Email and WordPress

The Business of WordPress Conference taking place on Wednesday, June 23 has gotten me thinking about using email with sites built on this platform. (If you’re asking yourself, “What’s WordPress?” go to this site and check out the capabilities of this content management system.)

So, if you’re a WP user or are thinking of using it to manage a website for yourself or your business, here are some things to keep in mind as it relates to email marketing:

Sign-up with an email service provider (ESP) that has a WP-plug-in: By having a sign-up form on your site that drops new additions into your ESP automatically, you’re saved the step of manually adding new sign-ups to your distribution list each time you want to send out an email. MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber and Emma are just a few of the many ESPs that have a WP-Plug-in created. (You will need to open an account with the ESP if you want to use its plug-in.)

Don’t mistake your email sign-up form for your contact form (or vice versa): Adding a “contact us” form is pretty much standard operating procedure for a web site these days. But this form shouldn’t be the same form people use to sign-up for your email program. You can blend the two if you a) add a box for people to manually opt-in to your email program and b) filter out the extraneous contact information and only import into your ESP the relevant fields, such as email address and first and/or last name. If your form includes a multi-part question, such as “Which products do you want more information about?” and three choices are included, this could also be added to your ESP as a way to further segment. (Look at Wufoo.com as a way to blend the two. It can be linked to your MailChimp account, too.)

Mention your email program on every page! OK, so this one isn’t specific to WordPress, but if you’re planning a website on any platform, keep this one in mind. Add a button in your header or sidebar that’s linked to an email sign-up page.

Am I missing something from this post? Please let me know in the comments section and I’ll be happy to fill in the blanks.

Preview pane optimization

Preview pane optimization isn’t the sexiest of email topics, but it’s one of the most important. After all, you’ve worked so hard to craft an engaging subject line that has convinced your recipients to read further, why waste that opportunity to capture your recipients’ attention with wasted space in the preview pane area?

Most folks assume that others view email the same way they do, but the reality is that there are so many different email clients, which all have multiple ways of being configured that it’s quite likely no single email is viewed the same way. The more someone has to scroll to get the gist of the message, the more likely they are to give up and move on. Don’t kid yourself by thinking that you’ll get a second chance to get your point across!

EmailStatCenter.com, a leading authority on email marketing metrics, posted the following note from an ExactTarget study: 52 percent of mobile phone owners access the same email account across multiple devices (PC, laptop, mobile phone, etc.), while 48 percent have a distinct eMail account for mobile-only email. -ExactTarget “2008 Channel Preference Survey”

This means that your emails should be designed to be viewed in web-based email platforms (like gmail, hotmail, etc.) as well as in Outlook, Mac Mail or Entourage (since many people view these accounts in those platforms) as well as on iPhones and BlackBerrys (or other PDAs). Sound like a big task? Just keep these things in mind and you’ll be OK:

Insert a link in your preview header (the space above your uppermost image) to view the email on a mobile device. Here’s an example from Old Navy:

When you click the “view on mobile device” page, you’re taken here, which is optimized for a BlackBerry.

Another trick is to put the main point of the email above the header image. Here’s an example from O’Charley’s:

Here’s a quick list of other ways to optimize your email for viewing in a preview pane on any device or platform:

Reduce the size of your header image. It may be great for branding, but the taller the image, the less recipients will see of the thrust of your email in their preview pane. The more scrolling they have to do to read the message, the quicker you are to lose them.

Use alt tags as teaser copy in case images are blocked or turned off. Here’s before and after copy of an email from Snapfish that still conveys the special offering, even with images off.

Do not embed copy in images or use single, large images. What happens if your headline, call to action or even the entire email is encapsulated in a graphic? The reader can’t see it at all if that image is blocked. Make your most important points in HTML text, as well as in graphics. Also, always link to a web version of your email with all graphics intact.

Say good-bye to One Size Fits All mailings

In my last posting I covered how to ask your email subscribers for more than just their address. I understand that collecting information retroactively can be tough, but no matter whether you’ve been able to collect more than an email address from the get-go or not, it’s important to think about segmenting your database to send relevant information.

