Archive for the ‘Published Articles’ Category

Are Email Marketers Outrunning The Bear?

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 1-9-14.

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There is a joke I  frequently tell clients and use in presentations as an analogy for email marketing. Like everyone else I’ve told it to, you’ve probably heard it before. Please indulge me anyway:

A woman met her friend at the trailhead for an all-day hike in the wilderness. Her friend showed up carrying a heavy pack filled with a day’s worth of food and water and emergency provisions in case they got lost. He wore long pants and sleeves to protect himself from poison oak and mosquitoes, and his feet were shod in heavy hiking boots. The woman, in stark contrast, was dressed in running shorts and a tank top, with lightweight running shoes on her feet. She began stretching.

The man looked at her, puzzled. He asked why she was dressed like that for hiking. She replied that there had recently been a number of reported brown bear sightings in these woods, and she wanted to be prepared to make a quick escape.

“But brown bears can run 40 miles per hour. You’re never going to outrun a bear!” he exclaimed.

She looked at his long pants, burdened backpack and heavy boots and replied, “I don’t have to outrun the bear.”

I’ve used this joke to make the point that marketers’ biggest competition in the inbox is clutter, and that to succeed with email all they needed to do was beat the bell curve so that theirs is not one of the messages to be ignored, deleted or filtered. But the email landscape is fundamentally different in 2013 than it was a couple years ago. Today we have to contend with:

-       Email volume continues to rise, to the point where consumers are no longer distinguishing between unsolicited spam and messages they simply can’t be bothered with right now.

-       The availability of inbox management tools (Alto, Inky, Mailbox app, Glider and many others) has blossomed from cottage industry into hotly contested market.

-       Corporations are studying the productivity loss from time spent in email, and even banning email for internal communications.

-       The biggest email story (now that the Petraeus scandal has faded) in business and mainstream media is how to deal with bloated inboxes. The “Today Show,} Forbes, USA Today, lifehacker and many others revisit the topic regularly.

-       The M&A activity around email over the past year has been staggering, with much of the investment going into automation. This means each of us will receive more messages than ever.

To continue to succeed in and after 2013, marketers must do far more than be slightly less disruptive, annoying or irrelevant than the next message in the inbox. Success in the inbox of the (very near) future means forging genuine engagement by learning about each of our subscribers and – importantly – acting on that knowledge with every message.

Many of the tactics email marketers currently use do fulfill the need the bear joke defines. Symbols in subject lines, embedded multimedia, preference centers that relieve us of the burden of data mining and targeting, even A/B testing that helps us lift the performance of each message but doesn’t improve our overall program — all these leave our hiking-booted companion behind us on the trail so that we can live to email another day.

But tactics that are as easy to implement as a change of shoes do not position our email programs to continue to thrive as the channel inevitably evolves. Rather, systemic and strategic improvements are necessary: data integration, marketing automation, responsive design, proactive analysis and segmentation, and dynamic content are some of the approaches that will quickly evolve from cutting-edge to cost of doing business.

The changing landscape means that (mercifully) I need to find some new material. Outrunning the bear is no longer an appropriate metaphor for email marketing, not when we’re hiking through a forest full of bears.

Posted in Engagement, Published Articles | Comments Off

Trends That Should Disrupt Your 2013 Email Program

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 12-12-12

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Now is the customary time to make predictions about the trends that will have the greatest impact on the email industry in the coming year. Only this year I’d like to focus not just on the trends, but also on how they should affect what we do as email marketers. Knowing what is going on is only useful if we adjust our tactics because of it (kind of like email metrics themselves).

