Let’s face it. It takes time and patience to develop a good e-mail subscriber list. First, you have to make it easy for individuals to add and update their e-mail addresses. Second, every time you e-mail them, you run the risk that they might unsubscribe. Third, maintaining the e-mail list requires that you clean the file (e.g., remove hard bounces), e-mail frequently to keep subscribers engaged and send targeted, timely and relevant e-mails.

 It is not surprising then that I am routinely asked about purchasing e-mail addresses. My standard answer is to be prepared to pay a lot and to get few responses relative to your investment. A recent Limeduck post illustrates what can happen when you purchase e-mail addresses.

Direct mail marketers face several challenges. First and foremost, they get no respect. Almost everyone refers to direct mail as junk mail and many think it is bad for the environment. Second, their business has been negatively affected by the current economic conditions. The credit card companies who were responsible for mountains of solicitations have fallen on hard times and reduced their mail volume. Third, e-mail is replacing some direct mail as it is cheaper and offers the same measurability as direct mail. And now there is news of Postal Service carriers who did not deliver the mail entrusted to them.

According to a recent Associated Press article, one Postal Service carrier stored third class mail in his garage for six years. He was placed on probation and fined $3,000 but an e-mail marketing firm, MailChimp, paid the penalty. AP reported that Ben Chestnut of MailChimp said, “We’re doing everything we can to stop junk mail.”

Most of what I have written this year about e-mail marketing has been complaints.  So these are my New Year’s resolutions for e-mail marketers:

1.  Target your e-mails.  Resist the temptation to blast everyone on your list regardless of whether they will be interested in what you have to say.  A good e-mail is timely and relevant.  If you send out too many e-mails, your recipients will report your e-mails as spam, hurting your reputation and possibly your ability to send e-mails in the future. 

2.  Send trigger emails.  I am a big fan of Barnes and Noble.  I love purchasing books on-line and they make it so easy for me.  For example, their website indicates how quickly each book typically ships.  When I place an order, I receive confirmation almost instantaneously and then am kept abreast of the shipping status of my order.  I love knowing exactly where my books are and when I can expect to receive them.  As a result, I appreciate trigger emails and expect them to be timely.  If I sign up for a new service on-line, I expect to receive a welcome e-mail within 24 hours, if not sooner.  I am amazed and disappointed by organizations that do not send trigger emails as they are important for reinforcing the relationship and offer an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity. 

3.  Create a preference center and follow it.  Allow subscribers to determine the frequency, content and even form of communication.   DailyLit is a great example I wrote about.  DailyLit allows subscribers to choose the amount of text they receive, the frequency and timing of communication and whether users receive emails or RSS feeds.  Thus, their communication is more likely to be read.

4.  Create your emails with image blocking in mind.  I wrote about image blocking in one post and then had to resist doing it again and again as I received more and more e-mails that clearly were not designed for e-mail providers who automatically blocked images.

5.  Reactivate or eliminate inactive e-mail subscribers.  As I noted in an earlier post, it is nice to be asked if you want to continue to receive emails from an organization.  This gentle reminder reengaged me and reestablished a relationship.  Alternatively, marketers could create a formal reactivation campaign as part of their campaign cycle. 

6.  Measure your campaigns and continuously learn.  I believe strongly in testing and measurement, comparing campaigns to benchmark rates or past campaigns, and determining the return on investment (ROI) of campaigns.  In the end, everyone one wants to know what worked, what did not work and whether the campaign was successful.  If you are interested, past posts have provided sources for e-mail metrics and a discussion of A/B testing. 

Happy New Year!

Recently I received an e-mail from a local art gallery that was updating its subscriber list.  They sent me a brief e-mail letting me know that they were moving their e-mail list over to a new host and, due to its strict anti-spam policies, they asked that I confirm my desire to subscribe and receive periodic e-mails from them.  All I needed to do was click on an embedded URL to verify my subscription.  If I chose not to subscribe, I had to do nothing.  Ignoring this request would result in my deletion from their e-mail list.

This was a great e-mail, because it …

1. was short and to the point
2. made it extremely easy for me to re-subscribe by including the URL in the e-mail
3. followed best practices by asking for me to opt-in (it is best practices to ask consumers to opt-in but for businesses, it is more common to ask them to opt-out)

Consider asking consumers to opt-in.  The quantity of e-mail addresses in your subscription list will diminish but your list will be the better for it.  Only those engaged and interested in your products and services will remain. 

To keep my niece entertained during long car rides, I tell her the story of Odysseus (also known as Ulysses).  If you start with the Iliad, which I do because it was Odysseus’ idea to build the Trojan Horse after all, and then move onto the Odyssey, you can pleasurably fill quite a lot of time.  So she’s 6 years old.  Can you ever be too young for Homer?

Well, there’s another Ulysses I was hoping to conquer.  This one was written by James Joyce.  I have begun subscribing to an e-mail service that provides excerpts of books.   It is from DailyLit.  I tried it on a lark and am enjoying the brief but intense dose of literature in my inbox each weekday.  That is, once I get over the dread and open the e-mail.  I loved Dubliners so why the dread of Ulysses?  It certainly has a reputation for being difficult but that is partly why the e-mails are perfect for me.  I can savor the book in small doses and read them when I have the time and focus needed.   Further, seeing them in my inbox each day encourages me to read them.

