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.

Your Email Marketing Recession Survival Guide

mediapost.com – By all accounts, the U.S. economy and others around the world are either in recession now or heading for one before 2008 ends. How long it will last and how rough it will get is anybody’s guess, but I’m not waiting for the official proclamation, and neither should you.My original column idea was to initiate a strategic discussion around the potential impact of a recession on our industry, but since fellow Insider Bill McCloskey stole my thunder in yesterday’s column, I’ve opted to outline survival strategies during an economic downturn.

Now is the time to strengthen your position inside your company. At the same time, reach outside to your customer base by making your email marketing as relevant and valuable as possible. By following a proactive strategic plan, you also guard against committing irreversible mistakes as you recession-proof your email-marketing program. Strategies to follow include:

• Launch or beef up your campaign to remind management how email marketing helps drive your company’s success. Many executives view email simply as an inexpensive marketing vehicle. Now is the time to reposition email as a strategic relationship-management channel.

• Implement programs that integrate with and extend the ROI of other channels such as search, direct mail, RSS, broadcast or trade shows. For example, optimizing landing pages to convert prospects into an email relationship even if they don’t take your core conversion action can greatly boost the long-term ROI of your search spend.

• Leverage your email editorial content for search-engine optimization. Particularly for publishers and B2B marketers, optimizing your article content for search engines can pay off handsomely. When planning your editorial content, write your articles and titles using high-priority keyword phrases. Improving your natural search rankings for certain keywords might enable you to reduce your paid search spend when the CFO comes wielding an axe.

• Assess the value of your customers and relationships. Use RFM or similar analyses to determine which customer segments are the highest value and most loyal and who will likely continue to spend during a downturn. Then, initiate or enhance loyalty or incentive programs to reward and encourage them.

• Learn more about your customers. Add or update your preference center, and incentivize subscribers to update their profiles. Survey subscribers for insights to help you deliver more relevant emails and greater personalization. Integrate Web analytics data, and deploy more highly targeted messages based on Web activity.

• Use more trigger-based emails, following up with subscribers based on specific open, click or Web activity.

• Implement measurement systems and management reports that demonstrate the impact email has on the company. Move beyond process metrics — opens, clicks, delivery rate — and gather output metrics tied to the company’s overall business goals, particularly strategic changes to adjust in a slowed economy.

• Identify ways that the company can switch to email to save money, such as e-billing statements or special notices.

What not to do now:

• Don’t panic, and don’t wait for your CEO or management to tell you to cut your email budget. Take the lead by proving value beforehand. Don’t expend energy on unproductive email-versus-direct-mail arguments within your company. Focus on demonstrating what email does best and how it extends the value of your company’s other marketing channels.

• Don’t revert to batch-and-blast techniques to boost or maintain revenue. I expect some marketers will be forced to just “send more emails” to their entire database. This might deliver short-term results, but it can also hurt your brand and deliverability, increase costs to replace lost subscribers and potentially anger many otherwise happy customers.

• Don’t compromise on permission and privacy. Resist the temptation to build your lists more aggressively. Focus instead on your most valuable prospects.

The reality of company politics and decision-making could make achieving all of these strategies difficult. So, don’t feel you have to adopt them all.

However, do something. If nothing else, go to management with your plan to leverage email marketing to drive both the top and bottom lines during the coming downturn. You will be way ahead of peers who wait for uninformed instructions to drift down from the high command.

Make the click worth their time

imediaconnection.com – Before making a deeper connection, consumers want to have confidence that their clicking time is worth the effort. HypeCouncil’s founder shows how to make them glad they said yes to your brand.

Consumer confidence in online advertising has eroded to an all-time low. We package clever, but elusive, copy and flashy graphics inside of a display ad and buy up every available impression on the internet only to wonder why no one is clicking. What are we exchanging with consumers that gives them the confidence to interact with our message? Simply broadcasting a message to the masses doesn’t necessarily leave consumers with enough information, or the confidence, to act on what they see.

I’ve often likened this confidence-building process to asking someone out on a date. I haven’t been single for a number of years, but I remember the delicate dance of trying to engage a person in conversation as an entrée into spending some more quality time together.

A long time ago in a pub far away, I happened upon an attractive woman who was chatting with some mutual friends of mine. Aside from the occasional comment directed to the group, this woman and I said very little to each other. Still, she seemed nice and she was a knockout, so at the end of the evening, I sidled up to her and made some wise comment — I can’t remember now what it was, but it was probably related to the band Hanson and how important they were to modern American music. Whatever I said was enough to make her smile and nod which, for me, was a real bonus. And so, I asked her out.

She said “no.” Not, “I have plans.” Not “I have a boyfriend.” Not even “Hanson. Are you kidding me?” She just said “no.”

I eventually got over the rejection, but a few years later, I bumped into this woman again at a party. We struck up a more direct conversation that lasted most of the night. I finally worked up the courage to ask her about that fated evening and why she didn’t go out with me. She told me that she had no clue about who I was and what I was about, and she didn’t want to invest her time and energy based on a two-second conversation. She said that she needed more to go on before making that kind of a decision. I asked her out again, and this time she said “yes.” We’ve been together ever since.

I learned two very valuable lessons that night. Never, EVER bring Hanson into a conversation with the opposite sex. It only serves to prove that you are, in fact, a moron. More importantly, I learned that the less you allow a person to engage with you, the less likely you are to get that person to do what you want. The same works with online advertising; the more you commit to engage the consumer, the more of a commitment you get in return.

As online marketers, we underestimate the level of commitment involved when a consumer clicks through to a website. The consumer is making several assessments in the blink of an eye — will this be a waste of time? Will the site I click to be safe? Will the information I seek be relevant? Will I get what I need efficiently? There is a risk vs. reward scenario that we all play out when deciding to interact with an online advertisement. If we rely too heavily on the website destination to do our talking, we will likely find that no one will be around to listen.

There are a dozen or more practical applications of this for online advertising. Let’s take a look at banner ads and use three examples to determine the level of information that is shared prior to making a commitment to act or, in this case, to click.

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