Adventures in Email Marketing

I know, this blog is about Email, but lately this is the stuff I’ve been doing:

Radiant (A CMS for Ruby on Rails systems)

- It did start with Email, namely Action Mailer and the extensions for Radiant, which I’ve written about before. Radiant Mailer Extension Basics
- How to create an extension. Extensions are ways of expanding the functionality of Radiant, be it for admin purposes or to customize databases, add-on functionality, etc.
- From frustration springs inspiration… I went on to write How to install Radiant Comments

Stuff I’m Learning

- HAML, a lightweight mark-up that’s a lot cleaner than HTML
- Ruby, but that’s really an understatement.

My Rails Projects…

I have a few sites now I can point to: Movie Haiku! on Heroku! and SnapLogic, which I helped with some loose ends after an initial installation of Radiant.

Not sure how many of you are using this flavor of a setup, but if you’re on a Ruby on Rails’ Radiant with the Mailer and having issues- I just wrote a quick basic installation post on Banane.com.

This is the third time I’ve written about the death of email- and anyone who blogs in this space is all too familiar with the claims (oddly by those not in the know). Basically: email is about as dead as your social security number, your physical address, or HTML. WSJ, never quite hip to stuff tech, is scared and from their vantage, I can see that it’s a wild world of web2.0, nay 3.0 marketing out there, it’s confusing and bewildering. But have no fear, email will always be used, until something more dependable and better comes along, and, more importantly, is trusted by an evergrowing base of users.

I agree that the usage of email is shifting. More and more people are using email as a notification service, not as a message carrier. “Oh I got a note on Facebook.” or, “Oh I should visit my bill pay site.” Could other technical tools do this? Sure. But it’s not about what’s technically available to the consumer, but what they trust. More and more demographics- beyond the early adopters- are getting onto email. As many email marketers know, focusing on early adopters (as WSJ is trying to do, 3 years too late) only opens up that segment. If you are Apple or Threadless, that’s great. But if you’re selling mutual funds and radial tires, you probably don’t care about the 30-35 geeky male nerd who cycles to work and spends his money as he earns it.

I’ve noticed during the recession, that more businesses have started focusing on their email vendors, departments and employees skilled in these areas, because it is a measurable, dependable marketing channel. Is it the future of tech? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not intrinsically enmeshed in the future.

More reading:
Mark Brownlow’s Three Years And Still Going Strong; his comments at the end are great and very useful.
Kristin Gregory over at Bronto does a round-up: Best of the Blogosphere: Embedded Video and the Slow Death of Email
Bob Frady, “Never Trust Anyone Under 30″, I agree in that it says more about the East Coast constantly focusing on high tech as a youth industry (and thus I blame the dot-com bomb on them) but that’s another post.

This is a series of basic questions, and tips, for email marketing.
Question: How frequently can, or should, I email?

Answer: The quick response is once a week. Very few of your customers will get upset if you email them once a week. Some folks use 1 every 5 business days, as a rule of thumb.

The longer answer depends on what kind of content you have in your email. Some email, such as daily stock alerts, can be sent every day. If your customer selects subscription with some kind of tip to frequency- “bi-monthly newsletter,” for example. Otherwise, if it’s regular promotional email “white sale,” etc. then you really should just send it once a week.

This frequency control is why more and more marketers are moving towards lifecycle, triggered, event email. That means the schedule isn’t dependent on you, the marketer, but on the user’s interaction with your site or products. Recipients don’t mind an email if it is super relevant to their communication with you.

A quick word about metrics: a way to find out the perfect frequency for your email is to do the following reporting work:
Determine the cost of acquiring email.
Determine the lifetime value of the average recipient on your site.
Watch and monitor the number of unsubscriptions per campaign, and the number of received emails per average user.

Balancing the ratio of acquisitions to unsubscriptions, along with the value of an email (the lifetime spend) enables you to carefully moderate the frequency with which you send emails. Once you lose a subscriber, it is very hard to get them back.

