What Matters Most in Email Marketing: Five Questions for 5 Experts – www.optindatalist.com

Do we ever figure email marketing out?

After years of creating email campaigns for races, retailers, restaurants, hotels, and a even a daily email for my old newspaper, I must say no. I still find myself searching for answers.

What’s a good open rate? What’s should we measure? Images or no images?

The questions keep coming, the answers change by the day and the person.

This summer my colleague Kate Hamilton and I reached out to some of the marketers we respect most to get their thoughts on some common email marketing questions. Today we’re sharing their answers here, and the differences in their answers shows you that there are no hard and fast answers when it comes to email marketing (despite what so many experts will tell you).

Here’s a sampling of their thoughts on some common email marketing questions I hear from clients and friends.

1. If you only have time to dig into 1 metric for your email campaigns, what should it be and why?

The purpose of an email campaign (for me) is to get people to click on something, to take some action; because of this the click-thru rate is my #1 metric. Of course if an email doesn’t get opened then no one will click through — so open rate is a close second.

Open rate, because this is the best way to get your message across, and also best way to gauge engagement level of your audience

CTOR. This is my favorite email metric.

[Note:  For the unfamiliar, CTOR stands for Click to Open Rate, the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens. This tells you how many of those who opened your email found your content good enough to read more or dig deeper.]

Who did not view. Why? You can try sending to them with a different title or as text-only.

My two cents:  I love the COTR metric, but all metrics leave something to be desired. None tell you how many people saw the subject line in their email program but didn’t open the full email. That’s still an impression. Opens and click-throughs can drop dramatically if you’re sending several emails a week, and click-throughs can be much higher if you’re sending one email per month loaded with great content. The metric, and what defines success, depends on the overall strategy.

2. What’s your best time-saving advice for email marketers?

Curate! Great content gets read, but you don’t have to write it all! If you create a list of the most important articles, videos or podcasts from the last week (or month) about a topic your clients and prospects are interested in, it can make you look smarter and get more clicks than a well written article of your own.

Use a simple template. A weird, complicated template will cost you many many hours over the years.

My two cents:  After doing this for eight years, I’ve found one of the biggest time-savers is simply having a firm cut-off for including content. Don’t bend because a board member or staff member wants to squeeze something in late. It sets a precedent and will add many hours to the task over the course of the year.

3. What’s your best trick for increasing click-through rates?

Have lots of things to click on! If you have just one or two articles and those topics don’t interest the reader you’ve lost them. If you have a list of articles that you’ve curated from around the web on topics of interest to your audience you’ll see more clicks and fewer unsubscribes.

Leave a “curiosity gap.” The teaser text shouldn’t give too much away.

Make it easy to follow without a lot of text. Provide good, usable content.

4. Are there industries where email marketing isn’t worth the time or money?

I highly doubt it. I was going to say prostitution, but I bet that would be great actually.

Those with super expensive items for sale, such as manufacturing plant equipment. You simply do not have hundreds or thousands of customers to communicate with.

Businesses that sell impulse items such as candy under $1. People just won’t subscribe. Also, businesses that sell aircraft carriers/submarines that cost more than $100,000,000. These decisions aren’t affected by content marketing very much. It’s more about relationships, sales processes, multi-year RFP processes and bribes. …everyone else should do email marketing.

I can’t think of one. Every demographic has a growing mobile segment and uses email to some extent.

Thank you to these experts for sharing some wisdom with us!

With Gmail Overhaul, Not All Mail Is Equal – OptinDataList

For some retailers that rely on emailed promotions, Google Inc. is adding insult to injury.

When the search giant overhauled its free email service three months ago, it set up algorithms to automatically siphon the flow of airfare offers and spa deals away from users’ main inboxes and into an easily bypassed “Promotions” folder.

But there is another wrinkle: For Gmail users that do visit those Promotions folders, the first items they see will often be ads sold by Google.

