Showing posts with label analytics-measurement-metrics-reporting-statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label analytics-measurement-metrics-reporting-statistics. Show all posts
Beating Amazon's Bulk Email Marketing Strategy
Amazon is widely seen as the number one site for relevant, targeted user content on their ecommerce platform. This view seems to have leaked over into their email marketing but is their email marketing as good as we think it is. In short, "nope it ain't". Here is why it ain't, why they get away with it and how you can do it better than them...read on
EMR: Email software popularity: 5 lessons for your list
In "Email software popularity: 5 lessons for your list" Mark tells us how to get even more from email depending on on your recipients' email client.
Even though the email standards project guys have tried gallantly we still have no real html standards but we are close and some of the ISPs have updating their clients to be more in with the standards the industry know it should be working with. Mobile is still a bit of a git though!
Any as per usual Mark Brownlow has nailed it, read this and have a play with some of the tools he suggests.
As Fingerprint is from the same guys as Litmus, this functionality should be in every ESP pretty soon.
I was having a chat with the one of the Web guys from Pure360 and he said he'd seen the patterns and it might even be do-able in the platform as part of the normal delivery report? fingers crossed for the next-next feature upgrade. It won't be in the next one because Automations is out in December - very exited!
Even though the email standards project guys have tried gallantly we still have no real html standards but we are close and some of the ISPs have updating their clients to be more in with the standards the industry know it should be working with. Mobile is still a bit of a git though!
Any as per usual Mark Brownlow has nailed it, read this and have a play with some of the tools he suggests.
As Fingerprint is from the same guys as Litmus, this functionality should be in every ESP pretty soon.
I was having a chat with the one of the Web guys from Pure360 and he said he'd seen the patterns and it might even be do-able in the platform as part of the normal delivery report? fingers crossed for the next-next feature upgrade. It won't be in the next one because Automations is out in December - very exited!
Blue Sky Factory
Another classic from the guys at Blue Sky Factory:
5 MORE Things All Email Marketers Need to Know
Reports, templates, and lists – oh my!
There are many aspects of an email marketing campaign. From building a list to analyzing campaign results, email marketers have a lot to keep track of. I recently posted a basic list of 5 things all email marketers need to know, but was asked to do a similar list with information that’s, well, a little less basic. (And while you’re here, save some trees. Just click on the image to the right.)
Ask and you shall receive. Here goes...read on
October 29th, 2009 by Amy Garland
5 MORE Things All Email Marketers Need to Know
Reports, templates, and lists – oh my!
There are many aspects of an email marketing campaign. From building a list to analyzing campaign results, email marketers have a lot to keep track of. I recently posted a basic list of 5 things all email marketers need to know, but was asked to do a similar list with information that’s, well, a little less basic. (And while you’re here, save some trees. Just click on the image to the right.)
Ask and you shall receive. Here goes...read on
October 29th, 2009 by Amy Garland
EMR: Assessing the best time to send email
In line with Marc Munier's article about misconceptions in email timing, the legend of Mark Brownlow has done his home work again and really gone to town, this guy knows his stuff and it is all on his web-site for us to use!
Assessing the best time to send email, As well as being a must read it also takes you on a journey through where you can find out what email is right now and where it is going. read everything this guys writes.
Assessing the best time to send email, As well as being a must read it also takes you on a journey through where you can find out what email is right now and where it is going. read everything this guys writes.
Pure360: Morning boosts and afternoon apathy
The media’s stereotype of employees taking advantage of work-based email and internet to browse online is leading marketers astray. Consumers’ behavioural patterns continually shift throughout the working day and email marketing providers must be aware of the changeable consumer mood if they are to reap the rewards.
For example, many marketing professionals believe that lunchtime is the perfect opportunity to engage with their audience. But new research by Pure360 contradicts this theory. Contrary to popular assumptions, the volume of marketing emails opened actually drops markedly during the lunch hour.
In fact, recipients are far more likely to open emails in their own time rather than at work. Almost half (48%) of all marketing emails were opened outside office hours. Marketers would benefit by targeting consumers at specific times of the day, instead of relying on ‘gut instinct’.
