March 15, 2007

Day Three: Sherpa Email Summit: Mobile and Email

Why Mobile?
It is more frequently on.
It is more likely to be carried "offline"
Larger numbers of consumers are upgrading to mobile devices, not just phones.

Who is using:
25-45 has the highest penetration of mobile
13-17 fairly low still (but I would challenge that they are the ones driving mobile adoption.

Challenges:
Most intimate, most personal.
Rendering on the handheld (how do you send in multipart and deliver the TEXT version to a mobile device that has been sent as HTML OR Text?) Many times we have seen the HTML show up as TEXT Html mix

Know that mobile is already being used. So what are you going to do about it?

NOTE: IF you are slicing your images for your email, KNOW that the email will break apart in images blocks for every slice. Think about chopping your emails into 2-3 parts. Keep the text together.

Musts:
Always insert "View this as a Web Page" and then put a full image on the server
Do not use your nav at the top of your emails, place it at the bottom
Use big bold images that are not sliced
Design in columns
Keep the message near the top (just like you should in all emails) think above the fold, but smaller)
Think about placing your phone number near the top of the email as you are emailing to a phone and they can act on a number faster than they can navigate with a mobile browser in many cases.

The Mobile Landing Page:
Mobile browsers are not forgiving
XHTML has rigid accessibility standards that make is good for mobile
Use Style Sheets (CSS)
Organize logically and consistently across each page and section
Include text links in the main navigation if possible
Use Jump tags in your CSS so as to make it easy to jump to that area of the site from the nav
LESS room above the fold, remember that you are working with less room (Until the iPhone comes out in June... still Jonesing for one)
Submit your site to major mobile search engines
Top Mobile Browsers: Opera (can show what your email looks like on a mobile device), Google or Squeeezer.
Offer a Send Me this Page link - that can send a web page to an email address for later review after mobile browsing

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 5:00 AM | Permalink

March 14, 2007

Day Two: Sherpa Email Summit: Inegration

One of the hot buttons this year is the growing data integration efforts between email, web, ecom, and marketing campaign analytics. We drink the Kool Aid and are excited to hear this presentation.

Responsys has a VERY deep behavioral analytics system that can set up dynamic individual campaign flows in email.

Can behavior increase conversion and revenue, yes.

Can it be accomplished? Yes, but it wholly depends on what you are using. We have an open XML API for our clients (which a new version was released this past weekend) that you can map email flows into other systems.

You need to select a web analytics platform (like Webtrends) that can allow you to map this data both ways.

The benefit is true analytics driven one to one email marketing campaigns. What is important is finding out WHAT you can drive to email with that data. Cart abandoned? Purchases? Downloads, and other events can be used to create on the fly campaigns.

It is not at this point something I have seen too man small to medium size companies use. Many of those that are doing this are large Fortune 500 companies as it does take some capital and time. It is not an overnight set up and delivery. So what can you do?

What you need to have: email address, campaign identifier, and unique visitor ID tags for return behavior.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:16 AM | Permalink

March 13, 2007

Day Two: Sherpa Email Summit: AM Session Two

Newest Email Test Results: Stop Guessing, Let the customer decide for you.

Christian Busch, Doubleday Entertainment
Barbara Sanchez, Doubleday Entertainment

350 Campaigns a month across the properties

35 Active book Clubs, 7+ million members
Book Club Categories: General Interests, Lifestyle, Male, Specialty Clubs, Professional Clubs
Channels: DM. EM, Internet, Phone

What are the KPIs for email campaigns?

Do you have a good email vendor, strong tracking capabilities and clean lists (they DO NOT buy lists)

Are you familiar with statistical relevancy, tolerance levels and testing-how-to?

IS your test objective SMART-I (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, trackable.... and implementable?

IF you test, make sure to quarantine those subscribers from anyone else in the company. IF you are testing, control who might be able to touch.

REPEAT your tests several times across different brands (if you have more than one)

Make sure that you have good creative samples and quantitative data for all tests

Tests MAY be interpreted in several ways. Finance might want to see them in other ways than you are watching or testing for, or another group that is involved.

Some stake holders can suffer from short term memory loss.. always back your notes and conversations so that you are able to reproduce the notes and results along the way to keep all on task.

TESTS:
Click Here VS Get.. and the winner is... Click Here got a higher click rate, BUT GET won the test with 47% more in conversions

Subject line:
Open now...
Save
A mysterious new offer" - won 11% higher than one now and 19% higher than Save

Name in Subject line:
Normal subject line vs Subject line with name
Normal had a higher conversion rate but open rate was higher for Name in Subject line

Free Shipping:
Over $25 - overall sales impact was best
Over $40 - Average order size was higher, duh

Free shipping with no barriers, was flat. Placing a dollar amount around the offer converted better.

Postcard vs Newsletter:
31% higher conversion rate
56% higher clickthru rate

Offer ONLY vs Offer with Images
There was not enough significant data to really drive a winner,

Stop guessing, start testing. Let the consumer/subscriber decide for you. Lock down your time to judge, 48-72 hours for tests. Look at the impact.

---------------------------------------
SPRINT/NEXTEL Presentation
Kristen Barletta

Newest Email Test Results for Sprint/Nextel: Transactional Email

They had sent out TEXT only, no cross sell or upsell messaging

Where to start: Shipping confirmation emails
Early life communications and 1000s sent a day (REAL live test)
Removed ANY non-relevant information
Added branding
Follow the 75/25 rule for how much is transactional and how much is promotional

What did they learn? Transactional emails sell
Higher sales, click rate, open rate 8X over standard campaigns

What's NEXT?
Webcat: Emailed written transcript of conversations between consumer and customer service. Took the IM session and reformatted in brand and send out right after conversation. Include relevant product offers around recap.