Here are the trends I’m paying the most attention to, and the evidence that we email marketers are responding to them:

Engagement metrics’ impact on deliverability: A few years ago, the concept of dead weight was finally introduced into email, when the major ISPs began incorporating engagement metrics into deliverability. The key (ultrasimplified) upshot is that the more people you have on your list who are unresponsive, the more likely ISPs are to regard your messages in general as spammy. This means there’s little justification for continuing to send to all those people who have done nothing with your emails in the past forever months. In the past year I have seen a lot of evidence that marketers are taking this trend seriously, with many discussions about reactivation programs and targeting subscribers based on engagement levels. My favorite anecdote is from one of the daily deal sites that is able to predict which subscribers will become inactive within a few days of their original signup, and proactively kicks them to the curb before they drag down metrics. But overall, the trend may be getting the best of us. Return Path recently reported that Inbox Placement Rates are down a sharp 5% from the previous quarter.

Mobile and the call-to-action: Mobile consumption is way up, with reports that 45% of opens are now on mobile devices, and that the iPhone is now the leading email client. So far the marketing reaction to mobile has been limited largely to design: make sure your message renders, you pad your buttons to avoid fat-fingered errors, and you include a link to a Web version. Is 2013 the year we start to see calls-to-action modified as well? We know that mobile visitors do not convert as readily as Web visitors, so shouldn’t “Buy Now” be replaced with something easier to do on a phone? I look forward to some mobile-optimized CTAs like “Order by Phone Here” or “TXT us to hold your spot for 2 hours” or “Download our app.” Mobile should force marketers to stop thinking about converting with email, and move more toward using each message to bring people closer to conversion.

Inbox management’s role in relevance: I’m placing my big bet for 2013 on inbox management applications. These are the tools like AOL Alto and PhilterIt and many others that disrupt the marketer’s access to the principal inbox by helping consumers sort, suspend, filter and otherwise triage email so that managing the inbox becomes more a proactive than reactive process. As email volume increases (which I boldly predict will happen again next year), the need for inbox management rises with it. I think the long-term outcome of inbox management will be a growing rift between preferred senders and merely permitted senders. Marketers will need to move past permission and even attention all the way to anticipation in order to continue to thrive in a managed inbox. Those that don’t may find that filtering does not just suppress their engagement metrics, but cuts them off at the knees.

Marketing automation and average-sized data: Label me a Luddite, but I don’t see a lot of email marketers in a position to integrate Big Data, despite how trendy it is to talk about. What I do see is a spike in enthusiasm for marketing automation – starting with highly effective triggered messages and working up to larger behavior-based workflows. For marketing automation to expand in usage, marketers will need to be as proactive about setting up their email programs as consumers are about managing their inboxes. And they will also need to identify the triggers, data and content that will power automated messages. The good news is that the performance of these messages is so superior to business-as-usual email, that a small test should hook us all. Nothing frees up resources like results.

Larger lists and smaller audiences: When email rose to prominence, it was touted as the holy grail of 1-to-1 marketing. It wasn’t then, of course. But it is now — at least for Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and some other highly progressive brands whose entire email program consists of sending messages created expressly for an individual recipient. We can’t all do that yet, but we should all aspire to increasingly smaller segments that allow more targeted messages and increased relevance, even as our total subscriber bases continue to grow. Our objective for 2013 should not be to send more messages to more people, but to send more accurate messages to the right people.

Posted in Deliverability, Industry News, Mobile, Published Articles, Segmenting and Targeting | Comments Off

The Rise Of 0-to-1 Email Communications

Thursday, November 15th, 2012

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 11-15-12.

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My inbox is losing its voice. Or rather, most of the messages in there have lost theirs. It wasn’t long ago that almost every marketing email I received was copywritten expressly for the email channel, allowing me to hear the voices of all the brands I subscribed to. But now most of the messages in my inbox have no such voice, and were instead authored by machines.

Over the past six months especially, native email content is being replaced by transactional, triggered and other data-driven messages. Instead of carefully worded pitches and prose, the content is instead curated from websites, blogs and online product catalogs, or generated directly from an application where the closest thing to actual copy is a template with some framing language like, “Here are some tweets you might like.” The content in these messages was not written expressly for email; the brands are using email as a delivery channel for previously created content. This is an important shift, and has profound implications on audience attention and engagement.

