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Emailioration Monday, 8-6-12: Revisit Scheduled Sends

Monday, August 6th, 2012

It used to be that when you send an email would not have a huge impact on engagement metrics. Because messages linger in the inbox, many messages would continue driving opens and clicks hours and even days after their arrival, once recipients logged in and worked through their new mail. But over the past couple of years, a few developments are promising to have a profound affect on delivery timing:

1. Mobile Audiences: A recent study found that over half of mobile workers check email on their smartphones before they even get dressed in the morning. You can likely assume they checked just before going to bed, while they were out at lunch, and during the commercials while watching the Olympics. Suddenly there is no bad time to send emails, no matter who your audience is.

2. Inbox Clutter: A message lying in wait in an inbox is as likely to be summarily dismissed as it is to be thoroughly triaged. If a subscriber arrives to work on Monday morning to find 8 messages in the inbox, then yes, each one might get the attention it deserves. How many did you have in your inbox this AM? Probably closer to 38. At volume like that, it’s not reasonable to expect our subscribers to give our messages their full attention. If it’s not urgent, personal or in the 90th percentile for relevance, it won’t get a second glance.

3. Social Media: In social media, messages do not linger, but rather appear fleetingly in feeds. This is changing the way our subscribers think about marketing messages. If you miss a tweet or a status update, chances are your company won’t miss its quarterly numbers as a result, nor will your career spin wildly out of control. I expect our audiences will start to think about email in the same way. With priority inboxes and filters and internal triage processes, subscribers are already finding ways of bubbling what is important to the top. The next step is to stop thinking about less important messages as must-read, and view the inbox as a feed of fleeting content as well.

Now is a good time to resume testing of scheduled sends, to see if you have better results first thing in the morning, later in the evening, even on weekends. Email timing is starting to look a lot like social timing, and is increasingly important to results.

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Each week on “Emailioration Monday” we spotlight a single tactic you can implement this week in order to improve your email marketing. Share tips of your own on Twitter at #Emailioration, and see the full collection of Emailioration tips here.

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Emailioration Monday, 7-30-12: Use Email to Build Anticipation for Email

Monday, July 30th, 2012

The more your subscribers anticipate your email, the higher your open, click and conversion rates. You can build anticipation in many ways, including promoting upcoming newsletters through your social channels or on your website. But the inbox itself is also an excellent channel to promote upcoming emails, as demonstrated by The Clymb, a daily deals retailer specializing in outdoor sports. Their regular alert emails typically include promotion at the bottom of “Coming Up Next” brands and sales.

Today, however, I received something new from them that was unexpected and effective enough to make the centerpiece of this week’s email tip. Instead of using an existing message to promote upcoming sales, The Clymb sent an email focused exclusively on the sales that will start this week. That is, it is an email telling me what emails I can expect from them over the next few days. Have a look:

Click to enlarge.

You don’t have to be a Daily Deals retailer to build email anticipation through email, though part of what makes this tactic work is that what will be offered is not yet available. A similar approach in marketing conferences might be an email that goes out a few days before registration opens, announcing that the first 100 registrants will receive $100 off their full conference fee. Or a magazine publisher might partner with an advertiser on a giveaway, and use an email a few days before the sweepstakes opens to build anticipation around the prize.

Building anticipation requires dedication and some creativity, but the payoff in engagement is almost always worth it.

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Posted in Emailioration, Engagement, Tips | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 7-23-12: Market Your Newsletter Like a Product

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

As marketers, much of the work we do is around positioning, promoting and otherwise selling our key products. We see where they sit in the competitive landscape and make adjustments so that they possess some unique appeal. We identify appropriate channels of distribution – either for the products themselves or for the marketing messages that promote them. And we use every point of customer contact to extol their virtues and remind our customers how, where and why they can buy from us.

If newsletters are an important communications tactic for your brand, why not apply the same energy and skill towards boosting their adoption as you do towards selling your company’s key products? Here are a few quick ways to start:

1. Give your newsletter a name: A name allows you to brand your newsletter, which lends gravitas as it demonstrates to your readership that it is worthy of its own moniker. Think your newsletter doesn’t lend itself to a name? If my county’s Department of Sanitation can call their weekly newsletter “The Paperless Airplane,” yours deserves a brand too.

