How to Maximize One-Day Shopping Events With 3 Easy Steps & Copywriting Tips

marketing sherpa - SUMMARY:  Special one-day offers are a staple for retailers, but many merchants don’t get the most out of their websites and email lists on those shopping days. See how a eretailer/manufacturer tested three offers and watched revenue jump 102% and conversions 29% for a Cyber Monday rollout.

CHALLENGE: Jessica Koster, Director, Ecommerce Marketing, Danskin, and her team were unhappy with their one-day online sales results heading into the year-end holidays. They wanted to map out a strategy to cash in on a really big sales day — specifically Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving.“We knew we could improve our copywriting for the site, while making the experience more targeted and personalized,” Koster says. “We were looking to learn…See rest of the article at Marketing Sherpa >>

Leverage Your Unsubscribes

mediapost.com - A recent In-Box Insiders discussion was whether a click on the unsubscribe link in an email should be included in the response rate calculation, as would a click on a product link. While most agreed that this negative action should not be counted as a positive, Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services for Return Path, made this excellent point: “I don’t think unsubscribes are negative. They are simply feedback — and as such, are positive in that they are actionable for marketers who care about creating solid subscriber experiences. There are lots of reasons why someone wants off the list, and usually it’s an indication of relevancy.”

This raises two important aspects of leveraging unsubcribes: learning from the data, and working to mitigate them.

The Email Diva’s first-ever article for MediaPost was on a new way to calculate the unsubscribe rate: unsubs/responders, which measures those who clicked on your email for the sole purpose of getting off your list. Try it and you’ll see greater variances from cell to cell and campaign to campaign. When you look at the data over time, and sort from high to low, you’ll see which content had the most or least resonance with your customers. As Stephanie points out, it will help you understand relevance in the eyes of your readers.

Your opt-out process provides an excellent opportunity to gather feedback and preferences. Address these four aspects:

1. Content Preferences — Give subscribers the options to indicate their preferences to improve relevance. These can either be positive “I am interested in silent sports” or negative “I am not interested in articles on camping.”

2. Frequency Preferences — Allow subscribers to reduce the volume of communication: “Send me email only once per week/month/quarter/year” (depending on your sending frequency). According to Stephanie, “offering even simple frequency options at the point of unsubscribe helps preserve up to 50% of those ‘exiting’ subscribers.”

3. Feedback – Ask unsubscribers to tell you why they’re leaving. This will give you useful information to improve your program overall. Ask open-ended questions as well as closed. While closed questions are easier to quantify, they only yield the results you anticipate.

4. User Experience — You’re saying good-bye to a customer, but you can still make the parting positive and keep the door open. The opt-out option should be prominent and easy to exercise, particularly if you are offering other options, e.g., “Click to opt-out” and “Click to update your preferences and tailor messages to your needs.” Say thank you for the time and space you were granted in your customer’s inbox. Use language that is consistent with your brand/email voice. A good example from Daily Candy asks, “Are we breaking up? Want to leave us for good? If you don’t mind us asking, why don’t you love us anymore?”

To leverage your unsubscribes, learn from your customers and learn from your data. Good Luck!

EMF Case Study: Gaiam Email Promo

We at Email Marketing Feed (EMF) took a quick look at a recent promotion by Gaiam (http://www.gaiam.com). We’d love to see your thoughts on this promotion in our comments. Is there ways for Gaiam to improve their email? Thoughts what they are doing right?

Click on the thumb to see full image.

2 email strategies most marketers forget

imediaconnection.com - Welcome and transactional emails both provide great opportunities for engaging with potential customers but are greatly underutilized.

Often when I’m working with clients, they just want to focus on their marketing messages or newsletters and whether or not they are getting good delivery or open rates. The problem is that no matter how great your newsletter might be, you could be missing out on another great opportunity to interact with your customers.

In my experience, the two most overlooked engagement opportunities are welcome and transactional messages. Both of these message types are highly underutilized by most marketers as a way to engage their customers.