Look at your own inbox after you’ve deleted everything that is not relevant enough to warrant your attention. What’s left? Notifications from your social network(s) of choice alerting you that someone has recently followed, friended, mentioned, messaged or tagged you; confirmations and shipping notifications from retail and other e-commerce businesses; and newsletters and digests comprised of a single article written for a publication (like this one), or aggregating links and abstracts from a number of articles into a digest format. What makes many of these messages highly relevant to you is that they are written – er, generated – expressly for you. Anyone else who hacks into my inbox will be bored stiff with the contents.

We may lament the waning of the copywriting craft in email, but modern email marketers will immediately understand why the shift is occurring: because the results support it. Plainly, machines are better at assembling and targeting content at the individual level than we are. Google generates more relevant results than NetGuide; Amazon’s product recommendation engine is far more scalable than Nordstrom’s personal shoppers; and Pandora builds better playlists than a college station DJ. When targeting, relevance and scale all matter, machines win.

The inflection point driving this shift in email is clutter. Now email marketers must operate in the Attention Economy. Message volume has outstripped our subscribers’ time to read and act on it all. Our challenge then is not to send messages that are relevant on an absolute level, but that are more relevant than most of the other messages in the inbox. We are not competing with our industry rivals as much as the 60 messages in front of ours in the inbox. Shorter, personal, better =-targeted and more frequent messages are better equipped to engage in the Attention Economy than long narrative paragraphs that say more about the mailing brand than the receiving subscriber. In a battle of narcissistic wills, smart brands are letting their subscribers win.

We can now break email into three separate categories, which tracks the rise of the machines:

1-to-1: When email rose to prominence as a marketing channel about fifteen years ago, it was billed as the first true “1-to-1 communications channel.” It never was, of course. We know now that a single name in the “To” field of a message 500,000 people are receiving simultaneously is not the same thing as 1-to-1 communications. Real 1-to-1 emails are the messages we personally receive from other people, and are what anchor the channel’s utility.

1-to-Few: Dynamic content allows a range of emails to be assembled from content blocks and targeted to subscribers based on preferences or attributes in a database. This falls short of 1-to-1, since the range of distinct messages is limited by the number of separate content blocks and corresponding subscriber attributes. They move the ball forward in relevance, but are hampered by an inability to scale.

1-to-Many: Most commonly, email has been a 1-to-Many communications channel, with the majority of recipients on a list receiving the same message, or lists broken into very broad segments and targeted with a separate creative treatment. Almost all email marketers I speak with know they should segment and target better. Finding the resources is hard, particularly since wasting an email appears to be far less expensive than running an unresponsive print ad, or squandering an expensive TV commercial on poor creative. Email is inexpensive and marketers own the audience, so segmenting and targeting are easily deferred to some future message or campaign. The rising importance of engagement metrics on deliverability is creating awareness of the need for increased targeting, though I have not yet seen any data that signals a change in email marketing tactics as a result.

0-to-1: Machines change the game. I call this category 0-to-1 Communications, as the machines – once programmed – churn out highly targeted and personal messages without a marketer writing copy, pulling a list or clicking “send” for each one. They can tell you which six products (or price points) in a store each individual customer is most likely to buy, when the merchandising accuracy of a 1-to-Many message is limited to a much broader segment. They can create messaging opportunities for a brand based on interactions (someone commented on your comment, these people have viewed your picture) too small to otherwise notice and act on. And they are scalable, able to perform the same level of targeting on a practically infinite number of people, at a frequency unmatched by even the most productive marketing team.

Should I be hedging my bets and claiming that some brands will continue to use a traditional one-to-many copywriting model for email and enjoy success? I suppose if you consider the family market on the corner that manages to stay in business despite a Safeway or Wegman’s down the street a success story, then yes. Some brands will persist, and the handcrafted artisan email will come to be regarded as quaint and possibly sufficient. But the machines are coming, and the gulf in engagement that their highly personal and targeted messages create compared to traditional email marketing is going to fundamentally alter the inbox landscape, and how consumers manage and respond to email.

