This month’s column for MediaPost Email Insider is really about keeping you honest with your email program’s objectives. Remember, your objective is not to send email – it’s to drive your business forward. Sometimes in our efforts to get out an email for the sake of getting out an email, we hunt around for the right hook to lead with and often spy what is topical. Here are some tips on how to use topical to your advantage, and when to resist the temptation to jump into a conversation your brand doesn’t really want to have in the first place.

Would Your Read This Column If It Were About Super Bowl Ads?
by Mike May
Published on 2.9.11 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

Despite what the title may lead you to believe, this column is not about Super Bowl ads. It certainly could be. As an audience of marketers, I may be correct in assuming that you might be interested in Super Bowl ads.. Plus, everybody else is writing about Super Bowl ads. Among an audience of marketers, there is perhaps no more topical topic.

On the other hand, the topic is so topical that it’s hackneyed at this point. By Monday at lunchtime, how many articles, tweets and blog posts had you read about Super Bowl ads? That was days ago; what can I possibly have to add to the discussion? If I write about Super Bowl ads now, I’m the very opposite of what I intend to be by picking up this topical trend.

And while you may be a targeted audience for this topic, as an email marketer I am not uniquely qualified to write about Super Bowl ads. However topical, for me Super Bowl ads are decidedly off-topic.

As an email columnist, I’ve shown some restraint here. As email marketers, sometimes the lure to be topical is too strong to resist. To wit: do a search in your inbox for “Valentine” in the subject line. (Repeat it again in a week for the full effect.) You’ll see some messages that are well-targeted, perhaps from retailers that have every business capitalizing on the collective mindshare we have for the upcoming holiday.

Looking in my own inbox, I see… well, never mind what kind of stores I seem to shop at (a lot) around Valentine’s Day. Moving on, I also see a message from a travel site. That’s stretching it a bit, as this travel site also knows I book family vacations and rent minivans when I travel. That message from a promotional marketing company has no business playing the V-Day card, nor does my alma mater’s Annual Giving department. (Seriously? You want me to give my college a Valentine’s Day gift?) I shudder at what is going to show up in the next few days.

Here are some of the rules I try to follow on the topic of topical emails:

1. Be authentic. Topical is the new beige. Email marketers who rely on what is newsworthy or current to forge a connection with their subscribers are like the guy at the cocktail party who, at a lull in the conversation, blurts out, “So how about those Caps?” having never even watched a full pro hockey game in his life. If Valentine’s Day is important to your business, by all means use it. If it’s not, you run the risk of looking like you don’t know what you are talking about or — or worse, like you cannot think of a genuine reason to ask for your subscribers’ attention. I don’t want to talk hockey with a guy who doesn’t know hockey; subscribers deserve the same conversational respect.

2. Do your homework. To be fair, your email database is probably not rich enough to indicate how many hockey games per month each subscriber attends. But you do know if they purchased gardening equipment last spring, traveled to Park City in March, or opened a message about barbeque  tips. Use what you do know, and say something meaningful to your subscribers, instead of resorting to trendy platitudes.

3. If you don’t have anything interesting to say… If there is a topical storm already brewing in the inbox and you are on the outside, wait it out. Adding your voice only increases the din. Let the storm pass and then re-engage your subscribers. (A tip: don’t begin with, “So, how about that storm?”)

Share this article

I’ve long-believed that one of the hardest things about marketing events is that you’re never done. You can always bring in a few more attendees, right up until the opening keynote takes the stage. For that reason, event marketers (or at least, the people who set the event marketers’ budgets and attendance targets) often focus on an event’s growth. Barring a macroeconomic or industry-wide meltdown, events should grow year over year. At their core, events are a community, and a vibrant and successful community naturally attracts more members.

