Segmenting Email With Web Analytics

mediapost – TRADITIONALLY, WEB ANALYTICS OF ON-SITE behavior and email metrics have peacefully co-existed in separate silos. Once a message gets its audience to a site, many email marketers believe their work is done. Stefan Pollard, director of email marketing best practices, and Dan Miller, manager of professional services, both of Lyris, Inc. argue for a real marriage of the two disciplines. Lyris, a combination of several recent acquisitions, tries to bring some of these metrics together in its own Lyris HQ dashboard. Pollard and Miller walked us through how email clickthroughs need to be followed and understood after users get to the site.

Behavioral Insider: How are email and Web analytics different?

Stefan Pollard: Segmentation from an email standpoint is really around identifying what group of consumers a particular message should be delivered to, and then what action you want that group to take. The only action from an email is to click through to the Web site. But the other half of that is getting the right message to the right audience. Often the information available to an email marketer is very restricted to information the consumer gives at the point of acquisition. With the addition of Web analytics, you get more in terms of the behavior that a person is taking. You sent them an email, you put them in a target audience and sent them a piece of creative that directed them to take an action with your Web site. Now they are performing a series of behaviors. Not only is one of their behaviors to not go at all, but another behavior is to visit and to not take the action you want — but to look at other things within the Web site.

Dan Miller: So Web analytics historically is based on server performance, quantity of traffic, and basic numbers like that. Basically visitors are a series of clicks. Web analytics currently is really taking all this data and session-izing it, looking across all the sessions and visitors to determine which clicks go together to form a session. And then we can start drawing some conclusions from that. We really parallel email without usually crossing paths. In email terms, segmentation means people having in common similar attributes when they signed up. In Web terms, it can be exhibiting similar behaviors. Let’s look at customers who reach a certain point in a conversion process but didn’t actually purchase.

Pollard: The opportunity is people who have visited the Web site taking a behavior and you feeding that information into your email application to trigger an event-based message. Someone downloaded a white paper. You want to pass that information back and send a transactional response message, and might want to use it as part of a drip campaign. People who downloaded this are also interested in that. And maybe three days later you follow up with them based on whether they clicked on any of those categories people click on. And you may see they haven’t responded to them, so you can present them with a different set of articles.

BI: How many site and publisher are actually integrating Web analytics and email?

Miller: The two separate pieces are common. Tying them together, I found, is rare. Traditionally, the Web analytics side works with blinders, focusing on one or two metrics that are common for that marketing channel. Customers who manage Google AdWords PPC campaigns focus on CTRs, and once the visitor reaches the site they might hope to tie a conversion rate back to that and at least know what percentage bought something. But they really don’t pay attention to what happens in between.

Likewise, email marketers are used to email metrics — open rates and CTRs. They judge success by how many people click through. But if a lot of them immediately leave the Web site then it is a false indicator of success. We are advocating tying these two tools together. Between those stated preferences [email] and implied preferences through behavior [on-site] we can fine tune a more targeted message.

BI: Do particular kinds of metrics come naturally from this marriage? Like users not staying long?

Miller: We call it a “short visit,” someone who views one page and doesn’t click on any links. That would be the starting point, at least finding out whether the landing page they were directed to from the email was a consistent enough message and a compelling enough call to action that the visitor felt they wanted to invest in clicking deeper.

Another common practice in Web analytics world is to assemble what we refer to as a funnel report. Often the data will take a shape similar to a funnel, in that you are assembling a series of pages or groups of pages that you would like the visitor to proceed towards conversion, and analyzing how many of them actually make it there and at what point they fall off.

To apply segmentation — to only look at email visitors from particular campaigns — can help tie these applications together. We can go back to the concept of follow-up messaging, possibly targeting specific visitors based on the point where they fell away from the process. A classic example would be, I added an item to my shopping cart, shipping was calculated, and I stopped. You might infer that I objected to the shipping prices. So maybe you follow up with a free shipping message.

BI: What are the challenges for implementing integration in the organization?

Pollard: It becomes a different way of thinking about your market. Often you have a marketing department with five to 10 people each responsible for a small piece.