First and foremost, the welcome message should be used to build off the initial engagement you created with the recipients when they first signed up to receive future campaigns. Many senders just send a text welcome message or a simple opt-in confirmation. There is so much more you can do with a welcome message, and the opportunity should not be wasted.

Welcome emails
Here are some tips for creating an effective welcome message template:

• Don’t be afraid to send an HTML message. A welcome message that looks like future mailings will let users know what to expect.
• Give recipients a sneak peak of the type of content they will be receiving. If you have a weekly newsletter, put one article in your welcome message from the week before to show the benefits of the information they will be receiving from you.
• Ask those who have opted in to add you to their address books. The welcome message provides the best opportunity for interested people to add your sending address to their address books, since you know they are currently engaged with your company.
• Thank the recipient for subscribing. Recipients have just done you a favor by signing up for your campaigns — remember that and tell them you appreciate their trust in you and their future business. People get a lot of email in their inboxes, and you want them to know they are special and a vital part of your business.
• Give those receiving your email an easy way to unsubscribe. By giving them an example of what the messages will contain, they might realize that it was not what they expected. Let them go now before sending multiple messages to them and eventually having them mark your message as SPAM. It is better to have them formally unsubscribe from your list right away then have them mark you as SPAM later.
• Give people an incentive to take further action now. If you want them to buy something, offer them a discount on their first purchase with a coupon code in their welcome message. They might have been thinking about eventually purchasing something from you, which is why they signed up for your messages in the first place. By giving them a little nudge, they might make the purchase sooner rather then later.

Transactional emails
The other major opportunity that’s often forgotten is the receipt or order confirmation message. While it is true that CAN-SPAM prevents these emails from being full-blown marketing messages, there can be some promotional aspects to them.

Some of the best examples of these messages usually come from the travel industry. It is a common occurrence to receive an email from an airline confirming a flight purchase, which provides links to rent a car, find a hotel or any number of other options.

These companies are always looking for opportunities to up-sell their customers. They have realized the importance of the order confirmation message and have used this to their advantage.

So what is the right amount of marketing in one of these messages? I usually suggest to my clients that if they lead with the transactional message and then add 30 to 40 percent of marketing messages, they should be OK. That way the main reason for the message is still intact, from the customer perspective. On a personal note, I appreciate these types of messages when they’re done properly.

Let’s consider these two message types in the offline space for a minute. I will use an example that happened to me just last week, when I took my truck in for some transmission work. When I went to the local shop that was referred to me, I not only received great customer service, but I was told by the shop workers exactly what to expect.

Now if the shop’s “welcome message” also included an upsell, I might have known that I could have also had my oil changed while my car was there, which is something I needed done. Furthermore, if someone had also offered me a discount on that oil change as a first-time customer, there would have been no question that I would have taken the shop up on that offer, right there on the spot.

When I was paying for the work that had been done, the shop had another opportunity to get repeat business from me. If on the receipt it was explained to me that if I brought in another car for any work within one month I would get a 10 percent discount, there is a good chance I would have brought in my wife’s car sooner, rather than later, if it needed some work.

So remember: Email is a lot like life. When you have someone engaged — even if it’s only for a short time — you need to take advantage of it. Don’t waste any opportunity to reach out to your customers and explain your worth at every chance you have. Good luck and happy sending.

Why are our targeted weekly e-mails getting little response?

Ask the Expert - When a marketing program does not work, always go back to the basics of marketing 101: right target, right message, right timing, right channel. Despite advances in scenario-based Web design created to track customer online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing campaigns, your customers are still bombarded with tons of irrelevant messages—often the result of batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped e-mail applications and outsourced e-mail service providers—each day.

If you aren’t getting responses, it is quite likely that your customers view your correspondence as spam, rather than relevant or valuable information, regardless of whether or not they have opted to receive your e-mails. Relevance is key in e-mail.

Assuming your target audience, timing and channel are right, it’s time to step back and take a closer look at your message and its relevancy. What about your personalization capabilities? If you’re relying on customer profiles and Web behavior alone, it’s time to expand your approach and take into account all customer interaction: Have you met face to face at a trade show? Spoken on the phone? Engaged in preliminary sales discussions?