Pure360 analysed hundreds of thousands of emails sent by 34 companies and discovered that a mere 9% of the emails sent were opened between noon and 2pm. Sixty two per cent of those opened were news or magazine alerts rather than promotions on goods or services. It seems that employees like to spend their lunchtimes catching up on all the latest news, sport and gossip and are significantly less receptive to marketing emails during this period than at other times of the day...read on
Oct 29 2009 on Brand Republic by Pure360
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Don't forget, some of this timing can be taken of for you with the right ESP.
For example, many marketing professionals believe that lunchtime is the perfect opportunity to engage with their audience. But new research by Pure360 contradicts this theory. Contrary to popular assumptions, the volume of marketing emails opened actually drops markedly during the lunch hour.
In fact, recipients are far more likely to open emails in their own time rather than at work. Almost half (48%) of all marketing emails were opened outside office hours. Marketers would benefit by targeting consumers at specific times of the day, instead of relying on ‘gut instinct’.
Pure360 analysed hundreds of thousands of emails sent by 34 companies and discovered that a mere 9% of the emails sent were opened between noon and 2pm. Sixty two per cent of those opened were news or magazine alerts rather than promotions on goods or services. It seems that employees like to spend their lunchtimes catching up on all the latest news, sport and gossip and are significantly less receptive to marketing emails during this period than at other times of the day...read on
Oct 29 2009 on Brand Republic by Pure360
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Don't forget, some of this timing can be taken of for you with the right ESP.
iPost: Email subscriber list management: Don’t forget your middle child
"The middle child on your email subscriber list needs some attention.
Those high-achieving oldest children—email subscribers who are active, engaged and likely to purchase—garner a lot of praise and interest. And a good amount of time is spent worrying about those rebellious younger children—those subscribers who have officially opted out.
But what about those who are technically subscribed to your emails, but are inactive and uninterested? These subscribers quickly delete your emails without reading them, but haven’t taken the effort to opt-out. It’s time to think about those middle children, or the “emotionally unsubscribed” as marketing blogger Joanna Lawson Matthew calls them"...read on
Posted by Bart Schaefer - September 10th, 2009
Captain Inbox says:
Never a truer word spoken, it is very easy to leave these guys to it and focus on the big clickers.
Also if you are already that white noise in their inbox you may have to come from a very different angle to get their attention. For instance a different from domain or address, a new style of subject-line and new creative etc. etc. ask for feedback and start a new dialogue.
Those high-achieving oldest children—email subscribers who are active, engaged and likely to purchase—garner a lot of praise and interest. And a good amount of time is spent worrying about those rebellious younger children—those subscribers who have officially opted out.
But what about those who are technically subscribed to your emails, but are inactive and uninterested? These subscribers quickly delete your emails without reading them, but haven’t taken the effort to opt-out. It’s time to think about those middle children, or the “emotionally unsubscribed” as marketing blogger Joanna Lawson Matthew calls them"...read on
Posted by Bart Schaefer - September 10th, 2009
Captain Inbox says:
Never a truer word spoken, it is very easy to leave these guys to it and focus on the big clickers.
Also if you are already that white noise in their inbox you may have to come from a very different angle to get their attention. For instance a different from domain or address, a new style of subject-line and new creative etc. etc. ask for feedback and start a new dialogue.
sign-up.to benchmark report
Sign-up.to have done their first pretty large scale report.
It's quite a good read with some very interesting stats.
The fact that the government emails have the best stats cannot really be a surprise and from some angles they might as well be dismissed as many of their emails are so necessary they are almost transactional!
Publishing is one to look out for as primarily that market has been more print related and the digital boom has caused some problems for them. With all of today's free on-line content they have all been trying to find ways to keep the advertisers happy while trying to keep the readers paying too. Some papers have gone completely free - and some of them are now giant adverts with some articles, some have found ways to get paid for content on-line and there is more of that to come. I know Robin Kennedy is up to his eye in paid for content strategy for publishers and it is a great concept but a sensitive one.
Spotting spam, can you do it, should you make the effort?
Back on the 15 of September Patricio Roblesm for Econsultancy listed out 10 ways to avoid spam in all of it's forms. Were about email.
One of those 6 was "Be careful about unsubscribing" - I believe that this needs some elaboration. The last thing the industry needs is people not trusting the optout link on legitimate emails.
