The Innovative Marketer

Send Email. Not too much. Mostly educational.

Just finished reading Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, where he distills his approach to eating healthy down to seven simple words: "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  What's beautiful about that is that it's general enough that everyone can follow it, and open for interpretation so that it can fit with anyone's lifestyle.

Last week, I stopped by the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami, and it seemed like marketers from every industry, at every level, were grappling with questions about segmentation, frequency of sending email, types of message to send.

So with a nod to Pollan, let me suggest an approach that may fit into any marketer's email marketing approach.

Send email.

No, email marketing is not dead.  If anything, corporate spending on the medium is increasing, and as the next wave of personalization and preference technology becomes more ubiquitous, and spam filters get better, It seems as if a new age of email marketing is nearly upon us.

Not too much.

Sitting with a bunch of my customers in Atlanta, I asked how much email to them from our company was too much.  The consensus was that there is no consensus.

It reminds me of a question I asked the audience at the OMS in San Diego a few weeks ago:  How do you know when your toast is done?

  Some people like their bread toasted super light, barely warm.  Others like it burn crispy so that the melted butter glosses the top of it.    So how much email is too much?  You have to ask your customers.  They're generally more than happy to let you know.   Keeping an eye on their Digital Body Language, their online behavior in reaction to your email send, is the best way to track their interest.

Mostly educational.

This was clear, both at the Sherpa show and at our customer group meeting.  If you are sending email on an ongoing basis to your customers, whether it's a regular newsletter, a multi-touch nurturing program, or an introductory note, be sure that what you communicate is of more value to them than their perceived value of their attention.

In a commercial transaction (as opposed to personal), there is an economy of information, where people trade their attention to you in exchange for something of value -- a new approach, an idea as to how to do their job better, some research that allows them to compare themselves to their peers.

If what you're sending is mostly educational, your perceived value will be high to your recipients, and you will find your open rates go up, your response rates increase.  And you'll likely find that you are top of mind when the customer is ready to move from the investigative phase of their buying cycle into the consideration phase.

More from Sherpa

Other bloggers have written about their impression of the event.  Here are some of the summaries I’ve read:

New objectives in email writing in 2008
http://emailgarage.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/day-3-new-objectives-in-email-marketing-for-2008/

Janine from VResponse had some interesting observations and I'm now 0 for 3 on events we're both at, but have no conversation longer than "hey there."  with her.    Check out her notes:
http://blog.verticalresponse.com/

And Duct Tape Marketing's Ubertaper John Jantsch scored an interview with Sherpa chief Eric Stockton to talk about Sherpa's mission and it's future.

Write for the Preview Pane

I'm normally a vicous spam eradicator.  Don't normally give them even a second glance. But something crept into my inbox today that made me think about a topic I speak about when coaching people on writing effective email: Write for the preview pane.

How are you?

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (URL omitted) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)

Most email readers have some kind of message preview feature, which shows the top portion of a message without the user's need to click on it.  Yahoo and Google are implementing this feature within their mail clients as well.

This entire message fits into my Outlook preview pane.  You don't have to click to open it to process the message. It tells a story, a ridiculous, absurd story, but it is a story. It has a call to action (what's with the partial 800 number?) and a conclusion -- all within four lines of copy.

What if you constructed your offers as compactly as this one? 

Eternal sunshine of the spotless email

Playing around with Outlook 2007, I discovered some email that previously displayed perfectly in my older version of Office began to look a little, well, stark.  Turns out, the new version of Office uses Microsoft Word for formatting instead of its own HTML rendering engine.  What does this mean for you?

Well, as reported in several places (here, here and here, for example), email that you expect Outlook users to read cannot, for example:

• Contain embedded forms within the message
• Include any background images or animated GIFs
• Display video or flash or other media types that need a plugin to be installed to the browser
• Render certain types of cascading style sheets, a popular tool designers use to create the look of eNewsletters

You can read the complete spec here.

Since most of the business users you are emailing to are using Outlook, this change will certainly affect your response rates.  Once again, content is going to win the day, as marketers with the most compelling stories to tell will stand out. 

Here's a snippet of a newsletter I received from a rancher from whom we buy grass-fed beef.  Notice there are no widgets or geegaws here, just engaging copy that propels you further into it:

Dear Friends,

When you own or manage livestock on rangelands in California, winter can be an emotional roller-coaster. We own a cow herd from which we harvest the animals that we sell as Morris Grassfed Beef™. We also manage cattle owned by others, known as “stockers”, as they stock the ranch temporarily. The cattle come to California for the winter and spring and then migrate—via interstate—to their home ranges in the early summer. On one of our ranches, the cattle are almost entirely dependent on rain runoff for their water, so the relationship between them is quite direct: no rain, no water, no cattle. We have not received enough rain to fill the ponds on the ranch this winter, so we have been able to put only half the normal number of cattle on the ranch. The other half has had to wait in Nevada for rain here. The problem is, it is the other half of the cattle the makesthe ranch economically workable.

The close relationship ranchers have with the weather makes us keenly sensitive to the variations in light and wind patterns. That buckaroo riding into the west is probably gazing at the setting sun and praying mightily fora cloud to appear. At a branding the other day, a warmish breeze blew in from the south, the whole crew stopped to feel it on their skin and to remark what each of us already was thinking: when we get a breeze from the south, rain is not far behind. The threat of imminent rain on a branding day is usually cause for anxiety and hurry, but this year we would have put up with a good soaking rain with joy.

