A direct rip from Email Labs article by Loren McDonald, this is hillarious: Top 10 List of Reasons Why Your Last Email Campaign Stunk. Drum roll please...
10. Addressed Each Recipient as "Dear Sucker"
Personalization is a must. Recipients expect it and the more you personalize an email the more successful it is in generating a response.
9. Earl in Shipping Wrote the CopyPeople do read email copy.
A common mistake emarketers make is in not using a professional direct response copywriter. Secondly, they assume the less copy the better, but end up with weak copy that also does not provide enough information to motivate a response.
8. Hired Neighbor's Son, Who Is Taking An HTML Course at the Local JC, to Design the Email. While almost anyone can learn to program HTML, email design is a very unique skill. In fact in our experience, many otherwise strong designers often struggle to create great emails.
7. Your Subject Line Was - "We Have What You Want...Really!"Good subject lines are critical to high open rates - which in turn drives your click-through and conversion rates. Always test a few subject lines before mailing in bulk.
6. Used "Joey Buttafuco" as the From Line
From lines can have a huge affect on open rates. Whether to house or rented lists, don't overlook the importance of from lines, and always test first if possible.
5. Landing Page Sign-Up Form Asked For GPA From Grammar School
A common mistake companies make is to ask people for too much information, too early in the "relationship." If you've mailed to a targeted list, recipients should already be "pre-qualified." Don't scare them away by trying to obtain your demographics wish list.
4. Thought "Live People Who Own Computers" Was a Targeted List
While the perfect list (or lists) rarely exists, conducting thorough list research and analysis will reap huge dividends. Segment your house list as appropriate and choose as many selects as are available when renting opt-in lists.
3. Your Offer Was - "FREE Copy of Our New Brochure"
Email offers must be compelling. Whether it is value proposition oriented or an incentive, an offer must be personally relevant and strong enough to motivate recipients to take action.
2. Thought "Testing" Was Only for Students and Olympic Athletes
Testing is integral to the success of email campaigns. Test the most important variables in your email, and apply the learning to your bulk campaign.
and the number one reason....
1. Rented List From "Bob's Email List Discount Warehouse"
Perhaps one of the most common and biggest mistakes companies make is in renting inexpensive lists. While poor creative can produce weak campaign results, great creative will rarely generate a good response from a cheap list. For some reason, many emarketers believe that old adage "you get what you pay for" doesn't apply to email lists.
Propable 10 mistakes you would not want to repeat in email marketing!
Showing posts with label Email Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Email Marketing. Show all posts
Friday, May 02, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
World's worst sales letter? - Direct Marketing
Geoffery James author of over 7 books has recently blogged on BNet, sharing one of the Worst Sales Letter he has seen. Here is the letter which he got:
The bracketed numbers refer to comments below:
"Dear Mr. and Mrs. James
During the past few months, I have completed an intensive training program for real estate professionals through the Century 21 learning system. [1] With this recent training and my experience as a full service agent, I feel quite confident in my ability to help buyers and sellers with their real estate needs. [2]
Century 21 is one of the best real estate firms in the area due to the many educational programs promoting current market strategies[3], as well as many years of experience within the real estate community.[4] In addition, we provide:
- Outstanding service to all clients.[5]
- Market data that is always changing.[6]
- Weekly updates for clients listing there homes.[7]
- A wide variety of buying and selling tools.[8]
It is great working with a company that has so much to offer their clients.[9] If you or someone you know is considering buying or selling [10] property feel free to give out my name or business card [11] and I will do everything I can to meet their real estate needs.[12]
Sincerely,"
His comments:
[1] OK, you’re fresh out of school. So why would I want to work with you?
[2] That’s nice. Unfortunately, you’ve said absolutely nothing to make me feel confident in you.
[3] Why do I get the impression that some marketing guy wrote this as boilerplate?
[4] Experience doing what? Sending out awkward direct mail pieces? And compared to whom?
[5] Outstanding in what way? Outstandingly bad? And by how much? And where’s the proof?
[6] Huh? Does this mean that the data is getting more accurate or less accurate or what?
[7] And that’s important because…? And what’s with the typo?
[8] Sounds like a hardware store. Why would I care? What do the tools do?
[9] Glad you like it. Why should I care? What’s with the grammatical error?
[10] Trying to address two different markets weakens the entire pitch.
[11] At this point it starts sounding positively desperate.
[12] Why would I risk my friendships for somebody I don’t know?
What’s really wretched is that the letter was sent first class mail to individual families, on heavy stock paper. This means that each piece cost somebody — hopefully not the obviously hapless agent — at least half a buck per letter. I’d be surprised if the guy gets so much as a nibble. Pitiful. Truly pitiful.
The bracketed numbers refer to comments below:
"Dear Mr. and Mrs. James
During the past few months, I have completed an intensive training program for real estate professionals through the Century 21 learning system. [1] With this recent training and my experience as a full service agent, I feel quite confident in my ability to help buyers and sellers with their real estate needs. [2]
Century 21 is one of the best real estate firms in the area due to the many educational programs promoting current market strategies[3], as well as many years of experience within the real estate community.[4] In addition, we provide:
- Outstanding service to all clients.[5]
- Market data that is always changing.[6]
- Weekly updates for clients listing there homes.[7]
- A wide variety of buying and selling tools.[8]
It is great working with a company that has so much to offer their clients.[9] If you or someone you know is considering buying or selling [10] property feel free to give out my name or business card [11] and I will do everything I can to meet their real estate needs.[12]
Sincerely,"
His comments:
[1] OK, you’re fresh out of school. So why would I want to work with you?
[2] That’s nice. Unfortunately, you’ve said absolutely nothing to make me feel confident in you.