The ads are different from those that already appear inside users’ opened messages. Instead, they look like emails sitting in an inbox but are shaded yellow and feature informational “i” icons explaining their purpose. Marketers still complain that the ads threaten to draw attention away from the coupons and pitch emails they want their targets to read first.

“People are not very amused by those,” said Tom Monaghan, product manager for the email service at marketing service HubSpot Inc.

Google shows no more than two inbox ads per user, spokeswoman Andrea Freund said. Some users’ inboxes showed no ads after Google tightened its “quality thresholds” for targeting the messages.

“Our goal was to put them someplace that was more relevant, and we thought that was the promotions tab,” she said. “When you’re looking at promotions, you’re looking for deals,” she added. “We do try to clearly label them as ads.”

If past software updates are any indication, Google will likely tread carefully as it introduces the new inbox ads, according to Ben Chestnut, chief executive of email marketing service MailChimp. Too many ads could alienate users, he said.

The ads are compounding the concern over the changes to Gmail, which has more than 425 million active users worldwide. Though Gmail users can’t see the changes when accessing their messages on iPhones, Google’s Web mail application is widely used on desktops. Ms. Freund said more than half of all users have the updated Gmail layout, which the company has been gradually rolling out since May.

Prolific emailers like Delta Air Lines Inc., Gap Inc., Gilt Groupe Inc. and Groupon Inc. have sent step-by-step instructions to their mailing lists on how to move messages out of the Promotions tab and back to Gmail’s “Primary” folder.

Marketers fear the new system could spread and put an unwanted kink in a tried-and-true method of driving sales, not to mention business models that rely on emailed coupons.

“We think other email providers will be adopting this as well,” LivingSocial Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge said of the new categorization system. “We don’t know when and we don’t know who, but we think they will.”

The reason for the instructions is simple, Mr. Judge said: “We clearly just want users to see our emails.”

“Let’s stay together,” apparel retailer Kate Spade Saturday pleaded in an email to its newsletter subscribers. Gmail’s “new inbox settings may have started filing away your Saturday.com emails into the depths of something called a ‘Promotions’ tab.”

“Ack,” it added.

Google redesigned its service to help users manage email overload, Ms. Freund said. Users can reroute emails they want to land in their regular inbox with a simple drag-and-drop, or by going back to the old layout altogether.

The shift appears to have made a noticeable but small impact on the rate at which recipients open marketers’ pitches. MailChimp last month found the percentage of emails that were opened by its 3 million customers fell by about 1 percentage point for Gmail, to between 12% and 13%.

Analysis from HubSpot showed the percentage of Gmail users who opened clients’ emails slid slightly over the summer, though activity spiked during the weekends. Open rates have declined at the same slow rate since April, suggesting user engagement is suffering from too many emails rather than Gmail.

“There’s a little bit of Chicken Little happening right now over this,” Mr. Monaghan said.

Gilt, an online service that alerts members to deals on luxury goods, said it hasn’t had any problems with Gmail’s new layout. “Having said that, we think the best thing to do is to educate our members,” said Elizabeth Francis, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Groupon Chief Executive Eric Lefkofsky last week said the changes had no “material” impact on his business, because the daily-deals service has shifted away from emailed pitches to offering deals on its website. But just in case, the company sent a batch of emails to subscribers later that week explaining how to move its messages from “promotions” to “primary.”

Gap and Banana Republic sent emails about the new inbox because customers “value personalized and relevant emails,” spokeswoman Edie Kissko said.

www.OptinDataList.com – Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts for Ecommerce Merchants

In “Email Still an Effective Marketing Tool?,” we addressed why email marketing is highly efficient, inexpensive, and easy to measure. This is unlike social media marketing, which for smaller merchants is often difficult to manage and track.

I used email marketing extensively in my previous online jewelry business. Here is a list of email dos and don’ts I learned along the way.

