Adventures in Email Marketing

Do you compare your emails solely to direct competitors, or other email in your consumer’s inbox?

Take the consumer’s perspective. On a Monday, they will have a serious 30-100 piece-thick stack of emails from everyone under the sun. If they are comfortable with online purchasing, that number will increase the years they’ve been doing it. Will he or she discern your offer compared to your competitor? Will he or she really weigh the pros and cons of each offer?

A more likely scenario, that I as a consumer do each morning, is to sift through my email checking for personal stuff. When I’ve depleted that, I check out the from addresses. Response could be: “Oh, here’s one from REI, that’s nice.” I don’t say: “Oh, REI, let’s compare that to the offer I got from SportsBasement yesterday, and the Activa direct mail catalog piece I got last week.” In fact, if I get a nice one from MINI-SF, I’ll definitely open that over REI, over Kodak (sorry client), almost over anything else.

Sure, it’s a debate of WalletShare vs. MarketShare. As email marketers, we have to consider marketshare. It’s a cruel reality, and with the frequency and amount of messaging by all corporate retailers (my vertical), it’s just a reality- as is educating colleagues on the realities of email marketing.

So we go to the old metrics of competition - it’s not simply on an offer level- it’s on design, copywriting, segmentation & targeting, personalization, all of those elements that make an email personal and relevant.

Competing against a single, or small, set of competitors has the danger of:
- Missing out on huge opportunities in new readers and customers
- Missing out on new design, techniques, and technology
- Missing out on the element of effortless innovation. If you’re always using your neighbor as a yardstick, you’re suffering from a strange form of inferiority. From what I’ve seen of retailers, too, they have a lot to learn in the world of email marketing, so doubtless the one you’re competing against has a lot of other issues.

For another project I’ve really been maxing out my CSS and design skills. It’s for the real web… that is, real web sites that can handle CSS, JavaScript, Ajax. Then I return to the email world, and wonder, to myself, why is it all so bad? (And is that the reason why I’ve been stunted, so to speak, in my front end programming abilities for the last 6 or so years?).

For those of you that have no experience with contemporary website design, it has undergone a real revolution. Elegant, sparse, and flexible, was my feeling when I finally upgraded a project from old tables and background colors- what we do in email- to the newfangled world of CSS2. So yes, there are technical restraints to using new design, how flash and CSS is oddly handled by all of the browsers and systems out there- but in general, we’re still not keeping to good consistent design (like our contemporaries in web design.)

But back to email- why is it so bad? See this Avis email I got a few minutes ago.

Not to pick so much on Avis- this is actually middling in the range of design flaws I get in my inbox every day.

What’s Wrong
If you’re asking yourself what’s wrong, read on, otherwise skip to “Why This Happens”.
- First off, the right sidebar alt text font color is hard to read over red.
- Subhead has different font and size- too large, unreadable- than main head. Solution? Encapsulate that in the same style setting, or set the body font to arial 10pt.
- Use of spacer GIFs instead of margins, also clutters up the rendering with image soff.
- Alt text in different font and style than the body- also managed with setting body style or inline styles to match.
- Images for headers, which is not advised with image suppression- use links.
- The Avis branding in the alt text is not enoguh to drive me to download images. It should be interesting and descriptive. They favored branding over getting images turned on- and basically maintaining subscription.

Why This Happens
My belief is that:
- Companies aren’t recognizing the errors and loss in readership, optin and subscribers, by bad design. Either they don’t have a testing suite to show them, or they don’t believe it (see: the perils of gut marketing). This is mostly an issue because they may get the email rendering OK in their work account, and don’t see the myriad of design issues in other inboxes.
- The best minds of design aren’t going into email- it’s still stigmatized by spammers.
- Lack of standardization means that, in the interim, designers just design for one or two situations (browser/OS) and disregard the rest.
- Organizationally, there’s a split in skills- the markup folks and the design folks- and passing the buck of “what works in what browser” and other testing suites. To get someone who knows the markup and can design worth some salt, that’s special indeed.
- Marketing managers don’t want to use templates. They think every communication should be different, that every offer is unique. I think this is misguided, as any email provider will tell you that the majority of their email messages from their clients look alike.

Today I fielded a quick question (recommended character length of a subject line) that ended up being a rather productive exercise in creating a subject line.

First:
- What is the goal of this email?
- Who are we addressing
- When, in the line of communication, has the recipient gotten this email
- Is there anything from the recipient’s point of view, that is new or remarkable about this email (besides the offer)

In our case, it was a new communication to a new segment of members- so a first kind of welcome to the site email.