You probably want – maybe even expect – your event to grow this year. What strategy are you employing to achieve your goal? Here are a few growth strategies to consider. Any could work, given the right combination of organization, industry, resources and commitment. Read through them all and see which one speaks to your company’s needs:

1. Rely on Industry Growth: If you’re in an industry on the rise, your event will get bigger just by being around another year. On the surface this is good news – you’ll have more attendees, sponsors, exhibitors and willing speakers, and your event staff and management will be comprised largely of shiny happy people. But if all you’ve done is follow the same email and event marketing schedule as in years past to let your event get bigger, chances are good that rival events are growing at the same clip or faster. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. But they don’t say what happens when the tide goes out. So I will – someone gets sunk. When an industry is on the upswing, many people are able to attend 2, 3 or more competing shows per year. But when their budgets constrict again they have to choose only one. So if your show is growing along with the rest of them, make sure you are taking steps to differentiate so that when the choice comes to attend a single show, yours is the one to get the nod.

2. Market More: While this is an improvement over relying on industry growth (above), it is still more of a tactic than a strategy. By increasing marketing, an event marketer’s objective is to grow faster than the industry. It is a prudent approach while the industry is strong, like investing in an aggressive growth fund when you have some extra cash and no near-term need to turn it back into liquid assets. If you choose to market more, however, put some energy into marketing differentiation in addition to added reach or frequency. Instead of more email messages that say “Register today,” devote some messages towards highlighting a single session at the event, or a special networking function that sets your show apart. If you are going to reach more people with your message, it’s better to invest in a more powerful message that will have a greater impact when it hits, and also helps differentiate your event for when the market constricts again and your attendees have to make a choice. Put some added resources into competitive positioning and how to highlight your event’s meaningful points of differentiation.

3. Greater Functional Reach: The initiatives above allow you to grow your event by bringing in more of the same people. If your show attracts IT directors, relying on industry growth brings in more IT directors, as well as IT managers and IT assistant managers. Marketing more increases your conversion rate, so that instead of 40% of the IT directors on your list attending the show, you’re able to bring in 45%. Growing your show through greater functional reach, however, means you are deliberately appealing to new titles and areas of functional responsibility within an organization. For example, in addition to IT Directors you may decide your show’s growth strategy is to bring in COOs as well. To achieve this, the event marketer focuses on the programming intersection between IT Directors and this new function. But there is only so much communication can do with this strategy. Ultimately it begins with programming, and the person who creates the agenda needs to shift the show content accordingly. At organizations where marketing is detached from programming, this strategy is a challenge. It is not uncommon for event marketers to be charged with simply bringing in more people, even though the content of the show itself does not appeal to new segments. But in some cases growth in this direction makes strategic sense, and is worth the early strategic sessions with the programming team to determine months in advance if this is how the show will grow. From a communications standpoint, this growth strategy is one of the least expensive. Team pricing or bring-a-colleague promotions can be very effective, and are emailed directly to your existing contacts.

4. Greater Company Reach: This is the strategy to employ when you know you have a great show and want to move it towards industry dominance. If your show is uniquely appealing to an audience of, for example, Marketing Directors within your industry, and it has grown in size and stature over the past few years, one avenue to future growth is to expand beyond your house lists and begin marketing aggressively towards Marketing Managers, Directors and VPs at companies not already within your own organization’s fold. Direct mail and online advertising can be effective at reaching new prospects, and as an email marketer you have an advantage over competing event marketers because you know you don’t need to get a new prospect to register the first time they come across your event. Instead, make it easy for them to subscribe to your email list so that you can provide ongoing updates about the event content, other companies attending, networking opportunities in the EXPO, and other event features. Your objective with your prospecting marketing is not so much to get them to sign on right away, but to give you permission to keep them informed. That takes your prospecting dollars further, and by increasing your house list gives you greater visibility into the possible size of your event in future years as well.

Share this article

Think about two things: your favorite hobby, and a new car. Now imagine you’re watching TV and a car commercial appears. If your hobby of choice is fly fishing, and the people on TV are unloading their rods and reels from the back of the shiny new car, the ad has your attention. Maybe you love to dance, and the commercial depicts a mother driving her young daughter to a ballet recital. Is chess your thing? I’ve never actually seen a chess tie-in for a car commercial but if you have, you surely noticed it.

When we think of email targeting, usually we start with the list – what segment of my audience can I send this message to? But many organizations forego targeting for event marketing emails since the audience they are mailing to is by design as vast as possible. Most don’t just want to tell some of their subscribers about the big annual meeting; they want to tell everybody.

