With a presentation on the second day about about one of his favorite topics “Always be testing” (also the name of his book). This time Brian referred to Adwords and Pay per Click testing, see that article here.

Email marketing: Do massive segementation

I got to speak to Bryan a bit more about e-mail marketing. Bryan has been running his own newsletter for years with over 40.000 subscribers. Bryan: “Do massive segmentation. Once you think you have segmented, segment again. And if possible, segment again. In good e-mail marketing, you segment first, and then personalize within that segment.”

Segmenting is a very effective e-mail marketing tactic

And he is right, several researches have shown Segmenting as one of the most effective email marketing tactics. Even more: Testing with Target Audiences (in other words: segment testing) is also found to be very effective. 91% of marketers find segmentation testing effective. That is huge. Testing segmentation is the number one effective testing tactic according research by Marketingsherpa.

Brian continues on massive segmentation: “For instance you can personalize an e-mail to people who are interested in tv’s versus stereo’s. Segment your e-mail campaigns to previous customers versus subscribers and know what you will be sending to them. First segment and after that go a level deeper and do more personalization. Use a RFM (Recency, frequency and monetary value) formula to calculate the right TV or bundle to offer and what discount percentage to give.”

List hygiene also counts.

Bryan: “One of the things we did on our own newsletter was to opt a large part out. We had 40.000 people on our list and asked everyone that wasn’t active to opt in again. In 7 months the e-mail list was up to same size, but much better quality. That means higher open rates and click through rates AND better deliverability. Not enough people do this list hygiene thing. At the very least put them [the inactives] on a seperate list. There is a technical term for people that aren’t willing to keep their list clean: Pussies.”

He ends with one last tip: “Never forget old content is new content to new people.”

Image by Remy Bergma

Not a bad idea to combine the two and craft a compelling e-mail program this Mother’s Day. Here are a few e-mail marketing strategies and tips to Make Mom proud.

Events and special days as a part of your e-mail marketing calendar

First off, it is a great idea to plan your e-mail activities up front using a (e-mail) marketing calendar. This can be as simple as writing down all the events and topics and putting them on a timeline. That makes it easier to look ahead and plan for the coming months, some campaigns are the most effective a few weeks before the date is there. And it also helps to keep track of your new and improved e-mail marketing strategy.

Setting the right mood

You can make the first steps into a segmented Mother’s day e-mail campaign with a combination of age and gender. Dads tend to spend more on this holiday, much more than their wives or younger generation. They also tend to give other types of gifts. A great reason to split your Mom campaigns and craft the most compelling message you can.

But not all e-mail lists will have this profile data at hand. Yahoo! has a lot of female subscribers but were they daughters, mothers or grandmothers? Their e-mail newsletter was not about giving gifts, they changed the perspective and made the message about things to do on Mother’s Day. Increase the match with the e-mail subscribers by changing Perspective.

Inspiration for Mother’s day e-mails

Now that we have decided if we are going to create a broad or a very targeted e-mail campaign, it is on to the creative part. Not every Mother’s day e-mail has to be the top of e-mail creativity, to get you started a few ideas:

Free entrance / products / etc for Mom.
Don’t forget about mom. (to create awareness about the day)
Things to do on mother’s day.
Discounts on moms dream products.
7 places to go instead of your mother-in-law and matching excursuses.
This year’s most popular mother’s day gifts.
A free Mother’s Day gift with your order.
Find the perfect mother’s day gift.
Create a special mother’s day product / service package.

The mother’s Day e-mail campaign that came too late, but still is great

E-mail driven transactions peak two weeks before the day of Mother, according to a report by Experian. The same e-mail marketing study showed that e-mails with the term “Mother’s Day” in the subjectline in the week AFTER the holiday had a 44% higher open rate than the e-mail campaigns in the week leading up to it. Thinking about it, it might be very interesting when you do a small Mother’s Day themed series, also send a post-Mother’s Day e-mail!