[3] Why do I get the impression that some marketing guy wrote this as boilerplate?
[4] Experience doing what? Sending out awkward direct mail pieces? And compared to whom?
[5] Outstanding in what way? Outstandingly bad? And by how much? And where’s the proof?
[6] Huh? Does this mean that the data is getting more accurate or less accurate or what?
[7] And that’s important because…? And what’s with the typo?
[8] Sounds like a hardware store. Why would I care? What do the tools do?
[9] Glad you like it. Why should I care? What’s with the grammatical error?
[10] Trying to address two different markets weakens the entire pitch.
[11] At this point it starts sounding positively desperate.
[12] Why would I risk my friendships for somebody I don’t know?
What’s really wretched is that the letter was sent first class mail to individual families, on heavy stock paper. This means that each piece cost somebody — hopefully not the obviously hapless agent — at least half a buck per letter. I’d be surprised if the guy gets so much as a nibble. Pitiful. Truly pitiful.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
60% of Wives in US Crave for more Sex
TITLE or Subject Lines can make or break it!
Apology for using that subject line on a marketing, communication and technology blog, I just couldn't resist it to make my point! Get a Title that baffles people!
For obvious reasons if you are reading this, you were not interested in any book or Email Marketing, but, to know more about the decreasing libido in US men. I do not blame you, it's the title that can make or break the thing sometimes.
1) A recent example: "37 Mating Techniques" , one of my ol' friend bought this book. Obviously she was trying to lay her hands on something new which she can try out. And just out of embarrasment, she didn't bother to open the book to read what's inside. When she reached home, jump-opened the book, just to find out it was a book on chess!
2) Help for Sex starved Wives, I was reading this report on TIME.com with the Title "Help for SEX starved wives" by Michele Weiner Davis shattering the myth of men not getting enough sex. According to her survey with redbook where 1000 wives in US responded with 60% of them reported that they wanted at least as much, if not more, sex than their husbands. The Sex-Starved Wife: What to Do When He's Lost Desire (Simon & Schuster) was the new book that she is trying to promote!
3) More Sex please we are French, while on the other hand TIME reported in France the sexuality has increased in France. According to the new 600-page "Study of Sexuality in France," commissioned by France's National Research Agency on AIDS, both the number of partners and diversity of sexual activity has significantly increased in France in the last decade. Only 3.5% of women aged 18-35 years now say they are sexually abstinent. The title is just another example of how to promote your report with a Title that rocks!
Apology for using that subject line on a marketing, communication and technology blog, I just couldn't resist it to make my point! Get a Title that baffles people!
For obvious reasons if you are reading this, you were not interested in any book or Email Marketing, but, to know more about the decreasing libido in US men. I do not blame you, it's the title that can make or break the thing sometimes.
1) A recent example: "37 Mating Techniques" , one of my ol' friend bought this book. Obviously she was trying to lay her hands on something new which she can try out. And just out of embarrasment, she didn't bother to open the book to read what's inside. When she reached home, jump-opened the book, just to find out it was a book on chess!
2) Help for Sex starved Wives, I was reading this report on TIME.com with the Title "Help for SEX starved wives" by Michele Weiner Davis shattering the myth of men not getting enough sex. According to her survey with redbook where 1000 wives in US responded with 60% of them reported that they wanted at least as much, if not more, sex than their husbands. The Sex-Starved Wife: What to Do When He's Lost Desire (Simon & Schuster) was the new book that she is trying to promote!
3) More Sex please we are French, while on the other hand TIME reported in France the sexuality has increased in France. According to the new 600-page "Study of Sexuality in France," commissioned by France's National Research Agency on AIDS, both the number of partners and diversity of sexual activity has significantly increased in France in the last decade. Only 3.5% of women aged 18-35 years now say they are sexually abstinent. The title is just another example of how to promote your report with a Title that rocks!
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Avoiding Email Marketing Blunders - Refer to your checklist
Email marketing is not about just sending out emails. This is the art and science of building long term relations and driving revenue for the organization. In today's fast changing world of e-mail marketing, an for attention to details along with an reasoning based attitude is necessary to avoid embarrassment and lost revenue opportunities for the sender.
Here is Karen Gedney's article on email checklist, which I read last year and I must say it's a very good read for email marketers.
On a day to day basis, when we keep doing the same job, we feel that we know it all. Though when you start exploring it more, is when you understand that there is so much more to it. The day we start believing that we know it all is the day you stop learning more and the moment you stop learning or you lose the will to learn more, you are nothing more than a dead man.
As Scott Ragsdale pointed out in his blog "Jack Murphy Syndrome", it's very easy to fall in trap of this syndrome and become incomplacent. But people who are consistent and committed and who want to learn more are the ones who would succeed. Not just in this form of marketing, however, in their lives.
Reading, Learning More and following industry trends is as important as your breakfast and missing it would make you slack physically or mentally. As I point out sometimes, Sharpening the Saw (7 Habits of Highly Effective People), is one of the most important activities and its not just physical fitness but also mental fitness what matters!
Here is Karen Gedney's article on email checklist, which I read last year and I must say it's a very good read for email marketers.
On a day to day basis, when we keep doing the same job, we feel that we know it all. Though when you start exploring it more, is when you understand that there is so much more to it. The day we start believing that we know it all is the day you stop learning more and the moment you stop learning or you lose the will to learn more, you are nothing more than a dead man.
As Scott Ragsdale pointed out in his blog "Jack Murphy Syndrome", it's very easy to fall in trap of this syndrome and become incomplacent. But people who are consistent and committed and who want to learn more are the ones who would succeed. Not just in this form of marketing, however, in their lives.