But in the context of the television ads we just looked at, there are ways to target based on creative, that still allow you to send to your full list. Like the car company above, you can see the response to your emails increase by putting the right message in front of different audience segments. Here are some ways to target your event emails with messaging tailored to specific groups in your database:

1. Past Attendees: In many cases, this is the audience most likely to attend again this year, and to register early. In the first few messages you send in support of your event (which commonly include early registration discounts), break out your past attendees into their own segment. Instead of sending them the same “Register by Friday and save $100″ message, tailor it slightly to reflect last year’s event so the message speaks more clearly to them. “All the networking, education and inspiration you remember from last year, at $100 less this year if you register by Friday.” By invoking the strengths of your previous event, you are creating an environment conducive to re-registration. Perhaps as importantly, singling this group out with specific offers early on is the best way to front load your registration process. And the responsiveness of this audience will be a useful barometer for how your event is perceived overall this year. If many of your last year’s attendees register early this year, you have a clear indication that your show hits the mark. If last year’s audience doesn’t jump right back in, you have some further work to do on your programming and/or messaging.

2. Regional Attendees: Many shows draw a national audience, but don’t forget that some of those people from across the country are only across town. Travel is a barrier to event attendance for many companies, so whenever it is removed by hosting a show right in some prospective attendees’ back yard, be sure to call attention to it with some messages targeted by city, state, zip code, or by domain name if you know that the company is based in the same region as the venue. Team pricing resonates with local audiences and helps build word-of-mouth among local companies since recipients of these messages tend to pass them along to the rest of the team. A free EXPO hall pass is another powerful audience for local companies, as less senior employees without T&E budgets can still participate.

3. New Subscribers: People who are new to your list might not yet know the role the event plays at your organization. For this audience, break out some messages to focus on the overall event experience, particularly the networking and community aspects. It is easier to sell a $1K – $2K event if it is merchandised in the context of the larger relationship with your company. People who have been in the fold for years already have that context in place, but new subscribers would benefit from some additional explanation of the intangible benefits of community.

4. Most Engaged Subscribers: Run a report in MagnetMail that identifies the subscribers who open or click on the highest percentage of messages. One Real Magnet client recently found that about 15% of its audience was highly engaged, and opened at least 10 messages in the past year. This is the population most likely to serve as advocates for your company. Instead of the general event messages you send to most of your list, break them out and send messages asking not just for their own registration, but for some other action that benefits the show: forwarding the message onto colleagues, building a team to take advantage of team pricing, posting the event to a department calendar, or sharing a link to the show’s website via social media. Getting this group to register won’t be difficult and shouldn’t be the ultimate objective. They are ready to work on your behalf, so give them the tools.

With all of these examples, the targeting supplements your existing email program for the event, not replaces it. For example, when you send to your Regional Attendees, you might mail on the same day you are sending a general message to your entire list. De-dupe your regional folks so that they only get the targeted message instead of both. This way, you’re sending the same amount of email and not overburdening anyone’s inbox, but many of your messages are crafted with more precision and will enjoy a nice lift in results.

Share this article

For my column on MediaPost this month, I thought I’d kick off the new year by taking a look at some of the trends in email marketing that I expect to gain some added traction in 2011. But lots of other columnists have already done the same or have drafts ready to fire, so I chose instead to raise the stakes. Instead of looking at trends in email that will grow in 2011, I elected to spend some time thinking about tools for driving engagement that don’t yet exist – but could, now that the landscape has changed a bit. Am I right on any of this? Let’s come back in a couple years and see.

Three Tools To Boost Email Engagement That Don’t Exist Yet
by Mike May
Published on 1.12.11 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

As digital media go, email isn’t typically exalted for its cutting-edge progressiveness. It is constantly evolving, with increasing analytic capacity, data integration and other functionality. But it doesn’t seem to follow the same digital media trends making the rounds in Online Media Daily, the Social Media Insider or even the Mobile Insider newsletters. So far, it hasn’t needed to. Email doesn’t need to rely on sexy, as long as it can rest comfortably on its ROI and marketing department ubiquity.