Email Marketing Dos

• Aggressively capture email subscribers. Capture email subscribers on your website, during checkout, in transactional emails, on your social media posts and pages, and any other place you can ask for an opt-in.
• Offer subscription options. Offer subscriptions options, such as frequency, subject matter, promotions, and past purchases.
• Offer at least one subject-oriented option. This means every email does not need to be a promotion. You can offer tips, customer profiles, and human-interest stories. Try to find some way to add some value to your brand beyond promotions.
• Personalize promotions. Mine your customer data and personalize promotions to the extent that your supporting platforms allow it. Past purchases, recent item views, and abandoned items can be used to personalize emails. Use what you have to increase your conversion rates and average order values.
• Give subscribers what they want. Respect subscriber choices and give them what they want and nothing more. If you create a new delivery option, provide a way for them to opt in rather than just assuming they will want it.
• Invest in a branded template. Don’t use the default templates included with your email marketing service. Create one that will help your brand stand out, support site links to relevant content, and support mobile devices. Create several for different types of promotions.
• Track email results. Use referral links that can be tracked as goals in your analytics. Track opens, clicks, add to carts, and conversions.
• Pay attention to results. If something is not working, try something else. If something is working well, make it better.
• Build promotional landing pages. If you are offering 40 percent off, create a 40 percent off landing page. You will see a higher conversion rate.
• Keep in contact. Sending more than one newsletter per week is difficult for some small merchants. But invest the time to make contact with your customers, for top-of-mind awareness.
• Offer an option to change preferences. When a subscriber opts out, offer alternative options to try and keep them on your list in a less intrusive delivery schedule.
• Ask why customers opted out. A simple question on the opt-out form, asking why they unsubscribed, can provide helpful insights.
• Send out mobile friendly emails. Soon the majority of emails will be read on mobile devices. Test your delivery on those devices. Test your landing pages on mobile devices. You will increase your conversions.
• Clean up your lists periodically. One of the best practices is to clean your lists periodically. At least once a year, send an email to all subscribers  who have not opened during that year. Ask them to confirm their subscription. This will weed out uninterested people and provide you with a better idea of your actual clicks and open rates.
• Compress your images. Keep images small so that performance is quick. No one wants to wait for a high-resolution image on a mobile phone.
• Send an instant newsletter to boost business. During slow weeks, when your sales are below your target, assemble a quick promotion to a list that you know will produce results.
• Post a copy of your email on your website. Post a copy of your email on your website, then promote it via your social media outlets. Create different links for tracking. Remove obsolete emails so people don’t find your old coupons in a Google search.
• Include an opt-in link. In addition to your opt-out links, be sure to offer an opt-in for those who may have found your email on your website or via a forward. Insert a forward-to-a-friend link, too.

Email Marketing Don’ts

• Don’t spam your lists. If you have an old list you want to import or use, send a one-time email requesting an opt-in to your new service. If subscribers ask to opt-out, whether they do it on the phone, via email, or from your automated links, remove them immediately.
• Don’t send out emails with poor content. Emphasize content development. Use quality images, proper grammar, and links that work.
• Don’t assume your list is good forever. Eventually, your list will go stale. Clean up your lists as suggested in the dos, above.
• Don’t send out bad coupons. If you have promotional coupons, make sure they actually work. Bad coupons anger consumers.
• Don’t put too much on the email page. Keep text to a minimum on promotions, have a primary offer and secondary links.
• Don’t make too many offers. Too many offers clutter the message and reduces its effectiveness.

www.OptinDataList.com: 3 Easy Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing List

Two years back, the idea that social media would hasten the death of email marketing was hotly debated in blogs and op-eds throughout the digital marketing community. And while I don’t see it often anymore, I will occasionally stumble upon a blog that states, “Yes, email marketing is very much alive and well.”

Need proof? According to a recent survey published on MarketingProfs, email holds more sway in the purchasing process than personal referrals, company social media and blogs, direct mail and more. Email even ranked second (19 percent) among young consumers (those aged 20-30) behind company websites as the preferred way to engage with a brand.

The validating statistics are moot, however, if you’re not aggressively working to improve your email marketing list. Here, I share three easy ways you can get more from your email marketing database.