The question is why these post-holiday e-mails get that much attention. Of course there are people that visit their family after the official day. It could also be that the original gift wasn’t the expected hit (and a replacement should be found). Gifts weren’t brought, but was promised. Or maybe just because it seems a bit “off” to send a Mother’s day e-mail AFTER the event. The last reason might spring some more original ideas. Catching readers with the theme, but taking that attention and give it a different spin.

More on Mother’s Day e-mails:
Mother’s day email ideas
Buy.com  example

A recipient of an email marketing message goes through a number of steps beginning with the descision to open that email (or not).

Normally you would look at the overall e-mail message, but it is even better to also look at the individual elements and the recipient steps they influence.

This allows you to optimize those email elements based on fuction and at the same time understand the interaction between them. Let’s look at the anatomy of those email marketing messages.

From name and from address

The recipient will want to know who is sending him that email. There are two elements to that. The ‘ friendly’ from name that displays a name as used in normal world (e.g. John Doe or Company X) and the from address (e.g j.doe@companyx.com). These elements can both be configured when sending you are sending a marketing email.

The subject line

The subject line gives some indication on what the email message is about. The subjectline is displayed next to the From name and is the second thing the recipient sees. No wonder the subject line has a huge influence when it comes to opening an email or not and therefore one of the most tested elements of commercial emailings.

The pre-header or snippet

The pre-header is the first text found in the email message. This pre-header is shown after the subject line in for instance Gmail and inboxes on mobile phones. It acts as an extension to the subject line. If no specific preheader text is used, the first part of the email may right be “click here to see the online version” or the url of an image. Not very stimulating for people to open that email.

The envelope

The sum of from name, subject line and pre-header can be seen as the envelope of an email ,marketing message. Make sure the envelope is attractive enough and your email has a bigger chance to get opened , read and acted upon.

The Header

The top part of the email is typically called the header. Extra care should be taken to include recognizable elements like a Logo and the color scheme of the sender, because the header is the first thing a reader will see of the actual email newsletter. The header is also displayed in the preview pane, making it extra important to make it both recognizable and enticing.

Navigation bar

A navigation bar can be included at the top of an email marketing newsletter. This email navigation bar can include links to the most important parts of the senders’ website, but doesn’t necessarily be a duplicate of the website navigation.

Index

Especially long and multi-topic newsletters could benefit from including an index of “topics in this newsletter”. It is used to give a quick overview of the items in that newsletter and provide a way to simply navigate to the items of interest. The index can link to the items inside the newsletter itself (automatically scrolling to them) or directly link to a webpage of the topic behind it.

Email Body

The body is “the meat” of the email marketing message. In newsletters it can include multiple articles. In sales or long copy newsletters it might just include a single topic. The body is where the magic should happen. Taking the reader from initial interest to reading and action.

Offer

Each sales driven email should contain one or more offers. Your product, service, content or other desired action (like filling a questionnaire) presented in such a way it gets the blood pumping. An offer can be spiced up when including a deal or special discount. The fit and attractiveness of the offer have a huge impact on the results of your email marketing message.

Hero shot and Images

Images are used to strengthen or even convey the main message of the email. Especially in industries that are very visually orientated like fashion and retail, images (of products) play a big role. Many email clients however, do not display images by default. Making smart email marketers craft their messages to also render well when images are off.

How to optimize images in email [presentation]

Call to action (CTA)

No email is complete without a compelling Call to Action. The call to Action tells the recipient what action is expected to do. The CTA is often a text link or button that stimulates to “read more”, “click here” or “buy now”. More descriptive Call to Actions often tend to trump those simple CTAs in number of clickthroughs they generate. A good Call to Action stands out from the message with enough contrast.

Footer

The footer is the bottom part of the email. It typically includes the unsubscribe link, liks to a preference center and a disclaimer text. But a well thought through footer can do so much more and actually help realize to your companies’ sales or communication goals.

Social media links and call outs

If your business is active on social networks, links to your social media pages could be a part of the anatomy of your most effective email newsletter. There a different kinds of social links. You could use a button or icon to link directly to your company social media pages.

Here are some examples of social media functions that are available inside your email marketing tools:

Automatically add social widgets and avoid the brick wall

Adding social media buttons is the easiest way to promote your social channels in your email and get more overlap with your audience being both email subscribers and fans and followers. Your email software can do this for you. Within your email template it’s able to place the “follow us on media X” buttons.