Miller: Not only do you have this siloed approach, but Web analytics historically has been looked at more as a technical application. So IT is running the tools. Even if the marketing people are consumers of the reports. they don’t have a real interactivity with the reports. They get numbers spit out with some pie charts. They don’t really use it to evaluate the individual campaigns — much less to potentially extract certain visitors based on their behaviors.

BI: With that in mind, who can best make use of the integrated data?

Pollard: Hopefully it starts more at the senior level, and you have someone who can at least wrap their head around the concept of a truly integrated campaign. It is not just gauging the success of the email on how many clicks it drove — but how the landing page converted, how we re-messaged people who didn’t do what we wanted them to do. I think the opportunity cost of not doing segmentation is starting to catch up with email marketers. Marketers who are still trying to focus on list size and one-message-fits-all strategies are having all sorts of problems. Those programs are not as successful as they were several years ago.

What’s the Best Frequency? Who Cares

mediapost.com – ONE QUESTION THAT EMAIL MARKETERS continue to ask all the time is “How often should I email my subscribers?”

If you are a publisher, this is still a reasonable question. But for most other businesses, it’s so last-century, so old-school, so Web-1.0, so… you get the picture.

The better, though more complicated, question might be: “What demographics, preferences and behaviors can I use to drive a continuous program that maximizes the lifetime value of my customers?”

In the old, direct mail world, you sent to a list until it didn’t make money anymore. With email, consumers tell you when you’ve gone postal on them by opting out or hitting the “This is Spam” button. But this paradigm is driven by sending regular, non-personalized “broadcast” emails.

If you can move to a system of emails fine-tuned to your customer relationships, you can likely email less often without sacrificing ROI, or even send more frequently and you won’t be penalized by ISPs. Most importantly, you’ll become even more valuable and relevant to your customers.

Email is the Swiss Army knife of marketing, giving you multiple tools to communicate with prospects and customers. I thought of 30 different kinds of email messaging that can be sent while I was listening to a session at the Email Evolution Conference recently: everything from welcomes to trigger-based messages to one-offs to confirmations to cross-sell/up-sell messages.

This vast array comprises “lifecycle marketing,” where the impetus for sending a message isn’t just the product or service you want to sell but a trigger, event, need or other factor of your customer’s, combined with your organization’s offerings and goals. Further, many of these messages can be automated (see David Baker’s MediaPost column on triggers http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=595), meaning you create the email, set the parameters, and let the technology take over. When you shift to this kind of customer-focused marketing, you turn the concept of frequency on its head.

How One Multichannel Marketer Missed the Boat

A few months ago, I bought a refrigerated wine cellar from a multichannel retailer whose catalogs I have been receiving for 15 years and emails for one or two years. This cataloger sells only wine-related items, from books to glassware to custom wine cellars. A wine unit like mine is one of the most expensive items it offers. Previously, I had made only a minor purchase. Now, I’ve vaulted myself into a high-value customer segment.

You wouldn’t know it from my inbox, though. After I purchased the cellar, I received a basic order confirmation along with an average nine emails a month, none of which acknowledged this significant purchase. At least one promoted the exact cellar unit I bought!

My purchase should have put me, and other high-end cellar buyers, into a lifecycle program. I was easily able to envision at least two dozen individual emails, all related to my purchase, persona and behavior, and all potentially able to drive more sales. Here are just seven types:

1. Order Follow Up/Customer Support: Besides the confirmation, send “It was shipped” and “Did you receive it/have any problems?” emails. Each could also include some upsell message for extended warranty, etc.

2. Cross-selling/up-selling: Next, a series of emails promoting related products such as Riedel glasses, decanters, wine inventory software, premium openers, books, or tasting kits.

3. Product replenishment: The filter should be replaced every 12 months. Remind me early and around my purchase anniversary to change it with a link to the filter page on the Web site.

4. Special programs/offers: Send me a birthday reminder and gift-certificate program for my wine-loving friends. How about a special VIP invitation or discount to your regional wine-tastings and magazine?

5. Refer a friend, receive a gift: Most wine drinkers don’t do it in private. Some of my friends spend more than I do, too.