2. Promote it in house ads: Most companies have some internal media used to promote upcoming conferences, webinars, launches and other revenue-generating products. Dedicate some of those ad impressions to your newsletter, using house ads designed with as much care as the rest of your creative. This will not only boost your subscriber base, but seeing the brand on the website and in the inbox will help build anticipation for your newsletter with your existing subscribers.

3. Set goals: If you’re planning a conference, you know how many exhibitors, sponsors and registrations you need to be successful. Create similar growth goals around your newsletter: number of new subscribers, total number of subscribers, number of reads and/or clicks per month, etc. Creating and monitoring goals helps ensure you keep the pressure on with the newsletter, and that it gets the attention it deserves as a meaningful part of your communications program.

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Posted in Emailioration, Newsletters, Tips | Comments Off

Emailioriation Monday, 7-16-12: Find Your Fold

Monday, July 16th, 2012

You have seen email advice articles I’m sure that advise marketers to make sure that the most important content within a message is “above the fold.” If the call to action or key content element is visible as soon as someone opens the email, the assumption is that the message has its best chance of succeeding.

But there is an assumption inherent in that piece of advice that bears challenging – that being that the space “above the fold” is where the greatest engagement is driven. This may not be true. The kernel of the recommendation then is to place your most engaging content wherever in your email drives the most engagement. It may be above the fold, or it may just as likely be in a sidebar, in pre-header text, the middle of the third paragraph or even in a postscript.

To figure out where your engagement hotspots are, use Click View tracking to see which sections of each message capture clicks, and then experiment with different content types in each of these sections. You may find your fold is not where you expected at all.

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Posted in Copywriting, Design Tips, Emailioration, Engagement, Tips | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 7-9-12: Try Something You Don’t Expect to Work

Monday, July 9th, 2012

Best Practices, or doing what you and others in the email business have learned over the years works well, are the safest way to manage your email program. We used to say in the IT Industry, “Nobody got fired for buying IBM.” Similarly in email, nobody is going to have some explaining to do in the marketing meeting if they just follow best practices. Best practices relieve marketers of the burden of exploration.

But you can’t break new ground without exploring, so sometimes the better practice is to chuck best practices out the window, and try something that seems less of a sure thing, and might even fail. If it does, at least you’ve learned something (which doesn’t happen when you’re following best practices – that learning existed long before you adopted that tactic). And if it doesn’t, you’ve found a way to zig when others zag. Maybe sending on Sunday isn’t such a bad idea after all, and subject lines longer than 8 words actually work better for you. You will not know until you try, and you will not move out of the meat of the bell curve without pushing the boundaries.

What should you try first? Start with something that unburdens your workload a little bit. Try copy that is a little more conversational than curated, or content that is repurposed from social or other media. If you can find something that takes less time but works just as well or better, you’ve already achieved something.

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Emailioration Monday, 7-2-12: Invite Replies

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

If you have 37 million subscribers and you’re using email to broadcast the 2-hour sale that starts right now, you probably don’t want to make it easy for your subscribers to bombard you with product and pricing questions. But chances are your list is smaller and you are using your emails to drive engagement as much as revenue. If that’s the case, making it easy for your subscribers to fire off a quick response goes a long way towards making your brand seem approachable and attentive to what your audience wants (very similar to a good social media strategy, in fact). Here are a few ways to help open your emails up into the beginning of a dialogue:

1. Use a specific reply email address. Obviously, you don’t want to use “do-not-reply@notlistening.com”. The standard “info@…” is acceptable but something that shows you’re actually paying particular attention to this channel is more inviting. Try instead “newsletter@…” or “replies@…” or “emailfeedback@…” to show your audience you’re not just phoning it in.

2. Explicitly invite responses. Your email copy works, so use it to drive engagement with a closing or PS that lets your readers know that they do not need to suppress their responses. Try something like, “If you have feedback or questions, go ahead and reply directly to this email or drop us a note at “newsletter@…”.