Caution: If you are asking your email subscribers to follow you on social channels. You do have to offer something of value on that platform. In a study I did on the Email marketing in the dutch Travel industry, 15% of the companies that included a “follow us on social” function weren’t active on those channels at all.

Just adding a button without activity actually causes brand-devaluation. It’s like driving customers into a brick wall. Part of your social media strategy should be to welcome them with some juicy content once they arrive at your social channels. The people going to your social channels from your email are most likely the active part of your subscriber and client base, so give them something to talk about.

Start sharing, but stop stealing attention

It gets more interesting when you want to share a certain piece of content.

Adding a share link or button would normally require an email marketer to manually enter and test the URL to that content, email tools can now do this for you, making the process more efficient.

But always monitor the usage of the share links. If your audience isn’t using them, they are just stealing space and attention from the rest of your message. One alternative would be to let people share the whole newsletter instead of each individual article.

Publishing and socially re-publishing your email newsletters

The best newsletters are carefully crafted and shaped to win (interaction). While there are many strategies to distribute content, it would be a waste not to re-publish this message to social channels.

Syndication

It’s possible to re-publish a newsletter to your fans and followers on channels like Facebook and twitter. To do this you need to generate an online version of the newsletter and post it with a triggering description like “take a look at our lastest newsletter”. The new functions in email tools let you syndicate content across channels. So you can actually schedule status updates from within your email tools, which is a big time saver that will streamline your workflow.

Future social media features that will appear in your email tool

There are more social features becoming available and the number will only grow. For instance:

• * Loading social media data to enrich profiles (sometimes called a part of eCRM).
• * Social sign up functions that uses social account login for easy newsletter sign up and registration.
• * More advanced reporting of social media usage (form email) and sharing.

As more channels like Google Plus, Pintrest and social media channel X appear and new functions on these platform develop, the email tools will be keeping pace. The easier it gets to combine email & social, the more options the email marketer has to deploy his own social media plans.

This post was written for the email marketing guys over at GraphicMail, but I liked it so much I just had to post it here first

The missed opportunity of smarter e-mail marketing

With all the love in the world we spend a lot of time on content creation and getting the message out there. Without really thinking through if it was the right message in the first place. We all want to hit the bullseye, but what could we actually do to increase chances of hitting it?

What would increase chances of actually hitting the bullseye?

* Train to shoot better (testing),

* Use a straighter arrow (lose clutter, improve design),

* Stand closer to the mark (customer knowledge).

But how about enlarging the bullseye itself?

Increasing the Hit Ratio of your messages:

We can increase the chance of hitting the bullseye by improving:

A Audience Match

B Brand relationship with the recipient

C Customer timeline and Time window

D Design of Offer & Message

I will go further into B, C and D in later posts. But let’s have a look at how we can increase Audience match.

Three original tactics for increasing audience Match:

The first things that come to mind when improving the match between your email and audience are segmentation and personalization. But that isn’t the only way to get a better Audience Match. Here are three Audience Match Tactics, that will improve the value of your messages.

Tactic 1: Increase audience match by adding Self-Selection:

In case of an entertainment retailer on fathers’ day email for instance. Instead of making a complete fathers’ day What are the interests of your recipient? Smart marketers ask for recipient preferences to build a profile. But there is a limit to how much you can ask. Even if not every detail is know, you can still create a message that resonates by letting the recipient choose for himself.

Instead of limiting the email about one type of gift, make it a self-selection:
In the case of a fathers’ day email, the email could contain links to pages for :

* Movie maniac dads

* Music loving dads,

* Do-it-yourself dads,

* The dad that has everything.

A retailer can have fun with these self-selection themes. Do-it-yourself might not be a real product category for a retailer. But it can be a combination of products that fit the theme. The complete seasons of Home Improvement, books on decoration, The best Music to play while doing DIY work. Thats how this is different than just copying product categories. It’s actually adding value by helping the recipient in his quest for an original gift.