Branding & Targeting
After making that a priority, we then juggled the very real initiatives of Branding vs. Targeting. That is, do we talk about us, or do we talk about you. You like it when we talk about you, but we have some goals in talking about us:
- please whitelist us
- please enable images ongoing
- please remain subscribed

That’s the reasoning for talking about us, but what about talking about you? Because our studies and learnings have shown clearly that when we address you by name, talk about how we know you, and otherwise serve you very timely relevant communications, everything is rosy. The subject line is key in that it’s the initiative to open the email.

But it is a balancing act, and really, can we do both at once?

The third element, my marketer friend reminded me, was getting the offer in the subject line. So now we are juggling 3 balls in the air: branding, targeting, and the offer (in our goal: 35-50 characters).

The Offer
When talking about the offer, there are so many caveats. For one, it really triggers spam filters and Postini, namely, to refer to it as a “sale”, “deal”, or “offer”. Common punctuation, like $ or %, also makes the subject line spamworthy. The subject line is heavily weighted in the email’s overall spam score.

How do you avoid this? Well the following advice takes this into account, but in a rather devious manner.

Creativity
Be creative! This goes in with targeting. Who *are* these people. Can you figure out a way of making the recipient special, showing your hand to a degree, in targeting them, and also communicating the offer in the email? I’ve seen report after report that shows that clever subject lines, eye-catching, engaging and funny, get seriously higher opens and clickthroughs than straight-up, no-nonsense, deal-hustling ones. So it’s a lot more work, and you may have to pull in various people to brainstorm, but believe me, it’s worth it. And, if you don’t believe me, feel free to test.

Examples:

- 4/29 Cinco de Yelpo: Yelp has cornered the marketing in funny creative content, and they’ve nicely dovetailed it into branding. Note no targeting.
- 4/29 updates from Kim: Anna you have... This is a transactional message from GoodReads site. After the ellipses was in the email body copy, which Gmail shows. Personalized, no branding. The From Address was the only branding.
- 4/29 Anna: Membership Discount Extended ... to change your subscription eHarmony also used the From Address solely for branding, personalized and included the targeting reason in the subject.
- 4/28 The Perfect Chair for Summer + Shop Mother's Day! Almost a desperate plea for taking an offer, any offer. no personalization, little branding (from address) and no targeting.
- 4/29 Interop: the 3 Billion Electric Bill points for cleverness- despite being in publishing and not retail, I’m impressed with this interesting content. Not targeted or branded, but funny enough- and I did open it up!
- 4/29 - Give Mom Our Favorite Gifts Cute, funny, nice and short. Probably the right voice too, for Mother’s Day. The branding is in the From Address, and the reason is clear- impending mother’s day- in a clever way. This really stood out in my inbox- amongst all of the dollar signs and % Off.
- 4/28 - Suit it up for summer with our innovative swimware Mix & Match Tool Eddie Bauer just gets garbled up with that long-winded subject line. I’d tighten it up and make it snappier. I can see the ingredients for a clever subject line, but it’s just half-baked.

Talking with an affiliate marketer the other day, we discussed how there are just slimy people in this world, and namely, in our industry. At the MarketingSherpa conference in Miami a few months ago, I met an honest to god, real spammer. Basically- after a few comments, I knew for sure where his ethics lay.

I seriously considered in 2002 about getting out of permission marketing, because the slimy factor, for me at least, was too high. Then, as usual I found a group of neat people, a great client, a team of marketers and email folks that I really hummed with, and we set about doing some truly cool and fun initiatives.

Then, I got splogged yesterday- my content stolen and re-purposed on someone else’s web site- and it reminded me again that there are con artists, unethical folks, and generally clueless people in this industry (or sadly, trying to be in this industry!). As he says on his site, “2,000,000 emails an hour!”. Is that something to brag about- blasting out nameless, offer-free, un-rich emails per second?

So it brought up the issue of what is an ethical email marketer (besides respecting copyright laws!):

- Recognize the privacy of the consumer- analyze data on an aggregate, not on an individual level

- Maintain and respect unsubscription processes and individual acts

- Communicate with those that want the information: internally evangelize the concept of positive, response filtering so frequent and interested customers are a prioritiy in all communications

- Maintain proper data channels, and data flows, for the workings of all of the unsubscription paths. Keep a high level of integrity for the processes of unsubscription

- Respect local laws on Privacy, and moreso, improve and evangelize tighter and more respectful privacy policies

- Do not sell lists

- Evangelize behavioral vs. demographic targeting, list acquisition, data appends.

- Promote security internally with personal information- make sure that all CRM staff knows how to handle personal information, passwords, encryption, data transfer, and manage the prevention of any loss or theft of PII. This is ongoing and training is ongoing, as well.

