Adventures in Mobile Marketing

Getting kind of addicted to LinkedIn’s Question & Answer area, and a couple of questions are around “why are my web2.0 emails considered spam.” I explored a little bit last post about why my email servers think Plurk invites are spam.

Invitational emails are that strange gray area of promotional and transactional- like “forward to a friend” functionality that some find spammy. Similar to “forward link” or “forward article” to a friend, many of these friends don’t appreciate their email being stored on NYTimes’ site forever, for example. Some sites explicitly say “we will not remember this email”- but otherwise it’s a little unclear, unless you read the fine print, exactly what a company will do with your friends’ emails.

That paragraph was to explain why precious Web2.0 emails are considered, at times, spammy. Another common reason: the site uses the source-friend’s email address in the “from”. This will set off problems with spam filters that look for a resolution between the From address and the real sender domain. If those don’t match up, it’s in the spam folder. So, don’t spoof the email to get automatically white-listed, it won’t work.

Use of “no-reply”- I don’t like this feature as it seems to take the position that the site can shoot out emails, but not handle any unsubscription/deletion requests, like it’s a one-directional firehose. I don’t know how SpamAssasin treats this, but I did notice the Plurk address was that way. What they should do is setup a simple unsubscription filter on the reply, like almost all GNU mailing list apps can handle, and a forward to customer service or some inbox that spits an autoresponder out “We got your email and we’re going to answer within X days,” with a list of helpful site link.

Plurk especially is missing out on a great opportunity to leverage the cutesy UI and design, by sending out these barebones text-only emails that aren’t even making it through spam filters (which really is the point of text-only transactional emails, in my mind.)

I know how these emails get built- been there!- an engineer (me) somewhere rolls out the new feature, “let’s let users invite friends by email!” and nobody checks the content of the email minus a cursory copywriter edit, and out it goes into production. Decisions like sender “real names,” domains, etc. are made on the fly by someone who can send themselves a message, so it must work! No monitoring on the systems, no ability to tell if the emails are going out, or how they’re being viewed. It’s a toughie, and not unique to any single system.

Update 6/14: I finally got one of my invites and it’s a simple text-only email. It did take forever and a day to get the darned thing. Wonder if they’re having scaling issues.

Looks like Plurk transactional email invites are considered spam by many webmail systems. I wonder why.

I noticed a couple of times this morning inviting people, that there was a caution: ”

“Spam issues: If your friends can’t find your Plurk invitation, please tell them to look into their spam / trash folder”

I sent 2 to other of my own email accounts, and haven’t received them. Anyone have one that I can use as an example for deconstructing exactly why these are considered spam? (And do Plurk some free work, ha!)

This is really not saying very good stuff about Plurk- and if you want your friends to use it, are they going to be that thrilled to check in the Spam folder? Otherwise the site has been a real delight. It’s a combination of Twitter with threaded messaging & a timeline.

A quick guess: badly formed HTML, strange subject line, and because it’s a social network, probably bombards networks and they don’t have good deliverability and sender reputation. But this is all guesswork until I see one!

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

From eROI‘s Dylan Boyd, this great writeup: Your Inbox Management Issues. A little background, Michael Arrington on TechCrunch wrote about a talk at FOWA, the Future of Web Apps (in Miami right after I was at EmailSummit), where a bunch of smart developers & founders in the Web 2.0 world- Kevin Rose of DIGG and Matt Mullenwag of WordPress, were a few I recognized, got down and dirty on building a quick new web app that would change their life.

So, what application did they decide to build in 40 minutes? An inbox reader. Their solution is that it would tell friends exactly how much you have and how much you’ve read. From Dylan:

So when you got a bunch of really smart people in a room and gave them 40 minutes to come up with a new life changing application, it was funny that they focused on inbox management.

The irony too, for me, is that FOWA and web 2.0 apps have actually increased my inbox problem. I’m constantly deleting Facebook emails. I took a snapshot of my eHarmony situation- 7 emails a day. So for these futurist developers to start screaming about inbox issues is funny to me- stop oversending! Think of contact frequency! Of course, these are the guys that developed twitter, my favorite whipping boy.

More irony is that when I talk to Web 2.0 developers and business people about email marketing, they literally cringe. If I say “permission marketing,” they have very little understanding. I’ll always remember one editor of a web site on indie pop saying, “but do people really buy from email?” and then a light went off and she said, “I love my MINI! I buy accessories from email all the time.” When I discussed transactional email messaging, they got more excited, and through the conversation, I realized that using the common corporate terms for marketing would not work.