 

Posted in Integrations, Published Articles | Comments Off

Facebook Timeline And Email’s Brand Narrative

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 10-17-12.

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Facebook’s Timeline is remarkable for brands because it allows consumers to follow a brand’s narrative almost at a glance. Every piece of content a brand contributes to its Timeline constitutes a chapter, and seeing them all aggregated chronologically and graphically allows them to be read quickly as a whole story. It’s actually fascinating how quickly you can pick up on a brand’s positioning and value proposition if they’re executed well on Facebook Timeline.

A similar aggregation of brand content is taking place in email right now. It’s more subtle and is occurring on a number of platforms and with a range of methods that make it increasingly likely consumers will have the whole picture of a brand’s email program through aggregated content. These methods are driven by the need for inbox management, a topic that is everywhere in the news now — covered in places ranging from Lifehacker to Fortune magazine to the Harvard Business Review. Everywhere you look, consumers are trying to find a way to reclaim their inboxes and make sure they remain as useful as they are essential.

Here are just some of the approaches your subscribers are taking to inbox management:

– Filters and Smart Mailboxes make it easy for subscribers to quarantine messages from selected senders into their own folder, for reading at a later time.
- Aggregation tools work similarly but require less subscriber input to triage more mail. Examples are Azigo, Hipiti and Swizzle.
– Time-shifting email with tools like InboxPause, which queues up email outside the inbox until the user elects to let it flow in.
– New means of inbox management are hitting the market almost daily. As long as marketers continue to email, consumers (and entrepreneurs) will continue to seek out ways to make the inbox experience more proactive than reactive. Aggregating like content will be an important strategy.

None of these techniques and tools is as clean as Timeline, but you can see how they give consumers  a whole view of an email program over a series of five, 10 or even 20 messages at a time. The unintended consequence of aggregating messages by brand is that the meaningful shelf life of each message may be extended. Every time a consumer goes to the “Brand X” folder or stream to see the latest message, the handful that preceded it will also be visible.

How can email marketers turn this trend into an asset instead of a liability? I think the answer lies in email marketers’ ability to think like brand managers as well as direct marketers. When subscribers see past individual messages to the email program as a whole, the brand narrative becomes more important. Here are some tips on how to be more attentive to yours, and ensure that the story your brand is telling in the inbox is consistent and engaging:

Use an editorial calendar: An editorial calendar ensures that the content focus is the same in the inbox, social media, search, and wherever else you’re marketing. It also helps email marketers remain proactive about content, instead of reactively resorting to promotional messages to move the needle. An email program that has “save 40%” in the subject line every time may position the brand well outside of where you’d ultimately like it to be.

Note the importance of the subject line: When messages are aggregated and queued up for review, the subject line carries the brunt of the storytelling responsibility. Make sure yours not only telegraph the message content, but do it in a way that supports your positioning.

Maintain a consistent voice: Not only do you want your content to be consistent across channels, you want all of the emails viewed together to obviously come from the same brand. If last week’s subject line is “An important message to our customers about saving 20%” and it is visible in a folder next to this week’s promotion of the same sale with the subject “20% off everything? Aww yeah!” you may have learned something about open rates, but you have confused your audience about your brand’s positioning.

Adopt a content strategy for your brand, not just the email channel: It’s time to stop thinking about email as a direct-response channel, even though it rocks at driving revenue-producing action. Instead, develop a brand content strategy that you execute across all channels. In order for email to help tell the brand narrative, it has to contribute to the whole story — not just the parts that drive the clicks you need today to meet your numbers this month.

Posted in Branding, Published Articles | Comments Off

Are You an Email Weekend Warrior?

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 9-19-12.