Often these data are stored in two different locations. Customer profiles are housed within your Web and e-mail system, and real-world customer interactions are stored in the sales force automation (SFA), or customer relationship management (CRM) system or a lead management database. What you need is an enterprise marketing platform that will link the two. Adding this technological infrastructure links online data accumulated through Web and e-mail tracking with offline data stored in SFA/CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to automate the communication process.

There are a number of platforms out there, however the best solution will manage and gather data as well as support more personalized, tightly coordinated communications across multiples channels, not just e-mail. This technology should be able to handle sophisticated marketing automation work flows—especially those supporting highly personalized, large volume outbound communications, and should integrate with back-end transactional solutions.

At the same time, the technology should continuously and automatically monitor response rates and digital body language to provide you and your sales staff with up-to-the-minute details on campaign performance. With A/B testing and measurable results, you’ll be able to devise more targeted, impactful campaigns while integrating e-mail with new and existing communications channels to increase customer loyalty and drive sales—a far cry from the soulless batch-and-blast campaigns flooding your customers’ inboxes.

Building up your e-mail file

multichannelmerchant.com - Ask any multichannel merchant what its biggest e-mail marketing challenges are, and growing the e-mail file will certainly be one of the first topics mentioned.

So why do so many of them engage in practices that speed subscriber attrition?

A recent survey by e-mail deliverability firm Return Path found that 36.2% of consumers said they received more e-mail than they expected based on the information they were given at signup.

Nearly one in four — 24.1% — of consumers surveyed by Return Path said they received much more, but still a manageable amount of e-mail during the 2007 holiday shopping season. Another 13% said they received so much more, it was overwhelming.

At the same time, more than half of respondents, or 56.4%, said they receive a lot of “junk” from marketers, defined as “e-mail from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me.”

Also, an alarming percentage of consumers surveyed by Return Path, or 22.3%, said they handled the increase of e-mails by reporting the sender as a spammer to their ISPs.

A spam-complaint rate of half a percent or higher will result in serious deliverability troubles at the major e-mail inbox providers, such as Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft.

As a result, managing people’s expectations is crucial when convincing them to hand over their e-mail addresses.

Ironically, many retailers are in a panic because their e-mail attrition rates are high, says Ben Ardito, vice president of professional services for e-mail service provider e-Dialog. But they’re high because of the retailers’ own actions.

“To them, e-mail is becoming more of a retention vehicle for their primary customers, but they don’t have e-mail addresses for everybody because they didn’t do a good job when they came in the door,” Ardito says.

Retailers are realizing that they need to nurture their lists because the volume of names that was coming in through early co-registration and affiliate marketing is dropping, he notes, “and the names aren’t as high quality as they have been in the past.”

But there are still a ton of opportunities to get people’s e-mail addresses.

For example, Ardito recommends asking in so-called transactional e-mails for permission from customers to begin sending them e-mail marketing messages.

Transactional e-mails, which include order confirmations, account statements, and product and service updates, get clicked on more often than other types of e-mail and, as a result, present a unique opportunity to open the channel for communication with customers.

There are rules governing the use of sales pitches in transactional e-mails, however, and marketers who over-sell in them run the risk of drawing the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. If an e-mail’s primary purpose is determined to be commercial, then it falls under the Can Spam Act and requires the sender to give the receiver an opt-out mechanism.

Return Path recommends no more than 20% of a transactional e-mail be devoted to a pitch. This is certainly enough room to ask the recipient to subscribe to other e-mail communications, though.

For example, Avis Budget Group has been able to enroll tens of thousands of people into its promotional e-mail newsletter by having its customer service call-center representatives ask if customers would like to receive an e-mail confirmation of their car rental reservation. The confirmation e-mail includes a pitch for renters to receive promotional e-mail messages.

While the transactional messages have achieved a not-surprising 87.1% open rate — they are, after all, car reservation confirmations — click-through rates on the promotional content within the e-mails have reportedly been an astounding 61.6%.

