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As a marketing executive for an Internet retailer, it’s a good habit to ask what you want to accomplish from your next email marketing campaign. One or more of the following categories can be used as a strategy or objective to drive your next campaign.
- Branding or awareness
- New customer engagement
- Demand generation
- Up-sell or cross-sell
- Re-engage dormant customers
- Pre/post – purchase communications
- Encourage purchase completion
- Promote partner offers
These could be fresh campaigns created from scratch or automated/trigger campaigns that kick in because of customer’s actions or lack thereof.
Please remember that we are not talking about email blasts here that go out to everyone on the list on a regular basis. Instead, these are well thought out campaigns with clear goals targeted at specific segments of your customer base and can be effectively measured during as well as at the end of the campaign. We strongly believe that having these categories will help the marketing executive of an Internet retailer effectively use email as a vehicle to retain customer base and grow revenues in a cost effective way.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
April 27, 2011 10:51 am |
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in
Campaign Strategy, Email Marketing, Internet Retail
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I made some quick observations looking at the campaigns I receive in my inbox:
First, the subject lines from the same brand do not vary much from one campaign to the next. There is one mid-major retail+online brand that sends me campaigns with the subject line – “x% of Everything …..” – every single week. It’s a cue to the subconscious mind that if I don’t open today, nothing is lost. There is one coming in the next few days.
Second, the subject lines lack personalization and what I mean by that is it addresses the general populace and not me in any specific way. Of course, you may need to send some campaigns that is not addressed individually such as timed demand gen offer, new product introductions, etc.
Third, when I open these emails, it’s very clear that it is a generic campaign that was sent to hundreds or even thousands of customers or subscribers and often includes a graphic that’s on the sender’s home page. It’s a generic, demand gen campaign. Not that there is anything wrong with it. However, the more often a marketer sends these, the sooner it loses relevancy to the recipients.
Fourth, there seems to be very little effort exerted to mine a customer’s past purchase history when creating campaigns. I am referring to those businesses, such as an Internet retailer, which do have end user transaction data and history. Yes, there are good brands that use web analytics software & automation to track your moves and send campaigns. Still, a number of these fail to stay relevant.
Fifth, is campaign frequency. This ranges from 2 a day to no specific frequency at all. A west coast wine firm sends me 2 campaigns a day even when it’s been months since I opened any of their campaigns. Not that I don’t like their product offerings but I am disenchanted with the rapid fire frequency and have no way of managing it other than completely unsubscribing from the list.
If you are a marketer and have embraced some campaign practices that result in some of the issues mentioned above, I encourage you to contact us for a free consultation to discuss about the limitations and challenges you or your team faces and how they could be managed better.
Retail stores, during this shopping season, are facing a dilemma: Set discounts or hold the line? Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that 90% of the shoppers surveyed are waiting for
 Shoppers want more. Stores are holding tight. at least a 50% discount and 33% are looking for a 70% discount. This weekend seems to be crucial with just 2+ weeks to go before Christmas. Retailers are trying to avoid deep price cuts using carefully planned promotions and limited inventories. However, if the shoppers stay put until they see the deep discounts, then retailers have no way but to blink first.
Consumers, with their tight budgets, have learned over the past 18 months that retailers need to clear store inventory and will cut prices, especially during peak-holiday season and so the extra discount is worth the wait. Retailers are no slouch either and are quickly moving to change prices. During Black Friday, Aeropostale offered 50% – 70% of all its merchandise, switched to item-specific promotion last weekend, but on Thursday reinstated the blanket discount.
Now, the survey data is specific about offline retail stores however, the same challenges extend to online retail too. I strongly believe that this is where retailers, who use email as a marketing channel have an advantage over direct mail in that they can quickly measure and act:
- Focus on targeted campaigns based on segmentation variables such as past purchase behavior, campaign responses, loyalty, and other metrics
 A lone shopper at a Memphis department store
- Hone in on those customers, who are likely to respond better to your offers and seek them out little bit more aggressively.
- Optimize campaigns by offering different promotional combinations
- Given that prices are likely to head south, two crucial decisions that an email marketer need to make are (a) not to send a reduced offer to a customer who recently purchased the product & (b) how to deal with the situation when a customer, who got a whiff of the lower deal calls you. Truth is, this is a challenge a marketer has to face – online or offline.