After the annual August lull when most of the country seems to carve out at least one week to take a vacation, the soccer fields, 5K routes, hockey rinks, cyclocross courses and other competitive venues are once again filled with grown adults reliving their adolescent athletic dreams. OK, our adolescent athletic dreams – I count myself among them. In fact, I expect a lot of email marketers suit up for competition on weekends. If you spend your weeks jostling for position and results in the inbox, it is only natural your competitive streak extends to extra-curricular events on Saturday and Sunday.

The hardest part about being a weekend warrior is probably also what is most rewarding – competing against people who have more time and resources than you do. If you do well against these people, you can be proud of your accomplishments. The same is true for email marketing. Many messages in your subscribers’ inboxes arrived there through the efforts of the industry’s leading professionals – entire teams and agencies devoted to the channel, with reams of research, terabytes of behavioral data and the leading technology at their disposal. They’re the ringers, and fair or not, your message is up against theirs in the battle for attention.

Even if you don’t have the team, the time or the tools of the biggest brands, it is possible to compete – and succeed – as the email equivalent of a weekend warrior. Here are some of the obstacles you face, and how to get over them:

Outperformed by competitors who train more: There will always be someone who puts in more time than you do. In sports, the secret to improved performance on a limited time budget is to train smarter and more purposefully, which many amateur athletes learn to do by hiring a coach or joining an established club. Experts can have a profound impact on performance in email as well. Hiring an email consultant not only allows your brand to benefit from his or her expertise, but the expense helps ensure that you actually act on the advice you are given. You can tap the collective expertise of a team or club by attending conferences, joining LinkedIn groups and making the most out of your time on Mediapost by participating in conversations in the comments. Resources abound to help you make up in quality what you lack in quantity.

Frustrated by mediocre results: Every time you compete, you develop a little more feel for the game. Part of it is the physical tuning competition builds, but strategy, tactics, nerves, instincts and vision all improve with the familiarity of competition. In sports, one way to get better results is just to compete more. The same is true for email, so put yourself in a live game scenario as often as possible. Create niche newsletters and other segmented messages that put your skills to test more frequently, and give you the chance to measure them. Create triggered campaigns and overhaul your auto-generated transactional messages. Create content for social channels as a sort of competitive cross-training. The more time you can spend actually creating the messages you want to perform well, the more natural the process will become and the easier it will be to turn to the marginal gains and advanced tactics of the game.

Prone to injury: Sometimes we compete when our bodies are not quite as finely tuned as our minds remember them being. When you are not fit, limber and well-conditioned, subjecting yourself to the rigors of competition often results in pulled muscles, strained ligaments, and aching joints. The email equivalent is causing injury to your sender reputation through improperly managed deliverability tactics, and damaging engagement with messages that are not targeted and relevant. In the inbox and on game day proper preparation is key, which means not just readying what you hope to go well, but also anticipating and preventing what could go wrong.  You hope you never need to use the emergency contact number you’re asked to fill out when you join the league or race, same as the crisis management plan you should put in place in the event you send to the wrong group or publish a message with inaccurate information.

Whether we compete because we enjoy it, or because (like winter camping) we enjoy having done it, the motivation is the same – to challenge ourselves and improve. As long as we’re in the game, we might as well win.

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Does Social Content Make Good Email Copy?

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

Originally published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 8-21-12.

I’ve written before about how email and social media are similar, in that they are both permission-based channels (or earned media) that require a similar approach to content strategy. Engagement and empathy work better than interruption and incessancy.

But are email and social media similar enough to share not just a content strategy, but actual content? An increasing number of marketers have remarked to me that it would be nice if emails could automatically pull content off the brands’ Facebook timelines or Twitter feeds, and auto-generate emails. It’s a question worth pondering. After all, many brands put more energy into creating social content than they do email, and some are seeing their engagement metrics go through the roof on Facebook, Pinterest and other social channels. The social content obviously does its job.

The other trend I’m seeing is that many senior social managers are moving into that position from the email group. With social in the marketing limelight, it makes sense for rising marketers to point their career path through social on the way to the executive suite.