- Recognize the copyright laws, and practice them in regards to stock content, user-generated content, and other content in the email creative.

- Provide multiple, and quick unsubscription paths for all communications

- Provide contact information on each email, available at any time.

- Retain control of all messages outgoing from the customer database, and branding, From address, basically all content and functionality in line with the communication strategy

- Educate marketers on what they can- and can’t- use from a privacy perspective

- Promote routine privacy policy emails to the base on usages, rights, and changes to the policy.

In the spirit of spring- with the wacky winds and brisk air, and moments of clear sunshine, we tend to want to roll up our sleeves and fix things that have been annoying us for a long time. In email marketing, I’ve noticed that these projects have started to get underway:

Database & List Cleanup
- Shrink your database. Take advantage of areas that are no longer in use.
- Evaluate your data: do you really need it? Or is it just a one-off, rarely used item? Could it make way for more important, useful data? There’s a trend to behaviorally instead of demographically, target customers- is this your system?
- Look through your inbox and find requests for data that you didn’t have, make a list and start bumping through it.
- Check the data flow and see if all of the data points are working as planned, a simple audit of key touchpoints like unsubscription, new data, mailing list uploads, etc.
- With some simple analysis, find out when people truly become inactive in your system, and segment your campaigns accordingly.
- Do a quick review of your email list by domain, region, and browser, any kind of browser availability out there, and see if your design guidelines match up. Basically: if you’ve decided not to support Gmail, see if it’s a significant portion of your list.

Marketing Program Clean-Up
- Are there campaigns still running that really aren’t earning their keep? If you can’t justify it with revenue or customer relationship gains, time to move on. Great opportunity to experiment with new subject lines, copy, or targeting.
- Are you caught in blast-land or managing a nice lifecycle program? Time to re-evaluate the efficiency of your programs and make your life (and your customer’s) more pleasant.
- Offers that are no-wins. We may have thought this was a good idea at one time, but due to competition or consumer trends, nobody uses this offer anymore. Refresh your offer list with invigorating and new offers- and be realistic about pet projects.

Reporting Clean-Up
- There’s good complexity and bad complexity. Are your reports really singing the truth or just dragging you down into the muck? Re-focus your internal metrics and get them to speak to your goals.
- Check out old reports, and create time-lapse reporting on specific campaigns, consumer behavior or email metrics. These combinations of timely reports can give you insight you didn’t have.
- Distribute reports. I hate being the bearer of bad news, but if we’re all on the same page, it makes it easier to get the car out of the ditch. I’m loving these business metaphors.

A snippet from an article I wrote on MarketingProfs:

You may or may not be using the basic segmentation strategy of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary)—that is, dividing your mailing list into a few buckets based on recency in ordering or visitation to the site, the number of times they’ve ordered or visited the site, and the lifetime spend.

My issue with RFM models is that I would instead like to see each threshold between activity, and tweak it on an ongoing basis. That’s the joy of email marketing, it’s all so available and adjustable, and in real time.

The article, on MarketingProfs.

I am seriously interested in buying a Mini (tired of the trials of having a ‘93 Civic!). So I am ripe for a conversation from MiniUSA on how to get going in the sales cycle. And, I’ve created an “ideal Mini” on their site. That’s a very cool feature. You determine all the bells and whistles of your dream car.

But they sent me an email this morning that was a joke, in that it missed so many opportunities.
First, it was just too fast on the sale in my experience with the email frequency. Until this point I’d gotten little weak missives, almost cult-like adoration about the car, like I’d already purchased a MIni. Then I get this, which looks like a funnel to the retail, dealer channel. Click through to talk to a dealer or financier. I’m the kind of person who is a little afraid of the hard sell (especially in the car world) so I’m going to postpone the salesperson as long as I can.

Regardless of my personal sales threshold, this was the first customized email from them that recognized my “age” in the sales cycle. And it tries to foist me off onto real people. The better message would have led me through a series of more and more education and information into the final purchase stages. Let’s also get into the nitty gritty of the webmail design and technique of their messaging. I don’t doubt that they had a very good ad agency help with creating hate emails, but as I saw flaws with their contact strategy, also, there are issues with the way they created the email:

First, the images-off version shows alt text “Copy 1″ and “Copy 2″ - whoops! Then, when you turn images on:

You get white text on black. That could easily have been created in HTML so the main copy shows in images-off. We know light text on black is generally a bad idea, since some webmails don’t draw the background colors, but I believe that’s been straightened out by now- and if you use light-ish colors, at least ones that will show on top of white, you solve most of the problem.