And now it is raining. That is good news. Let’s hope the ponds fill. The grass is looking good, and so are the cattle. Our breeding program seems to be paying off, for this year’s weaned calves look better than ever. It is easy to make calves. It is not easy to make tough animals with tender meat, but that is our goal. Our animals have to be hardy to thrive on only what the range provides. That is the lowly cow’s lofty purpose. She thrives caring for the grasses and other plants that support her and her. “Where the wild things are” is more that just a children’s story for T. O. Cattle Company: the “wild” is our model.

No animated cows moseying across the computer screen, no videos of the pasture, no exquisitely designed typefaces.  Just a story, a brain movie that engages you and claims a piece of your attention.  And that's all we can ask for from our customers.

3 Things You Should Know About Email Marketing

1.  Use the same call to action link in multiple places.
2.  Craft the layout of your copy so users can easily scan the content.
3.  Be succinct.

(thanks to the people in the elevator for prompting this posting)

Your Newsletter Gets an F

What do people see when they look at your organization's newsletter?  Despite our fervent wishes, people don't eagerly consume each word, nor do they even read your content in the order it's presented. 

Rather, according to Jakob Nielsen's eyetracking study, people tend to read horizontally across the upper part of the content area, then move down the page in a shorter horizontal movement, then finally swipe their eyes across a vertical area on the left-hand side of the page.  In essence, here's the dominant reading pattern:

F

Nielsen's implications:

1. Once again, we learn that users don't read on the web; they scan the text. We should design our newsletters for scannability, rather than readability.
2. Put your most important information at the top of the page.  Don't bury your content OR your call to action, deeper down.
3. Put action words early in your headlines.

Email Marketing is NOT Web 2.0

Yes, the new web bubble hysteria is building, and with every point rise in the Nasdaq, people who have no idea what they're talking about are repositioning themselves and their companies as players in the Web 2.0 "space."

Fact is, Web 2.0 is all about collaboration, about user control of their experience and about remixability and participation. 

Well, guess what?  Email has none of those attributes, especially the way many people practice it.  Fact is, email used as a point solution, in the absence of any kind of ongoing intelligence about the customer, is often used as a symbol about what is WRONG with the Internet.  And that's so... Web 1.0.

Unless you have a two-way conversation with customers, where they indicate interest in how, when and what you communicate to them, you're going to be viewed as increasingly irrelevant to your customers' lives.  And that's worse than not being viewed at all.

Get Certifyed Web 2.0 compliant.

Lowlights of Deliverability Panel

There are 60-65 billion email messages are sent each day.  AOL reports that 90% of the email they intake is spam.

11:33 a.m. first mention of AOL and Goodmail.

Holy cow!  Seven panelists, all from competing companies, all trying to position themselves relative to one another.  I just want to learn what the future holds for email delivery to consumers.  Recommendation for next year:  Get an analyst or two to speak, rather than have a vendor slugfest.  Most of the attendees I spoke to left this session more confused than when they entered.

Fun with math

Flint McGlaughlin - Director, MarketingExperiments, begins to talk theory, but then presents a results slide which indicates that by applying a complex formula they created, their client saw over an 800% increase in subscriber growth.

Created a formula to apply to offer pages to determine why they convert traffic.

C = 4m + 3v+2(i-f)-2a

where

c = probability of conversion (email capture)
M = motivation of user (when)
V = clarity of value proposition (why)
i = incentive to take action
f = friction elements of process
a = anxiety about entering email

He walks us through the case study where he applies this formula.  I'll post a link to the slideware later on.

More notes from morning session

Todd Watermann from Christianity Today International.

They have a permanent place for their newsletter on their organization's home page.  Some interesting how-they-do-its, but

what's notable is that every organization I talk to these days that is doing email successfully does this:

They flow chart the flow of the campaign; that is, they don't think about single emails any more, but rather multiple mail sent as part of an overall program.  Fire up the Visio!

Todd hammers home an important point:  your email must be FROM a person. It must have a human voice.  And it must be TO a person.  That is, it must acknowledge that there is a real person on the receiving end and it should speak to them as if they were face-to-face.

CT uses Please note: copy at the top of the page (should appear in the preview pane).  Calls attention to the most

--------------------------------

Nick Usborne, who works for MarketingExperiments and publishes the Excess Voice newsletter, speaks next.

Nick talks about newsletter co-registration, so they can sign up for related newsletters when they sign up for yours.  And partnering with others who will do the same for you.  But don't go into a relationship where money changes hands. Rather, look

for value and benefits to your subscribers.  He suggests on the sign-up thank you page, you offer a free download of something as an incentive, then provide links to subscribe to related newsletters.

Brings up a topic that I think will be a recurring theme of the show here:  don't think that by building your list to twice its size that you will double its quality.

Anne Holland: Email marketing is not dead

After a short delay to process the sold-out crowd, Anne Holland is on stage now.

Notes from her talk:

All the opinions out there that "email marketing is dead" are just that.  In fact, clickthrough rates are holding steady.  Nothing is dying -- it's the same.  Conversion rates are up (because people are getting better with offers and landing page use is up), and average list growth is 38.4%/year.

The problem, she says, isn't email, it's what people does with it.  Dynamic content, testing, segmentation are what people need to focus on the most.

If your list is less than 10,000 names, you still need to segment.  Even 5,000 names, you can do testing to a split list and determine what offer pulls better.

Recommendation:  Don't send email in-house.  The only people who should be doing it themselves are extremely large emailers who know what they are doing  Email is very complex, and you should leave it to the experts.

But how do you meet the budget challenge?   Email generated 14 percent of traffic to web sites, but only took 9% of the share of the online budget.

Next presenter up shortly...