"Surely if the email is legit the recipient will know the sender, be expecting their email and know to trust the optout link" - I hear you cry (faintly in the distance).
Well, there is a lot of email marketing going on and some people don't know it as well as others and as new fads and conventions come about some users just on certain band wagons. For instance on company sends a B2B email once a quarter to a few thousand people, one day they read an article about re-targeting so they get their old list of people and try to bring them back on board. Half of these people might not remember this brand, yes it is not the best practice but it still happens.
If the creative is rubbish you might not even trust to load the images but it still happens.
You need to know what to look for in an email which you do not recognise but has an unsubscribe link. You need to know that when you hit that opt-out link you are actually opting out and not telling a spammer that your address exists.
But what is the point, why care? If you don't recognise it, just hit spam!
Fair point, if the sender gets it wrong, they have abused the trust you have given them so mark it as spam.
If they use an ESP, marking as spam in at least Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL should also get you optout because the EPS should be on their feedback loop. Strangely I can't see Gmail with one, they seem to be about those List Headers!
If not you just tell your email client to not put it in the inbox any more and tell your ISP that this lot or spammers. The ISP then knocks a load of point of the IP reputation of the sender and gets on with it.
Is there a way? Nothing consistent to be honest. The old way was to take the domain out of the email address and paste it into the address bar and see if you get to a web-site that resembles the company sending it.
But nowadays from sending domain is often a dedicated sending domain for email and night not always got back to the home page, often this is a bi-product of using an ESP. This also counts for the links. Mark at Email Marketing Reports wrote a cool one about tracked links - and also said that Pure360 was one of the best too!
So that kicks that idea into touch.
Phishing
One thing to always check is the link text and the link destination. If the link text you can read on the page says something like www.natwest.co.uk but when you hover over the link and look at the bottom of the browser, where it says where the link is actually going, if it says www.imgonnastealyourmoney.com you can be fairly sure that it is a phishing email. Most email clients will spot this for you and either junk it or a least flag but it is still the first thing to look out for.
A recent load of spam that I have seen is to me and from me. This is quite cheeky as it get past a lot of the filters because my domain is white listed on my email server.
One thing you can always do if you are worried about the optout link but you want to try and optout is to forward the email to abuse@ the domain sending the email and the domain in the reply address if it is different. If there is an ESP that should get you optout out too if it is an agency they'll jump on it and optout you out and if it is a business their postmaster should taker action. IF it is a proper spammer, you'll probably get a hard bounce back!
BlueSkyFactory: Preference Centres - I'd take it further
This is the second time today I have had the opportunity to mention a previous post - I hope that doesn't mean I've covered it all now?
Anyway, a while back I mentioned email preference centres and it came up again recently when talking about Unsubscribe surveys.
About two weeks ago, BlueSky factory took the old Burger King slogan "Hold the pickles hold the lettuce special orders don’t upset us, have it your way" and stated that "Email marketing should be this way too" which follows on nicely from their article "I Just Don’t Love You Anymore" published two week before.
They say that "There are several ways to allow your readers to have it their way"
1. When they opt-in
2. By having options on your subscriber preferences page
3. By sending a specific email asking readers to update their preferences
Obviously I am a fan of this concept and so far I think the Clickz preference centre is the best one but BlueSky's article also gives some great examples.
Personally I don't think BlueSky went far enough...
Yes ask them about categories and frequency as early as possible and always allow them to change their minds, always do that but there is more...
In the grand scheme of things you might want to know so much more about them in order target them better. You might - should - be taking your recipients' responses back to your marketing database/warehouse and comparing them with your web analytics, ecommerce etc. etc. Also categories may change and you can't just email people about the new categories until they change their preferences, they might just opt-out.
That kind of information would be one giant survey and no-one will take the time to fill that in unless you are giving them something very expensive for free.
Robin Kennedy calls it "Profiling" and I agree. The key is to ask a bit at a time. Profiling needs to be a gradual thing as you build that trust, that rapport, that dialogue!
Every so often have an underlying theme in a message which would relate to a section of your profiling and include a link to a small form to collect just that information, maybe 3-5 questions with multiple choice predefined answers. Obviously don't start with personal stuff as you have not built enough of a rapport yet.