6. Check up: “How are we doing?” surveys, reminders to update preferences, post comments on the product.

7. Behavior-based: Where I click on the Web site or in the regular emails should trigger messages, especially if I abandon a cart.

Yours truly is a motivated buyer. But the nine-a-month, one-size-fits-all approach is not prompting me to pull out my credit card again. In fact, on average, I open only one or two out of the nine. Send me an email promoting the inventory software, and I’d likely pull the trigger.

So, the next time you are waiting for a plane or riding the train home from work, list all the email messages your company could be sending to add value to your customer relationships. I guarantee you can come up with 15 different ones, or I’ll eat this column!

A few good welcome emails

email-marketing-reports – When someone signs up to your email program, there are four increasingly advanced ways to treat them:

1. Add them to your list and let them wait for the next email scheduled to go out

The technical term for this is “a wasted opportunity.” By not extending any kind of email welcome, you’re ignoring them at the very moment they are most engaged and positively disposed toward you.

And let’s hope they didn’t sign-up the day after your monthly newsletter went out. Otherwise by the time they get their first email from you, they might have forgotten they ever subscribed.

Now they think you’re a spammer. Great.

2. Send them a welcome email and then add them to your standard email marketing program

Here you need to adhere to some basic best practices for welcome emails. Even those using value-priced services and software should be able to send this kind of welcome message.

Miranda has some good and bad examples for you here.

3. Send them a series of “welcome” emails tuned to the needs of new subscribers, then eventually shift them across into your mainstream email marketing program

Chad White talked about this “onboarding principle” last August.

A series of welcome messages guides the newcomer into your program, priming them for the “real thing,” and making the most of the greater level of interest in your brand/business generally shown by new subscribers.

In addition, you get to learn more about the recipient based on their responses to these welcome messages. That information can feed into your main program to ensure they get relevant emails.

Adam Covati provides a good example in this analysis of the early messages in the Netflix email marketing program.

And his colleague DJ Waldow describes how one company overdid the welcome, risking an end to the email relationship before it has a chance to gain traction.

4. Send them a stream of welcome emails, customized according to the source of the signup and what you know about them. Then eventually move them into your wider program, depending on how they respond to your initial messages

If you can use segmentation with your main emails, then why not with your welcome messages?

You don’t have to wait to segment based on responses to previous emails. You can use the information you get at signup or the information you already have about the prospect/customer.

At the very least, you should know where they signed up. So you can add nice touches like “thanks for visiting our booth at the ACME Tradeshow” to your welcome.

And if the new subscriber has expressed clear content preferences, make sure you respect them. Dylan Boyd reveals the frustrations induced when you don’t.

E-mail List Prices Drop, Databases, Masterfile Prices Up: Worldata

directmag.com – Business-to-business e-mail list prices fell by an average of $2 per thousand, while consumer e-mail lists dropped by $3 per thousand, according to the Winder 2008 List Price Index from Worldata.

At the same time, databases and masterfiles, public sector lists, and attendees and members file prices edged up.

Cost-per-lead data, which the Boca Raton, FL-based firm began tracking last quarter, had a slight increase in its pricing, due to jumps in B-to-B leads. Cost-per-lead consumer programs averaged $1.30 per lead, a slight decrease over last quarter, while cost-per-lead B-to-B Programs averaged $4.90 per lead, an increase of 7% over last quarter.

Among the study’s other findings:

*Permission-based e-mail B-to-B was the highest priced category, with a straight average price of $287/M, a decrease of $2/M from last year. The decreased pricing in the B-to-B e-mail category reflected a growth in the number of B-to-B E-mail lists available for rental.

*Newsletters was the second highest priced category, with an average price of $178/M, an increase of $6/M from last year.

*Public Sector was the third highest priced category from 2008 at $170, an increase of $8/M from the prior year.

*The largest price increases occurred with Attendees/Members and Public Sector, each having increases of $8/M, and Databases/Masterfiles increasing $9/M.

*The largest price decreases occurred in the Permission-Based E-mail B-to-B and consumer categories, which dropped $2/M and $3/M respectively from the previous year.