P.S: This post is based on an article that appeared on Wall Street Journal newspaper on Dec 11, 20009. Image credits: Wall Street Journal.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
December 11, 2009 3:36 pm |
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in
Marketing Promotions, Retail
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Whitelisting happens when an email recipient (your customer) requests her email application such as Microsoft Outlook or an ISP such as Yahoo Mail or GMail to add the sender (you, the company) to the address book or contact list. Doing so will help the ISP or the email client to direct your emails to the recipient’s inbox rather than to a junk folder. This in turn increases the opportunity that the subscriber will open your email, which may motivate her to take the desired action. Further, you can maintain your brand presence and build an on-going relationship. This approach will create an uplift in your marketing metrics and could improve your deliverability rates too.
Lately, some marketers have dropped the idea of urging their newer subscribers to whitelist the sender’s email id or domains. The reason being that the delivery into an inbox is more dependent on sender’s reputation. True, but I still see a good number of emails from highly recognizable brands land in my spam/junk folder. However, it is not consistent either. Sometimes they do land in my inbox. Why don’t they land in my inbox all the time? It could be for a number of reasons. You see, the email client application or the ISP systems do not have the intelligence to figure this out on a consistent basis. So, the responsibility falls on the part of the marketer to educate their subscribers to whitelist the sender. It’s easy if you just make this part of your process.
We recommend our clients to encourage their prospects, customers, and subscribers to whitelist their email id. There is no better time to accomplish this task than when the subscriber or prospect opts-in to receive communications from you for the first time. We suggest that you give your users clear directions on how to whitelist your emails by selecting major ISPs and email applications. You can include these instructions as part of your welcome email or just after sending the welcome email. For example, you could say this for Yahoo Mail users:
Yahoo Mail users: If you find our email in your “Spam” folder, open the message and click the “Not Spam” button. You can find this button between the buttons ‘Forward” and “Move” just above the message header.
Want to get more specific? Include an image of where the users can find this button (like this one below).
This is even more important for certain types of transactional communications that may require the recipient to print a part of the email such as tickets to a sporting event, airline tickets, or clicking a link to confirm or check a transaction.
With our system, Vanilla\Connect, this process can be accomplished through our autoprocessors, where clients can configure when to send a whitelist cheat-sheet to their subscribers. Once configured, anytime a new subscriber opts-in, Vanilla\Connect can send the whitelist message – all done automatically. You can also segment those recipients who have not opened your whitelist request email and gently remind them in, say, 2 weeks, to consider whitelisting you. With Vanilla\Connect, you can automate this reminder too.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
October 05, 2009 1:15 pm |
Posted
in
Email Marketing, List Acquisition, Marketing Automation
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Mars, the maker of M&Ms, Skittles, and other confectionery recently launched a new brand – Fling – its first in 20 years. For now, it’s only sold in California and online at flingchocolate.com.
 Fling Chocolate You may think that it’s just another candy – so what? The interesting thing to notice is its focus on a specific target market with an overt nature of its gender bias. Everything from the outside packaging, choice of color, the typeface of the brand name, the slimness of the chocolate bar inside, the pink wrapper, and all their communications – shouts feminine. Well, doesn’t such an overt display and positioning of a product really drive away other demographics from trying it out? Yes, I think it does. However, that’s exactly what the marketing folks at Fling want to happen. If fact, listen to what Thomas Pinnau, VP of Indulgence for Mars’ snackfood division had to say – “We had lengthy discussions about whether pink would be too feminine but we decided if it’s polarizing, that’s good.”
It’s clear that Mars wants to target this brand at a specific segment but you may think that hey! wouldn’t that approach come with the risk of driving away potential sales. Not necessarily. More and more, even marketers at large brands are moving towards some type of targeted approach (almost niche marketing) rather than mass marketing. The challenge with offline marketing is the lack of an ability to quickly measure the results as well as cost-effectively change the tactics, if warranted. This is where digital marketing approaches such as email marketing becomes more effective.
So, what are the two key takeaways from this example that we can apply to email marketing? – Segmentation & Target Marketing. Just because one has 20,000 subscribers in a list does not effectively translate to the fact that one should just send an email blast of every campaign to everyone in the list. So, what do you do?
- The first thing you should embark is to learn more about your subscribers by collecting demographic, geographic, and behavioral data. You can gather the first two data types either during opt-in time or by encouraging your subscribers to update their personal profile and the last one using clickthrough information on your site, past purchase details from your database, and responses to your past email campaigns.