“The open rates were expected, since we’re sending transactional messages, but the click-through rates on promotional content have been surprisingly encouraging,” says Dawn Perry, director of CRM, Avis Budget Group.

E-dialog’s Ardito recommends advertising the benefits of signing up for an e-mail program everywhere possible, especially on the Website’s home page.

“I understand front-page Website real estate is precious, but customer retention is precious too, and you have a higher probability of getting someone to come back if you get their e-mail address,” he says.

Beyond asking for the address, one simple tactic for boosting e-mail subscription rates is to offer prospective subscribers a preview of what they’ll receive if they sign up, says Ardito.

“It’s very simple to add a link that says: ‘Click here for a sample,’” he says. “You could even do it so it’s last month’s e-mail. The ‘click here if you can’t see this’ hosted version can easily be used to put someone on the Website to see last month’s e-mail.”

He adds that merchants should be asking for e-mail addresses on every channel through which they communicate with customers and prospects. “I’m still waiting to see a TV commercial that says ‘come to our Website and sign up for our e-mails,’” he says.

E-mail appending works, Ardito notes, as long as it’s done intelligently. “When you receive the file [of appended names], don’t just put them into the promotional messaging stream,” he says.

“Treat them as a fresh opt-in with a welcome message, and within that message be clear on setting expectations for what they’ll be receiving, what kind of content, maybe what the frequency will be,” he says. “It’s about really making it a different experience from just throwing them into the promotional messaging stream and assuming they’ll know why they’re getting e-mail from you.”

The same philosophy holds true for e-mail names gathered through co-registration, says Ardito. “It’s all about being transparent,” he says. E-dialog also recommends different welcome messages based on how the addresses are gathered.

Adding Value

Stefan Pollard, director of e-mail best practices for e-mail service provider Lyris, says e-mail address gathering is simply a case of, “ask, ask, ask, and ask again, everywhere that somebody can potentially interact with your brand. Make it prominent, and make it clear what they’re opting into.”

It’s important to set up the e-mail program so people get something of value they wouldn’t otherwise get, Pollard adds. For example, electronic bookseller eReader.com offers two prices next to each title: a sale price and a discounted price for its newsletter subscribers.

Every e-mail newsletter eReader sends features list prices and discounted newsletter prices on the books it promotes.

“Everything they do is built around having those subscribers stay on the list,” Pollard says. “And it’s not complicated at all. And maybe you don’t want to hurt your margins by discounting everything you sell, so then put a valuable discount in the welcome e-mail.”

And if there’s a reader out there who hasn’t yet discerned that welcome e-mails to new subscribers are a necessity, they are. “It’s the most important thing you can do,” says Pollard, adding that the majority of marketers inexplicably still don’t.

“That’s your first opportunity to drive expectations and offer them something of value,” he adds.

Another way to keep people on a multichannel merchant’s e-mail list is by offering them exclusive promotions, such as letting e-mail subscribers take advantage of sale pricing one day before everybody else, says Pollard.

One area where most marketers fail in their e-mail file-building efforts, according to Pollard, is by not including a clear reason to opt-in to their programs on every landing page from all marketing activities.

“If you’re using search marketing and have a dedicated landing page, make sure you’re asking them to sign up,” he says. Like Ardito, Pollard is an advocate for asking for e-mail addresses inside transactional messaging.

“You know, provide a little plug for them to get e-mail-only discounts and special offers,” he says.

He also says too many companies fail to ask for e-mail addresses offline. “We just got through a heavy business season, and how many companies took the time in the package that was sent to a friend or relative to include promotional information allowing them to opt-in to get the catalog or newsletter?” he asks rhetorically.

Another area where multichannel merchants fail in e-mail marketing is thinking that once they’ve received permission to e-mail someone, they have permission to mail for all time.

“A lot of marketers think that permission is permanent; it’s not,” says Pollard. Because recipients can hit the “report spam” button and cause delivery troubles for the sender, it’s imperative to monitor e-mail list activity for those who stop interacting with the merchant’s communications.