3. Publish or recognize email feedback. Showing your audience that other subscribers are writing back and getting a response helps underscore the two-way value of the email channel. Simply mentioning that someone wrote in breaks the seal, like “Last week we received some replies to our newsletter asking for more info on our Widgetizer 9000. We’ve since updated the product page to let you know that it weighs 900g, runs on 3 AA batteries or solar power, and is available in both blueberry and mochacinno flavors.” Your audience does not respond because they do not think anyone listens to the email channel. Examples like this assure them that you are.

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Emailioration Monday, 6-25-12: Create (and Distribute) a Monthly Email Report

Monday, June 25th, 2012

A monthly overview report of your email activity and metrics won’t make your next message perform any better, but it does improve your program in a few other ways:

1. Compiling a reports are the best way to remind yourself to watch trends. Your open or click rate on your last newsletter is meaningless without context. Reports that you compile and distribute compel you to analyze your performance data over time, which is the best way to keep your thumb on its pulse.

2. Distributing the report includes more people at your organization as stakeholders. In most organizations, every single business and product relies on email in some way. Sharing its successes helps ensure the channel gets the credit it deserves, and being clear about the challenges you face in email can help secure the resources you (and the other stakeholders) need to keep moving your business forward.

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Posted in Analytics, Emailioration, Tips | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 6-18-12: Clicks are Wins

Monday, June 18th, 2012

There is no arguing that emails drive action. But the action they drive is closer to the first step in the funnel, not the last. While we may send out emails to sell products, drive conference registrations, prompt downloads of research papers or run up advertising-laden page views, the truth is that the email actually does none of that. All the email does is start someone down the funnel with that first click.

This is important to remember for two reasons:

1. Email can’t be held fully accountable for the success or failure of the programs it supports. If your website is ill-equipped to close the sale, no amount of clever inbox copy can fill your webinar or save your quarterly numbers.

2. Don’t lose sight of the prize – the clicks. If your objective is to bring someone into the funnel, the email’s job is not to inform or entertain or announce. All of that is important in an email program, but some messages are for getting the real work of your organization done. When you’re writing one of them, remain singleminded of purpose and drive those clicks. Use links generously; include no content that is not aimed squarely at the product or event you’re promoting; be concise enough to stay out of your own way. If your email program has done its job of respectfully engaging your subscribers previously, you have built the attention you need to succeed. Harvesting that attention not only moves your business forward, but it deepens engagement with subscribers. Clicks are wins.

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Emailioration Monday, 6-11-12: Promote Social Alternatives on Unsubscribe Page

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Unsubscribes are inevitable, but they don’t always mean your subscribers just aren’t that into you. An increasing number of departures from email lists are not eschewing your brand as much as trying to manage the load on their inbox. I see a lot of brands try to talk customers out of unsubscribing, but a better tactic is to give them alternatives for keeping in touch with your brand. The Unsubscribe confirmation page then is a perfect place to promote your social channels and encourage folks to stay in the fold that way.Messages in social channels do not need to be managed and triaged in the same way as email, making them a little easier to live with for subscribers facing information overload.

If you have multiple channels (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest) make sure you tell people what each one is used for so they can follow you wherever makes the most sense to them.

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Posted in Email+Social, Emailioration, Tips | Comments Off

Emailioration Monday, 6-4-12: Use Narrower Content for Deeper Engagement

Monday, June 4th, 2012

Many emails are written to try and include something for everyone, with content aimed at multiple roles, functional responsibilities, levels of seniority or interests. I understand the logic: if subscription is open to everyone, we had better include something for every person who subscribed, so they don’t find zero value aimed at them and then unsubscribe.

But attention is at an all time premium, so a nod to each segment in your subscription list may no longer be enough to keep them engaged. Now is the time to begin experimenting with narrow content aimed expressly at the segments of your list who are the most strategically important. Aim to make your newsletter not just unoffensive, but must-read for the people who matter to you most.

If that just isn’t possible because you have many disparate constituencies you need to continue to serve, launch niche newsletters for each of them, focusing solely on what is most relevant to each group. Remember that your objective is not to get your newsletter read, but to keep your audience engaged.

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Posted in Content Strategy, Emailioration, Newsletters, Tips | Comments Off