So we see Web 2.0 companies flounder in the email marketing world because of a huge case of denial that what they do is email marketing, and by implementing certain standards- like optin process (for Facebook)- they could avoid common pitfalls. But wait, is Web2.0 actually doing email marketing?

The difference in my mind between Web 2.0 email processes and traditional email marketing:
- web 2.0 emails are not salesy
- completely functional
- live/real time
- text-only
- part of a multi-channel approach including RSS, SMS
- usually notifications
- part of a functional request to receive email, not a global preference – far more specific than usual email preference centers

Here are some samples from my inbox
- Someone is following you on Twitter (the stalker note)
- Someone wrote you a note on Facebook
- Summarized google alerts from the entire day (a stored search on keywords)
- Your turn on Scrabble (You can select this for each game)
- Someone commented on a blog you are following (note: also available via RSS)
- “nudge” requests on Facebook
- Moderated comments in WordPress

You’re saying: wait, Anna, these are not marketing messages but parts of an application. Are they? Aren’t some goals of CRM groups to create stickiness and reasons to return to the site? Aren’t those the same goals- adoption and use- of most Web 2.0 sites?

I think the relationship between traditional email marketers and Web 2.0 developers can grow- much like SEO and application developers. We’ve learned things, and we can contribute, and they are showing us a part of the inbox that is wide open: very customized, transactional, personalized emails that give the consumer a lot more control- the what, when, and how- of the information they receive.

eHarmony got a lot of attention at the EmailSummit, so I thought I’d go undercover and share my findings. I got two sets of emails, from different From addresses: userservices, and ehsupport. That would be a problem with whitelisting the sender. One From address seems to be their long-chain, lifecycle emails. The other, transactional messages about “matches”.

Transactional Messages

7 messages a day. I grew to ignore them. This message just meant that eHarmony matched you, but it was still pending the nod or diss from the guy/girl. You can adjust the matching criteria, but not the frequency. I was inclined to unsubscribe. I’m not sure how they can solve this as they do need to notify users that the system has matched them. Such frequent contact made me think the matching system is flawed, i.e. it’s just a numbers game. Not really the feeling, I think, that eHarmony wants to posit in its members. Perhaps a daily summed up email, showing all contacts. I believe match.com and OKCupid do this. In the “email settings” menu, they provided you optins for content and 3rd party, but not for frequency. The match menu item ambiguously aske dyou whether you wanted “matches” or not- not via what medium (RSS would be nice) email or web. The preference center:

Lifecycle Emails
I was impressed with the lifecycle emails. They were not every day- but maybe two or three times a week, and varied frequency. They concentrated on a single message and focus each time. I think this is a big issue for companies starting out on lifecycle series — Don’t try to communicate everything all in one. Tell a story. Have a conversation. What would you say if the person was right in front of you?

The funny thing about this email is that I posted my photo immediately on 2/17, but received this imperative to add a photo on 2/24. So they’re sending based on 7 days since signing up, and not based on the content of the message- have I uploaded a photo or not. Ideal segmentation for this campaign would be, for example:

I wonder if I was “photo-nudged” by a match. They have this odd feature available, though I’m not quite sure what the resulting email looks like.

The Cancellation
My cancellation today took about 6 steps. Do you think that’s a little long? I do. The questions were scored, which is a nice touch, but none of them were the main reason. I also wondered if they spoke more to the marketer’s interests and not the consumers, as I found very few of them relevant. What is a refusal reason if not oriented to the consumer’s interests? If it is for the marketers, to what benefit is showing your targeting or weaknesses? They finally got to the open letter portion which had a limit of 250 characters. So they want my feedback, but not really. I wonder if they’re getting a bit too much feedback on their site?

I was trying to find a screen that would show me my refusals (I still have access until the end of the month) and came across this odd, conflicting offer. I can extend for $21, or “reactivate” for $50.

The Buzz
I think in the world of email marketing, eHarmony is doing so many things right, but in the technical whirl of implementation and user interface design, they lost some key objectives. Keep someone retained in a positive light, and don’t inundate them with messaging. The Web 2.0 apps all have this problem- death by croûtons* – Twitter, Facebook, et. al. have all had to face the issue of over contact. Well, maybe not Twitter.

* not original

I’m blogging here from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit and got the opportunity to scour the speakers’ list and choose some folks to interview. Check out other coverage of the summit on the Information & Coverage microsite. This is the third in a series of interviews for the Email Summit.