You know what they say about the winds of change, though — they blow. As the landscape shifts, it’s becoming clear that engagement will become critically important to email marketing — not just to boost ROI, but because of its growing importance to deliverability and sender reputation. I believe some of the biggest innovations we will see in the industry in the coming years (or even months) will be designed to boost engagement, since the benefits greater engagement yield can impact an profoundly affect an organization’s email program

Here are a few innovations I’ve been thinking about, that in past years haven’t been worth the investment. But with engagement at a premium, we may start to see more energy and resources devoted to tools previously considered pie-in-the-sky, but now looking a lot like the cost of doing business:

1. Survey-based targeting. Behavioral targeting in email has long existed: if you email your previous customers specifically based on past purchases, you’re in the BT business. But BT is limited to assumptions based on observable data, making it susceptible to false negatives and false positives.

For example, Dave might really want that KaPow oversized driver featured in today’s message, but his birthday is next week and his wife has already promised it to him. Dave has no reason to click through the email, much less buy it. Still, a sender could conclude he doesn’t like the driver, or KaPow, or golf altogether — each of which is a false negative. As it turns out, Dave’s wife shops at the same online retailer and decided to purchase the KaPow driver for him there. She knows nothing about the product, brand or sport, but Dave did write down for her the exact name and model to make her gift-giving easier. She buys him the driver, which Dave loves so much that he throws himself headlong into the game, sacrificing every weekend to 36-hole marathons and every available week night to the driving range.

Dave’s wife leaves him, of course, but still receives an email at least once a month featuring other KaPow products and equipment from other golf companies. She’s a false positive.

Survey-based targeting relies instead on explicit input from consumers, combined with observable data, to create consumer profiles used to anticipate behavior or identify attitudes or values that drive behavior. The survey component requires the use of panels, since only a small percentage of consumers will participate. But a large enough sample size (more easily achieved with a population of subscribers who already have a relationship with the sender) would allow an email marketer to extrapolate, and identify the segments the subscribers in the much larger group of survey non-participants likely belong in. As the size and data richness of house lists grow, segmentations like this become more feasible.

2. Collaborative filtering that treats messages like products. Amazon.com pioneered collaborative filtering at the product level, allowing the retailer to make cogent suggestions for products a shopper might like based on her past purchases and the purchasing history of other shoppers who bought some of the same items. The premise is that not all shoppers can survey the entire available inventory and spot something they like. Collaborative filtering amounts to some helpful editing.

But in our world, the same problem exists. Our subscribers miss or ignore messages when they are distracted or away, even if the messages are well-targeted and the subscriber would genuinely be interested in the content. Imagine treating your messages like products and giving subscribers who overlooked them another crack. At the bottom of this week’s offer, a sender might have a list of recent offers well-targeted to the subscriber, but ignored the first time around. “If you like today’s offer, you might also like these.” The links go to the Web versions of the past messages for that subscriber, complete with tracking.

3. Paid premium email subscriptions. “This is the only piece of mail worth keeping,” I said to my wife yesterday evening when I was sorting the mail. Three catalogs, two credit card offers, three account statements (viewed regularly online), four postcards from local businesses and one fundraising request from an environmental nonprofit all went straight into the paper recycling. The only piece to escape the daily purge was the bright red Netflix envelope containing the DVD that is part of our monthly subscription — our paid monthly subscription.

Paid content isn’t new online, but what exists today are paid subscriptions designed to monetize premium content. I think we are not far off from paid versions of very high value email. For example, appointment shopping sites with limited offerings like Gilt or TheClymb might get away with a premium (paid) subscription giving subscribers early access to select deals. Groupon, LivingSocial and their ilk could do the same for partners with limited availability – like a restaurant opening or a book-signing event. And retailers, travel sites and others might all have an opportunity to craft a new premium subscription with exclusive offers.