Alternatively just see if any of your messages relate to part of the profile you are trying to build and stick a link in the message.
Imagine all of your Web-analytics data, ecommerce data, email marketing reporting data, and everything else all query-able from one spot! This is possible and without a great amount of data migration.
If you like the idea give Apteco a shout and ask about Faststats. They might even be at Ad:tech.
It also has full loop integration with Pure360 and it's really pretty too! Don't forget to let them know who referred you either!
Robin told me he has been working with a few companies on profiling strategies for brands through Pure360 and it sounds pretty exiting. You could even ask him about it at Ad:Tech London next week.
Anyway, a while back I mentioned email preference centres and it came up again recently when talking about Unsubscribe surveys.
About two weeks ago, BlueSky factory took the old Burger King slogan "Hold the pickles hold the lettuce special orders don’t upset us, have it your way" and stated that "Email marketing should be this way too" which follows on nicely from their article "I Just Don’t Love You Anymore" published two week before.
They say that "There are several ways to allow your readers to have it their way"
1. When they opt-in
2. By having options on your subscriber preferences page
3. By sending a specific email asking readers to update their preferences
Obviously I am a fan of this concept and so far I think the Clickz preference centre is the best one but BlueSky's article also gives some great examples.
Personally I don't think BlueSky went far enough...
Yes ask them about categories and frequency as early as possible and always allow them to change their minds, always do that but there is more...
In the grand scheme of things you might want to know so much more about them in order target them better. You might - should - be taking your recipients' responses back to your marketing database/warehouse and comparing them with your web analytics, ecommerce etc. etc. Also categories may change and you can't just email people about the new categories until they change their preferences, they might just opt-out.
That kind of information would be one giant survey and no-one will take the time to fill that in unless you are giving them something very expensive for free.
Robin Kennedy calls it "Profiling" and I agree. The key is to ask a bit at a time. Profiling needs to be a gradual thing as you build that trust, that rapport, that dialogue!
Every so often have an underlying theme in a message which would relate to a section of your profiling and include a link to a small form to collect just that information, maybe 3-5 questions with multiple choice predefined answers. Obviously don't start with personal stuff as you have not built enough of a rapport yet.
Alternatively just see if any of your messages relate to part of the profile you are trying to build and stick a link in the message.
Imagine all of your Web-analytics data, ecommerce data, email marketing reporting data, and everything else all query-able from one spot! This is possible and without a great amount of data migration.
If you like the idea give Apteco a shout and ask about Faststats. They might even be at Ad:tech.
It also has full loop integration with Pure360 and it's really pretty too! Don't forget to let them know who referred you either!
Robin told me he has been working with a few companies on profiling strategies for brands through Pure360 and it sounds pretty exiting. You could even ask him about it at Ad:Tech London next week.
Robin Kennedy at Ad:tech London
I've just been informed that a good mate of mine, Robin Kennedy, will be doing a Seminar at Ad:tech next week called:
"Email - to Blast, to Broadcast, or enter into Dialogue?".
Robin is one of the most knowledgeable people on email I have ever met and great laugh to work and socialise with.
Anybody who wants to learn something, anything or almost everything about email marketing should make sure they attend whenever this guy's doing any seminar.
This Ad:tech seminar is on the Tuesday 22nd Sept, 3.50pm - 4.20pm in the Email Marketing Thaetre.
Be there!
"Email - to Blast, to Broadcast, or enter into Dialogue?".
Robin is one of the most knowledgeable people on email I have ever met and great laugh to work and socialise with.
Anybody who wants to learn something, anything or almost everything about email marketing should make sure they attend whenever this guy's doing any seminar.
This Ad:tech seminar is on the Tuesday 22nd Sept, 3.50pm - 4.20pm in the Email Marketing Thaetre.
Be there!
SEOhosting: Make Your Links Count
"Usability expert Jakob Nielsen once said that email marketing is “probably the single highest ROI-action you can take to improve your internet presence.” Some studies have shown that an effective email marketing campaign can generate an ROI of nearly $10 for every $1 spent. Research by the Direct Marketing Association concluded that email marketing outperformed all other direct marketing methods in ROI.