Reading, Learning More and following industry trends is as important as your breakfast and missing it would make you slack physically or mentally. As I point out sometimes, Sharpening the Saw (7 Habits of Highly Effective People), is one of the most important activities and its not just physical fitness but also mental fitness what matters!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Download Top 10 Email Marketing / Database Marketing Resources | Forrestor | Gartner | McKinsey
Top 10 Email Marketing / Database Marketing Resources
Keywords: Email Labs, Gartner, Forrestor, McKinsey, Reports, PDF, Download, Email Marketing, Marketing Sherpa, Benchmarking, Resources
As a marketer I keep a tab on what's new in the marketing world and a lot of resources are available online. All this information is scattered all over the place so I thought to combine most of the stuff in a common place on my blog. All companies and trademarks are their registered names and copyrights, I have nothing to do with it. These reports are freely downloadable from Internet from their respective websites and to bring it to a common platform, I have brought them here. You can download these email or database marketing resources and get s stronger hold on the email or database marketing scenario.
1)Download the 4Rs of Email Marketing Detailed Guide in PDF format. A practitioner's guide to Email Marketing. Tips and tricks on creating Call to Actions (CTAs), Subject Lines, Email Deliverability enhancement and more.
2) Email Labs Online resources this link provides access to best practices in Email Marketing from various people contributing a large number of articles, articles on day-to-day email marketing needs and more...
3) One detailed guide on ensuring your email gets delivered. Download the Email Labs Deliverability Guide a must read for every email marketer and strategic decision maker.
4) Download the Email Labs Opt-in List creation Guide which is a comprehensive compendium for creation of Hygenic email marketing lists from various banner ads, other campaigns etc.
5) Email Marketing Service Providers Q4 2007 Forrester Wave report, A good analysis on how to choose your email solution provider.
6) Gartner report on Email Security Boundary - Magic Quadrant. A little old report on security and deliverability.
7) McKinsey report - How companies are using online marketing? A good report to understand the worldwide usage of online media.
8) What personalization tools work in e-commerce and why? A Forrestor report on what personalization tools work and why.
9) Marketing Sherpa's Email Marketing Benchmarkeing Guide 2008 - Excerpts. An enriched guide to quickly benchmark your company's performance and see how you fare on the metrics. Also watch the latest trends in Email marketing. Buy the detailed guide here.
10) The Forrester Wave™ report: Database Marketing Service Providers, Q4 2007 report a detailed analysis on what are the expectations from MSPs and how are they faring on the same.
Keywords: Email Labs, Gartner, Forrestor, McKinsey, Reports, PDF, Download, Email Marketing, Marketing Sherpa, Benchmarking, Resources
Key Email Marketing Metrics – CTRs, Opens, Forwards, Leads, Quotes, Revenue, Market Share
Key Email Marketing Metrics – CTRs, Opens, Forwards, Leads, Quotes, Revenue, Market Share - Part of 4Rs of email marketing
While marketers do all this jazz of email marketing, tracking, optimizing, testing the core objective in my perspective should be sales revenue. Whether it is marketing leads to sales closure or its direct marketing online closure.
So certain key metrics to be looked at can be: Clickthru rates, Open rates, Forwards (if it’s a viral), Website visits, Leads generated, Leads getting converted to quotes, and finally how much revenue is generated.
Also some of the CMOs metrics should be the market share attained. How much share holder’s value enhanced?
Clickthru rates shows 2 things:
-Whether you communicated to the right audience or not?
-Also whether your CTAs were well planned and executed?
Leads generated on the microsites or websites show if you were really able to give the experience to the prospects or not. These leads truly showcase how marketing can add value to the organization’s business objectives as well as it adds to the brand awareness.
Leads getting converted into quotes and finally into revenue is the true marketing success. Though there is element of Sales skills involved in it, however, online closure of deals is a pure, honest marketing success!
An annual review of market share expansion should be conducted by the CMO to understand the impact of the marketing and ROI analysis through various media should determine the future expenditure planning and budgeting.
While marketers do all this jazz of email marketing, tracking, optimizing, testing the core objective in my perspective should be sales revenue. Whether it is marketing leads to sales closure or its direct marketing online closure.
So certain key metrics to be looked at can be: Clickthru rates, Open rates, Forwards (if it’s a viral), Website visits, Leads generated, Leads getting converted to quotes, and finally how much revenue is generated.
Also some of the CMOs metrics should be the market share attained. How much share holder’s value enhanced?
Clickthru rates shows 2 things:
-Whether you communicated to the right audience or not?
-Also whether your CTAs were well planned and executed?
Leads generated on the microsites or websites show if you were really able to give the experience to the prospects or not. These leads truly showcase how marketing can add value to the organization’s business objectives as well as it adds to the brand awareness.
Leads getting converted into quotes and finally into revenue is the true marketing success. Though there is element of Sales skills involved in it, however, online closure of deals is a pure, honest marketing success!
An annual review of market share expansion should be conducted by the CMO to understand the impact of the marketing and ROI analysis through various media should determine the future expenditure planning and budgeting.
Email Opt-in techniques and Deliverability
Email Opt-in techniques and Deliverability - Part of 4Rs of Email Marketing
Opt-in means that your prospects and customers have chosen to communicate with you. Opt-in status “yes” means that the user wants to communicate with you or your company so its fine your communication is not unsolicited. Also your email should comply with the CAN SPAM act.
There are a lot of ways that marketers leverage to create an opt-in status of a user.
Some of the questions that you should ask to see how you are building database.
· How do you collect consent from recipients to send commercial or promotional email: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; preselected option with verification; or other?
· How do you collect consent to share email addresses with third parties or affiliates: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; pre-selected option with verification; or other?