This list was inspired by a good friend who had to do a quick 101 class in email marketing when his Web2.0 company had some email hiccups the other day.

Throttling, it is your friend.
Despite how much you think you customer base wants to hear from every little social activity on the web site, make sure you’re really only sending one email a day, if that. Digest the notifications (or provide the option).

Frequency Control
Allow your users to manage the frequency and notification by use of a web page that allows them to check and uncheck the various ways you can email them. Offer RSS as well as Email.

Frequency Control… nuances
Check on history, and consider rolling out “tastings” of each communication, just once, in the cycle of their engagement with the site. So for certain kind of notifications, the customer/member gets it once, until they select that form of notification in the preference center.

Sharing, FTAF in the footer
Include viral pass-along options in every communication. FTAF = Forward To A Friend.

Test your emails in SpamAssassin
Check the content of every notification against a SPAM filter to make sure it’s not triggering some odd rules. Even Though you’ve convinced yourself you’re not a spammer, that means very little to the consumer. It’s in the eye of the beholder, and luckily, we can test that.

One-click unsubscription
Despite your audience loving you, and you not being a spammer, still provide one-click, easy, non-sign-in unsubscriptions. Provide a link to the notification preferences center, but a one-click will save you a lot of grief.

This has come up in a few conversations on EmailRoundtable, and in a conversation between me and @LorenMcDonald, and I thought I’d put my thoughts here. I don’t like list rentals. But to elaborate, let’s talk about the various ways of (in)organically acquiring email addresses:

- For a fee, you use another company’s email systems to send your email. It’s on their system, but they send your content. All links in email go back to your site.
- Some companies sell their lists. So they actually hand over part of their customer base. You insert into your system and drop the email.
- Some companies share part of a newsletter with you, so you can insert a form, and acquire sign-ups.
- Some companies do back-end overlays of data models, to determine who in your company list, fits the model and is thus a good fit for some kind of segment.
- Some companies specialize in giving you extra data on your email list. So I have the email, they will tell me the email’s favorite flavor of ice cream.

I’ve avoided using the marketing terms for the above processes as that’s a completely different discussion.

Issues to think about if you consider any of these options
What’s the email’s provenance? How did the consumer give their permission? The minute you use that email, you are potentially a spammer, if you are unaware of how it was given. And check back a few generations.

Whatever route you take, will the customer understand the relationship? The email I used to opt-in to Zappos emails, and suddenly I’m getting Gap emails. Does that make sense? Don’t underestimate the consumer. They know how they interacted with your company. It doesn’t take a lot to be considered spam.

Are you giving over more value than what you’re being provided? If I give 100K emails to a datafarm, I need to understand that I’m providing them with value. They only exist by the customers they have, and the lists they get.

As Loren McDonald says very well in his post, If Someone Says Buy A List One More Time…”

After all, marketers who ask about buying lists could just be asking, “How can I build my list quickly, and where can I acquire email addresses?” Unfortunately, there is no easy way to build a good list quickly. If there were, presumably we’d all be doing it.

Here’s the truth: In the email world, you can’t buy legitimate email addresses. You know those $399 CDs with 50 million email addresses? Most of the addresses are probably harvested or gathered in some less-than-stellar manner. Many are probably either out of date, converted to “honeypots” by ISPs looking to trap some spammers, or otherwise undeliverable. The owners of those addresses certainly haven’t given you permission to email them.

There are many methods of increasing your email list, “organically,” a term I use just to say, it’s part of the normal process of business. It varies by company and organization, and it’s largely to do with getting out the word that you have interesting mailing campaigns, that you make it a priority to take email addresses at F2F events, strategic parts of your site, at the cash register, etc. Viral campaigns are great, and parternship marketing.

