to FriendFeed. All of my buddies can see what I’m listening to, reading, microblogging, and photographing. Vice-versa. It usually ends up with my obsession with MC Hammer and my friends teasing me about other bad old Hip Hop.

OK, maybe it’s best shown than described:

During the elections I was far more informed than most people I knew, because I’d get Digg-style “top of the heap” articles read via FF instantaneously. Our live-feed room on the elections was bar none the best to hear insights, fact-check, and ridicule the speakers.

Last note: people compare FriendFeed (FF) to Twitter mostly, I suspect, because there’s just nothing like FF out there, and Twitter is the closest, but it’s not a competitor. Twitter’s more like the hot high school football player that occasionally notices you at dances, but is slowly blowing out his knees and doesn’t study, and FriendFeed is the funny, charming computer geek that carries your books for you and opens doors. A little harder to get to know, but a lot more value.

* talked to Bret Taylor after a MySql meeting regarding the database structure which is totally fascinating in its own right: “How FriendFeed Uses MySql to Store Schema-less Data”.

First, check out this profile and see if you can tell what’s amiss:

The biggest thing was: I don’t know what the acronym stands for. The profile should basically tell who you are, to all kinds of people, non-political folks, folks out of your niche, folks that are un-techy. Don’t rely on them to click on the URL, that’s there for follow-up info, but basic “who are you” info has to be in that profile.

Some other profiles that have a nice ratio of followers/followed and basic 411 right on the profile page:

Robert Scoble follows a lot of people, and engages with most of his followers.

Janet just twittered me (ha) that she “…thinks it’s worth it to add a link to an about me in the bio too. I use VisualCV now ’stead o my websites.” I’ll definitely check that out.

What I like about these- full name, clearly says what they do, and they have nice “ratios”- that is, followers/followees. It’s a conversation for them, not a bullhorn.

Obvious spam example:

Zero followers, no posts, and no description. Easy.

For the sake of showing a full spectrum- here are oft-followed, rarely-follower profiles:

I end up being very wary of folks who are either followed, or subscribed, to more than 500 people. Why? Because I know how much work that is, even with Twitter tools. Users have different aproaches to the use of the tool, and if it’s a very lopsided ratio, they either use it as an inside-joke chat application, or a bullhorn. If it’s a more balanced ratio, it tends to be a threaded live discussion, which is what I prefer, and what I think is the best use of Twitter.

BTW, feel free to criticize mine at will!

Questions from the overflowing mailbag…

Changes in requests from different people in our team means different database structure (and this tidbit: Salesforce doesn’t allow outer joins!).- friend at dinner tonight

That sucks. Beyond a redesign (on MySql) and an ad-hoc query software, I don’t know what to tell you but this is the 4th non-profit I’ve heard of who has taken advantage of Salesforce’s 10K free-to-non-profits deal, and subsequently been bitten somewhere in the a$$ by restrictions. Note, negotiating is not dead with some of the smaller end ESPs, and it’s never too late to relocate your mail services.

Why doesn’t anyone write about trigger/transactional emails anymore? - Ben at MailChimp
Personally, I’ve never understood those fickle bloggers. Is it not discussed because it’s not sexy? Because its old news? Because nobody asks (I really don’t think most marketing departments use them- prove me wrong). I think, for the audience, this is a battle in their workplace they are just tired of fighting (promotional vs. lifecycle). So, in arguing for more at your place of work, make the conversation about ‘lowering costs’ versus ‘revenue’ and you will win that argument.

How can I share this cool article about fundraising with email marketers…

From this twitter, started a covnersation with Tyler of Involver about how their tool works- you embed a little image of the video- but more importantly, there is a follow-up call to action after it plays, and deep links to the video for sharing, plus a little chiclet to share it out. Case study by a client at Stanford regarding its relevance to non-profit spheres, too. He saw a 23% lift in fundraising over the year, and 51% of it was online. Interesting (if long- scroll to end) post.