- Once you collect these details, divide your customers into different segments. For better identification, you can even create personas for each of these segments. Try to keep things simple. Do not create too many segments.
- To begin with, target your campaigns and communications to one or two segments.
- Test your campaigns using A/B split test and apply dynamic content.
- Try to offer the content that is related to the subscriber’s past behavior.
- Measure the results and compare them to your subscriber’s previous responses.
- Continue to Optimize.
- Take this to the next level by adding more segments.
- Monitor, Measure, & Optimize.
I understand that all this could look overwhelming. You need just a combination of marketing strategy, a process to capture data, a good database, an email marketing toolset, and some effort at the beginning. After couple of iterations of using these tactics, you will be able to accomplish several objectives:
- An increase in your communication relevance to your subscribers or customers
- A lift in the basic metrics such as open and click rates
- An increase in your conversions, which will result in
- A higher revenue and/or lower unsubscribe rates, translating to
- An increase in deliverability rates
Let us know if you are interested to discuss any of these ideas with us to positively impact your marketing campaigns.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
July 05, 2009 4:19 pm |
Posted
in
Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy
3 Comments » |
As promised, highlights of IRCE 2009 are below. The following topics/speakers are what I felt worth mentioning here either because they were offbeat or funny or insightful or interesting:
- Patrick Byrne: Patrick, CEO of Overstock.com, was one of the keynote speakers on Tuesday. Patrick’ speech by any means was not earth shattering or insightful but for what he did during the last 10 minutes. He asked the audience whether to move to Q&A session or allow him to share his tribulations with Wall Street. Almost 75% chose the latter. Then, he went on to share his challenges with Wall Street’s short sellers, hedge funds, and some analysts on how Overstock’s stock was hammered based on false rumors and manipulation as well as his prescience calling of the 2008 financial meltdown back in 2006. I know what you are thinking – how is this related to Internet Retail? It is not but it seemed to be a crowd pleaser.
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 Rue la la Invitation
- Alibris & Drugstore.com: Brian Elliott, CEO of Alibris.com, and Tracy Wright, CFO of Drugstore.com covered a session titled “Understanding web site financials.” Both Brian and Tracy are great speakers and knew the stuff cold. They deftly related how online metrics relate to Revenues and Margin. They went beyond traditional traffic, click-through, and conversion to frequency of purchase, customer churn, LTV (Lifetime value), and others. The presentation was chock full of dashboards depicting how they measure all these in their organizations.
- Arthur Middleton Hughes: Arthur was one of the speakers who covered the session, “Why and how to segment your email marketing list.” Some of you may know that he is called the “father of database marketing.” I have met Arthur before but this was the first time I listened to his presentation. He was hilarious. His irreverence, mastery of the subject, and delivery made it so. I wish I could share an audio snippet of his talk here.
- The Question Mark Guy: Have you seen “The Question Mark Guy” on TV. If you did, you know who I am referring to. If not, google (or shall I say, bing) and find out. I was riding the Silverline bus in Boston heading towards the convention center and lo and behold! “The Question Mark Guy” hops into the bus. Instantly I thought, hey! I have seen him before but I did not know his name. I caught up with him as we walked towards the convention center. He is Matthew Lesko. The reason I write about him is that he has a unique persona that he seems to have developed over the years. I asked him whether he wears this suit all the time and he said yes and that he has more than 20 of these. You can always find him in this attire – Talk about brand consistency. As we cross the pedestrian walkway, spectators and folks in the cars at the traffic light were pointing at him and smiling. That to me is Instant Brand Recognition. The question marks on his suit are like a RED color Coke can. He told me that Harvard Business School asked him to come and give a speech on Branding to its MBA students but he declined because he is not doing these as a branding exercise. Think about that for a second – HBS wants to know how he developed his brand. He is attending IRCE because he is trying to sell his products/services online. BTW, branding is not about a logo. It is more about what + how we influence customers & prospects to associate with that brand. To achieve that objective and be relevant, we have to address the target market needs, define the brand promise, stay true to that promise on a consistent basis through our products, services, communications, and measure constantly whether our beliefs are close to the perceptions out there. It’s hard, however, in this competitive world, it is extremely important to have this thought process in our DNA to help us stand out and be differentiated.
