Back to school basics for email marketing

In the United States, it’s the time of year when school kids and college students across the country are beginning class for the school year. Fall semester has begun, and with Labor Day (another American holiday) coming up, summer is just about over, for all intents and purposes.

In the spirit of going back to school, a time when students across the country are getting refocused on learning, here is a checklist of items to help your email program come together the way you intended:

1. Start with an objective: what’s the end result you’re aiming to achieve? Students have a degree or certificate in mind when they enroll. Be sure your call to action is going to help you achieve the goal you’ve set out to reach. Don’t bury the action in a big block of text and don’t only include it in an image that’s likely to be turned off.

 

2. Assemble a supply list: what is it you’ll need to get the job done? Whether it’s a relevant landing page for the email campaign or the buy-in from team members to fulfill the email’s call to action, make sure you have your resources in order before activating the campaign. Don’t send an email out with a free giveaway offer if you don’t have the commitment of purchasing and anyone who will have to help fulfill the offer, such as cashiers or your fulfillment house.

 

3. Who else is in your class? If you haven’t already done so, sign up for emails from your competitors.  Check out what they’re doing to keep an eye on the information your customers or clients are potentially reading.

 

4. Remember to put your best foot forward: There are so many ways to address this issue, whether it be testing how your email is rendering across platforms or proofing for typos, be sure your emails are as polished and presentable as they can be.

 

5. Be open to learning: Review metrics after each send and adjust future campaigns accordingly. Hopefully your production lead times allow for flexibility and adapting your plans based on recent past campaign performance.

 

6. Make new friends: In email marketing terms, this is also called growing your list. Just as with personal relationships, look for quality not quantity. Are you adding the best possible contacts to your database? There are plenty of co-registration tactics that will yield a large number of subscribers, but they may not be your best customers in the future. I always recommend promoting an email program in such a way that captures people who have willingly sought you out: web visitors, customers who have made online purchases, personal referrals from current list members and even those who orbit in your social media circles. Don’t forget to capture Facebook friends and Twitter followers – even FourSquare check-ins are a good source of emails.

Why Food Trucks Need Email Marketing

In Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I live, the food truck phenomenon is taking the streets by storm. Not a day goes by when I don’t get a Tweet or Facebook update on the location of one or more of these trucks. Each time, my stomach starts to grumble, and sometimes I even abandon my original plans to partake in their food.

Food trucks have entered the market at the height of social media. Of the trucks I follow in Atlanta, Yumbii, the King of Pops, Tex’s Tacos and Westside Creamery, none use email to market themselves.  Playing devil’s advocate, they could say, “Why should we? We’re selling out our inventory as it is using Twitter and Facebook. That’s enough marketing for us.”

But is it?  Here are my arguments for why food trucks need email marketing*:

1. Not everyone is on Twitter or Facebook. According to a December 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 77% of American adults use the internet. 92% of those adults use email, while only 61% use an online social networking site. While Facebook may have 500 million active users, 50% of which log on in any given day, if you’re not following your favorite truck, you’re likely to miss out on their location or schedule.  Same for Twitter. Even though the service is adding 500,000 accounts daily, according to this report from May 2011, only 8% of Americans over the age of 12 are using it. Using Census figures, that’s ~20 million people. Awareness of Twitter is at 92% of Americans of the same age (12 or older), but adoption is clearly lagging.
2. Email is shareable. Yes, I know Facebook has its “share” button, which is intended to make it easier to spread items among your network on the site. But the trucks I follow post their daily locations as status updates, which aren’t shareable (i.e. no “share” button for that feature). And when was the last time you forwarded a Tweet? I suppose you could re-tweet the tweet of your favorite truck and cc your Twitter friend as if to say, “Want to go?” But what if the friend you want to make plans with isn’t on Twitter? Or you can’t immediately recall their user name? If you’re using Twitter on an iPad, you can mail a tweet. But wouldn’t it be nicer if the information were already in your inbox? I just know that if I were emailed a truck’s schedule for the week, there’s high probability that I’d forward it to a friend to make plans for a meal.  It’s hard to do that with a Facebook status update or Tweet.
3. Space limitations. Tweets are restricted to 140 characters and Facebook status updates are generally fairly short. Perhaps this is why posts are done on a daily basis – there’s not enough room to convey an entire week’s schedule in one place. (Though some do say something to the effect of “Our weekly schedule is up – check the website” with a link to the applicable page on their website.)  But they’re missing the opportunity to share more information about themselves that an email affords. An email, in addition to informing the recipient of the week’s schedule, would also allow the truck’s owner to highlight their menu or feature a particular item. In an email message, one food truck owner could even feature another food truck that offers a complimentary menu item (dessert feature in an entrée food truck email, or vice versa). No harm in some co-promotion among food truck friends, I don’t think.
4. Segmentation. Email allows you to get to know your audience in a way that Twitter and Facebook cannot. As part of the email sign-up process, a food truck could ask for the person’s home and work zip codes. This would allow food truck owners to send subscribers special notices when the truck is going to be in their area. Twitter doesn’t allow food trucks the luxury of targeting, and neither does Facebook (unless you count paid advertising, which I’m not in this case).
5. Email can be distributed via social media. It’s possible to “tweet” an email and broadcast its contents to your followers or “share” an email on Facebook. However, it is possible to share the content within an email via a “tweet this” button, Google’s +1 or a Facebook share button so a particular piece of information, photo or video to be shared via a social network. Similarly, many email software providers offer functionality that will allow for web-hosted versions of the entire email to be distributed via Twitter and/or Facebook when the message is sent. In some cases, these web-hosted versions have a toolbar at the top that includes a button for Tweeting or sharing on Facebook, so even if someone wasn’t on the email’s original distribution list, they can still pass along the email via social media. Also, when an email is posted to Facebook as the campaign is sent, it’ll likely be as a news item with the “share” option included. As I’ve said earlier, Facebook status updates don’t include that option.
6. Email can go viral: Thanks to the forward button, an email recipient can send an email to as many friends as they’d like. If you can’t share a Facebook status update or forward a Tweet, a food truck owner is banking on someone to remember to have an offline conversation about their truck. Given the trucks’ success, it’s happening. Tweets can be retweeted, thus they can be shared many times over beyond the food truck’s network, but it’s worth mentioning that an email has the same ability to go far beyond its original distribution list, even without ever being posted to a social network.

* This was not intended to be a “why email is better than social media” post. Rather, I’m aiming to highlight the food trucks’ missed opportunities by limiting their marketing plan to Facebook and Twitter. I’ll admit that social media is better for last-minute change of plans. Food trucks have the benefit of picking up and moving to a new location when sales are slow or the weather doesn’t cooperate. But since their customers use more than one channel to get information, in my biased opinion, I think food trucks should also diversify their marketing efforts beyond social to expand their reach via an email marketing program. A few additional fans wouldn’t hurt should they ever decide to add a second (or third) truck to their fleet.

Keeping mobile in mind for your email campaigns

You’ve designed a beautiful email, sent it at a time of day when you expect to garner optimal results, but yet there’s something you’re not seeing in the metrics that you’d expected. What’s missing? Did you take into account the segment of your audience who would be reading your email on a mobile device when you devised this campaign?

According to Nov 2010 comScore data for U.S. consumers, some 70 million mobile users accessed email through a mobile device, with 43.5 million doing so on a near-daily basis.  I recently attended a conference at which Justine Jordan of Litmus said that ~9% of all marketing emails sent are opened on a mobile device.

Not all designs are created equal

If you think your results aren’t what they should be, tools like Litmus, Unica or CampaignCog are now available to give some estimates of how many people open your email on a mobile device. If there’s a significant slice of your audience viewing your campaigns on their iPhone, Droid or other mobile device – even iPads, it may be time to think about revamping your template to accommodate those platforms. Think designing for desktop clients was tough? Now email marketers must also take into account rendering on mobile devices while being mindful of how a recipient will interact with the campaigns if viewed on a smartphone. Here’s a link to a blog post by Jordan with a graph that shows mobile email compatibility across a variety of clients.

Finger is the new mouse

If you’ve ever used an iPad, or other mobile device to surf the web or view email, you’ll know how frustrating it can be when you try to click on a micro-sized link only to hit the wrong one. When designing your emails, remember that instead of clicking with a mouse, recipients may be using their finger to respond to your call to action.

Here are some things to think about:

• Are your links big enough to click without expanding the message first? If you have a navbar at the top of your emails to send recipients to various parts of your website, it’s likely that it will be tough for recipients to click on without expanding the message in order to click the right link.
• Font sizes and sentence length: Lengthy sentences written in a small font will be tough to read on a mobile device.
• Include a link to a mobile version of your campaign at the top of the message. This way, recipients can easily click to a text-friendly version of your message.
• Think about your subject line – short and sweet, tell don’t sell. Not all devices have a preview pane to help recipients quickly make an informed “read or delete” decision. Sometimes the only information they have is a subject line and the sender’s name (which should NEVER be “info”).
• Highlight your call to action (CTA): Don’t bury it in the fine print. Make it easy to read and click. Keep it above the fold.
• Keep an even balance of images and text. Make sure the primary CTA is in read-able text even if images are turned off. If a message is one big image, and images are turned off or broken, how is a recipient going to understand your message?
• Time of send: Earlier this year, direct digital marketing firm Knotice announced the results of a study which showed that mobile readers typically view their messages early in the morning or late at night. If you want to catch someone’s attention quickly, lengthy newsletters on a weekend aren’t the way to go since that’s when most folks are just triaging their inbox until a later time when they’re not trying to read their iPhone while pay attention to their kids, friends and the like.