In other words, email marketing is a highly effective tool for putting money in your pockets. At the core of email marketing is linking. Within your newsletters, you’ll be asking your customers to click links to learn more about your products and services and to take action on special deals.
To help you get the most from those links, I’ve come up with this short list of email marketing linking tips"...read on
Written by: Eric Brantner Aug 2009
In other words, email marketing is a highly effective tool for putting money in your pockets. At the core of email marketing is linking. Within your newsletters, you’ll be asking your customers to click links to learn more about your products and services and to take action on special deals.
To help you get the most from those links, I’ve come up with this short list of email marketing linking tips"...read on
Written by: Eric Brantner Aug 2009
Lyris: What Good is a Click?
That is a very good question, we've been on about the difference between render-rates and opening-rate and email html standards for so, we've forgotten the reason for the email in the first place - to get the click through to the web-site!!!
Obviously on 14th Aug 2009 Dan Miller hadn't when he wrote "What Good is a Click?" for Lyris.
Have a look see what you think...read on
Obviously on 14th Aug 2009 Dan Miller hadn't when he wrote "What Good is a Click?" for Lyris.
Have a look see what you think...read on
VR: Make All Of Your Clicks Count
July 28, 2009
You spend your valuable time creating your email marketing campaign, you load it with images, text and links, but where do you send your clickers? Hopefully not a black hole where they don't really know what to do! Let's take a look at 4 places that you are probably sending your clickers to and what you could do better...read on
Nice little article about the bit that we always forget about, the actual landing pages from the clicks.
What it doesn't mention is that the reason most EPSs actually exist is because the marketing department did not want to have to rely on the IT department to market digitally, so people built ESPs to give the power and the control to the marketers.
These same marketers would not have control over the web-site unless enough budget and resource has been given to them to have a CMS. Subsequently unless you have an e-commerce site, a blog or a CMS you still have to cover everything in the email.
Also mentioned is Integration with Google Analytics, my favourite ESP Pure360 also has integration with Google Analytics. I also have it on good authority that Pure360 is also working on an all signing all dancing CMS bolt-on for their email platform. It's not scheduled for release on this year's up and coming software update but some of the stuff on it sounds fantastic - I can't wait - or tell anyone what they are!
You spend your valuable time creating your email marketing campaign, you load it with images, text and links, but where do you send your clickers? Hopefully not a black hole where they don't really know what to do! Let's take a look at 4 places that you are probably sending your clickers to and what you could do better...read on
Nice little article about the bit that we always forget about, the actual landing pages from the clicks.
What it doesn't mention is that the reason most EPSs actually exist is because the marketing department did not want to have to rely on the IT department to market digitally, so people built ESPs to give the power and the control to the marketers.
These same marketers would not have control over the web-site unless enough budget and resource has been given to them to have a CMS. Subsequently unless you have an e-commerce site, a blog or a CMS you still have to cover everything in the email.
Also mentioned is Integration with Google Analytics, my favourite ESP Pure360 also has integration with Google Analytics. I also have it on good authority that Pure360 is also working on an all signing all dancing CMS bolt-on for their email platform. It's not scheduled for release on this year's up and coming software update but some of the stuff on it sounds fantastic - I can't wait - or tell anyone what they are!