Also, it’s just not a lot of graphics and photography to merit an entirely image-only email. The logo, yes, the car, yes. That’s about it. Which leads me into the image of the car…

A nice touch would have been to send me personalized information
- a picture of the car I created
- my name, and some non-skeazy personalization about my “ideal car.” Absolutely no personalization here, despite me telling them one of my dreams! To buy an oxygen blue 2008 Mini.

It’s almost sacred being the repository for someone’s dreams (ok maybe I’m reading a lot into this) and here they treat it rather cavalierly. They could really do *so much* with this email, leading you into the sales cycle of car-purchasing, which I’ve already expressed interest in. It’s a very qualified lead, and instead they botch it by just showing me a link to talk to an agent.

I’m heading into a meeting today to review a proposal on this, so I really shouldn’t post this morning about it (as will probably have more insight later today!) but read this in my RSS aggregator and wanted to talk about it: Ryan Deutsch of Strongmail’s post on EMM vs. ESP solutions for large event-based transactional messaging systems. What a mouthful.

He brings up some great points, namely the access to response data from each campaign and feeding it back to the system that is segmenting and issuing the lists. While there’s a lot of gut marketing out there, numbers prove the points, so having response data on each lifecycle series/ event email, and the goals of each, is vital to maintaining and expanding working programs.

One thing for me is that these systems don’t just “pop up” miraculously out of nowhere. They are a steady evolution from insight and lessons. It’s an organic, historical beast that came out of years of work from other marketers. Sure, there’s always the urge to want to wipe out the old and put in the new, but what we’re missing out on is all of that detailed testing that went into it.

On a contact strategy diagram I recently did, I took into account the inactive, former programs (with response metrics). I’m not surprised now that one of them is getting embraced again- as we all know in email marketing, things change. What was a problem 3 years ago could not be an issue now. What was a roadblock or obstacle internally due to various issues, could have dissolved.

Final note- while large, complex event messaging is great for so many reasons- better relationships created with relevant, timely messaging, they are very complicated, and the more information that goes into them, and the more you respect the existing framework, the better and strong they will be (and more understood, and better communicated internally.)

I hear these thrown about a lot, and I was training someone the other day and had to clarify my own definitions. So here I will attempt to lay down some common usages and accepted definitions of these terms.

Transactional. These are email messages sent out from customer purchase behavior. I’ve also seen them used as general online behavior, event-based messages. “Cart abandonment,” for example, is considered by almost everyone a transactional email. Forgot your password, etc. are transactional emails.

Lifecycle. These are emails based on the recipients stage in their relationship, or life, with the company or sender. A beginning educational series of emails would be a lifecycle series of emails.

Event-Based. Based on a certain event, the recipient gets the email. They visit the site, they do some online activity, like “adding someone” on a social community, and the system drops an email to them. Basically the same as transactional- but transactional tends to be just commerce & shopping cart-related.

Trigger. I think of this as a kind of slangy term for event-based, or transactional, messaging. It was used a lot about 5 years ago, but as things have gotten more sophisticated, it tends to confuse more people than communicate. I had a long conversation with a colleague where we were both using “trigger” in different contexts. Him: an event-based email, me: as a lifecycle series.

Diving In Deeper
What word choice you use says a lot about you as a marketer. My old linguistics-anthropology teacher could tell who you studied with by how you said “shaman.” I think you can derive the same results from whether someone uses “trigger” instead of the more precise terminology. Not to be too judgmental, I’ve been using transactional for a long time, but I’ve also just been fixated on it for a while.

Back in 2001 or so, we were all excited if we could get our email systems to look at behavior and send out an email. The possibilities seemed endless, from an IT, integration, and data perspective. From a marketing perspective, most email was focused on the issues with rendering and delivery. In the last few years the segmentation and modeling of data- largely from print market and direct marketing industries- has opened up the larger world of lifecycle emails. Nurturing, and influencing your pod of customers and prospects to a final desired end state, all via the miraculous fully test-able channel of email. So now single event triggered messages, have been relegated to the transactional world, and long state, series emails all working on influencing customer behavior, including recommendations from other users, user-generated data, and social arenas, I see as having grown out of the initial trigger methods. The “blasts” of yore- another great term!- have changed to the timed releases of offers and information, to select segments.

More Reading
Email Marketing Reports: Transactional Emails
Tamara Geilen’s BeRelevant!: Triggered Campaigns: 3 Things to Keep In Mind

The Gmail Grimace movie is up!

Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.

It’s pretty funny. I like the slow pan with voiceover and tinkly piano notes. I think my favorite’s the guy reading the CSS book.

Hope Google will finally get the message. On a totally personal note: my photo was rejected!