If a few million people will pay 99 cents to download “FatBooth” onto their iPhones, surely there must be a market for paid email subscriptions that promise the subscriber savings many times over the purchase price. The rationale behind these subscriptions, however, would not be to drive revenue; rather, it would be to cement engagement. As with my red Netflix envelope, people will pay more attention to what they have paid for. As engagement metrics influence sender reputation, hyper-engaged programs can boost the effectiveness of a sender’s entire program.

With engagement at a premium and email remaining mission-critical to marketers, the scope of possible innovations is vast. What do you see coming down the pike? Maybe more interestingly, what do you see coming behind what you see coming down the pike?

Share this article

On Wednesday 12/8 I gave a webinar on the topic “Update, Don’t Inundate: Event Marketing in the Full Inbox Era.” The webinar was based off a whitepaper on the same topic, available for download here. If you missed the webinar, it is available for on-demand playback below, and you can also download the slides here.

The playback does not include the Q&A that followed the webinar, so I’ll use this space to recount what my responses were during the webinar (and edit them if I think of something more clever to say this time around). There were also a few questions from listeners that we didn’t have time to respond to on the webinar. I’ll respond to those below as well.

Event Marketing Webinar Q&A

Q: Can you go over the “lite” subscription again?  How can someone subscribe to some messages and not others?

A: The idea here is to recgonize that some of your event prospects are less engaged than others. You’ll have some who will want to read all 6 or 8 or 10 messages promoting your upcoming conference, and others who will want to know it’s happening but do not need the details. They both may attend – appetite for emails is not always a clear indication of intent. I recommend that you use a preferences center or a manual group structure to allow for a “lite” subscription to your event emails. Give your subscribers a chance of “opting down,” which is certainly preferable to opting out. Then when you write your messages for your event, decide which ones go to both the lite and full subscribers, and which ones do not go to the lite subscribers. Announcing that registration is opening or the keynote speakers or registration deadlines are all candidates for both subscription categories. But emails that go into detail about the exhibitors or the content in the educational tracks may be more suitable for the full subscribers only. If you don’t have a preferences center or another mechanism for allowing your subscribers to opt-down, take a look at responsiveness to previous messages. Find the subscribers on your list who have not read or responded to many messages over the past year and move them into the lite subscription group. You may find that reducing your frequency actually increases their responsiveness.

Q1: Have you found that offering special discounts for events for Facebook friends or Twitter followers only is effective?
Q2: We’d love to promote our events through social media like Facebook or Twitter but we just don’t seem to have the interest. Any suggestions on how to generate use of those methods by our audience?

A: I’m not an advocate of offering public promotions to only segments of the prospect market, such as requiring that someone is a Facebook fan in order to be eligible for a discount. You may have very loyal attendees who sign up every year, but have no interest in getting poked by high school friends they haven’t seen in 25 years, and didn’t like even in high school. With a Facebook-only discount, some greenhorn who is into social media might get a better deal on the conference than your company’s VIPs. I do believe in rewarding loyalty and engagement though, and think there is a huge opportunity to leverage the value of your events to help establish your social channels. In the case of Twitter and Facebook, there is the opportunity  to reward people by pushing open promotions only or first into those channels. For example, one of your event sponsors might want to invite attendees to a free upscale dinner the night before the event. Instead of promoting it by saying, “Only open to our Facebook followers – RSVP here,” I’d recommend you push the invitation out to Facebook first, with the message, “Room for 20 at the VIP dinner – RSVP in a hurry if you’d like to attend!” Then as you communicate the value of participation in the social channels, you can certainly say “Be the first to learn about promotions and special opportunities.” The end game is not to get people to fan your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter – it’s to build up a communication channel that is effective for you.

Q: Can we move past the history and get to the solutions????

A: Really? I thought the history was the best part. You must not have been an event marketer in 1999 or you would have happily relived that period too.

Q: Website- are you suggesting the home page be simple and lead further into the site?

