On this first full day of March Madness 2012, I thought I’d apply email marketing strategies to the annual ritual of filling out tournament brackets. Here are four No. 1 seed strategies to keep in mind as you develop and manage your email marketing program.

No. 1 – West Region: Relevance
Is what you’re sending of interest to your audience? The information in your message may be a priority to you (and it should be if you’re sending it out), but the reader needs to be able to quickly understand how/why your email is important to them.

No. 1 Seed – East Region: Audience
Do you know who’s on your distribution list? I don’t mean knowing them personally, but are they people that were invited by you to join your email program? I hope the answer is, “Yes!” It’s key to manage your opt-in program with more information about your list members than just an address. Use this additional information to send your database and send targeted campaigns.

No. 1 Seed – North Region: Design
News flash – the days of single-device viewing are shrinking. A May 2011 report by Campaign Monitor saw 20% of total emails opened come from a mobile device. Bear in mind that not everyone views 100% of their emails in one place. But if some of your list members switch between viewing their emails on a PC and their phone, a smaller subset of that group might only see your message on their phone or iPad. The growth of a mobile audience has been sharp over the past year and it’s critical to make your message actionable for someone surfing their emails with their thumb. Design your message to be action-friendly for desktop platforms, web-based programs and mobile devices.

No. 1 Seed – South Region: Timing
Woody Allen is quoted as saying “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” (I don’t think any of the teams who made it into the tournament would use that as their primary game plan.) Yes, getting into the inbox is what we strive for, but how about sending at a time when your message is most likely to be read? Over a period of time, test out different send times and monitor the results. Whatever time is best reaching your desired metric, be it opens or sales or some other business objective, use that until you see a dip in results. Then test again. But always keep in mind your audience demographics, if you know them, and act accordingly.

Do we need a Cinderella story for our tournament bracket?
It wouldn’t be March Madness without one! Pinterest is the social media darling du jour. Let’s keep an eye on how this site integrates targeted HTML emails into the mix.

A recent study stated that the first two days of the NCAA tournament account for a loss of $175 million in productivity as basketball fans turn their attention to the games and away from their responsibilities.  Don’t let your email program’s productivity suffer by ignoring any of these top-seeded strategies.

With February being my birthday month, I’ve received a ton of notes to wish me well on my special day. This seemed like a good opportunity to talk about these feel-good emails that any business can send.

Step 1 to sending these is collecting the necessary information. Adding the birthday field to your sign-up form will solve that problem.

The next is to decide the objective for your birthday email program. Do you want the messages to be a branding initiative or are they to be a means for adding incremental sales? There’s no reason you can make both of these a goal for your happy birthday emails. Keep this in mind as you design the email’s template.

If you’re using these as an opportunity to merely have a favorable brand impression, your message doesn’t need to have a sales incentive, but the content should be strong enough to have a positive impact. If you also want to increase offline or online sales from the message, include an incentive, such as a special birthday discount, to drive purchases.

Here are some birthday message tips:

• Make the email pretty – keep your brand colors and look intact, but this is an opportunity to do something playful as well.
• Give people time to redeem the offer – Your contacts receive lots of birthday emails. Give them a chance to make use of your promotion.
• Test your campaign – this message can be used all year long. Keep an eye on what offers are performing best and which subject lines have the highest open rates. Adjust as needed.
• Send a targeted offer – use past purchase behavior or other information collected at sign-up to send a relevant offer.

As was expected, I received numerous emails to wish me well on my birthday. Here are some notes about a couple that stood out:

Atlanta Magazine:
What I liked: I’ve been a regular reader of the print version for several years, but their message included a discount to subscribe to the digital version of the magazine. In all, the message was short and sweet.
The offer: In addition to giving a discount on the digital version, a local museum also offered a discount on tickets to visit. This is one that I’ll definitely be using, especially since the offer is valid for four months – plenty of time to visit.

The Counter
This burger restaurant is a favorite of my family’s, but I’ve never ordered a shake after a meal there. The email itself looked pretty, but left me with more questions than answers. The message didn’t include any details about the offer (What size shake? When does the offer expire?) or even what types of shakes do they offer. When I clicked to learn more, I was taken to a web page with offer details written in tiny print. It’s nice that they wanted to wish me well, but I’d have had a much more enjoyable experience if I could’ve just printed the email (or shown it on my smartphone) to get my free shake. Is abuse of the offer really that rampant?!

Here are some other links that discuss birthday emails:
Silverpop: Your Blueprint for Building a Birthday Email Program

Marketing Profs: Birthday, Anniversary Emails Generate More Revenue

If a birthday wish is buzzworthy, your customers can become brand ambassadors. Be sure to include a sharing mechanism if you want to extend the “birthday party.”

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.

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.

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.