Third up is Eric Stockton, president of MarketingSherpa. Eric was the head of research at MarketingExperiments, an on-the-ground running experiments lab, and when MEC acquired both companies, he rose to become president. Unlike the other interviews I actually talked to him in person, so it’s less inline responses and more my freeform version.

First, we talked about surfing. Turns out MarketingSherpa in Jacksonville Beach has a door right out to the surf. That is very, very nice. “It brings us down to earth” Eric said. When we finally got off the topic of Pacific surfing vs. Atlantic surfing, I asked him about the reason behind having a certification course. He responded that it “fills the need” for the community, which is having something more tangible than best practices. They started with online testing, paid search, then landing page optimization. “It helps IT and marketing speak the same language,” and he told me about a company that literally had such contentious IT and marketing staffs that the executives brought both groups into certification. Surprisingly having the same way of talking about the systems, efficacy, and process was the solution to getting the groups to work together.

I asked him if he sees any trends over the last year, from the Benchmark Guide, or talking to CEOs and Presidents of companies. I gave him a laundry list of things I thought had come up in the last year- mobile becoming more important suddenly, subject lines, spam decreasing, user content and web 2.0, SEO- and he surprised me by answering quickly, “What I hear is, ‘email is dead.’ We see it in dropping open rates, the metrics/stats, customers getting smarter.” I’d written about it in June, here, commenting on a Fast Company article with same title, but I was still surprised that this was an issue. He backed it up saying that he’d heard it from a bunch of folks- as well as metrics, but generally – and that the reality is that email is actually “… diversifying into multi-platform & media, data phones, RSS. You can’t ‘blast’ any more, it’s communicating now, user generated content is a perfect example.”

He liked my next question- how he sees MarketingSherpa Benchmark Guides in the corporate structure. How do customers use them, what role do they play, and where he sees their place in general. “We find that customers think they’re great for planning for budgets, strategic planning, using in a boardroom meeting- the data points, charts, etc., and other benchmark guides too, not just email marketing, but ecommerce.” My first encounter with MarketingSherpa was when a graphic artist I know bought it for the user testing results, as a guide to email-specific design elements.

I asked him what the sexiest bit of the BenchMark Guide was- the element that he always hears about, that stands out among customers and the membership community. He didn’t even wait a beat: “Eyetracking.” Ha ha, that’s what I’d say too.

Of the many surprising answers he gave me, this perhaps tops the charts: I asked him if there were any anxieties or fears in the companies that he talks to. I feel like Eric has a great line onto the heads of corporations and their marketing executives, who may speak freely to him about concerns. Turns out that one of the top things coming up for MarketingSherpa, and this lines up with my question about anxieties, is that companies are asking how much their customer lists are worth, for mergers and acquisitions. I experienced this at WebVan, as they had acquired HomeGrocer, and in the merger one of the top things they did was integrate the customer marketing databases. Eric said, “The question I get from CEOs, or mainly CFOs, is ‘Did I buy this 5M list and now it’s not worth anything?’ And we can look at our studies and metrics and help them determine that, and we’ve finally gotten to a mature place where we can tell them that.’

He made an offhand comment that MarketingSherpa had some room for improvement, and I prodded him as to what he would do to improve it if given millions and millions (billions?) of dollars. He said that he essentially got that opportunity with the acquisition by MEC, and that their first goal was to “Help support the community of marketers, provide training, be place that has the data points, the structure, charts that help the presentations, good ideas, inspirations,” and he mentioned the new membership program, and the ‘Ask a Sherpa’ program (which is not consulting) but taps into the community of experts for one-off questions.

All in all it was a great conversation, and I had renewed respect for the MarketingSherpa think tank.

In a seminar hosted by Strongmail yesterday, I heard some surprising notes about contact frequency, basically, if your inventory can support daily emails, do them.

Daily!

I’ve noticed some retailers doing the daily thing- namely Macy’s during Christmastime- but didn’t think much of it. My concerns about daily contact are:

What kind of customer are you creating? A “bargain basement” sales scout? Someone who reads each email carefully? Or do you numb them into just noticing the brand, seeing products, and skipping to the next email? Maybe I’m naive and creating a CRM relationship with your customer- the long tail- is just a dream.

Of course testing is key. A member of the audience at the seminar noted that they had several clients, and tested, and basically if there were a large variety of products that could create new content each day, the revenue went up. I think this bears more testing, because instinct says that the unsubscription flow from heightened frequency would disprove any revenue boost. In other words: you could get more out of your list in the long run if you grew it out and didn’t get rid of folks who wanted lower frequency.