A: The context to this question had to do with landing pages. I made the point that breaking the content into smaller pieces and promoting individual aspects of the show can be advantageous over trying to promote the whole kit and kaboodle in emails and then sending your prospects to the homepage. You know more about your event than anyone else – you’re the expert. As an event marketer, your role is akin to a guide: help your prospects get to the information about the show that is most relevant to them, and which will cause them to register. To answer the question, I’m not recommending that the homepage be simple. The function of the event homepage is to get people through it, and onto the narrower event content like the agenda or the speaker lineup or the exhibitor list. But the truth about the event homepage is that even if you’re highly skilled at wielding the landing page, your event homepage is still going to get far more traffic than any part of your site. For that reason, you have to put a lot of energy into that page, merchandising your show content effectively. It has to work harder than any other page on your site, even if its goal is simply to get people off of it. So don’t think simple – think representative, and edited. The homepage should highlight – concisely – the aspects of your show that best serve to differentiate it, and which are the most appealing to your target audience. If you have something to say about your show that is not going to resonate with a good chunk of your prospects, leave it off the homepage.

Share this article

I’ve written a few other times about email in event marketing. I’ve approached the topic from a number of angles, but have always focused on dedicated event marketing emails – that is, the emails that you send out expressly to put butts in seats. When we think about Event Marketing Emails, those are the ones we typically envision. They’re the workhorses of most organizations’ entire event marketing program.

But there are other ways to use email to support your event business that aren’t dedicated event emails. Here are a few I’ve seen used successfully:

1. Advertising in your own newsletters: You may already integrate some of your event promotions in the content of your newsletters. Leverage that media one step further by running a graphical “house ad” in the newsletter as well. Use Click-View Tracking to see how effective your ad is at driving traffic, but know also that the ad adds value independent of clicks. The image gives you a greater opportunity to help brand your event with its logo and color scheme, and provides added frequency for your event message. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the newsletter ad is that it allows you to reach a population of subscribers who may have opted out of the promotions specific to your conference or webinar, augmenting the reach of your event marketing.

2. Launch a Dates & Deadlines Newsletter: Most organizations do not have an event. They have a whole portfolio of events – conference, dinners, webinars, each with separate dates and various early registration deadlines. On top of the events, most organizations have other key dates and deadlines to communicate, such as deadlines for research participation or board elections or release dates of anticipated research or products. Suddenly that’s a lot of dates and deadlines, which are either piling up in inboxes in dedicated messages, or choking content-based newsletters better used to communicate news instead of logistics. If this sounds like your organization, consider launching a “Dates & Deadlines” email that goes out weekly and telegraphs all the relevant to-do items on the calendar for that week and the week after. Keep it content-light with a very soft sell, as its purpose is to add value by reminding and informing. Channel your inner Twitter when you write entries, and try to keep every item to 140 characters or less, making for easy reading and low unsubscribe rates. And do whatever you can with the design to keep as much of the content above the fold in the preview pane as possible. Think of the entire newsletter almost as a sticky note in the preview pane with a handful of items easy to scan, digest and traffic as appropriate, and nothing more. When you evaluate the metrics of this newsletter, you’re more interested in open rates than click-through. Your principal aim is to remind, but since it is not a targeted message you may see lower levels of engagement than you are accustomed to. That’s OK. If you’re successful, the greatest lift you’ll see is in the results of your events business, since you’re increasing frequency and reach, and doing a better job of communicating your events (which is the greater part of selling in the Full Inbox Era).

3. Post web versions of event emails online: Even if you’re fully leveraging your newsletters and other media to promote your events, you are probably still putting a lot of energy into your dedicated event emails. Why not squeeze even more productivity out of the dedicated messages by posting them online? Wherever you have a presence and an audience is appropriate – link to them on your blog, your Facebook fan page, your LinkedIn group, Twitter, and on your website. Even encourage your employees who use social media for business purposes to post links to the web version as well. To track the results from these efforts, set up an internal “subscriber” to your messages whose account is used to generate the online version. Then put this subscriber into his own group in MagnetMail, and include this group in your message. Then when you look at the tracking for the message, you can filter by this group and see the gross clicks attributed to this user. You will not be able to see exactly which ones came from the company’s Facebook page, or Larry in Accounting’s Twitter account, but you will at least know the quantitative click lift your web version initiative generated.