Facebook and Email: Part 1 of 2

For the sake of discussion, I’m going to assume you’ve heard of Facebook. But just so we’re all clear, it’s a “social networking service and website” (to quote Wikipedia) that connects people to their friends, family members, co-workers, etc. for the purposes of sharing information about their daily lives.

But can it really help your email marketing program? Of course! Here are a couple of tactics for using Facebook to enhance your email marketing program – and vice versa. This post is part 1 of 2. More tactics will be posted this time next week.

Email sign-up forms in your business’s page
This is low-hanging fruit. If you have a Facebook page for your business, incorporate a sign-up form for your email marketing program into the page. Some email software providers (ESPs) have a means for users to build the form directly into your page. Otherwise, link to it from your welcome tab.

By doing this, you’ve converted a Facebook fan into an email subscriber and have an additional channel by which to communicate with them.

Make your email messages shareable
You’ve created a fantastic email campaign and want to enable your recipients to share this message on Facebook. (You’ll first need to create content that your recipients will want to share. What’s considered shareworthy will vary from sender to sender, and even recipient to recipient. That’s an entirely separate posting, but here’s a link with concepts for sharing B-to-B content. Some of the ideas could apply to B-to-C as well.)

To be able to share your content or message on Facebook, you need to use the share URL that Facebook has created. By doing this, it will create a preview of your content, which can then be posted to a Facebook profile or sent as a direct message.
The simplest way to give a subscriber the option to share your link is to add this code into your email:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=URL

Just replace URL with the link you want to share. In the case of an email message, it would be the URL to view your message online. Don’t forget to include a call to action to “share this message”, preferably using a Facebook icon or linked text.

For example here is the link for the blog post of this message arranged so you can share it on Facebook.

Share this post on Facebook

When you create a link such as that, a preview window will open with optional image selections from the page URL provided. There will also be a place for your email recipient to include their thoughts as to why this link is worth viewing. Once they hit the “share” button in that window, the link is posted to their Facebook profile profile, their wall is updated and the URL will appear in the news feed of their friends with your recipients’ endorsement. Your message now has a personal referral to your recipient’s Facebook network!

Showing up in multiple news feeds is when you start to leverage your recipients’ entire friend list. This process has the potential to move virally as people leave comments or share the item with their friends and family – and so on and so on.

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Got another idea (or two) for blending Facebook with your email marketing program? Leave a comment or post to my Facebook wall. Otherwise, stayed tuned next week for a couple more ways Facebook can enhance your email marketing program.

Fighting unsubscribes

At the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association’s February event, which focused on email marketing, “frequency” was cited most often as the reason why people unsubscribe from a company’s email marketing program. This statistic was anecdotal, but plays into the feeling a lot of people have: “This company is jamming up my inbox! Make it stop!”

So how do you fight churn? At a higher level, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Keep messages relevant. Sending people what they want to receive, or melding what you want to say with what they want to hear, will go a long way in giving readers a positive experience with your email.
• Stick to promise you made when you asked readers to sign-up for your email. If you promised news and helpful hints, don’t beat them over the head with coupons.
• And there’s the frequency issue I mentioned above. If you’ve committed to weekly news, that means one email a week. Weekly doesn’t mean: “Send as many messages in a week as you can.”

Tactically speaking, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot recently hosted a Science of Email Marketing webinar (slides posted here) in which he analyzed 9.5 billion emails. (That billion with a b is not a typo.) A statistic he pointed out is that more the links a message has, the lower a message’s unsubscribe rate:

Thought to keep in mind: When your unsubscribe link is easier to find, the more likely someone is to click it and remove themselves from your list.

That said, don’t throw in links for the sake of having links. Burying your call to action is never a good idea. Do what’s right for your company’s branding and your campaign’s goals, but one link for a call to action and one to unsubscribe could lead to a higher unsubscribe rate for that campaign.