The e-mails from DailyLit are what e-mails should be — relevant, timely and meaningful to the recipient.  In this case, I selected the book from a myriad of choices and set the frequency.  My choices were daily, weekdays or Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Further, I was able to schedule the time of the e-mail or RSS feed.  Other e-mail senders can learn from the customer preferences provided by DailyLit.

Book Vending Machine © Craig Alexander

Have you heard this one before?  If you put two analysts together what do you get?  Three opinions.  Okay, so it wasn’t a very good joke but I have certainly had conversations with analysts where it seemed like I was talking to Sybil.

This is my way of saying that I understand if you are sceptical about the following link to Email Marketing Q&A.  However, it was created by the Email Experience Council of the DMA.   Also, if you are new to e-mail marketing, you might find it helpful.  If you don’t find it useful or relevant, please let me know.

I was catching up on Tangyslice’s blog and enjoying his 5 meaningless marketing metrics post, when I thought of another meaningless metric.  Last week I was reading a presentation which described the response rate of one group as slightly greater than the control group.  What does slightly greater mean in this context?  Well, it turns out the difference was statistically significant once I did the math.  What I find meaningless is when analysts do not look for statistical significance when comparing two groups.  This is known as A/B Testing.

Conceptually A/B testing is very simple.  You are comparing Group A to Group B.  A might be a control group and B the test group.  Alternatively, A and B might be two different offers, landing pages, e-mails, direct mail lists, or landing pages.  As the name suggests, this is a test which is why A/B testing is also known as split testing.  Ultimately, you want to know if A and B differ in a way that is statistically significant.

Here’s an example to make it concrete. Let’s say that you marketed to 50,000 customers encouraging them to purchase product A and 5,000 of them responded. That is a 10% response rate. In addition, there were 5,000 customers that you could have marketed to but that you did not.  Instead, you assigned them to the control group.  They look and act just like the 50,000 customers that you mailed. The reason for the control group is that some customers might buy product A regardless of whether you market to them or not.  In this example, 450 of them or 9% purchased the product. Is the difference between 10% and 9% statistically significant?  Was the campaign successful?

In this case, we perform the two-proportion z-test for equal variances using the following formula:

and

where…

p1=10% (response rate for Group A)

p2=9% (response rate for Group B)

x1=5,000 (number of responders in Group A)

X2=450 (number of responders in Group B)

n1=50,000 (quantity mailed in Group A)

n2=5,000 (quantity mailed in Group B)

If the value of z is greater than 1.96 then the difference is significant at 95% confidence.  In this case, the z value is 2.26 so the difference is statistically significant.

In order for the test to be valid a few assumptions must be met:
1. Your control group needs to contain customers or prospects that look and behave like the treatment group
2. You need to have sufficient numbers of direct mail recipients and responders such that n₁ p₁ > 5 AND n₁(1 − p₁) > 5 and n₂ p₂ > 5 and n₂(1 − p₂) > 5 and n2>29 and the groups contain independent observations

The math might look scary but really the hard part is making sure that the test is done properly.  It is vital that the control contains a random selection of customers who are similar to the treatment group.  If not, you could end up with very strange results

If you have been reading Limeduck like I have, you might have read about a Rockport print ad showing shoes that are not available for purchase.  As I noted on that website, this has happened before.  In a Marketing class several years ago, my professor showed a television ad featuring a car that could not be purchased.  As you can imagine, consumers saw the car and went to their local dealerships looking for that car only to learn that it wasn’t available.  Given that high profile mistake, I am surprised that Rockport made the same gaffe.

And yet, just today I received an e-mail that I wanted to share.  In an earlier post, I talked about how some e-mail programs do not load images.  This was in the context of measuring the open rate of an e-mail.  However, the fact that some e-mail software turns images off by default also affects the look and feel of an e-mail.  Here’s what the e-mail looked like:

In the image above, pictures have been replaced by boxes featuring red squares, blue triangles and green circles.  All of the time spent crafting a beautifully designed e-mail is lost if recipients cannot quickly read about the offer(s) and easily engage with the e-mail. I certainly did not bother to display the images in this e-mail.

Clients ask me about e-mail open rates and, honestly, they are not what they used to be.  In fact, they no longer matter for many reasons but here are my top three:

1. False negatives.  An e-mail is considered opened when a tracking image is downloaded.   However, major e-mail clients like gmail disable images by default.   If you read the e-mail with the images disabled, it will never be counted as an open.   And what about text e-mails?  They do not include images and thus do not count as opens unless you click on a link (and even that might be e-mail software dependent).

2.  False positives.  Let’s assume that images are enabled.  E-mails displayed in a preview pane are considered opened because the images were downloaded.  But who always reads the e-mails in their preview pane?  I don’t and I bet you don’t either.   So you have undercounting due to the disablement of images and overcounting due to the use of preview panes.

3.  What really matters is the action taken.  To me, the true success of an e-mail marketing campaign is whether you drove the desired action.  Did you sell more widgets as a result of the e-mail campaign?  If not, the open rate is moot.