- US Postal Service: USPS, in partnership with Pitney Bowes, offered a freebie – any attendee can mail anything that fits in one flat rate box to anywhere in the continental US. Pitney Bowes is actually picking up the cost. On day 2, when a gentleman waved the box at me “do you need one,” I declined. The next day, I saw more USPS members holding the mail boxes saying “Free Shipping,” I grabbed one. I did not do it the day before for 2 reasons – didn’t hear “FREE,” did not have the top 500 online retailers book (it’s around half the size of your typical yellow pages), and some other marketing material. Interestingly enough, neither PB nor USPS are capturing sender data. I thought the moment I fill in the shipping form online, right there, I am a lead and I have opted-in. Nope, said the manager. So, is it merely an awareness campaign on the part of PB and USPS? They are giving away almost $12 – 15 per individual (or prospect) for nothing? Well, some of us will remember the good gesture, but …
- Who gets the credit?: This was actually a very interesting session that focused on the complexity of online marketing budget allocation. Simply put, if your prospect visits several channels (search, catalog, web site, coupon site, email mktg campaign, PPC,…) and finally makes a purchase, which channel should get the credit? If you offer incentives to several channels for the same purchase, then you are throwing money away and hurting your profit margins. The speaker from Rimm-Kaufman did a good job of walking through the complexity.
- Website Feedback: One of the sessions had 3 panel members who offered on-the-spot critiques and advice to those brave online retailers who volunteered their sites to receive feedback. This was very lively session. There were more volunteers than time allowed. The three panelists were well versed in website design, search engines (SEO, PPC), placement of specific CTA (Call-to-Actions), site traffic, conversions, and many more. The smart thing here was that there wasn’t only one panel member doling out advice. The three were nice but very eager and competitive to voice their opinions – all in good fun. Given that not all online retailers have a million dollar budget, listening to these suggestions about their or other sites helped a number of attendees to take home some practical ideas that when implemented could give a lift to their conversions.
- Getting your message to GenY: This session focused on how to market to Gen Y (Generation Y – those born between early 80′s and early 90′s). The speaker, Michael Penna, talked about participatory marketing and instead of jumping into a powerpoint presentation, he invited a panel of 3 students (all girls) from Pace University, New York to share their experiences about online shopping, channels that they use, and some general online behavior. Here are some thoughts that they shared:
- They sleep with their laptops, check their facebook a/c and email when they get up and throughout the day
- They do not twitter much
- Like messages that are interesting & relevant (like store location nearby offering discounts)
- Love deals and promotions (because students are poor and always like discounts)
- Prefer online retailers focus on making communications more memorable and engaging
- They wish online retailers spend time and effort to try to understand their needs
- Recommend merchants give the users the control to choose when and how to receive the communications
- Some of the promotions/advertisements that they liked in the recent past are: Virgin America’s Wi-Fi, ETrade’s talking baby, Microsoft’s “I am a PC campaign.” These ads broke thru the clutter and offered relevant, interesting, valuable messaging and offers. Virgin America offered free Wi-Fi for all their passengers and had a contest around this, ETrade’s talking baby was funny, and Microsoft’s “I am a PC use campaign” resonated with one of the girls who is a PC user.
- Like sites such as http://www.shopittome.com
Written by
Suda Madabusi
June 25, 2009 2:21 pm |
Posted
in
Internet Retail
1 Comment » |
 Exhibit Hall - Left @ IRCE 2009 Last week, I was at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) in Boston from June 15 through 18. It was a well organized show but for the far flung conference rooms, which made those who wanted to cherry pick the general sessions run around a lot. The food was OK. The networking party sponsored by Alibaba.com was great especially the card tricks (poker) that a young local magician performed at our table. Look, I have seen my share of these before but I got to tell you that this one was mesmerizing.
The conference sessions covered a wide variety of topics and the speakers, for the most part, were good. The exhibitors, more than 300 of them, ranged from search engine companies to e-commerce solution providers to fulfillment houses. The attendees represented wide ranging geographies – from those local to Boston to California on the west coast, to Australia, New Zealand, and India.
There were 4 full-day workshops on Monday and Thursday covering Email, Search, Mobile Marketing, and Small Retailers. The general sessions, with number of tracks, were on Tuesday, Wednesday and covered wide ranging topics.
 Exhibit Hall - Middle @ IRCE 2009 I did observe few recurring themes during the conference and this is keeping in perspective of the needs of small and medium sized online retailers:
- Everyone was well aware of Search Marketing – be it PPC (pay-per-click) or SEO (Search engine optimization) and most attendees have been using search in some way to attract traffic to their sites.