But inactive addresses also offer opportunities many marketers fail to take advantage of. Pollard recommends using positively worded promotions to reactivate them. “Don’t say, ‘You haven’t opened our newsletter in a year,’ say, ‘You’ve been a subscriber to our e-mail newsletter for a year. Happy birthday. Here’s a coupon for 25% off,’” he says. “Now if they respond, they’re back in the active file.”

Moreover, they’re far less likely to report the merchant as a spammer. Another reason it is important to monitor inactive addresses is that a significant percentage of them will be those of people who no longer use the address and have moved on without telling the merchant.

ISPs turn abandoned addresses into spam traps. Hit enough of them and delivery troubles will result, so it’s important to clean abandoned addresses off an e-mail file.

What constitutes enough inactivity to warrant removal from an e-mail file will vary from merchant to merchant, depending on how often they mail and the length of their sales cycles.

Opting-In

No discussion of general e-mail list building tactics is complete without addressing opt-in practices.

Permission-based e-mail address-gathering practices generally fall into two groups that go by various names, single opt-in and double opt-in being the two names that we’ll use here.

Single opt-in is where the prospect signs up for an e-mail program and the merchant sends a welcome e-mail confirming the subscription, but the subscriber does not have to respond in order to start receiving e-mails.

Under so-called double opt-in — some call it fully verified opt-in — the subscriber must respond to the welcome/confirmation e-mail in order to begin receiving messages.

Many marketers argue that double opt-in is like asking the subscriber for permission twice. And a high percentage of subscribers will not respond to confirmation e-mails, making the e-mail list-building process more arduous.

Anti-spam activists will argue that the only way to ensure the person really wants to receive e-mails is to get confirmation. Forged e-mail subscriptions are not uncommon.

Double opt-in is also a foolproof way to make sure new e-mail names are clean and the risk of spam complaints from them is low.

“I’m not a real big fan of double opt-in for any purpose other than data validation,” says Pollard. “If you have store clerks entering information and call centers taking e-mail addresses, you want to use double opt-in to make sure there are no data entry problems. Double opt-in will protect you from having typos on your list.”

Tracking Email Campaigns Using Google Analytics

mediapost.com - GOOGLE ANALYTICS IS A free Web analytics tool that can be integrated with your email marketing campaigns to gain valuable information about the subscriber activity on your site. This data can be used to increase the effectiveness of future campaigns, and thus boost sales conversions, subscribers, or other campaign goals. In fact, according to a 2005 JupiterResearch report, using Web analytics to target email campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits compared to regular mass email campaigns.

Today I am going to talk about how you can easily tag your email links in Google Analytics so you can better track your email marketing campaigns. Before we begin, make sure you have a Google Analytics account for your Web site, and verify that it is set up to track conversions. This involves placing a piece of code on every page you want to track on your site, including each conversion or order confirmation page.

What is Link Tagging?
Link tagging involves adding additional information (i.e., variables) to the destination URLs used in your online ads so Google Analytics can detect and associate each link with a specific campaign.
You can tag any number of online activities, including banner ads, paid search ads, or emails. Once a visitor responds to the ad, Google stores a cookie on his or her machine and is able to connect her ongoing actions with the original ad.

How to Tag Your Links
Tagging your links is very easy using Google’s  URL Builder.You merely need to identify the proper information to place into each of the following variables:

·    Source

·    Medium

·    Term

·    Content

·    Campaign

Source
The source identifies who is delivering your message to the customer. It also defines the origin of your message. Examples include Google, Yahoo, a Web site you are advertising with, or the name of your newsletter.

Medium
The medium is the means that is used to deliver the message to the recipient (i.e., CPC, banner, email). For an email marketing campaign, you will use “email.”

Term
This is the term or keyword you purchased and is only used in paid search tracking. Therefore, it will not be included in an email marketing campaign.