DotMailer & ReturnPath's: 3 Checklists to improve ROI by building trust in your email programme
Dotmailer decided to copy and paste a bit of return path's Sender Education Programme Kit and blog it, here it is:
"The year ahead may be challenging but that doesn’t mean you can't exceed your revenue goals and enjoy even greater ROI. Building trust is the key to growing your revenue from email marketing. Follow our checklists in this Revenue Booster kit to help improve customer confidence, sharpen your campaign relevancy and reap the rewards"...read on
Article undated, read 28/08/2009
"The year ahead may be challenging but that doesn’t mean you can't exceed your revenue goals and enjoy even greater ROI. Building trust is the key to growing your revenue from email marketing. Follow our checklists in this Revenue Booster kit to help improve customer confidence, sharpen your campaign relevancy and reap the rewards"...read on
Article undated, read 28/08/2009
listrak: abandon cart triggers
August 13th, 2009 by Megan
"Between June 15 and June 30, 2009, two Listrak employees visited each of the Internet Retail 500. They shopped and abandoned carts on 398 sites. The remaining 102 sites, or just over 20%, could not be shopped or included in the study, either because they required a credit card number to put items in a shopping cart, or they did not require an email sign-in, meaning abandoning a cart could not trigger an abandonment email"...read on
"Between June 15 and June 30, 2009, two Listrak employees visited each of the Internet Retail 500. They shopped and abandoned carts on 398 sites. The remaining 102 sites, or just over 20%, could not be shopped or included in the study, either because they required a credit card number to put items in a shopping cart, or they did not require an email sign-in, meaning abandoning a cart could not trigger an abandonment email"...read on
One click unsubscribe
"It's not the first time this has happened to me, but it still surprises me every time. I send an unsubscribe request by email as instructed in the email I received, and then it bounces back to me because of a spam filter"...read on
July 18, 2009 By Joshua Baer for deliverability.com
I was a a little surprised that something that important was overlooked but I suppose it depends on who is emailing. Not having a link to click to opt-out or an on-line form is just bad practice. If I am mildly interested in something and ask for their emails the first thing I do is check the opt-out process. Often I'll even use a temporary email address tool.
- - -
"Not sure how to go about this today without embarrassing a company, but I feel the need to make a point today about unsubscribing, list management, and Can-Spam.
In the past few days, Kodak or kodakgallery.com started to send emails to one of my own personal spamtrap@ addressees that is not used for anything, but harvesting of email address off my personal website. This means obviously that I wouldn't use it to sign up for accounts, newsletters, etc using that email address. I just have it sitting out their on the Internet waiting to be scraped up by some spammer"..read on
July 29, 2009, By Dennis Dayman
I went to unsubscribe from dotmailer this morning and the landing page asked me to type in my email address!!! These guys are supposed to be a good ESP yet they can't even manage to pre-populate my email address in a form, let alone encrypt it. I could enter in any email address.
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July 18, 2009 By Joshua Baer for deliverability.com
I was a a little surprised that something that important was overlooked but I suppose it depends on who is emailing. Not having a link to click to opt-out or an on-line form is just bad practice. If I am mildly interested in something and ask for their emails the first thing I do is check the opt-out process. Often I'll even use a temporary email address tool.
- - -
"Not sure how to go about this today without embarrassing a company, but I feel the need to make a point today about unsubscribing, list management, and Can-Spam.
In the past few days, Kodak or kodakgallery.com started to send emails to one of my own personal spamtrap@ addressees that is not used for anything, but harvesting of email address off my personal website. This means obviously that I wouldn't use it to sign up for accounts, newsletters, etc using that email address. I just have it sitting out their on the Internet waiting to be scraped up by some spammer"..read on
July 29, 2009, By Dennis Dayman
I went to unsubscribe from dotmailer this morning and the landing page asked me to type in my email address!!! These guys are supposed to be a good ESP yet they can't even manage to pre-populate my email address in a form, let alone encrypt it. I could enter in any email address.
emailadvisor: Need a little help freshening up your email benchmarking and metrics reporting?
22/07/2009
"I think we've all been guilty of getting to "caught up" in the email process to take a step back and really focus on email metrics and benchmarking. The problem may lie with the difficulty of extracting the needed data from your email system or simply not really knowing what data that you need to be looking for.
If you consider your metrics reporting a little on the light side, take a look a these few tips to help you establish a clearer look in to your benchmarking and metrics strategy"...read on
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"I think we've all been guilty of getting to "caught up" in the email process to take a step back and really focus on email metrics and benchmarking. The problem may lie with the difficulty of extracting the needed data from your email system or simply not really knowing what data that you need to be looking for.
If you consider your metrics reporting a little on the light side, take a look a these few tips to help you establish a clearer look in to your benchmarking and metrics strategy"...read on
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mediapost: Christmas Advice In July
by Chad White, Tuesday, July 21, 2009, 10:15 AM
"For many retail brands, we are quickly approaching the saturation point for email volume. My Retail Email Index currently indicates that retail email volume is running 19% above last year's. While that's slower than the 28% year-over-year increases that we were seeing in July 2008, it's alarming because we're heading into the holiday season.