Append

In February, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced it will stop delivering first class mail on Saturdays starting this August. Possible ramifications jarred many multichannel marketers enough to begin investigating options to amplify their email efforts.

Email append is a good solution for finding the email addresses of customers on your current postal list. Email append works like this:
Email marketers provide the names and postal addresses of the consumers they want to find addresses for to an email append service provider.
The provider uses algorithms to match the list to databases of opt-in email addresses, names and postal addresses.
The provider sends a permission request to each matched email address, giving the customer the opportunity to opt into email communications.
The provider adds approved email addresses to the customer files, which it returns to the email marketer.

Clean

Having too many bounces, complaints or spam trap hits damages your email reputation, which means your messages could be sent to the junk folder or, worse, blocked. Silverpop provided a snapshot of how industry bounce rates and spam complaint rates compare in its “2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study.”

Performing a simple data check to correct misspellings and typos entered during the acquisition phase is one step toward cleaning your list, thereby improving deliverability, says Pamela Vaughan, director of brand strategy for Lititz. Cleaning your list enables you to correct simple syntax and misspelling errors, and it allows you to remove distribution email addresses, like sales@company.com.

Enhance

Personalization is a common email marketing strategy nowadays, but gathering enough data about your customers to make emails personalized can prove tricky. Whenever I’m filling out a form (whether online or on paper), I never enter personal information into the boxes without those pesky “required” asterisks. (Hey, you want my phone number? You’re going to have to work harder than that!) I bet you’re of the same mind.

So how do you gather that data without scaring customers away? Data enhancement. By sending your email list to a data enhancement provider, you can discover demographics (including name, mailing address, age and income), psychographics, buying behavior, lifestyle data and business information, making your personalization efforts a breeze!

OptinDataList | Spike in Email Undeliverables: 5 Tips for Increasing Delivery

The Challenge: Major email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL have implemented new algorithms for email deliverability based on “engagement.” If your emails are not triggering sufficient interaction, they are likely not to be delivered.

Recently, most email service providers have converted to a new customized algorithm that calculates deliverability using a combination of the original email delivery rules plus new “engagement” factors: open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints. With these new human behaviors factored into the equation of deliverability, future emails that you send may be considered SPAM or not delivered at all, even to subscribers who signed-up to receive your emails. Email marketing service MailChimp explains an even more damaging point “if enough recipients click the ‘spam’ button on your email, the providers assume that no one else would want that email either.” Read Google’s white paper on deliverability and the Priority Inbox.

What can you do to improve engagement? Here are five tactics:

1. At a minimum, follow basic list management best practices, such as keeping your list opt-in only, honor unsubscribe requests and remove undelivered emails from your list. MailChimp suggests using a double opt-in method to further improve engagement metrics.

2. Motivate new customers to engage with you. Silverpop recommends a quality welcome series.

3. The strategists at Econsultancy suggest “Combining behavioral data and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) creates Engagement-RFM (eRFM). Using this methodology can improve the accuracy of segmentation, strengthen influence and engagement, and lead to an increased ROI.”

4. Use personalization and dynamic content. Leverage this information to deploy personalized communications for significant events such as customer appreciation messages, unexpected “surprise and delight” communications, birthdays, post purchase “thank-you’s”, and dropped cart messages.

5. Reward email actions like opens, clicks, and shares. Marketing Profs highlights how companies like GameStop and Southwest Airlines are experiencing success with engagement by tracking subscriber’s interactions and awarding loyalty program points.

Key Takeaways:

1. Sending “spray and pray” emails will damage your brand, hurt your reputation, and compromise future deliverability of legitimate emails.

2. Provide value-added information. Per recent findings from recent Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm, customers are willing to provide in-depth information in exchange for receiving value-added information. For consumers, the rationale for providing preference information is to receive increasingly relevant offers, communications, and experiences.

3. Segmentation is more essential than ever. Develop increasingly specific customer and prospect segments so you can send highly targeted emails that are of interest to each recipient in your sub-segmented groups.