Tag: Email Marketing

Online Marketing: Don’t Mistake New for Better.

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I was recently informed by a client that they needed to step up their social media presence because “email is on the way out”.  That was a shock to me as most of my clients (this one included) see a nice return on their email marketing investment.  In fact, industry wide email marketing boasts a leading ROI among online marketing efforts with $42.08 generated from every dollar spent.  In short, my client was mistaken.  He’d made the error of thinking “new” was “better”.

Social media seems to be the new “new”.  It’s one of the first things out of people’s mouths when internet marketing comes up.  And I don’t mean to pick on social media, it’s a valuable tool.  It just shouldn’t be put on a pedestal above older communication channels that still outperform it.

An older example is when CSS layouts were first appearing.  Many companies rushed to update their pages for the new “standard”.  The problem was that many of the web browsers weren’t quite up to speed in rendering these sites so web developers had to create multiple versions for individual browsers.  That made developing the site significantly more expensive.  The difference between jumping on CSS layouts when it was new and when browser support increased was potentially tens of thousands of dollars.  At the end of the day there was no difference between a tabled layout and a CSS layout to most users but the early adopters could revel in the “newness” for a short period of time.

Neglecting other marketing channels to do what’s “new” can be very problematic when resources are shifted to a new media that does not perform as well as an older one.  It’s like trading a dollar for a quarter, it might be shinier but there’s no financial upside.

Of course I’m not suggesting that you let your online marketing stagnate into a tried and true rut.  Innovation and new technology will come up and many times it should be adopted.  But focus on effectiveness not newness.  When you keep track of what’s performing best it keeps the allure of “new” out of your decision making.  Online marketing is about increasing awareness of a company, driving opportunities, and ultimately having a positive impact on the bottom line.  Newness is hard pressed to affect any of those things on its own.

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Monitor Bounces: Email

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Like websites, there’s a temptation to look at the positive metrics rather than improving negative ones.  Bounces from email is a great indicator of list health.

An email campaign that has a low bounce rate (under 10%) is often a well built list that is regularly maintained.  The benefit of this is that it usually reflects audience engagement.  Poorly built lists can see bounce rates approach 50%.  This is typically a sign of poorly compiled lists or a build up of bad addresses over an extended period.

Monitoring your bounce rate has a few benefits:

  • It let’s you know if your list quality is acceptable (going over 20% bounce rates is a sign of trouble).
  • It makes maintenance a recurring task so that bad email addresses can be removed.  This often saves money on your email list provider as the list or emails sent gets smaller.
  • It gives an idea of true audience so if your list begins to shrink then efforts to boost subscribers can be launched.

Don’t just focus on the positive metrics like opens and clicks.  Keeping an eye on who isn’t getting your email communications can be as informative as knowing who does.

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Multiple Technology Platforms for an Email Marketing Contact Management System

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It’s hard to find all inclusive tools.  Some times the features in one system do a certain task well while another technology is better suited for something else.  This is often true in email marketing, especially for small and medium companies.  There’s no inherent problem with using multiple database or list platforms.  However a lack of planning and organization can cause administrative nightmares for running a cohesive email marketing campaign.  Set a contact management system for your email marketing program that ensure data is shared across all your list management technologies.

The first task is to simplify technologies.  Get the number of necessary technologies down to the smallest number possible.  It’s extremely rare that there would be more than two technologies involved:

  • An email marketing specific platform that specializes in templating, some list management, automated sending, and opt-out/opt-in compliance.
  • A database platform with advanced sorting/queries, reporting, and dynamic contact management.

There are add-ons to popular database platforms for email marketing.  If the add-on suits all of your email marketing needs then they can be an ideal solution.  Some are better than others but there is usually a sacrifice in functionality or accessibility with these add-ons which is impractical for certain email marketing campaigns.

I’ve yet to see an email marketing platform that has a robust enough list management system that it can double as a company database.  Email marketing platforms fulfill a niche role and most of them do it well.  Don’t try and hammer it into a function it wasn’t designed for.