Last year, retail email volume rose 43% during the holiday season -- and during its peak week was up 76%, compared to the pre-holiday baseline. If this holiday season follows the same trajectory, retailers will average 3.4 emails per week, with a peak of 4.2 emails per week.
More than ever, the question is: How can we make each email that we send work harder? How can we minimize volume increases to avoid increased list churn and deliverability issues, while maximizing revenue?
Consider these tactics"...read on
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If you are able to properly profile your recipients, you will not have to hammer everyone and send less but more targeted and relevant content to everyone and make more money!
"For many retail brands, we are quickly approaching the saturation point for email volume. My Retail Email Index currently indicates that retail email volume is running 19% above last year's. While that's slower than the 28% year-over-year increases that we were seeing in July 2008, it's alarming because we're heading into the holiday season.
Last year, retail email volume rose 43% during the holiday season -- and during its peak week was up 76%, compared to the pre-holiday baseline. If this holiday season follows the same trajectory, retailers will average 3.4 emails per week, with a peak of 4.2 emails per week.
More than ever, the question is: How can we make each email that we send work harder? How can we minimize volume increases to avoid increased list churn and deliverability issues, while maximizing revenue?
Consider these tactics"...read on
- - -
If you are able to properly profile your recipients, you will not have to hammer everyone and send less but more targeted and relevant content to everyone and make more money!
Mailvivo: Newsletter structure & variant layouts
Way back in April this year (April 7th, 2009) George Burrell, wrote a good article about using different structures in your emails for different people depending on their behaviour with previous emails you have sent them and their web-site activity:
"For example, a subscriber who has recorded multiple past purchases is a prime candidate for an email that contains big offers, coupled with a strong cross selling section, the return is rather significant. Your standard email may not want to include cross selling as you do not wish to dilute your original email’s goal, however with the subscriber in this example we know they are active and responsive"...read on
It is a pretty good idea but the structure that needs to be in place before hand has to be pretty well thought out. Even if you have the software to handle it everyone will need different rules and these will need to be set-up. You will then need to decide what kinds of variants you will use. Will you do the interfaces thing like you do on web-sites where everyone randomly gets a different look and feel or will it depend on their previous actions.
Of course it will be better to decide from previous actions but how will you decide that? In this example it is saying that people who always buy get an offer early and people that rarely buy get what?
So as well as the level of profiling needing to be incredibly in-depth, mixing email reports, web-analytics and purchasing history together you then need to categorise different recipients and prepare creative structure and variants for each one. Surely if you are going to go that far, you might as well also make the products and services you include focus on their person's profile too? That is a big job that takes a lot of thought and preparation. I've managed a couple of projects that are similar to that for e-commerce companies and that required a lot of database work and interaction with the CMS to get the content ready for the emails. I like getting FastStats to do much of the work then making a bit of middle ware to do the content work. After that you just set-up, press go, sit back and pray :-D
"For example, a subscriber who has recorded multiple past purchases is a prime candidate for an email that contains big offers, coupled with a strong cross selling section, the return is rather significant. Your standard email may not want to include cross selling as you do not wish to dilute your original email’s goal, however with the subscriber in this example we know they are active and responsive"...read on
It is a pretty good idea but the structure that needs to be in place before hand has to be pretty well thought out. Even if you have the software to handle it everyone will need different rules and these will need to be set-up. You will then need to decide what kinds of variants you will use. Will you do the interfaces thing like you do on web-sites where everyone randomly gets a different look and feel or will it depend on their previous actions.
Of course it will be better to decide from previous actions but how will you decide that? In this example it is saying that people who always buy get an offer early and people that rarely buy get what?
So as well as the level of profiling needing to be incredibly in-depth, mixing email reports, web-analytics and purchasing history together you then need to categorise different recipients and prepare creative structure and variants for each one. Surely if you are going to go that far, you might as well also make the products and services you include focus on their person's profile too? That is a big job that takes a lot of thought and preparation. I've managed a couple of projects that are similar to that for e-commerce companies and that required a lot of database work and interaction with the CMS to get the content ready for the emails. I like getting FastStats to do much of the work then making a bit of middle ware to do the content work. After that you just set-up, press go, sit back and pray :-D
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