Share this article

Much of the objective of your emails is to encourage people to click. But your subscribers don’t actually click on your emails – they click on individual links within your emails. Figuring out what, how long and where those links should be can have a huge impact on the number of clicks you receive, and how successful your email marketing is.

What to hyperlink: In most email templates, the hyperlinked text has a sharp visual contrast with the rest of the body copy. It works in the same way that bold text does, and draws in the reader’s attention. I know we would like to think our subscribers read every word of our emails, but the truth is that many emails are only skimmed. When this happens, it may be only the hyperlinks that your subscribers even focus on. For this reason, what you hyperlink becomes critical. For example, if your objective is to promote an article that your CEO just published on the blog about lobbying efforts in your industry, you could hyperlink in several different ways:

Read our CEO’s perspective of the lobbying efforts on the Wainwright Bill on our blog.
or
Read our CEO’s perspective of the lobbying efforts on the Wainwright Bill on our blog.
or
Read our CEO’s perspective of the lobbying efforts on the Wainwright Bill on our blog.

Of these three, the first is the most commonly used, but it is also the weakest. If someone is skimming the email, the phrase “on the blog” does not include any indication of where the click will go. The second two are much better, and they show a decision the email marketer needs to make. If the subscribers are more likely to find the CEO’s perspective appealing, the middle example works well. If the hot topic is less the CEO, and more the lobbying efforts on the Wainwright Bill, then the final example is stronger.

How long should a hyperlink be: Let’s stick with the above example and assume that the email marketer believes the most powerful words in the sentence to be “CEO’s Perspective” and “Wainwright Bill,” but not “lobbying efforts.” Again, there are options:

Read our CEO’s perspective of the lobbying efforts on the Wainwright Bill on our blog.
or
Read our CEO’s perspective of the lobbying efforts on the Wainwright Bill on our blog.

In the first example, the hyperlink-as-bolding principle is applied, and the trigger words are highlighted separately in the sentence. Both links would go to the same article on the blog. This emphasizes the strongest words well, but it suggests that the links will go to different places, which isn’t the case. It also suggests that the second link, to “Wainwright Bill”, will go to something with more detail on the Wainwright Bill. Fool me once, shame on you; Fool your subscribers once, they unsubscribe.

The second example is certainly more accurate, but starts to push the limits of acceptable length. If you can’t glance at the entire hyperlink and in an instant know exactly what it says – that is, if you have to actually read it to understand – it is too long. So neither of these options is ideal. A better choice would be to rewrite the sentence so that the most powerful words are clustered together:

Read our CEO’s perspective of the Wainwright Bill and lobbying efforts on our blog.

Where to place hyperlinks: Again, think about your subscribers skimming your article looking for the highlighted bits. The links connote importance. If they are clustered together, the suggestion is that this area contains the most important content. Conversely, if a section has no hyperlinks, skimmers are likely to disregard that content entirely. Where to place your hyperlinks is a function of where you want attention to focus. Once you have composed your message, skim it yourself to make sure that your eye falls naturally on the sections you feel are the most important.

Hyperlink analysis and testing: My favorite tool for measuring the impact of all these tactics is Click-View Tracking, visible underneath the thumbnail image of your message in the Track module. Go through your last dozen or so messages using Click-View Tracking, to see exactly which links pulled the best. Look for patterns in content, context, placement and link length, or anything else you can glean and put into practice with your next message.

Testing the content and length of hyperlinks is also something A/B testing is perfect for. If you’re torn between emphasizing, for example, “CEO’s Perspective” or “Lobbying Efforts on the Wainwright Bill”, split your list in half and try each. Why guess when you can learn?

Share this article

This month on MediaPost I wrote about email ROI. But instead of talking about how to increase it, I wrote instead about why to decrease it. No, I’m not playing devil’s advocate, nor have I gone stark raving mad. My point is simple: if it costs more to reach inboxes, they’d be a lot less cluttered, allowing those of us with legitimate relationships with customers to attract their attention more easily.

If you’d like to read the 1000 word version, you may do so below, or on the MediaPost site.