Tactic 2: Increase audience match by Changing Perspective

Sometimes all you need to do is change the perspective. I’d advise to change perspective every now and then to keep things lively and fresh. It doesn’t always have to be “buy this item, it’s the best & cheapest”. There is a lot more to say about the way people use and get value from a product. Or maybe not focus on the product at all for once and just tell a compelling story.

Changing perspective can greatly increase your chance of an Audience Match. Try to shift away from just “buy this” messages and change the perspective. You could focus on the event at which the products will be used or product use itself.

In our father’s day example, you could make the email about:
* Things that you could do on father’s day

* The most asked for and given presents on father’s day

* Mother’s day versus Father’s day.

Those messages can also appeal to the people that receive the gifts or have influence on the purchase and add some entertainment value.

Tactic 2: Increase audience match by Using catch all’s

If your main message is that appealing to all recipients use a catch all. This is a lifeline to your website, that allows readers to find their way. Even if they are not interested in the message you sent. Catch-alls can come in the form of a navigation bar that links to more categories and topics on the website. It can come in the form of a “top 5 popular items” lists.

The smaller the Audience Match with the primary offer / message, the more attention should be given to catch all’s. If it truly too narrow, there probably should be a secondary offer included as well.

Email marketers have a lot more options for improving their messages than they realize. Try if you increase your Audience Match for your next campaign.

Your challenge

So what are the challenges in combining social and email? It largely depends on the tools available to you and your own tactics and market. Integration of social media in your email marketing strategy is a bit different for different companies and industries.

Based on the available tools and tactics you first need answers to these questions:

• Can we combine customer data from multiple sources?
• Can we plan campaigns and follow ups beforehand?
• Can we monitor what, where and how people are interacting with our brand?
• Can we bring our message to scattered audiences across the various channels?

Social and email tools available to you

For each of these questions it is even more important to consider whether it can be easily done. It doesn’t matter if the tools and tactics are available. It matters if they are available to you, right now and in a form that is simple enough to use – and that’s after factoring the stress on budget, knowledge level and other in-company limitations.

While a big challenge, can integrating marketing channels bring Justin Bieber to your hometown?

Integrating marketing channels both offline and online

I am fascinated by the integration of online and offline marketing campaigns. Just a few years ago a marketing plan was layered by sending messages (tv, direct mail or email) to a person’s home, building brand awareness outside the home on the way to the brick and mortar store, and once he or she steps through the door, move the shopper with in-store advertising to the moment of truth decision of placing the product in the basket or not.

The marketing ecosystem has evolved.

Our society spends so much time multitasking and actively participating on the web and social sites through mobile devices, smart phones and tablets that there is no clear path to purchase. For a mobile consumer purchasing decisions can be influenced in a variety of both physical and digital locations.

An organization’s marketing tactics cannot be soloed to be effective in today’s integrated marketing communication plans. For this strategy to be effective today, businesses must link all communication points to allow information to flow seamlessly between channels. This is a requirement to ensure the brand’s community can spontaneously participate in relevant and timely conversations.

Linking all communication channels isn’t easy

Linking channels and communication points  is not an easy task, especially for email marketers. In fact, 55% of marketers in our Email Marketing Benchmark Survey reported integrating email with other data systems was a very significant challenge. This obstacle led all challenges including deliverability, achieving ROI and growing the number of subscribers.

Integrating marketing channels can bring your favorite artist home

A company called Eventful which aggregates entertainment events around the globe, has done a nice job of combining its email program with social media and website. Subscribers can request to receive updates on upcoming artists, performer, musical act or movie is coming to their area.  The subscriber can share their personal tastes in a variety of ways including uploading their iTunes play list.

Spread the value proposition through search & social media

Eventful also has a robust natural search strategy, which immediately delivers value to a person seeking information on their favorite performer.  The way Eventful spreads its value proposition through social media networks is by a service called Demand It! This tool gives fans the opportunity to request their favorite act to come to their local venue.

This program has successfully brought Country music star Alan Jackson, to the small town of Mineral, VA (population 495.) The town was able to amass over 31,000 “Demands.”