· How do you determine whether third parties who provide you email addresses have obtained their users’ consent: in writing; reviewed their consent method; reviewed the URL where the third party obtained consent; or other?
· Do you send commercial or promotional email based on prior business relationships but without prior consent?
· Do you require users to accept your commercial or promotional email as a condition of doing business with you?
You can run whitepaper, survey, e-book, research reports, webzines, webinar download campaigns, and generate opt-ins. You can look at even banner ads or you can hire in some space in newsletters or run a contest or even better may be a viral campaign etc depending on your business needs.
Here are two email opt-in and deliverability guides from Email Labs which are a must read.
-EmailLabs – Grow Email Opt-In List
-Email Deliverabilty Guide
Opt-in means that your prospects and customers have chosen to communicate with you. Opt-in status “yes” means that the user wants to communicate with you or your company so its fine your communication is not unsolicited. Also your email should comply with the CAN SPAM act.
There are a lot of ways that marketers leverage to create an opt-in status of a user.
Some of the questions that you should ask to see how you are building database.
· How do you collect consent from recipients to send commercial or promotional email: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; preselected option with verification; or other?
· How do you collect consent to share email addresses with third parties or affiliates: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; pre-selected option with verification; or other?
· How do you determine whether third parties who provide you email addresses have obtained their users’ consent: in writing; reviewed their consent method; reviewed the URL where the third party obtained consent; or other?
· Do you send commercial or promotional email based on prior business relationships but without prior consent?
· Do you require users to accept your commercial or promotional email as a condition of doing business with you?
You can run whitepaper, survey, e-book, research reports, webzines, webinar download campaigns, and generate opt-ins. You can look at even banner ads or you can hire in some space in newsletters or run a contest or even better may be a viral campaign etc depending on your business needs.
Here are two email opt-in and deliverability guides from Email Labs which are a must read.
-EmailLabs – Grow Email Opt-In List
-Email Deliverabilty Guide
Email Design – Is your CTA Actionable?
Email Design – Is your CTA Actionable? - Part of 4Rs of Email Marketing
CTA or Call to action is like the button on your TV remote which when triggered makes your TV do the things which you want it to do. Similarly your CTAs should be punchy and actionable. Well crafted too, so that when you take an action by clicking some link on the email you should be able to drive the relevant action from the customer/prospect.
Your CTA should be placed well in the email which is easily located. Also, it should come at a point in time that there is some suspense element, some kind of need that is created and should create urgency.
Examples:
-Using quick links in the newsletter.
-Offers should be highly visible.
-Probably using colours, images, or simple text (but should be punchy and actionable)
-For European, Asia and American geos, preferably left aligned or centre aligned
-For Middle Eastern geos, preferably right align.
-CTAs like click here should be avoided as they trigger spam filters.
-Read more…, Learn more…, Get this whitepaper here, Get your own copy, Click to continue… and more…
CTA or Call to action is like the button on your TV remote which when triggered makes your TV do the things which you want it to do. Similarly your CTAs should be punchy and actionable. Well crafted too, so that when you take an action by clicking some link on the email you should be able to drive the relevant action from the customer/prospect.
Your CTA should be placed well in the email which is easily located. Also, it should come at a point in time that there is some suspense element, some kind of need that is created and should create urgency.
Examples:
-Using quick links in the newsletter.
-Offers should be highly visible.
-Probably using colours, images, or simple text (but should be punchy and actionable)
-For European, Asia and American geos, preferably left aligned or centre aligned
-For Middle Eastern geos, preferably right align.
-CTAs like click here should be avoided as they trigger spam filters.
-Read more…, Learn more…, Get this whitepaper here, Get your own copy, Click to continue… and more…
Email Marketing - Email Design and Subject Lines
Email Design and Subject Lines - Part of 4Rs of Email Marketing
46% of Marketers take 15 secs to create email Subject Lines
One of the most important things in email marketing / website content development is the subject lines. Even though the above statistic is just an example to showcase that how a good subject line should be, simultaneously, it’s an indication that a lot of marketers do not spend enough time in creating subject lines.
I have created subject lines which have got me open rates as high as 40% and clickthru rates as high as 20% however, I have also created bad subject lines which yielded open rates as bad as 8% and clickthru rates of 0.7%.
It’s very evident from my experience that a good subject line can really decide the success and failure of a campaign. Just imagine you spent hours all together with teams in brainstorming and coming up with the right strategies and communication messages. But while executing you forgot to test the subject line and spent like 5 secs. in creating something that struck you at that moment and suddenly the entire campaign fell through as people didn’t open your emails at all.
Damn it’s annoying but true, that, something as simple as a subject line can kill the productivity of a brilliantly crafted message and designed campaign.
Some examples which work … mostly:
-Personalization
-Questions
-Emotive words
-Using statistics
-Using numbers
-Using company name
Put Whitepaper: , Survey: , Tech Report: , as the starting words.
Here are some examples:
-Hello {firstname}, are you among the TOP 100 {jobtitle}?
-Hi {firstname}, 5 mins Step-by-Step approach to plan your vacation.
-77% of the {jobtitle}s have registered with us, {firstname} have you?
-Are you weak like your colleagues?
-Whitepaper: Garbage the future of energy?
-Survey: 86% of HR heads are outsourcing recruitments.
-Majority Declared: 91% of mothers spread the word.
-{Companyname} Weekly Round-up: Customers want synergy at low cost.
46% of Marketers take 15 secs to create email Subject Lines
One of the most important things in email marketing / website content development is the subject lines. Even though the above statistic is just an example to showcase that how a good subject line should be, simultaneously, it’s an indication that a lot of marketers do not spend enough time in creating subject lines.
I have created subject lines which have got me open rates as high as 40% and clickthru rates as high as 20% however, I have also created bad subject lines which yielded open rates as bad as 8% and clickthru rates of 0.7%.