What am I, just an address to you?!
You should really want to have a deeper relationship with your list members, which is why you should collect (or ask for retroactively) more information from your subscribers than their email address.

If you only have an email address for your subscribers, you’re taking the “spray and pray” approach. You’re sending the same message to the masses and praying that it’ll be well received. But that’s most likely to be a waste of your time and resources. (This will work for general company updates, i.e. “everything is on sale” or “We’re moving” notices.)

The objective of segmenting your email list members is to increase the relevancy of your messages so that they add more value to your members. This makes your messages a welcome addition to their inbox – builds a good brand awareness for you and improves your reputation with your ESP (fewer spam complaints is good thing).

Moving beyond one size fits all
To segment your the list for your email campaign, split your email list into groups, where each group has some shared characteristic(s). Then you tailor your campaign to each group, with email content, timing and frequency reflecting those shared characteristics.

Still not sure how to segment your list? Here are some ideas:

1. Prospects and clients:

For service providers, someone who’s made a purchase shouldn’t receive the same information as someone who’s still making the purchase decision. Once an email list member has become a client, it’s time to re-classify them so they receive emails that are designed for clients and not prospects. There is nothing that can create more cognitive dissonance than for an existing client to receive an email marketing to them as if they were a prospect offering a better deal than they just received.

2. Demographics:

Too many marketers still fail to leverage the data they collect, such as gender and birthdate. Other demographics might include education levels, occupation, location of residence, marital status, number of children, income or other socio-economic factors. Birthdays are great opportunity to mix up your messaging to an email subscriber and give a non-sale oriented, warm and fuzzy to build trust and enthusiasm with your brand and email program. Only ask for demographic information that’s relevant to your business’s objectives.

“Demographics” is not to be confused with “Psychographics” or the identification of certain characteristics that your clients have that would influence their buying decisions. These could be factors that include measuring their attitudes, interests, opinions, cultural identity, etc.

3. Open rate or CTR rates:

Open rates are inherently inaccurate, so this isn’t one that I’d recommend highly. But, it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that email list members that open your newsletter or click on something on a frequent basis are clearly more engaged than members who do not click on things… therefore, you can test sending a higher frequency to your most engaged members to increase conversion or response. Because of the wonky nature of open rates, some of these followup campaigns may be perceived as pesky duplicates to some recipients.

4. Acquisition Channels:

Where your email members came from is known as an ‘acquisition channel’ and different acquisition channels have different characteristics. Example: Co-registration email list members will always respond or convert differently than organically acquired email members.

5. Geography:

Your prospects or clients in a foreign country really don’t want to hear about your domestic holiday chit chat. And sending your email for a morning special that arrives in your recipient’s inbox at lunchtime because you’ve forgotten about the time zone difference isn’t very helpful either. Why waste resources sending an email to someone who’s geographically undesirable to the point of your message?

6. Interest-based preferences:

If you’ve done surveys over the past year, then you know certain email members have different interests that can help you classify their interest levels in various offerings related to your core product or service.

7. Product lines purchased:

If your firm has a wide line of distinct product lines, it’s best to address your prospects and clients by product line. Give this segment specific offers or content relevant to the product line they are interested in or purchased.

8. Major clients:

VIP clients need to be acknowledged, remembered and given better attention, gifts of exclusive information / content and some of your best deals.

9. Most recent activity:

If you have transactional customers who only purchase your type of product once every X weeks/months/years, it would be wise to segment this type of buyer so that the moment you identify their recent visit or click of a specific campaign, they would be the perfect target for increased attention and offers vs. other times in this type of customer buying cycle.

Anything that lifts the relevancy of your message lifts responses and protects against email fatigue is a good thing – and segmenting your database list will do just that. Questions? Be sure to contact me or leave a comment on this blog post and I’d be happy to talk with you about this topic.