VistaPrint.com
Retention Email Goals:
Improvement Net Contribution/Impression

TESTS:
Multi-product Sales

Drive Re-orders

Dollar, Trial and New product Sales

New Product Introductions

Life-cycle Transactional Email Campaigns

Reducing In-actives increased revenues by 10-40%.

Non Buyers: 0-3 months kept, over 3 months no action remove into another list.
What should you do? Remove? Never mail again?

No move them to a new control list. test then quarterly, or every 6 months.

Try the win back email to re-engage them.

This is your LAST Chance, confirm you want this now OR we will remove you forever. Those that re-activate are still good, and those that were removed (suppressed) saved money and improved campaign results

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:00 AM | Permalink

March 12, 2007

Day Two: Sherpa Email Summit: Keynote

I will be posting some recaps from the Sherpa Summit. Flow might be a little off, but tried to hammer down as many notes as my fat fingers could bang out...

Tad Clarke does the intro, Editorial Director of Marketing Sherpa

Anne Holland and Stefan Tonrquist ( I love this presenting combo):

The Good News: The impact of email across both b2b and b2c is on the rise. It is the main driver of impact across marketing. 3600 people were surveyed on these results from a recent Sherpa Study.

List Growth: B to B 3.9%, B to C 6.0% ad Large Lists (Over 300K) 5.3%
At the same time they are losing: 2.1%, 2.9%, 3.2%
Annual growth rate: 22%, 37%, 25%

The losing rates are more of the hard bounces than they are unsubscribes.

Winning opt in campaign example from Blockbuster Video shown.

Interesting that 39% of Sherpa opt ins sign up for the co-reg on the Thank you page of their own site.

Marketing Sherpa did a test of opting in to all the 435 websites of attendees. AUDIT
15% of show attendees offered sign up on home page
18% offered it on a form on the secondary page
42% used a link on a page to drive to subscribe
25% - NO mention on the home page
They feel that not having it on the home page, even a small form, is going to hurt list growth.

55% of sites sent a Welcome message within 72 hours.
45% of the sites that allows opt in DID not send a help or welcome at all
36% of those Welcome messages get opened SO make sure to send it as that is one that subscribers expect.....

Welcome Messages tested:

Brusnwick welcome message with a coupon on the intro was a winner

Monster.com welcome message, simple and clear, broken out in clear boxed areas worked well

Transactional Email:
Do you put marketing in there and how does it work?
How do people respond to all opt in email vs service based emails?
21% read the shipping notice/ transactional emails
But on that note from 2005 to 2007 the consumer perceptions and reactions to this type of email with marketing messages moved the individual acceptance rate to a neutral to strong acceptance reaction rate.

As long as the content was relevant it was positive.

Reputation based acceptance:
AOL 100%
Earthlink: 77%
Gmail: 100%
Hotmail: 40%
Yahoo: 80%

What this means is that ISPs are not looking at content. subject, html, images etc as much. More likely to look at who is a good mailer, uses authentication systems, spam /junk complaints low... what is this mailers reputation...

Reputation Fixes:
1. Slash your lists: Clean them up, who is "active" how can you remove/suppress or put them in a secondary list
2. Third parties and Can Spam: 72% of affiliate emails have issues with them. Your reputation is tied to all partners, third party offers, channel, etc
3. Rendering: Incorrectly rendered spam is perceived as dangerous. So this has a mental impact on your delivery and rates.

OUR Programs: From Test

Prior to the arrival of all the Summit Attendees, Marketing Sherpa subsrcibed to all of the attendees sites.. or tried in some cases.

90% No secondary touch of why you left... No attempt to re-engage at point of unsubscribe or after in notification/confirmation email.
It would be okay to ask them a few questions as WHY they are leaving. Can be on the site and not in the inbox... Think exit survey.

24% had NO unsubscribe link in the footer of newsletters

4% had the process broken - meaning that the unsub page showed Pedro instead of Michelle in the link and unsub page.

Eye tracking:
The example of the newsletter shows that the content is too much. If you can shorten the copy and they keep it simple, use images to navigate and flow the copy. The most important part I see is the USE of a button as an action item. (Why do so many people always use a text link? SHOW me where to go and what to do.

Image blocking:
Groups divided by age:
36% 18-34
48% 35-4
37% 55 and over

Copy DRIVES emails with image suppression. And IMHO drives actions period when done WRITE (sic).

Preview Pane capable:
96% in B t B - 69% use is in business - 72% of people that use it
38% in b 2 c - 27% use it in consumer - 70% of all people that can use it

The Majority of consumers are only seeing: From and subject line before they open. 73%.

Top Creative Results:
Landing Page Copy yields the highest impact 44%
AB Email Offers: 41%
Subject line Tests: 34%
Landing Page Creative: 34%
AB Emails Creative: 33%

New formula presented by Marketing Experiments Director:

Good "The Index" formula presented:

ECE=3Iq+2or+2bc+2it+ef+dr

ECE: Email Campaign Effectiveness
lq: List Quality
or: Offer Relevance
bc: Body copy
it: Intrinsic timing (send times and urgency)
ef: Envelope fields: Subject/From Lines
dr: Deliverability Rate

ORGANIZE your email campaign notes around these 7 things. If you can improve each one, you can drive higher results.

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 8:32 AM | Permalink