For clients who have explored the acquisition routes above, I have never seen one of them that has exhausted the organic methods. Lifecycle, “triggered” emails are probably the most unsung hero in acquisition channels. It enhances the relationship, it is targeted, and personalized, and 24×7. But it’s a little tricky to execute. I think marketers go the “easy” route by back-end data models, because it’s something they understand, whereas lifecycle emails are not one-hit-wonders but slow growth. Still, when you compare cost and response rates, lifecycles win every time. Web 2.0 companies understand this- their emails are short, text-only (or with maybe 1 image) and triggered according to user activity on their site. They notify you of social relationships- and they create a stickiness. Unfortunately retail and consumer goods haven’t launched onto this as much, they’re still in the image-heavy, HTML one-drop-a-week world, barely inching up from the “cart abandonment” email campaigns. They can go there, and some are trying, but it’s a hard row to hoe.

Reading on the topic
How to Grow A List ClickZ
Email list rental may fall out of favor DM News. Great quote from Julie Katz at Forrester:

“We saw it coming because renting names from a list can be very risky for a marketer,” says Julie Katz, analyst at Forrester Research. “Those people don’t necessarily have any affinity with your brand. Also, if the names are bad, you could get caught in a spam trap and it can ruin your reputation.”

Bulk email lists: good or bad? by Mark Brownlow on Email Experience Reports

I was recently on a podcast, and after listening to it, once it was post-production, had a lot of “constructive criticism.” The funny thing is that criticism wasn’t just about podcasting, the aural experience, or using the myriad of technical tools available to auditory editors. Nope, it was just good writing.

1) Make your point quickly. Especially with video and podcasting, users can’t graze or glance through material, so get to the main point, gist, angle, funny quickly. David Sedaris uses the “40-second rule” as does most of This American Life. Make your joke in 40 seconds.

2) Why are they here? Why should they listen? Think of your audience and why they’re giving you their precious time. Imagine in your head a composite audience member- some readers you know about or just guess who your ideal reader would be, and give them reasons to stay.

3) Short is good. I jumped into the podcast in 20 minutes. 20 minutes of the host rambling. I honestly can’t tell my friends to listen to it because they have to hear this guy for that long. (Actually I tell them to fast forward to 20 minutes).

4) Be niche. It’s an easy way to get a dedicated audience. This isn’t a requirement, just a tip.

Probably the best way to learn from good podcasts, videocasts, and blogs, is to show them.

Podcasts
Stuff You Missed in History Class (http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/category/stuff-you-missed-in-history-class/)
WNYC Radio Lab (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/)
This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/)
Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/)

Videocasts
Illdoctrine Hip Hop Video (http://www.illdoctrine.com)
Steve Isaacs (http://steveisaacs.tv/)
Bronto TV (http://blog.bronto.com/videos/)

The reality is that it’s a very cheap campaign. Basically, take your email, and send it again a few days later. Heck, send it a third time.

You can see that list fatigue sets in pretty quickly. For this, you have some options:
- change subject line
- suppress openers and clickers, or those that act on the email contents
- change header text on top of creative (the text right before the main message, called different things now, by various folks.)

Some demographics will support this more than others. I’ve heard from B2Bs that rarely have any negative feedback, but they re-pitch only with conference registrations, and other once-a-year or twice-a-year notifications.

For consumer and retail, it’s been spotty. Basically consumers really need the slightest excuse to unsubscribe, and once that happens you don’t get them back. Some of my clients use this rule- only do the re-engage campaign occasionally. Then, a significant portion of your base won’t consider this as a regular technique. You don’t want them to say “stop hammering me,” essentially. But the occasional re-issue is tolerated.

It’s a great way to increase response and repurpose creative. There are also other more effective ways without the negatives:

- lifecycle campaigns. Make one creative and email according to the consumer’s lifecycle, not your marketing calendar.
- re-activation campaigns. Re-use the most popular creative to bring back lapsed viewer/engagers. Send this out after no contact in 3/6/9 months, for example.

More Reading:
The Reminder Email, Does It Work?
Killing Off Inactive Subscribers
Terminology: Transactional, Lifecycle, Event-Based, Trigger

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