Asking for more information

I’ve had a few conversations recently about how important it is to ask for more than just an email address when setting up a form on a website to begin an email marketing program. So many times, someone will add a box to collect an email address, make sure the form works and think they’re done. That’s some short-term thinking right there!

Of course you want an email address, but how can you segment your database with just an email address?! You can’t. (Unless you want to separate the Yahoo!’s from the Hotmail folks….) As a result, when getting addresses for your mailing list, be sure to collect information that will help you segment your database in a way that’s relevant to the purpose of your email program. Let’s say you want to send offer A to folks who live in Georgia and offer B to everyone else. To do that, be sure to have a place for people who are signing up for your emails to enter in their state.

After the fact…
Now say you’ve been collecting addresses for a long time and want to go back and get more information to go with these addresses. Think that’s going to be tough to do? Think again. Here’s how you do that:

1. Set up a preference center. That’s a fancy name for “form to collect information for my email database beyond just an address.” Here’s a link to an article with tips for better sign-up forms.
2. Craft an email to explain why you’re now asking for more information. Be sure to carefully explain that you’re doing this to send them future emails tailored to their location/interests/whatever else you plan to ask about them to segment your list. For example, if you’re going to be offering seasonally-relevant items to your list members, mention that you don’t want to accidentally offer a snow shovel to a Floridian.
3. Include a link to update their profile in your database. Every reputable email service provider (ESP) will have a means for inserting this link into your email. It’s generally part of the footer boilerplate verbiage. The form itself is similar to the email sign-up form, but that form would give your recipients an error message since their email is already in your database. An “update profile form” will recipients to add the information that’s asked for in your sign-up and associate it with their email address.

Tactically, that’s how you get started. Now that you’ve begun to collect more information about your recipients, it’s time to segment your database and send them relevant information. That’s the topic for next time!

Twitter vs. Email

With Twitter growing at a dramatic clip in 2009, I thought it might be worth a note about how this platform compares to – and compliments – an email marketing program.

This missive was inspired by a Tweet from Simms Jenkins of Brightwave Marketing, who wrote:

another difference between email & twitter is marketers think about what their audience wants b4 sending via email but not so much 4 Twitter

The nature of Twitter lends itself to quick-send behavior.  How much thought can you give to 140 characters anyway?! But to send an email to your list without planning is folly.  It’s also just as silly to think that Twitter and email is an either/or proposition.  It’s possible that Twitter could be used in place of email, but I think that time is still in the distant future.

Cost: Twitter is free monetarily, but there is a price to pay for irrelevant tweets. You alienate your followers and eventually cause them to lose interest, possibly to the point of removing themselves from your list.  Hmmm… this sounds an awful lot like what happens when you send inappropriate emails.

Audience: Your list of Twitter followers can fluctuate in size rapidly – someone can easily follow and un-follow your messages with one click.  But there’s no segmentation capabilities to tailor your tweets to different audiences. So everyone gets the same message – come one, come all.

Use Twitter and Email for same campaign

Cookware and cake-decorating accessory company Wilton has used social media and email in tandem to grow their audience.  Here’s a link to the Marketing Sherpa case study, which delves into their program further.

They used email to grow their social media fans (on Facebook and Twitter) and social media to drive subscriptions to their email newsletter.  Before a product was launched, they use Twitter to tease its release and developed a traditional email campaign to promote the product.

Promote your emails in Twitter

It’s also a good idea to send a Tweet of each email campaign by shortening the web URL of your message (the “view this as a web page” link that should always be at the top of your email) using a service like bit.ly.  When doing that, add a # and a keyword for your product or service. This will help your content be discovered by other Twitter users who have set up a filter for keywords of interest to them.

Twitter in place of email?

A recent ClickZ article suggests that tweets could replace subject lines in e-mails to drive potential customers to offer pages.  With Twitter’s ability to have offers pushed to you like e-mail, without exposing your e-mail address, this article suggests it “could threaten the e-mail marketing channel and reinvent the world of affiliate marketing.”

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