Results of the test would populate this criteria:

The idea is that the emails you send out are directly relating to behaviors in ordering, browsing, and other online services, and not just promotional advertising. Those revenues increase because the opens/clicks increase, because the customer is more engaged and interested in relevant, targeted emails.

In some clients I have noticed transactional opens and clicks up to 40%, while promotional opens linger around 0-10%. If you up the frequency, you get higher numbers, but are those customers trained to be high level, valuable customers that have higher average spends? Higher brand loyalty? More engagement?

Article over at Vertical Response echoes my own feelings about aspects of this industry. “Publishers Clearhouse Must Die!” It’s the same way I feel when folks talk to my clients about buying lists, matchbacks with data houses, or catalogs. I’m just not a fan.

For one, I have never stepped onto a client site and discovered that they’re using all of the data possible. They’re using a degree of it, and then marketers go outside to look at other data houses. Why not continue checking out the behaviors of customers in your system? Why go to third party vendors?

I had a learning experience back when I was temping in college at a interactive game company, doing the marketing database, before email marketing was ever conceived (’92, I believe). They acquired a list of customers who had bought satellite dishes etc. from their VISA cards. The team of 10 telemarketers started cold calling the list, and I worked on the refusal forms, and did analysis. Basically, they were crap. Took tons of man hours, and very few of these leads panned out, and not enough to cover the cost of purchasing the list. The manager at the time was from the Midwest, the call center capital of the world, and had been wanting to buy lists to “pump up” the sales cycle.

Ironically for this company, what pumped up the sales cycle was a visit from speaker OJ (prior to his criminal life) and a saleswoman who used the return policy to her advantage.

Instead of buying more data, we could have spent more time and money examining our existing data. We could have poured over soft refusals from last year, partner leads, contest winning leads, etc. Now with online companies, even with proven successes of email, I encounter similar tendencies to go retrograde: downgrade customers (online to phone), have other companies tell us who their customers are (data houses), and spend time and money on bargain hunters.

It’s not that I think catalog or direct mail marketers are lazier than email marketers, I think they are actually far more hardworking, and require a lot more resources– material paper resources, getting a lot more results out of less information, creating 20 pages of exciting print creative than one email– than email marketers. I think that working on imaginative segmentation strategies inhouse, as well building and setting up transactional campaigns may not be in the area of expertise of many high-ranking marketing executives. Oh, and going social & viral, yes that’s a challenge too. But the faster we do that the better our relationship with the customer (and a better customer).

Time to give award ceremony attention to those great silent workhorses.
From my treasure trove of an email inbox, here are a few winners. I reviewed approximately 100 companies, the emails I’d received in 2 months, various interactions with all of the companies (past purchase, online registration, etc.) over the past two years. There are 3 categories: Web 2.0 (sites with more online features), traditional retail companies with web presence, and Booby Prizes.

Web 2.0 Transactional Emails

- Twitter notifications of “who is following you”
+ What’s involved? Create a once-a day or real-time database query that checks on when some users request to follow others, email in real time the notification with both user’s names, the one to follow and the one being followed. Requires dynamic input, but the email itself is text-only and relatively easy to create and send. Why is it great? Because we are all self-obsessed, and finding out who is watching/clicking/viewing you will always be interesting, and brings the customer back to the site, that being the goal for most Web2.0 companies.

- Yelp “so and so thinks you’re their friend”
+ Same as the Twitter notification, a simple notification email on a behavior, dynamically pulling in the two names and creating a custom link to the other’s profile and/or settings to add or remove the friend. Why is it great? Yelp could do a whole lot more – with these Web2.0 companies there’s so much personal and behavioral data, so focusing on the social aspect, “friendship,” is the best kind of message and email to send to improve the stickiness factor.

- Facebook/Likeness, challenges on movie data (or other quizzes you’ve filled out)
+ Facebook is getting some grief for letting these application providers contact the base so easily, based on friendship and not on optin preferences. Other than that, though, this is a great little transactional email notifying your friends/associates of your performance on a quiz (whether it’s good or bad- natch). The majority of users, I’ve noticed, have no idea they’re telling their base their scores, or that they’re doing quizzes at work! So this will fly in their face soon. Scrabulous defaults to optout, which may be the reason why they’re one of the more popular FaceBook apps. Still, it’s the social factor, and random trivia, and it drags people back to the site, which ultimately proves its success.