Dan’s research also found that people were less likely to unsubscribe to messages sent on a weekend. It’s not uncommon for retailers to send emails on weekends to spur online shopping, but these figures hold true for B2B senders as well.

Thought to keep in mind: Weekends work because people spend more time perusing their email. (This could also be why the research showed a higher click-through rate on weekends as well.) They’ve either filed it away during the week to read at their leisure or are just taking more time to read a message that comes in on a weekend.

But, there’s no single right day or time of day to send a message to guarantee an open or click-through. This behavior is specific to each list and can best be learned over time by tracking the behavior of multiple campaigns.

Trick or treat, email-style

In the spirit of Halloween, this month’s installment is about email tricks and treats. No ghosts or goblins here, just a look at the good and bad of email marketing. No guarantees, but if you keep these in mind, you’ll have an increased chance of avoiding the “toilet paper in the trees” equivalent happening to your email program.

Let’s start with email acquisition. Don’t trick people into signing up for your list. Be honest and up front with what you’ll be sending. The treat of this will be a receptive audience who’s more likely to respond to the calls to action in your message. It’s also a treat for your audience to get exactly what they were promised when they were told to expect it. If you said on your sign-up form that you’d be emailing once a week with special offers, don’t send an email once a month with company news.

Not getting your messages to render the way you want? One trick is to use alt tags with your images. This way, when your recipient has them turned off, they’ll still see something that tells them more about what they can’t see. Also, treat your recipients to relevant imagery. Don’t use clip art for the sake of having a picture in your message. Unnecessary images weigh down an email and take up valuable space.

Use landing pages wisely. Don’t trick your recipients into clicking a link for more information if the page you’ve directed them to has nothing to do with the call to action in your message. Treat those who click a link for more information with respect by having the promised information be the main focus of the landing page. Ask someone to hunt for what they’re expecting to be front and center on a web page will cause frustration and you’re sure to do harm to your brand or image.

As always, think of what your recipients would want to read when crafting a campaign. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that what’s important to you is necessarily important to them. Study results from past campaigns to determine future campaign components. Deliver on the promise made when your audience enrolled in your email program and you’ll be treated to an email marketing program that’s living up to expectations.

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.”

They’re just not that into you: Inactive subscribers

It may be a little early to think about spring cleaning, but I figure that a new year is a good time to clean up your email list and focus on your active subscribers. To combat list fatigue, when subscribers ignore and don’t open your e-mail, here are some suggestions to try to re-engage those list members.  Think of it as Operation Re-engagement.  At best, a re-engagement campaign will energize and strengthen the relationship with your subscribers. At worst, you will remove some subscribers from your list, which will lower your deployment costs, but will help increase your ROI per campaign.

Let’s get started:

Step 1: Define inactive. This will vary based upon the desired activity you want your list members to perform. It could be anything from not opening messages to not making a purchase.

Step 2: Filter or segment out this inactive group from your master list.

Step 3: Communicate with care. The desired goal is to engage subscribers to the point of clicking, reading, or at the very least opening the email. Any activity is better than none and reinforces that the subscriber is still interested.

Here’s a three-step process to consider following:

1. Reach Out With a Special Offer
The first attempt to contact inactive subscribers could include a special offer such as a contest, survey, coupon or free whitepaper. If they take the bait, mark them as an active list member and remove them from the mailing list for the remainder of Operation Re-engage.

2. Attempt a Second Contact
If the special offer is unopened, then follow-up with a message that their subscriptions will expire soon and a link to confirm that they wish to remain on your list. If you keep the message brief, it might trigger formerly unresponsive subscribers. At the very least, include the benefits of subscribing and mention what they’ll miss out on by not receiving future messages. Just as with the above, be sure to remove anyone who expresses an interest in remaining on your from Operation Re-engage.

3. Send a Final Notice
If subscribers still do not respond, give them one more chance to remain on your list. In this e-mail’s subject line use language that announces it is the last copy of your newsletter or special notices, as well as creative that highlights what they’ll be missing out on in future e-mails.

Within each message, I’d recommend keeping a friendly tone and avoiding any mention of their behavior being tracked, i.e. nothing saying they haven’t opened, clicked, or otherwise responded in a long time (even though that may be the case). By mentioning this, you appear like Big Brother.

Each email should include a call to action for subscribers to demonstrate that they want to remain your list. This could just be a link to a landing page with a form for them to re-opt in to your list – or opt-out, since it’s also a good practice to give your subscribers a way to remove themselves from your list as well.