When To Write Long Emails

mediapost.com – LONG COPY HAS BEEN THE stock-in-trade of advertising writers since Gutenberg first made type move. Like top salespeople, writers know that given a chance to flex their verbal muscles, they can mesmerize their prospects and close many a deal. “The more you tell, the more you sell” was a mantra of the direct marketers of yore.

Email marketing tends to be focused on the top 300 pixels, giving little play to a longer message. We all know why — attention spans today are so short, we feel we have to hit the consumer with a short, sharp shock in order to be noticed, never mind read.

That being said, there are still times when longer emails can outperform short ones, especially when you want to secure the understanding, engagement and loyalty of customers with your emails.

Making a complex or expensive sale. When you are promoting a high-end or very technical product or service, follow up your riveting headline or offer with a story that explains the product’s attributes and advantages. Draw in the prospect with problem-solving propositions. Present persuasive facts about your offering in sufficient detail to overcome objections. Be sure to keep your brand positioning in mind as you write.

Sample applications: luxury goods, expensive travel packages, high-end technology. Why? Long copy can help justify higher prices and convincingly point up superior differences in raw materials, manufacturing, service, user experience or longevity.

Building relationships. Email is a letter written from one human being to another. Keep this in mind when addressing fans and customers who have displayed an interest in your organization. Woo them with friendly email communications, which they will read when they have the time, because they like you and want to know your news.

Sample applications: membership communities, entertainment products, cause marketing. Once they have opted in, these highly aligned consumers will enjoy getting to know you and will become more informed and engaged with every newsy communication you send. You can write quite extensive emails to them, such as Christopher Kimball’s Letter from Vermont — it’s chatty, it’s personal, and it leads the reader seamlessly from his latest hometown experiences back to the kitchens of Cook’s Illustrated. Hook, line and sinker, and his readers love it.

Introducing new concepts. Sometimes urgency has to take a back seat to education in email marketing. Bearing in mind that your target audience probably doesn’t have time to read every email you send, it’s a good practice to repeat your message and explain your benefits more than once. If you are introducing a product or service whose full attributes won’t be intuitively grasped by a casual reader, or would require an extraordinary commitment to buy in to, spend time telling them about it. It might require a series of emails to cover the subject adequately and create the conversion response you seek. Be sure that customers know where to find any information they might have missed along the line by providing contextual links to your Web site in each email.

Sample applications: product and service innovations, new financial or investment offerings, or products with a long term of use, such as a retirement community. Long copy can help your target audience better understand your offering, and give them a chance to picture themselves being transformed by it.

Reselling your product. What better way to get a customer to buy more of a product than by demonstrating new ways to use it? Next time you plan to send a coupon by email, spend some time firing up the readers’ imaginations with alternative uses as well.

Sample applications: consumer products from avocadoes to laundry detergent can benefit from (reasonably) long copy emails. Be inventive, invite engagement, walk a mile in the consumer’s shoes and show you care about making their life better.

In email as in other forms of marketing, let your approach fit the product and the audience, and support your goals. You can leverage email effectively to build brands, change minds, and sell more, both long-term and in the moment.

Can Google Analytics help my e-mail marketing?

btobonline – Answer: Marketing professionals know that careful, accurate and constant campaign tracking and analysis are just as important as delivery itself. Integrating Google Analytics into your e-mail marketing is an easy—and free—way to make this possible.Google Analytics has become one of the industry’s most powerful Internet marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers and Web site owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting and marketing initiatives. It is a robust Web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.

You can learn where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, e-mails, blogs or affiliates. And you’ll know which cities, states and countries your primary visitor traffic resides in, so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.

While hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor e-mail marketing campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign, sending carefully targeted, relevant messages.

To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant Web site files, then add parameters to URLs in each e-mail marketing message, denoting which visitors arrive as a result of each e-mail marketing campaign.

Once an e-mail campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting Web site traffic, telling you which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your Web site, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival. You can then adjust your campaign variables to improve results over time.

Campaign managers can also drill down using the Segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems and visitor activity, like the most popular landing and exit pages.

Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities e-commerce companies have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages. They can design messages to their audience’s preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping cart abandonment, improve landing page effectiveness and keep visitors on the Web site even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most people exit. And it’s free.

3 themes shaping behavioral targeting

imediaconnection – As marketers test BT waters, they will need to come to grips with a still-evolving landscape and integrate some of the key lessons of the past 10 years.

The tantalizing promise of behavioral targeting — delivering ads precisely to the right internet users at the right time based on their past web behavior — has been touted for nearly a decade. While advertisers have been relatively slow to adopt BT as a mainstream marketing method, there are indications that this technology is gaining traction and may even be reaching a tipping point. A recent eMarketer report projected that advertisers will spend $1 billion on behaviorally targeted ads in 2008 and upwards of $3.8 billion on them by 2011. As marketers, and brand marketers in particular, start to test these waters, they will need to quickly come to grips with a still-evolving landscape and integrate some of the key lessons of the past 10 years.

Ad networks and publishers that offer BT develop audience segments based on common content consumption patterns (say “Sports Enthusiasts” who consume a threshold level of sports pages in a certain time period), then use information collected on individuals’ web browsing to categorize users in those segments. BT providers then sell advertisers media buys that deliver ads directly to segments likely to be influenced by them.

This approach requires a shift in thinking for many marketers. BT is about buying relevant audiences, not relevant context. If a user’s consumption of auto content suggests that he is in the market for a car, behavioral targeting offers automotive advertisers a way to reach that user with a relevant message when that user is not consuming auto content.

Benefits
The benefits of BT can be significant, especially in categories like automotive, travel and pharmaceuticals in which certain predictable patterns of online content consumption strongly suggests immediate interest in buying something:

• Behavioral targeting can make acquisition marketing easy and powerful by generating “lists” of good prospects that can be mined efficiently and anonymously.
• Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography or demographics.
• Audience-based targeting enables advertisers to reach audiences of interest beyond limited, and often expensive, contextually relevant inventory, thereby increasing frequency and the potential for cost efficiency.

Shortcomings
While the benefits of behavioral targeting can be impressive, marketers must evaluate whether or not BT is a good fit. Limitations of BT include these:

• BT is really good at generating small lists of buy-now prospects, but not so good at achieving mass levels of reach or addressing and developing consumers who are “up the funnel” from the immediate point of purchase.
• The lack of standard segment definitions across BT providers puts the burden on advertisers to cobble together disparate groups in an attempt to replicate its real target, with limited ability to plan and view a cohesive whole.
• For the most part those offering behavioral targeting have yet to define an application for marketing “upstream” — in the areas of awareness building and preference shaping that account for the bulk of media spending by large, sophisticated brand marketers.
• The direct response metrics typically used to measure and manage behaviorally targeted campaign effectiveness may not be relevant to brand marketers.

Three themes for the future
As more and more marketers turn to the web to help them achieve their branding objectives, the following three themes are likely to shape the structure of the industry and new product innovation:

1. Transparency
When assessing the validity of any behavioral target classification, it is essential for the marketer to understand the assumptions used to define the target. All too often the assumptions used are not particularly transparent and are shrouded in “black box” mystery. This is particularly an issue as firms work to standardize segment definitions in an attempt to increase their potential reach. Is someone who has visited auto content once in 45 days really an “Auto Enthusiast”? Increasingly savvy buyers will demand more transparency around qualifying behavior.

2. Privacy Protection
A global concern often associated with behavioral targeting is whether a user’s privacy is compromised in the process. The simple answer is no. Behavioral targeting only tracks where an individual has been online; it does not identify the individual through any personal data such as name, address or email.

However, consumers increasingly are concerned that personally identifiable information is mingled with non-personally identifiable information, which they fear might be used to discriminate against them at some point in the future. Groups representing a small handful of privacy-concerned consumers have pressured the FTC to make all cookies opt-in rather than opt-out, a radical approach that would bring the entire internet advertising industry to its knees. Unless the industry quickly develops privacy protocols that are effective, the government is likely to step in with solutions of its own.