Traditional Retail Transactional Emails

- Amazon rating on purchases
+ Initially annoying, as its a survey and generally pointless to the consumer, who doesn’t get anything for it. But ingenious for Amazon in general, to allow merchants (third party sellers) to reach into the behavior data and access the customer base, for something justified like a review. Great for the third party, great for setting up trust between the merchants and customers. How is it done? You bought through this merchant, what did you think of the transaction? Probably a daily email sent three days after the estimated delivery, asking a few basic questions on the service, and dynamically providing the merchant’s name, with links back to the order information page, and the seller’s page.

- Incomplete Transaction/Project: KodakGallery
+ OK usually I don’t discuss my client’s programs, but I did receive a “you didn’t complete a calendar!” email when my sisters and I were building a holiday calendar of all of the niece and nephews. I got an incentive to complete the calendar, which I sent onto my sister (it was a joint account). That was one of the best retail/traditional transactional emails I’d received in a while.

- Amazon “based on your interest in [product category]”
+ A database call on past purchase in a specific product family, in my case jewelry, and notification of a special sale, etc. in that relevant category. Add “based on your interest in”- I think it’s important to call out targeting in this case.

Booby Prizes: Missed Opportunities

As I went through my inbox looking at winners, above, I noticed a lot of missed opportunities.

- Orbitz
+ They could really tailor their emails to me, based on my past flights and travels, and this is a situation where I would call out the targeting in the email message. “Anna, new flights to Baltimore, Minneapolis & Seattle!” (All usual destinations, i.e.)

- iTunes
+ Similar to Orbitz, if they are targeting, I can’t tell, and I’d be much more interested in the content, if they called it out in the subject line or inside the email message: instead I get generic “best of 2007″ and “new for 2008″ when they could say: “Latest R&B artists in 2008″ (based on my purchases of albums in that general product category- see Amazon above).

I was able to check out a great email delivery tool yesterday- YesMail’s Ajax enabled Magellan release (6). They also purport to do dynamic content swapping in and out based on some simple logic. Some folks in the meeting wanted to replace our extensive “tree” structured segmentation tool (Epiphany 6.5) with this logic. The vendor, myself, and my client were trying to express why we use a CRM tool to segment before sending to the ASP for further dynamic content logic. It’s not an either/or situation, but a marriage between two features.

Probably works better to use a concrete example. Take for example a monthly newsletter segmented into 20+ number of cells. Logically determined by when they bought over their life, their last twelve month spend, their internally defined “customer type,” their affiliate sourcing, etc. Three basic points of complicated segmentation:

- targeting the audience
- labeling them for reporting
- providing targeted content to the audience (this is where dynamic content could be applied)

Reporting
Marketing teams have ongoing reporting systems, trends analysis and forecasting, that uses the segmentation of customer types. Some clients have integrated this in with their email campaigns. It’s like RFM on steroids.
One reason to do it in email, is that you can report on the logic that you used to segment at that time, and in the past. What is really nifty is seeing the conversion reports from these campaigns- what was once a non-purchasing visitor later becomes a highly active customer. Then, you can point to why they converted (an amazing email campaign, of course). With adequate site codes and link tracking you can even get more granular with revenue sourcing.

Dynamic Content & Reporting
One issue with dynamic content is that it’s not used for reporting. So if you’re trying to determine the point at which CRM segmentation tool leaves off, and dynamic content picks up, you may try this exercise: what do you want to report on? Is it important to match legacy reporting? Should it be revamped? The marketing cell is the last moment at which the marketer can identify their customers with a group – so that should be the most detailed reporting item you’d like to see. From that point on, individual data can be swapped in to make a very good personalized email.

Well-Applied Dynamic Content
Back in 2000 or so people thought dynamic content would save the (email marketing) world. What I’ve seen really work well with dynamic content, is when dynamic works hand in hand with segmented logical campaigns, refining them to a finer detail that would be impossible in a segmentation tool. Here are two examples:

Amazon has a great transactional email, where they inform me of new works by an author I’ve bought in the past. The campaign would be like this:

Segmentation logic: For all new books that are being published, search for customers that have bought a book from the same author.
Dynamic Content: In the email content area, add a dynamic content element that looks up the individual new book title for each recipient. <> (“Anna!”) < > “You bought Sense & Sensibility.” Austen has just written << new book title >> “Mansfield Park!”

Similarly, for all Web 2.0 and user-generated sites, you can email back to them their own content. Facebook has a notification that uses dynamic content: “Anna, Gabriela has written on your Wall.”
Segmentation Logic: For each event of new wall writings, search for customers that own the wall.
Dynamic Content: In each email content, replace “recipient name” and replace “wall author” name.
<> “Anna,” <> “Gabriella” … ” has written on your wall!”