Step 4: Say Goodbye. It’s time to remove those subscribers who did not respond to your re-engagement campaigns from your e-mail list. Send a farewell message letting them know their accounts have been suspended and, for the last time, include a link to reactivate their accounts. Don’t unsubscribe the recipients from your database completely, but segment your data to prevent this group from receiving future messages. Use your other channels wisely, to keep your brand in front of these subscribers, and they’ll potentially reactivate their e-mail addresses in the future.

Preparing for Cyber Monday

Even though we haven’t even gone trick or treating yet in the United States, it’s not too early to be thinking of Cyber Monday, the first weekday after Black Friday that kicks off the online holiday shopping season.

What are you going to do to get ready? From a marketer’s perspective, there’s plenty to work on in the course of readying your holiday email campaigns. Here’s a checklist of things to think about (in no particular order):

Landing pages: Every email should have a call to action. But where are you going to send your recipients to take said action? A landing page! You think your existing web pages may do the trick, but that may not always be the case. It’s worth considering creating a landing page tailored to each email campaign. This increases the relevancy factor, which can lead to a higher conversion rate. Here are a couple of links with more information about landing page design:
10 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page
Tips to Optimize Your Email Landing Page

List segmentation: I’ve preached the importance of segmentation before and will do it again here. The more you know about the members of your distribution list, the better able you’ll be to send them relevant information. The number of promotional emails landing in your recipients’ inbox will increase dramatically this holiday season. If you want yours to be among the ones they open, stand out with content tailored to their interests. A good subject line helps too. Which leads me to my next point….

Subject lines: I’ve always preached “tell, don’t sell” the content of your email. This means straightforward subject lines that clearly state the content inside the message. Here’s an article MailChimp wrote about subject line best practices (don’t let the fact that it was written in 2007 scare you.).

And here are some questions to ask yourself in the planning process that will play a part in setting a plan:

• What’s my budget? Knowing what you can spend will determine how many emails you’ll be able to send, which will control the time spent developing email content and landing pages. (OK, this may be the No. 1 thing you need to know before doing anything else mentioned here….)
• How often will I be sending emails? This will be a function of budget and workflow.
• What am I trying to accomplish? Knowing what it is you want to do is going to drive everything else mentioned. Is it sell more widgets? Increase sign-ups to my company newsletter? (Since it’s holiday season, I’ll go with the first question.) Staying true to your mission is a key success factor.

If you’re not an online retailer, this is still a time to be thinking about how you’re going to get the most out of your online shopping experience. Keep an eye on your inbox for special promotions from your favorite online retailer. Or sign-up for their e-alerts and promotions, if you haven’t already done so.

In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

Transactional emails don’t have to be boring

I just noticed last week that Facebook has switched its friend request emails from plain text messages to a full HTML version. The benefits of HTML email over text are numerous and it’s nice to see Facebook offering its users something of value in these messages.

Here’s a “before” snapshot of the friend request notification:

And here’s the “after”:

Facebook could have gone crazy adding features and links to these messages, but thankfully they kept it simple. In the past, the person’s name wasn’t familiar and you weren’t sure you wanted to accept the request to connect, you had to take a few steps to get more information to make a decision. Now, it’s much easier to make a (superficial) decision based upon their photo.

Twitter also recently switched from a text notification of a new follower to an HTML version. Click the images for a full size version of each.

Old – text	New – HTML

I mention these changes because it’s easy to write-off a transactional email and not give any thought to their design. The updates Facebook and Twitter made added a lot of value for the recipients without going overboard adding bells and whistles just because they could. The basic concepts guiding transactional email design apply to all marketing emails.

With the holiday season coming up and folks doing more online shopping, many companies will be sending emails whose only real point is to say, “Here’s written proof of your order. Thanks for shopping.” Take this opportunity to put some thought into your transactional emails and give them a refresh. But when you do, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does this add value to the consumer? Just because you can add images to HTML emails doesn’t mean you should. And this means including a banner ad. Nobody likes those, other than the guy who designed it. Those will just make the email clunky without adding anything to the user’s experience.
2. Am I over-designing it? Just as you shouldn’t go crazy with adding images, overdoing on fonts isn’t necessary either. Keep the file size small so it’ll load quickly. And keep the coloring easy on the eyes and consistent with your brands.
3. What useful information can I add? Answer this one as if you were the consumer, not as someone trying to sell more products. If your message is confirming a product purchase, try adding a link to a user manual. If you’re sending an email to confirm a dinner reservation, add a link to find directions to the restaurant.

If you think the above doesn’t apply to you because your business doesn’t send transactional emails, think again. These are basic questions that really apply to all marketing emails. I hope you’ll go forth and give a thoughtful approach to your email designs – transactional and otherwise.

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