Content
The content variable can be used to perform A/B testing on two versions of an ad. For instance, you can send out two email newsletters and determine which one performs better for you by tracking them separately. You can also assign different content attributes to different parts of a single email. For instance, you may want to tag your header, special offer, footer, and product links. When you use a different content variable for each specific link in your creative, you are able to determine the effectiveness of each part of your email.

Campaign
This is the name of your campaign. You can be running one campaign on several different mediums. Use a descriptive term or slogan like “February Promotions” or “Get in Shape for Spring.”

Once you have identified your specific campaign variables, simply enter them into the Google URL Builder, and click on “Generate URL.” Then replace the original URL of the link in your email with the new one. You’ll need to repeat this for each link in the message you’re working on, as well as every future email broadcast you send.

How Is My Email Performing?
Now that you’re successfully tracking email campaigns, it’s important to know how to access the data. To begin, log into Google Analytics and click the “Traffic Sources” tab. Then click “Campaigns.” All of your campaigns will be listed here for the time period you selected. You can click on a specific campaign (i.e., February Promotions) to see the full campaign summary. The “Segment” drop-down box has a long list of options, including “Source,” “Medium,” and “Content.” You can use this feature to track the origin of your traffic, the specific email it’s coming from, and the call-to-action that’s generating the traffic.

Spend some time exploring Google Analytics and learning how to use the technology. The program’s full capabilities surpass the scope of this article.

Integrating Google Analytics with your current email marketing reporting tools helps you understand how customers and prospects respond to your ads and interact with your web site. You will have instant access to all of the clickstream data users generate as they move from page to page across your site. This means you can find out who left your site after previewing your landing page, and who started the process of purchasing a product but strayed to another part of the site. You can see who reviewed product or service information, and who didn’t. Essentially, this will allow you to identify what is working in your campaigns and what is not. Then you can tweak future campaigns to see an improvement in performance and ultimately, an increase in sales conversions.

E-mail marketing secrets & lies: transactional marketing

btobonline.com - A 2007 study from StrongMail and MarketingSherpa found that 60% of marketers surveyed didn’t include promotional offers in transactional e-mails such as customer service messages, registration confirmations and order confirmations. However, 90% of those surveyed said they were making plans for 2008 to improve those transactional e-mails. Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, StrongMail’s VP-market and product strategy, expands on the results of the survey and points out one little-known “secret” and one widely believed “lie” about transactional marketing.

Secret: Transactional e-mails affect your overall deliverability rates.

ISPs categorize all of a company’s e-mails the same way if they originate from the same IP address—regardless of whether the marketing department is sending them or they’re coming from an automated, triggered mailbox, Robinson-Pridemore said. If one e-mail list has a lot of bad addresses, it affects everyone sending e-mail from that IP address. Marketers don’t realize this and aren’t keeping track of their company’s overall reputation, she said.

“About 65% of marketers have no visibility into key delivery metrics for transactional e-mails,” she said.

Another issue is that most transactional messages are written by either an IT person or an automated template. Robinson-Pridemore’s advice: Marketers need to control the reputation of all e-mails coming off their e-mail server. This means taking responsibility for the creation of transactional messages, and asking for deliverability metrics for any messages that are sending over a shared server.

Lie: You can’t use transactional messages for marketing purposes.

Marketers assume that transactional e-mails with promotional messages aren’t CAN-SPAM compliant. But if you read the FTC’s Facts for Business (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm), you’ll quickly see that transactional or relationship messages are exempt from CAN-SPAM to some extent, Robinson-Pridemore said. “The main purpose of a transactional message must be about the transaction,” she said.

Because most transactional messages are generated by a template, Robinson-Pridemore suggested having your legal team approve that template, and when sending out cross- and up-sell offers, stick to some simple best practices. Offers should relate directly to a transaction; if you’re selling a software program, don’t cross-sell a hand truck, for example. This may be legal in the U.S. but may alienate customers. (This type of non-specific cross-sell is illegal in the European Union.)

“Your transactional e-mails can definitely give customers the idea that they are getting in on an inside deal, which can be very beneficial,” she said.