Tag Archives: relevancy

Email as primary marketing channel, not a last resort

  By Remy | May 16, 2012 - 08:10 | Email Marketing Insight
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karate_email_catch_flies_with_chopsticks_like_Mr_miyagi

Catch subscribers' attention like Mr Miyagi caught flies with chop sticks!

Just recently I heard about a company that quit their email marketing for a very strange reason: business was doing well, and they’d only need email marketing if things would turn ugly for them. How strange is that?

There are several reasons email is fantastic as a marketing channel compared to other (online) marketing channels in terms of building a relationship with prospects, clients and subscribers.

One of those reasons is the little effort you can put in to be succesful at basic email marketing compared to other channels. Sending out a basic newsletter which is correctly personalized -and- segmented to meet a receiving person’s preferences goes a long way to establish your reputation and a relationship with the receivers.

Also, the next level isn’t that hard to reach: running campaigns and integrations with your crm system(s) can take some time to get fully implemented, but the rewards are massive. There will be no more separate data silos anymore, and automated email campaigns will save a lot of time and keep your email lists alive and kicking.

However, one of the most important reasons you should employ email as primary marketing channel is money. Lots of it, actually, compared to what you put in. According to a DMA USA report (2011), email returns more than $40 for every dollar invested. Search does about $22, and catalogs $7. Talk about performance!

How about that other channel, social media? The trouble is, using it as a marketing channel can’t be done (effectively) by all types of companies. Some companies will be succesful, others will mostly apply social media for webcare or creating a fan base – but directly for marketing: not so much.

Just yesterday, GM decided to quit their Facebook advertising altogether according to Mashable, citing its ineffectivity: they have little impact on consumers.

Don’t just let email be a last resort marketing channel: make it the champion, the spider at the center of the web to grow all your online marketing efforts. It will pay off if you put in some time and effort.

Related Posts:

Optimize email campaigns for target groups, not platforms

  By Remy | April 12, 2012 - 08:00 | Email Marketing Insight
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optimize_email_campaigns_targetgroups_missing_the_markIn the old days (let’s say 6 years ago) email marketing was sort of simple. You had one platform called desktops (sometimes portable desktops called notebooks) where people used email clients: either offline clients like Outlook and such, or webmail clients like Hotmail and Gmail.

This would mean that you’d optimize email campaigns for a handful of clients, and mostly manually tested them too: no biggie!

However, along came a certain company that reinvented the smartphone after a few tries by Nokia, Motorola and other brands to do just that. The iPhone (2007) and later the iPad (2010) were introduced by Apple, much to the delight of consumers. Because of their commercial success, all the other companies rallied and started making smartphones and tablets too, which meant even more differentiation on the market.

Meanwhile, what happened to the ‘ol desktop/notebook platform? Screens got bigger, up to 24″ or even 30″ sometimes, but also smaller: enter the widescreen netbooks with weird resolutions like 1366 x 768 pixels. (more…)

Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad: no email conversion optimization?

  By Remy | March 15, 2012 - 08:00 | Email Marketing Design
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How would you go about introducing a new product in the Photoshop family if you were Adobe’s marketing department sending out a promotional email? Probably with lots of lavishly designed graphics, special offers or discounts for existing customers, key feature highlights, stuff like that, right?

Adobe thinks differently about that. They’re not really into email conversion optimization it seems. Yesterday I received their email promoting the recently launched Photoshop for iPad and it was lacking in many departments.

Here’s the full email (pink overlay is my work, I’ll get to that in a bit):

Subject line was: Now you can create Photoshop magic on your iPad.‏ (more…)

Informz email marketing benchmark report: relevancy, not timing, is key

  By Remy | March 14, 2012 - 08:00 | Email marketing
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Informz, an email service provider for associations and non-profits, has published their annual association email marketing benchmark report. One of the key findings is that relevancy, not timing, is key (for this industry). The report contains data from 700 assocations using their platform, and those are located in the US, Canda, UK, New Zealand and Australia. Email volume sent over 2011 amounts to about 600 million.