3. Predicting Behavior vs. Reacting to It
Rather than picking off individuals who have “tripped a trigger” indicating they are in the market for something and attempting to influence their decision at or close to the point of purchase, the next generation of targeting will focus on helping marketers “fill the funnel” with more of the right people before they register interest.

One such approach is psychographic targeting. Marketers have long known that psychographic characteristics correlate strongly with brand affinity and buyer behavior, but they have had no way of targeting them in media. Psychographic targeting would enable marketers in highly competitive categories, where psychographic traits such as spontaneity, pragmatism and assertiveness spell the difference between brand devotees and the merely indifferent, to effectively turn up the volume against their most important consumers.

Without question, it’s an exciting time to be in the media and advertising business. Today, the leading behavioral targeting firms are effective list generators for direct response advertisers. But as brand dollars follow mass audiences online, behavioral targeting is destined to become a more important tool for marketers looking to efficiently and effectively reach their target audiences. Those firms that are able to define relevant segments for brand advertisers with mass reach will succeed.

Best Practices For Unsubscribing

mediapost.com – JOHN ENGLER OF UNSUBCENTRAL HAD some great comments based on my article last week and the problems I was having unsubscribing from a newsletter. I’m providing them verbatim with his permission:

1. Marketers should make it clear and easy for people to unsubscribe. The only truly acceptable method for unsubscribing is to offer a link to a Web page with this text: “Click Here to Unsubscribe.” Anything else puts too much onus on the recipient and will likely compel the recipient to hit the “report spam” button in his or her email client. Also, recipients should not need to log in, recall an account number, or type in a password in order to unsubscribe. One best practice to reduce recipient pain is to include the email address in the unsubscribe link, allowing the unsubscribe form to automatically accept the request with one click. Another alternative is to offer just one form item on the unsubscribe page, and allow users to enter their email address and click a button to unsubscribe. I understand per your fellow columnist Loren McDonald’s recent best practice story, some recipients are simply trying to change their preferences. It’s a good point, so put that link on the unsubscribe page. This response is tailored around the folks that truly wish to end communications with the sender.

2. Process the unsubscribe request instantly. CAN-SPAM may allow marketers to fulfill unsubscribe requests within 10 days, but users expect it to happen faster, aren’t likely to know about the 10-day rule and, quite frankly, don’t care — why should they? So, wait if you must but understand that you do so at the expense of your fine brand and will likely upset quite a few members that might just return if you treat them well. Our experience is that consumers who continue to receive mail after they’ve unsubscribed, even if that unsubscribe was yesterday or the day before, just don’t accept that. If you send mail to someone who doesn’t want it, they’ll rightfully perceive you as a spammer. This may compel them to simply hit the “report spam” button — which could affect your deliverability in the future or worse, lead to escalated action.

3. Offer options. Some companies only offer an email-based unsubscribe options (for example, “Reply to this message with ‘Unsubscribe’ in the subject line”) and some only offer Web-based unsubscribes (example: “click here to unsubscribe”). The best marketers offers users both methods, and they test each method to make sure they work reliably. Users that are on mobile devices may only be able to reply to your email. Users that have email forwarded from another account may only be able to click a link to a Web page. Marketers should allow both options all the time.

4. Link to your privacy policy in your email. The best marketers will also include a link to their privacy policy and, if practical, include a phone number to call to unsubscribe if all other methods are failing for the user. A physical address is required by CAN-SPAM, so make sure you’re checking that physical address for unsubscribe requests too.

5. Respect the unsubscribe request. CAN-SPAM requires you to opt out users from all commercial email when they request it. So, if bob@yahoo.com unsubscribes from your newsletter, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t want to receive an unsolicited email from your sales reps, or another department. The law requires you to honor that request. A best practice would be to offer multiple options on the opt-out page (like MediaPost does on its account management page), so you can make sure you’re respecting your users’ wishes. If you don’t offer multiple options, then the smartest thing to do is just accept the request across your entire company until you get another request for communication from that user.

To summarize: Make it easy for people to unsubscribe instantly using whatever method they want, and tell them where to go if they just can’t unsubscribe. Doing that will help you with the law, as well as help you build your brand’s credibility with your users.