180 degree customer view

There you see it. Jeffrey gives a great example of cross channel integration, which can even lead to Justin Bieber giving a concert in your hometown. Linking all communication channels might be a sort of a Utopia for most companies though.

I [jordie] always talk about this running gag that companies could at maximum get a 180 degree customer view (the pitch of CRM software vendors and even suppliers of email marketing systems is they can provide a 360 degree customer view). People are talking about your brand or competitors when you aren’t there. And experiencing your products, being influenced and changing their information and preferences all the time.

If you can combine channels and information with a strong product, in most industries you can quickly become a marketing leader.

The one golden rule to live by

Enjoy working on your email marketing program.

It is as simple as that. If you enjoy working on your email marketing program it will show through in all emailings you send out. How do you think a recipient is going to be enticed if you aren’t? Going to enjoy reading if you didn’t enjoy writing?

Here are 3 ways to keep the marketing juices flowing and bring enthusiasm to your email program:

1. Get Hooked and get Newsjacking

Marketing is the art of connecting with your audience. One of the ways to connect with your audience is to tap into their everyday life and understand what is keeping them busy. So this year you might want to put the Olympics on your agenda as well as Easter, Father’s Day, Valentine’s or school vacations.

What really gets blood pumping is what is called “real-time marketing” or Newsjacking – a kind of hook on to the events of today. Luckily email and social media are both as quick as you can spell “real-time”. What’s in the papers today can become the subject of your marketing.

Some email tools can connect the website RSS feed to your newsletter template, making it easy to publish over multiple channels at the same time. Because in these cases, time is of the essence, it requires a flexible marketing team and one or two quick thinkers, tough it can really give you encouraging results and a boost of energy to work on a project like this.

2. Create a goal specific campaign

All email marketers have goals to reach. Even if the goals aren’t written down (yet). Email marketers want new subscribers to sign-up, they want to increase sales or stimulate customer loyalty. Or even measure their impact through the more simple metrics in life such as increasing email opens and click throughs.

Take at least one of these goals and run with it. It is very stimulating to work towards a (new) goal especially if the results can be measured and monitored real time. So for instance; create a campaign that is specially designed to get people that haven’t opened their email in a while to interact. Think about including new and stimulating ‘from names’, stellar subject lines, pre-headers, preview pane design and all elements to re-active that interaction-lagging subscriber. You can just go ahead and make the improvements. But if you really want to know what works best, there are different ways to do A-B testing with your emails. Are you getting some creative ideas yet?

3. Go green

Creating fresh content isn’t about reinventing the wheel. Most companies have a ton of (unused) content lying around and some of that is really good too, like blog posts from a year ago that could have been written yesterday. Check out what evergreen content had some good impact before. There are lots of ways you can go crazy when you have a great foundation.

For example; customer feedback that hasn’t been used or what the top five email newsletters of last year were?
Grab that content, and revive it, make it even better than it was. This is not only very efficient use of your resources, but also very rewarding, because you will almost certainly see the effect.

The one email marketing rule to live by

There you have it. Do you love to create great emails? Maybe not every day. But by adding some juice, a sparkle of enthusiasm and some variance it certainly becomes more enjoyable! So see if you can adapt one of three ideas and don’t forget the one rule: Always enjoy working on your email program.

This post was written for the email marketing guys over at GraphicMail, but I liked it so much I just had to post it here first

Adjust your timing to Customer behavior

Some industries have the luck to profit from mass customer behavior. At the start of the new year, new year’s resolutions are made and broken.
And one of the most heard is getting into shape. A great time of year for sports retailers.

Yes, I will be sending out an email newsletter and yes it was a shame that I didn’t get around to it earlier. And yes all rants about why i didn’t do it earlier and praise for getting around to it CAN be placed in the comments.

Building a email marketing list

Online marketing is always a journey and as i’ve done some list building before, i’d like to take you all with me on my trip with list building efforts for my own e-mail newsletter. Reporting on what worked and what not.

I started out with this Mantra: A day lost is a subscriber lost.

But the true effort is just starting now. So i’d suggest you sign up!