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.”

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.

Gmail, Gmail, Gmail

Gmail has made some changes lately that affect email marketers. Here’s an update on a couple of these modifications and what they may mean for you, as a marketer and a consumer:
 
Images On:  Most email clients (Yahoo! Outlook, etc.) leave images turned off. This is intended to protect the recipient’s privacy. (Remember, you generally only know who opened your HTML emails by those who have downloaded your images.) For those of use sending legit email, it’s annoying. Now, whenever a Gmail user gets email from someone they’ve emailed at least twice containing images, they will see them right away.  This is a good thing for marketers who create image-heavy messages AND have encouraged feedback from their subscribers. As Ben at MailChimp points out, if encouraging feedback is scary, just add a link to messages sent to Gmail subscribers. And get rid of the “Do Not Reply Statements”! 
 
Auto unsubscribe: In late July Gmail added a feature that lets users automatically unsubscribe from unwanted mailings with one click.  It doesn’t work for every sender, but if you want to incorporate this feature into a newsletter, there’s more information on the Gmail blog. Worried that your list size will shrink? I think making it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe is absolutely a welcome concept.  This is a chance for you to make a good final impression, which hopefully will make your customers want to come back. This feature is the closest Google has come to offering a feedback loop for complaints. While marketers would generally prefer for subscribers to use the unsubscribe functionality within the message, this type of unsubscribe button can ultimately lead to lower complaint rates. This, in turn, helps email from those companies be more easily identified as good.

When should we start social media marketing?

Recently on MarketingSherpa, this question was posed in an article (Full link here):
When should we start with social media marketing?

Their response follows:

Social media is a powerful channel, but it works in conjunction with other efforts, such as email. You should get your email marketing tactics nailed down first, before you make a big social media push.

Here’s why: Engaging with customers and prospects through social media is another channel for two-way communications, like email. A well-developed email program can help you learn important things about your communication strategy, such as:

• What types of content resonate with your audience
• How frequently they want to hear from you
• How to segment your audience to deliver relevant messages
• How to convert visitors into subscribers who want an ongoing relationship with your brand

I’d like to add:

Before doing the above, make sure you have the infrastructure in place to handle a two-way conversation.

If you open a dialogue by sending an email, it’s important to have measures in place to keep up your end of the discussion. This means assigning someone to check the inbox of the reply-to address on your emails. It’s important to remember that someone may reply to your message with a question or solicitation for more information. Having an email like that go unanswered is a surefire way to lose a customer and inspire bad word of mouth.

The exception to the above is transactional emails. In those messages, be sure to include something like the following in your footer that’s linked to the page on your website with contact information:

Please don’t reply to this email. We don’t monitor this email address and won’t be able to reply to email sent to it. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

Above all, ask yourself, “Why are we doing this?”

If the answer is, “Because everyone’s talking about Twitter so we may as well do it” then you need to re-think your plan. Email is a great way to stay in touch with your constituents. Shore up the points above and you’ll be well on your way to having an email program in place that will complement your social media strategy.

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