It’s very evident from my experience that a good subject line can really decide the success and failure of a campaign. Just imagine you spent hours all together with teams in brainstorming and coming up with the right strategies and communication messages. But while executing you forgot to test the subject line and spent like 5 secs. in creating something that struck you at that moment and suddenly the entire campaign fell through as people didn’t open your emails at all.
Damn it’s annoying but true, that, something as simple as a subject line can kill the productivity of a brilliantly crafted message and designed campaign.
Some examples which work … mostly:
-Personalization
-Questions
-Emotive words
-Using statistics
-Using numbers
-Using company name
Put Whitepaper: , Survey: , Tech Report: , as the starting words.
Here are some examples:
-Hello {firstname}, are you among the TOP 100 {jobtitle}?
-Hi {firstname}, 5 mins Step-by-Step approach to plan your vacation.
-77% of the {jobtitle}s have registered with us, {firstname} have you?
-Are you weak like your colleagues?
-Whitepaper: Garbage the future of energy?
-Survey: 86% of HR heads are outsourcing recruitments.
-Majority Declared: 91% of mothers spread the word.
-{Companyname} Weekly Round-up: Customers want synergy at low cost.
Email Content – Keep the promise!
Email Content – Keep the promise! - Part of 4Rs of Marketing Series.
How do you build a relation with your friends? May be you get introduced by someone to a friend or may be you met someone somewhere (online in this case) or may be you just make a promise and live up to it and strengthen your relation with friends and over a period of time convert them to loyal friends.
It’s something similar in case of a customer relationship management through email marketing. Let’s say you were running an ad in a website or hired some space in a targeted newsletter and you were offering something useful for a prospective customer, you started generating traffic to your website through it and got people interested and started increasing your list size. Now, what is important is that you should remember to “keep the promise”, the promise that you made while gathering the information of the prospect. You made a promise to deliver a useful and relevant piece of information like a whitepaper, survey, research report etc. Obviously you should focus on your business, definitely, however, keep your promise by investing in the promise that you made continuously. Or else, you would be not more than anyone else in the same business. The only way you can differentiate is by keeping your promise to the customer during the time you acquired that customer’s relation.
As relevancy is taking the utmost importance in today’s time, it’s imperative to deliver highly relevant content. There are various ways to achieve this. You can manage your CRM system effectively and capture various details about your customers and prospects and leverage that date for delivering highly relevant content. This is no rocket science. It’s something which Google.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and many other companies do, by learning about your preference and delivering what you need.
Additionally you can look at Omniture Segmentation Guide, Docmetrics - Document Optimization, Silverpops – Testing Methodology, Forrester’s Web Analytics report, Geographical optimization, Behavioral Triggering and Instance based triggering.
So let’s say while you are building your CRM database, keep a field open which says “Acquisition Source” which can be a pick list with values like: Banner Ads, Ad Words, Referral, Forward from a Friend etc. However, important thing to notice is to keep another field which says offer chosen like: Whitepaper, Survey, Research Report, Tech Paper, Event registration, Tips and tricks, Videos etc.
Just by doing this small activity you know later on what the interest type of the person was, so that the next time you wish to roll out some offer, you can just bundle it with another Whitepaper, Video, Survey etc and you were able to deliver on your promise while keeping your relation and relevancy.
Some important things to keep in mind are not to use potential SPAM words in the content or else your email deliverability will get hurt. Find the list of TOP 100 potential spam words here.
How do you build a relation with your friends? May be you get introduced by someone to a friend or may be you met someone somewhere (online in this case) or may be you just make a promise and live up to it and strengthen your relation with friends and over a period of time convert them to loyal friends.
It’s something similar in case of a customer relationship management through email marketing. Let’s say you were running an ad in a website or hired some space in a targeted newsletter and you were offering something useful for a prospective customer, you started generating traffic to your website through it and got people interested and started increasing your list size. Now, what is important is that you should remember to “keep the promise”, the promise that you made while gathering the information of the prospect. You made a promise to deliver a useful and relevant piece of information like a whitepaper, survey, research report etc. Obviously you should focus on your business, definitely, however, keep your promise by investing in the promise that you made continuously. Or else, you would be not more than anyone else in the same business. The only way you can differentiate is by keeping your promise to the customer during the time you acquired that customer’s relation.
As relevancy is taking the utmost importance in today’s time, it’s imperative to deliver highly relevant content. There are various ways to achieve this. You can manage your CRM system effectively and capture various details about your customers and prospects and leverage that date for delivering highly relevant content. This is no rocket science. It’s something which Google.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and many other companies do, by learning about your preference and delivering what you need.
Additionally you can look at Omniture Segmentation Guide, Docmetrics - Document Optimization, Silverpops – Testing Methodology, Forrester’s Web Analytics report, Geographical optimization, Behavioral Triggering and Instance based triggering.
So let’s say while you are building your CRM database, keep a field open which says “Acquisition Source” which can be a pick list with values like: Banner Ads, Ad Words, Referral, Forward from a Friend etc. However, important thing to notice is to keep another field which says offer chosen like: Whitepaper, Survey, Research Report, Tech Paper, Event registration, Tips and tricks, Videos etc.
Just by doing this small activity you know later on what the interest type of the person was, so that the next time you wish to roll out some offer, you can just bundle it with another Whitepaper, Video, Survey etc and you were able to deliver on your promise while keeping your relation and relevancy.
Some important things to keep in mind are not to use potential SPAM words in the content or else your email deliverability will get hurt. Find the list of TOP 100 potential spam words here.
4Rs of Email marketing – A Practioner’s Guide!
4Rs of Email marketing – A Practioner’s Guide!