Let’s assume that add-ons aren’t available for your database technology or that the add-on doesn’t have all the necessary functionality required.  That leaves two distinct technologies in your contact management system.

The trick to making your contact management effective is a recurring update process.  In some cases that can be automated which is ideal.

Other times automation is too complex or too expensive to implement.  In those situations, a schedule is vital.  Basically, a person or people need to fill the role of automation.  This often is not a daunting task.  Contacts can be held in the database and advanced sorting allows for very specific criteria to be met.  Most database programs make exporting data easy and most email marketing systems make importing data into usable groups simple.  This provides a simple exchange of information so that both technologies are on the same page.

The only time this process becomes problematic is if the schedule is not well planned out or the timing is not followed.  Managing your contacts is critical to all marketing efforts.  Sacrificing functionality is a poor option.  So if you find that you need to have more than one technology in your contact management system, ensure there is a plan to keep them synchronized.

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Does Your Landing Page Add Incentive or Repeat What Recipients Already Heard?

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Every offer made online through email, social media, ads, or sponsored links should direct people to a webpage on your site dedicated to that offer.  These landing pages are a tried and true best practice because if people land on a page that doesn’t reinforce the offer they were interested in, confusion and abandonment multiply.  However, good landing pages bring additional reasons for recipients to take advantage of an offer.

Your online target audience is looking for reasons not to take advantage of your offer.  And with good reason, there are so many opportunities and promotions online that we tend to have a strict filter.  There simply isn’t enough time in the day to keep up with every marketing message we encounter online.  So your landing page needs to reinforce the benefit of completing the offer.

The problem is that many landing pages repeat information rather than build on it.  How is this done? Many landing pages just repeat the initial marketing message.  For example, it’s not uncommon to receive an email marketing communication, click on the offer link, and find the exact same info and layout but with a form at the bottom.  Sometimes this is done strategically like if the page has a promotional video that couldn’t be delivered directly via email.  Many times, however, it’s done because it’s quicker to copy and paste the information than to build a custom landing page.

It’s a good idea to use some formatting and content from your online promotions to create consistency.  It’s a bad idea to copy it verbatim with no additional selling points.

The reason is that you usually don’t need to repeat yourself.  Some people will be very motivated to take advantage of your promotion.  They won’t look at your landing page and complete it as long as they clearly see the offer is the same.  Reinforcing the offer on the landing page is for the group of people who are interested but not quite convinced.  Repeating what they already saw is a poor way to convince them to complete the offer.  The landing page should have additional information about the offer that highlights subsequent or additional advantages.

There are a lot of schools of thought on landing page effectiveness and optimization.  Only two rules apply to everyone.  Your landing page needs to have a single focus of getting visitors to complete the offer and tests should be run to improve results.  Beyond that you are free to customize your content and layout.  Use that freedom to build a page that reinforces the promotions done for the offer.  Reinforce the offer with additional benefits and more in depth information so that people that need to know more to complete a landing page conversion are reassured to do so.

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Buying or Renting Email Lists

It’s not uncommon for people to want to infuse their email list with a batch of new people.  The stock answer from email marketers (myself included) is to gradually and methodically build a list.  Use your network of contacts and regular business interactions to build up a legitimate opt-in email marketing list.  However, some people are in a hurry or don’t have the patience to build a list.  So if you find you are backed in a corner, the last resort is to buy or sell an email list.

The theory on any bought or rented list is that the people have opted in for marketing communications.  That assumption is only as good as the person you are buying or renting from.  The first thing that email marketers need to understand is that buying or renting a list has become difficult and/or expensive.

Buying a list is very rare.  In fact, if I run into someone that is selling lists, I am suspicious.  Selling lists legally has become very challenging, if not impossible, and is typically not a good route to pursue.  You’re more likely to run into a scam than a legitimate list source.

