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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 |
Posted
in
Campaign Strategy, Email Marketing, Internet Retail
No Comments » |
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.
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
No Comments » |
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 » |
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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