An in-depth tutorial or a hand-book on email marketing or a practitioner’s guide to email marketing. I have covered various components of email marketing. I have tried to put together resources from various email marketing or lead automation solution providers in a single place.
3 years ago I got introduced to a simple yet effective concept of marketing, “Email Marketing” or “Inbox Marketing”. As simple as it sounds, it means sending an email to a prospective customer or an existing one, either to share some existing piece of information, or about informing or educating them on some new product or service that you can offer or may be just to say “Hi”.
Well Email marketing has been highly regarded for being able to get the highest returns on investments. It involves the least cost, requires the least set-up time, and you can see the responses very quickly. Though it might just sound like sending out an email, it’s not that simple!
In today’s time people can choose what they want to receive in their inbox. The good old ways of pushing the message in someone’s inbox is gone. Today’s it’s about the 4Rs of Email Marketing: - Relation, Request, Relevance and Returns/Revenue.
In simple words, today marketers need to strike up an engaging relation with prospects or customers during which the customers could request for some information and the content that you are offering should be relevant to the customers or prospects to get real returns on your investments (Revenue).
Components of Email Marketing
-Email Content
-Email Subject Lines
-Email Testing
-Email Design CTAs
-Email Opt-in Techniques
-Deliverability
-Key metrics – CTRs, Opens, Forwards
4 Rs in Action: - Relation building – Requesting Opt-in – providing Relevancy - ROI
Email Content – Keep the promise!
How do you build a relation with your friends? May be you get introduced by someone to a friend or may be you met someone somewhere (online in this case) or may be you just make a promise and live up to it and strengthen your relation with friends and over a period of time convert them to loyal friends.
It’s something similar in case of a customer relationship management through email marketing. Let’s say you were running an ad in a website or hired some space in a targeted newsletter and you were offering something useful for a prospective customer, you started generating traffic to your website through it and got people interested and started increasing your list size. Now, what is important is that you should remember to “keep the promise”, the promise that you made while gathering the information of the prospect. You made a promise to deliver a useful and relevant piece of information like a whitepaper, survey, research report etc. Obviously you should focus on your business, definitely, however, keep your promise by investing in the promise that you made continuously. Or else, you would be not more than anyone else in the same business. The only way you can differentiate is by keeping your promise to the customer during the time you acquired that customer’s relation.
As relevancy is taking the utmost importance in today’s time, it’s imperative to deliver highly relevant content. There are various ways to achieve this. You can manage your CRM system effectively and capture various details about your customers and prospects and leverage that date for delivering highly relevant content. This is no rocket science. It’s something which Google.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and many other companies do, by learning about your preference and delivering what you need.
Additionally you can look at Omniture Segmentation Guide, Docmetrics - Document Optimization, Silverpops – Testing Methodology, Forrester’s Web Analytics report, Geographical optimization, Behavioral Triggering and Instance based triggering.
So let’s say while you are building your CRM database, keep a field open which says “Acquisition Source” which can be a pick list with values like: Banner Ads, Ad Words, Referral, Forward from a Friend etc. However, important thing to notice is to keep another field which says offer chosen like: Whitepaper, Survey, Research Report, Tech Paper, Event registration, Tips and tricks, Videos etc.
Just by doing this small activity you know later on what the interest type of the person was, so that the next time you wish to roll out some offer, you can just bundle it with another Whitepaper, Video, Survey etc and you were able to deliver on your promise while keeping your relation and relevancy.
Some important things to keep in mind are not to use potential SPAM words in the content or else your email deliverability will get hurt. Find the list of TOP 100 potential spam words here.
Email Design and Subject Lines
46% of Marketers take 15 secs to create email Subject Lines
One of the most important things in email marketing / website content development is the subject lines. Even though the above statistic is just an example to showcase that how a good subject line should be, simultaneously, it’s an indication that a lot of marketers do not spend enough time in creating subject lines.
I have created subject lines which have got me open rates as high as 40% and clickthru rates as high as 20% however, I have also created bad subject lines which yielded open rates as bad as 8% and clickthru rates of 0.7%.
It’s very evident from my experience that a good subject line can really decide the success and failure of a campaign. Just imagine you spent hours all together with teams in brainstorming and coming up with the right strategies and communication messages. But while executing you forgot to test the subject line and spent like 5 secs. in creating something that struck you at that moment and suddenly the entire campaign fell through as people didn’t open your emails at all.
Damn it’s annoying but true, that, something as simple as a subject line can kill the productivity of a brilliantly crafted message and designed campaign.
Some examples which work … mostly:
-Personalization
-Questions
-Emotive words
-Using statistics
-Using numbers
-Using company name
Put Whitepaper: , Survey: , Tech Report: , as the starting words.
Here are some examples:
-Hello {firstname}, are you among the TOP 100 {jobtitle}?
-Hi {firstname}, 5 mins Step-by-Step approach to plan your vacation.
-77% of the {jobtitle}s have registered with us, {firstname} have you?
-Are you weak like your colleagues?
-Whitepaper: Garbage the future of energy?
-Survey: 86% of HR heads are outsourcing recruitments.
-Majority Declared: 91% of mothers spread the word.
-{Companyname} Weekly Round-up: Customers want synergy at low cost.
Email Design – Is your CTA Actionable?
CTA or Call to action is like the button on your TV remote which when triggered makes your TV do the things which you want it to do. Similarly your CTAs should be punchy and actionable. Well crafted too, so that when you take an action by clicking some link on the email you should be able to drive the relevant action from the customer/prospect.
Your CTA should be placed well in the email which is easily located. Also, it should come at a point in time that there is some suspense element, some kind of need that is created and should create urgency.
Examples:
-Using quick links in the newsletter.