List brokers will rent a list by sending a communication to people that have opted in but prices can run up to 50 cents a name.  In most cases, that multiplies the overall expense of the send by at least five.  If the price doesn’t scare you off, the good list brokers can also offer some kind of targeting so that the list is sent to people that fit your email offer.  Bad list brokers don’t even share basic demographic data.  I ran into one that couldn’t/wouldn’t verify the email was sent to their list.  In shor

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Define Success: Email Marketing

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Using generic metrics for gauging success is very common in email marketing.  Specifically the most common gauges are:

  • Open rate
  • Click rate

Don’t misunderstand, these metrics are important but for most email campaigns they should not be the defining factor in measuring success.  Success depends on the intent of the email.

Here’s an example, an email campaign that consists of one communication promoting an event and a second that offers informative tips.  The open rate matters in both cases as it is an indicator of subject line clarity and recipient loyalty.

In fact, for the informative tip the open rate is a good immediate indicator.  However, the rate of the email being forwarded might be a better gauge because it clearly indicates that recipients valued the content.  Even a fairly small percent of forwards is a major victory because this particular metric typically only records a fraction of actual forwarding activity.

For the event promotion opens are a good initial indicator and click through rates are important.  However drilling down to what was clicked on is typically more important.  Were people drawn to a video link, an image, a headline, or a particular hyperlink?  This information is a better gauge for success because it can be linked to who registered for the event as well as inform future communication on what draws the target audience.

Of course this is only a sample and other metrics would be more critical to success in other cases.  The point is that open and click rates are usually a starting point to evaluating a campaign.  They rarely are capable of being a stand-alone gauge for success.

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Define Success for Your Online Marketing

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It’s common for people to use general metric standards as a guideline for success when analyzing online marketing data.  This can lead to real problems with their campaigns because it doesn’t take into account individualized goals.

Each webpage, email communication, or social media post needs to have a clearly defined metric for success rather than being analyzed on general metrics. General metrics like visitors, open/click rates, or post views can be misleading on the effectiveness of online marketing.  This data is informative but should not be the measuring stick for most online marketing initiatives.

In upcoming posts we’ll look at three separate areas of online marketing and general metrics that people use to measure success.  We’ll then outline how in many cases the general metrics are feeding false assumptions.  The three areas we will focus on are:

  • Email Marketing
  • Website
  • Social Media
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New Year’s Resolution – Evaluate Your Online Marketing Programs

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Once we get into a system for email and online marketing that works for us we can get lazy and blindly stick with it.  As 2011 begins it’s a good idea to challenge what you are doing.  If you don’t regularly review your web and email marketing performance, start now.  If you are regularly monitoring results, check your trends over a longer period of time, at least into the previous year.

Are your initiatives performing as well as they had? 

If so, great, you might tweak some things here or there but at least you confirmed that you are doing well.

If not it’s a good time to reevaluate your initiatives and either revamp them or at least give them a facelift.

It’s a clichéd resolution but make sure that online marketing initiatives are in good shape.

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Email Subject Lines – Be Direct

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Jakob Nielson wrote a great article on email usability.  There is a lot of good points but I wanted to focus on his section about subject lines.  As a rule of thumb, if you have doubts on what the subject line should be . . . be direct.

There is a great example in the article of a subject line that the ad or marketing people probably loved.  And with good reason, it’s a witty one liner.  It just sucks as an email marketing subject line because it doesn’t give recipients a clue as to what the email is about.

In marketing and advertising it’s easy to be swayed by our cleverness.  The problem is that almost all email recipients don’t have time for clever.  They get too many communications to want to revel in advertising wit.

Make subject lines to the point and open rates will be better.  Our testing typically shows a 10% – 20% decrease in opens if a question or tag line is used in the subject line vs. a direct subject line that summarizes the email content.  The same is true for subject lines that are too long, so don’t attempt both direct and witty.

Tell recipients what you want to talk about.  The email is the chance to tell them again with more detail.  Finally the web landing page is a chance to tell them a third time and give them an opportunity to act on it.

It might not be flashy, but in email marketing the subject is your first chance to say something. Make sure it sets recipients up for the email’s content, not leave them guessing about what a clever subject line has to do with anything.

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