Key findings of the report as noted in the press release: (more…)

Email insight: the value of an email

  By Remy | July 5, 2011 - 09:00 | Email marketing
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Imagine every email you send as an email marketer costing 5 bucks. Sending out to the nice round number of 100,000 people would cost half a million. All of a sudden, you would make every single e-mail and every single address count. Why else would you spend that kind of cash to send out your next email newsletter?

Of course current email costs are low compared to many other marketing channels, and return on investment is comparatively high. But instead of thinking that you send as much as you can (which I do support, up to a point), think about making every single email count like it would be the last one you send out at your current job, or one costing 5 bucks like the previous example.

Because one should not forget that to get an interesting amount of revenue from email, there should be a considerable investment at first. This doesn’t mean having the biggest list out there. Having a 100,000 people on your list sounds nice, but what if only a 100 people do something in response? In that case the 99,900 other contacts on that list are quite useless…

Finding out how to provide value to all your list members is crucial: it will take you some time and investment of resources, but will pay back. A lot actually: currently email is the ROI champ with a 43 to 1 ratio (read here). For every dollar invested you get 43 back. Unbeatable methinks: other channels are slipping or still have to prove themselves (like social media).

When you make an email more valuable (e.g. relevant content, timely fashion, etc) to the subscriber they will respond better to it, and more shall respond!

To recap: next email campaign will cost you $500,000. Spend it wisely.

edit 13:42 CET:

Jordie van Rijn has reacted to this post in lightning fashion: his responding blog post can be found here: http://www.emailmonday.com/the-value-of-email-marketing-messages

 

Email insight: subject line, most important conversion factor?

  By Remy | April 18, 2011 - 09:00 | Email Marketing Insight
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Could it be that the subject line of an email is the most important open factor? I believe it is ranked in the top three, together with the sender name and reply address. Loren McDonald made a post on sender name over at the Silverpop blog, in which he describes that he received an email with ‘Thanks for staying!’ as the sender name. Was it a mistake, done on purpose, just an experiment? Who knows, I agreed with Loren that it was weird to say the least.

Back to subject lines. What would you say if I told you a big Dutch retailer uses several Twitter hashtags with product groups in their subject lines? For instance #camera, #videocamera, #hifi and such? It’s very strange and shouldn’t belong in the subject line. Here’s another one: ++ official message +++. Seriously, I’m not joking. From Gucci: ‘Lighten up’. Last one, from WE Fashion: ‘Spring brings a lot of discounts’. Well great! What’s new?

The trouble with the above examples is that they don’t tell what’s inside. A subject line should be used what it’s meant for: tell the receiver what the email is about. No more, no less. Humor and teasing is allowed of course, word play is fun: but don’t overdo it. How informative should a subject line be? Just last month a Marketingexperiments post noted that longer subject lines increased opens 8,2%. But are big open rates really your target? Might making money be more important than open percentages?

Avoid these words in subject lines: they come from a 100 Junk mailed Mac emails, by Thomas Hawk.

At his presentation at Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels, Dela Quist noted that one of his company’s clients used a subject line telling people that they’d get very nice discounts in-store the next day. The discounts were only communicated through email, but open rates were actually low. However the stores did see a surge in customers the next day. What happened? People saw the email, saw the subject line, and knew enough. No open or clickthrough necessary: just the mindset that they could go to the store the next day, buy stuff, get discounts. Very effective I’d say.

Is your subject line still something like: ‘ Newsletter 14 – April 2011′ ? Welcome to 2011 and forget that type of subject lines: it tells nothing. You need to inform your audience about what’s inside the email, or what message in its most basic form you are trying to convey. Have an event for which you want people to register? Tell the name, date and location in the subject line, and maybe cost if applicable. The most important message is conveyed to the subscriber, so you have already scored points there.

Don’t get too creative (or too boring – see the Win an iPad subject line post) in subject line creation. Only make the subject line after your email is finished, because only then you’ll know the overall tone of voice of the email, and the total content. If you really want great results, get your subject line thinking in gear: you’ll see the rewards soon enough.

PS: have a great or crappy subject line example? Let us know in the comments.