-Offers should be highly visible.
-Probably using colours, images, or simple text (but should be punchy and actionable)
-For European, Asia and American geos, preferably left aligned or centre aligned
-For Middle Eastern geos, preferably right align.
-CTAs like click here should be avoided as they trigger spam filters.
-Read more…, Learn more…, Get this whitepaper here, Get your own copy, Click to continue… and more…
Email Opt-in techniques and Deliverability.
Opt-in means that your prospects and customers have chosen to communicate with you. Opt-in status “yes” means that the user wants to communicate with you or your company so its fine your communication is not unsolicited. Also your email should comply with the CAN SPAM act.
There are a lot of ways that marketers leverage to create an opt-in status of a user.
Some of the questions that you should ask to see how you are building database.
· How do you collect consent from recipients to send commercial or promotional email: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; preselected option with verification; or other?
· How do you collect consent to share email addresses with third parties or affiliates: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; pre-selected option with verification; or other?
· How do you determine whether third parties who provide you email addresses have obtained their users’ consent: in writing; reviewed their consent method; reviewed the URL where the third party obtained consent; or other?
· Do you send commercial or promotional email based on prior business relationships but without prior consent?
· Do you require users to accept your commercial or promotional email as a condition of doing business with you?
You can run whitepaper, survey, e-book, research reports, webzines, webinar download campaigns, and generate opt-ins. You can look at even banner ads or you can hire in some space in newsletters or run a contest or even better may be a viral campaign etc depending on your business needs.
Here are two email opt-in and deliverability guides from Email Labs which are a must read.
-EmailLabs – Grow Email Opt-In List
-Email Deliverabilty Guide
Key Email Marketing Metrics – CTRs, Opens, Forwards, Leads, Quotes, Revenue, Market Share
While marketers do all this jazz of email marketing, tracking, optimizing, testing the core objective in my perspective should be sales revenue. Whether it is marketing leads to sales closure or its direct marketing online closure.
So certain key metrics to be looked at can be: Clickthru rates, Open rates, Forwards (if it’s a viral), Website visits, Leads generated, Leads getting converted to quotes, and finally how much revenue is generated.
Also some of the CMOs metrics should be the market share attained. How much share holder’s value enhanced?
Clickthru rates shows 2 things:
-Whether you communicated to the right audience or not?
-Also whether your CTAs were well planned and executed?
Leads generated on the microsites or websites show if you were really able to give the experience to the prospects or not. These leads truly showcase how marketing can add value to the organization’s business objectives as well as it adds to the brand awareness.
Leads getting converted into quotes and finally into revenue is the true marketing success. Though there is element of Sales skills involved in it, however, online closure of deals is a pure, honest marketing success!
An annual review of market share expansion should be conducted by the CMO to understand the impact of the marketing and ROI analysis through various media should determine the future expenditure planning and budgeting.
An in-depth tutorial or a hand-book on email marketing or a practitioner’s guide to email marketing. I have covered various components of email marketing. I have tried to put together resources from various email marketing or lead automation solution providers in a single place.
3 years ago I got introduced to a simple yet effective concept of marketing, “Email Marketing” or “Inbox Marketing”. As simple as it sounds, it means sending an email to a prospective customer or an existing one, either to share some existing piece of information, or about informing or educating them on some new product or service that you can offer or may be just to say “Hi”.
Well Email marketing has been highly regarded for being able to get the highest returns on investments. It involves the least cost, requires the least set-up time, and you can see the responses very quickly. Though it might just sound like sending out an email, it’s not that simple!
In today’s time people can choose what they want to receive in their inbox. The good old ways of pushing the message in someone’s inbox is gone. Today’s it’s about the 4Rs of Email Marketing: - Relation, Request, Relevance and Returns/Revenue.
In simple words, today marketers need to strike up an engaging relation with prospects or customers during which the customers could request for some information and the content that you are offering should be relevant to the customers or prospects to get real returns on your investments (Revenue).
Components of Email Marketing
-Email Content
-Email Subject Lines
-Email Testing
-Email Design CTAs
-Email Opt-in Techniques
-Deliverability
-Key metrics – CTRs, Opens, Forwards
4 Rs in Action: - Relation building – Requesting Opt-in – providing Relevancy - ROI
Email Content – Keep the promise!
How do you build a relation with your friends? May be you get introduced by someone to a friend or may be you met someone somewhere (online in this case) or may be you just make a promise and live up to it and strengthen your relation with friends and over a period of time convert them to loyal friends.
It’s something similar in case of a customer relationship management through email marketing. Let’s say you were running an ad in a website or hired some space in a targeted newsletter and you were offering something useful for a prospective customer, you started generating traffic to your website through it and got people interested and started increasing your list size. Now, what is important is that you should remember to “keep the promise”, the promise that you made while gathering the information of the prospect. You made a promise to deliver a useful and relevant piece of information like a whitepaper, survey, research report etc. Obviously you should focus on your business, definitely, however, keep your promise by investing in the promise that you made continuously. Or else, you would be not more than anyone else in the same business. The only way you can differentiate is by keeping your promise to the customer during the time you acquired that customer’s relation.
As relevancy is taking the utmost importance in today’s time, it’s imperative to deliver highly relevant content. There are various ways to achieve this. You can manage your CRM system effectively and capture various details about your customers and prospects and leverage that date for delivering highly relevant content. This is no rocket science. It’s something which Google.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com and many other companies do, by learning about your preference and delivering what you need.
Additionally you can look at Omniture Segmentation Guide, Docmetrics - Document Optimization, Silverpops – Testing Methodology, Forrester’s Web Analytics report, Geographical optimization, Behavioral Triggering and Instance based triggering.