- Most attendees were aware of Email marketing but a majority of the attendees did not know how to strategically use email marketing to their advantage.
- I did not attend the mobile marketing workshop but did hear that some medium sized businesses were interested to understand the tactical component of using mobile marketing in addition to their other marketing channels.
- There was a lot of interest to learn how to optimize an online retailer’s website to increase conversion.
- There was also a lot of interest in analytics, performance metrics, and optimization in general.
- Everyone across the board was impacted during the last 12+ months due to state of the US economy – as if this is new news, hello?
- There was neither much focus nor serious interest in utilizing social networks as an additional marketing channel for the online retailers – yet!
- The challenges catalog marketers are facing…
- The innumerable number of moving parts associated with running an online retail business – everything from technology, operations, financial, logistics, marketing, traffic, conversions, partnerships, and more.
 Exhibit Hall - Right @ IRCE 2009
There were also some highlights that I think deserve coverage. I will share these in the next post.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
June 24, 2009 11:33 am |
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in
Internet Retail
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Brand Loyalty is eroding, reports Financial Times, based on a study done by CMO Council and Catalina Marketing’s Pointer Media Network. Just look at the picture below – these are some of the top brands in US. A two-year analysis of 685 grocery and pharmacy-stocked brands using data from 32 million consumers supermarket loyalty cards found that in 2008 the average brand lost a third of its formerly highly loyal customers.
 Brands left to ponder the price of loyalty Image Credits: Financial Times
Highly loyal customers are a brand’s most profitable ones and their defection will have an impact on both top line and bottom line. The prolonged recession in US, for sure, played a role. So, what are the driving factors? – price and promotion. I feel that there is more than price and promotion in play. As competitive products, including store brands, sit next to a brand at store shelves, price comparison is very easy, visual, and quick. You don’t need google for this. Just a little nudge that’s motivated by an economic condition might help a consumer to reach and try the no-name brand. As these non-brands make inroads in quality, just one try might make a brand lose its highly loyal customer – forever.
I realize that you cannot avoid brand erosion under trying economic times. However, I strongly believe that brands need to engage their customer base on a constant basis both in good times as well as bad. Further, this engagement should use multiple marketing channels rather than just a broadcast medium. Now, the top brands listed above definitely have the wherewithal to fund the cost of such an engagement. How about those second or third tier brands?
What can online retailers, those selling their own brands, learn from this and react to changing economic or usage conditions? I strongly believe in collecting rich consumer or buyer’s behavioral data and update these on a consistent basis. An increased effort in data collection, RFM analysis, and segmentation will help online retailers gain insights into these changes on a regular basis and roll-out strategies to retain their user base.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
June 23, 2009 9:05 pm |
Posted
in
Brands & Branding
3 Comments » |
Do you use email marketing to send marketing campaigns on a regular basis? If so, do you always make it a habit of referring to a checklist before sending campaigns? It’s natural for most of us to treat any repetitive activity as a routine after few iterations. However, here in lies the danger. To start with, email marketing might look simplistic in nature. Why? – you may ask. It’s the tendency to view email marketing as a campaign generator tool and not as another channel a business could use to keep their brand prominent, retain customers, convert prospects, up sell or cross sell your products or services. We suggest few items, from our extensive checklist, that you could consider as part of your checklist to make sure you are at least heading on the right path towards increasing your ROI using email marketing.
- Check whether the message is targeted to the appropriate audience.
- Make the message personalized at a minimum by greeting the subscriber by his/her name.
- Check the message whether it is communicating the right content and offer.
- Did you include a Call-to-Action in the message? If so, is it prominent and visible for your subscribers to take immediate action?
- Does the subject line of the message naturally flows to the actual content of the email campaign?
- Did you test with multiple seed lists to check where your message lands (inbox or junk/spam) with different email clients?
- Does the Call-to-Action leads to the appropriate landing page? This has serious implications on conversion rates.
- Look through your past campaigns and decide the best delivery time for high response rates.
- Check whether your campaign contains all items concerned with CAN-SPAM laws including your postal address and unsubscribe options.
- Review your campaign metrics that includes receipt rate, reader rate, click rate, bounce rates, conversion rates, referral rates and others to optimize future identical campaigns.
Written by
Suda Madabusi
June 23, 2009 6:05 pm |
Posted
in
Email Marketing
1 Comment » |
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