To Improve Email’s Effectiveness, Lower Its ROI
by Mike May
Published on 9.29.10 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

Almost everything I read about email marketing here in MediaPost and the other trades, as well as all the case studies and panel discussions at the email conferences, and also the white papers penned by the email marketing companies, are about the same thing: how to make email easier, and improve its ROI.

But we’ve got it all wrong. In order to be more successful, we actually have to decrease the ROI of email.

By way of explanation, let me ask a question: what is the single largest impediment to the greater success of your own email marketing? You could search internally and lay some blame on list size or hygiene, your sender reputation, content strategy, competing objectives, or any of a number of other factors. But I think the biggest obstacle you face has nothing to do with your email marketing. Instead, your greatest inbox adversary is everyone else’s email marketing.

Email’s biggest asset is also its greatest liability — the almost frictionless environment in which it operates. Give me a week and a thousand bucks, and I can clog the inboxes of a million of the subscribers you have worked hard to add to your own house list. Spam notwithstanding, even the efforts of legitimate and reasonable senders make your job significantly harder, since the expense associated with their sending just one more message is tiny, and often justified by an absurdly low response rate. So send we do, making inboxes fuller and all of our messages a little less effective.

The barriers to entry for email marketing are simply too low. I look at the challenges faced by email marketers and see parallels to the interactive advertising industry around 2003. CPMs were impossibly low and publishers — desperate for revenue — were perfectly willing to pile on more, larger and more intrusive ad inventory. The result was unbearable clutter, coupled with embarrassing creative quality. With CPMs so low, many advertisers could not justify allocating bona fide creative resources to a campaign. Hiring a designer to build even a few different creative executions for the several size ads within a campaign could effectively double the cost of the campaign. Better to just use the same cheap ad but compensate for its fatigue (and awfulness) by running it a few million more times.

It was a vicious cycle to break out of, but gradually CPMs began to rise, allowing publishers to constrict inventory a bit and requiring advertisers to put more energy into creative. That is, barriers to entry were established. They still do not exist in email marketing, and as proud as we are of the ease in which marketers can get started in email, I’m starting to think it’s time to add a little necessary friction. The higher the barriers, the less clutter there will be, and the more the resourcefulness and skill of accomplished and strategic email marketers will show up in the results.

I can identify a few prospective barriers: ease of use, list procurement, expense. Of these, ease of use should not and will not be a barrier. With over 100 ESPs and some darn slick interfaces already in the market, that horse is long out of the barn. We’ve long wanted to make list procurement a barrier, but as long as the cost of sending is low, resources will be inevitably be devoted to suspect procurement.

So that brings us to expense. The undeniable truth is that if email were more expensive, inboxes would be less full, and the efforts of legitimate email marketers would be better rewarded. And an increased cost-per-message would likely compel email marketers to scrutinize their messaging strategy further, putting ROI analyses in place on newsletters and other content channels where no ROI tracking currently exists, or using email in conjunction with other channels, not instead of. List hygiene becomes more important as unresponsive addresses are suddenly expensive to keep. Play it forward and the actual annual expense of email for many marketers could remain unchanged, as prices rise but volume decreases. And the less cluttered inboxes and more strategic sending could keep results and therefore ROI at about the same level as well.

Where does this increased cost come from — ESPs? It’s true that ESPs can raise prices, but with over 100 of them operating currently, no rate increase will go unnoticed (or untrumpeted) by many hungry competitors happy to continue competing on price. A wholesale rate increase will not happen, nor am I advocating that it should. What about the possibility of fees imposed by ISPs or email administrators for premium delivery, or accompanying messages with branded preview pane icons. And as an email consumer, I also certainly wouldn’t mind making a little coin every time an email marketer wanted my attention. There may be a business model that begins with the phrase, “If I had a penny every time someone sent me an email…”

Every couple of years a new initiative along these lines crops up and is summarily dismissed because “email wants to be free.” But email isn’t free. It costs senders, ISPs, email administrators and consumers countless hours — many of them wasted on unwanted, untargeted or wholly unsolicited messages. Isn’t it time for the industry to take the long view of what’s necessary to reassert email marketing as a strategic communications channel, and not another mass media based on sheer tonnage?

Share this article