So let’s say while you are building your CRM database, keep a field open which says “Acquisition Source” which can be a pick list with values like: Banner Ads, Ad Words, Referral, Forward from a Friend etc. However, important thing to notice is to keep another field which says offer chosen like: Whitepaper, Survey, Research Report, Tech Paper, Event registration, Tips and tricks, Videos etc.
Just by doing this small activity you know later on what the interest type of the person was, so that the next time you wish to roll out some offer, you can just bundle it with another Whitepaper, Video, Survey etc and you were able to deliver on your promise while keeping your relation and relevancy.
Some important things to keep in mind are not to use potential SPAM words in the content or else your email deliverability will get hurt. Find the list of TOP 100 potential spam words here.
Email Design and Subject Lines
46% of Marketers take 15 secs to create email Subject Lines
One of the most important things in email marketing / website content development is the subject lines. Even though the above statistic is just an example to showcase that how a good subject line should be, simultaneously, it’s an indication that a lot of marketers do not spend enough time in creating subject lines.
I have created subject lines which have got me open rates as high as 40% and clickthru rates as high as 20% however, I have also created bad subject lines which yielded open rates as bad as 8% and clickthru rates of 0.7%.
It’s very evident from my experience that a good subject line can really decide the success and failure of a campaign. Just imagine you spent hours all together with teams in brainstorming and coming up with the right strategies and communication messages. But while executing you forgot to test the subject line and spent like 5 secs. in creating something that struck you at that moment and suddenly the entire campaign fell through as people didn’t open your emails at all.
Damn it’s annoying but true, that, something as simple as a subject line can kill the productivity of a brilliantly crafted message and designed campaign.
Some examples which work … mostly:
-Personalization
-Questions
-Emotive words
-Using statistics
-Using numbers
-Using company name
Put Whitepaper: , Survey: , Tech Report: , as the starting words.
Here are some examples:
-Hello {firstname}, are you among the TOP 100 {jobtitle}?
-Hi {firstname}, 5 mins Step-by-Step approach to plan your vacation.
-77% of the {jobtitle}s have registered with us, {firstname} have you?
-Are you weak like your colleagues?
-Whitepaper: Garbage the future of energy?
-Survey: 86% of HR heads are outsourcing recruitments.
-Majority Declared: 91% of mothers spread the word.
-{Companyname} Weekly Round-up: Customers want synergy at low cost.
Email Design – Is your CTA Actionable?
CTA or Call to action is like the button on your TV remote which when triggered makes your TV do the things which you want it to do. Similarly your CTAs should be punchy and actionable. Well crafted too, so that when you take an action by clicking some link on the email you should be able to drive the relevant action from the customer/prospect.
Your CTA should be placed well in the email which is easily located. Also, it should come at a point in time that there is some suspense element, some kind of need that is created and should create urgency.
Examples:
-Using quick links in the newsletter.
-Offers should be highly visible.
-Probably using colours, images, or simple text (but should be punchy and actionable)
-For European, Asia and American geos, preferably left aligned or centre aligned
-For Middle Eastern geos, preferably right align.
-CTAs like click here should be avoided as they trigger spam filters.
-Read more…, Learn more…, Get this whitepaper here, Get your own copy, Click to continue… and more…
Email Opt-in techniques and Deliverability.
Opt-in means that your prospects and customers have chosen to communicate with you. Opt-in status “yes” means that the user wants to communicate with you or your company so its fine your communication is not unsolicited. Also your email should comply with the CAN SPAM act.
There are a lot of ways that marketers leverage to create an opt-in status of a user.
Some of the questions that you should ask to see how you are building database.
· How do you collect consent from recipients to send commercial or promotional email: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; preselected option with verification; or other?
· How do you collect consent to share email addresses with third parties or affiliates: double opt-in, opt-in with verification; opt-in; pre-selected option with verification; or other?
· How do you determine whether third parties who provide you email addresses have obtained their users’ consent: in writing; reviewed their consent method; reviewed the URL where the third party obtained consent; or other?
· Do you send commercial or promotional email based on prior business relationships but without prior consent?
· Do you require users to accept your commercial or promotional email as a condition of doing business with you?
You can run whitepaper, survey, e-book, research reports, webzines, webinar download campaigns, and generate opt-ins. You can look at even banner ads or you can hire in some space in newsletters or run a contest or even better may be a viral campaign etc depending on your business needs.
Here are two email opt-in and deliverability guides from Email Labs which are a must read.
-EmailLabs – Grow Email Opt-In List
-Email Deliverabilty Guide
Key Email Marketing Metrics – CTRs, Opens, Forwards, Leads, Quotes, Revenue, Market Share
While marketers do all this jazz of email marketing, tracking, optimizing, testing the core objective in my perspective should be sales revenue. Whether it is marketing leads to sales closure or its direct marketing online closure.
So certain key metrics to be looked at can be: Clickthru rates, Open rates, Forwards (if it’s a viral), Website visits, Leads generated, Leads getting converted to quotes, and finally how much revenue is generated.
Also some of the CMOs metrics should be the market share attained. How much share holder’s value enhanced?
Clickthru rates shows 2 things:
-Whether you communicated to the right audience or not?
-Also whether your CTAs were well planned and executed?
Leads generated on the microsites or websites show if you were really able to give the experience to the prospects or not. These leads truly showcase how marketing can add value to the organization’s business objectives as well as it adds to the brand awareness.
Leads getting converted into quotes and finally into revenue is the true marketing success. Though there is element of Sales skills involved in it, however, online closure of deals is a pure, honest marketing success!
An annual review of market share expansion should be conducted by the CMO to understand the impact of the marketing and ROI analysis through various media should determine the future expenditure planning and budgeting.
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