Finally, email is harder to write than a tweet or status update. With many brands seeing open rates decline, why not just find a way to limit the resources required for email and automatically scrape-and-send the social content they know is engaging?

Brands who regard email as a non-strategic channel, valued principally as an undifferentiated means of distribution for content, may find the opportunity appealing. But marketers who have grown their email list over time and who rely on it as a source of revenue, customer retention or engagement will, I think, be disappointed by the results of repurposed social content. Here’s why:

1. No call to action: Social content engages so well because — in part — it asks very little of its audience. It is not salesy as much as chatty. But for marketers who rely on email to sell product, fill conference rooms, book hotel rooms or drive subscriptions, social content in the inbox cannot be organized or designed to do the job nearly as well. If emails cease being revenue generators, they will end up being evaluated by the same branding and engagement metrics that CEOs often insist cannot be tied to sales. More important, the sales lost in the email channel have to be made up somewhere else. Guess what happens when you try to turn your engaging social media into direct-response channels? Yup, you end up squandering them too. Better renew your USPS indicia permit.

2. Loss of relevance: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all rely on email to notify members about specific happenings in their network — when a friend has mentioned them, a colleague has added new skills or contacts, or even popular tweets that may have been missed. This type of tailored social content in the inbox is highly relevant. But when a brand sends an email exclusively about what is happening on its timeline or feed, it’s narcissistic. Social content within someone’s network answers the question, by definition, “What’s in it for me?” Your fans and followers don’t want an email about what you have posted on your timeline — any more than you’d like an email about whom they are now following on Twitter. When email content is no longer relevant, unbsubcribes increase.

3. Broken promises: For many brands, repurposing social content may be seen as a way to make better use of their existing email lists, particularly if they have stopped emailing altogether. But subscribers didn’t sign up to see a rehashed Timeline or Twitter feed, and sending them content not tailored for the channel may be perceived as a broken content promise. It also sends the message that your brand is not serious about the inbox, which leaves your subscribers less willing to give you any attention there, or even let you in.

4. Email’s critical editing function is lost: Email works best when content is carefully selected from all available sources and tailored around the interests of a particular audience or segment. It is less about creating content than it is identifying what content will appeal to different segment, and applying an effective editing function (whether that function should be human or algorithmic is a topic for another day.)

This editing function actually IS a way that social content can be integrated into the inbox. For example, an automotive brand that pushes out everything in its social sphere to its subscribers misses the mark with almost all the content. But let’s say the automotive brand just targets its segment interested in pickup trucks with carefully curated social content in emails, like photos posted to its Timeline by new pickup truck owners, Twitter conversations about compatible cargo bed liners and other aftermarket accessories, etc. Not only would this draw subscribers into the email in the same way it draws fans into the social content; it would also draw email prospects into the social channel itself.

Finding fresh and effective content for email is an ongoing challenge. Repurposing social content for the inbox by itself is not a viable email content strategy. But drawing on social channels in the same way we use our newsletters and other messages to point to our website, blog and other media does makes sense. The channels do require unique content, however. Your Timeline in the inbox won’t be any more effective than the print ads we used to email out a decade ago. Audiences are too discerning for that — a condition that we marketers ought to see as an opportunity, not a liability.

Posted in Email+Social, Published Articles | Comments Off

Achieving Your Optimal Email Frequency

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

For my column in MediaPost this week, I drew inspiration from a webinar I co-presented last week on Email List Building. The marketer co-presenting revealed that for some of her company’s subscriptions they were sending as much as 3 emails per day. Volume like that flies in the face of conventional best practices, but throughout the webinar and the Q&A that followed, she discussed how the company had been able to ratchet up the volume over time. Some best practices are ripe for revisiting. Does the opportunity exist for you to increase your own email frequency?

Achieving Your Optimal Email Frequency
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 7-25-12

Last week I participated in a webinar with an email marketer who said in her presentation that her company sends as many as three emails per day to some of its subscription lists. Almost all of the questions during the audience QA that followed were variations of, “How do you do that? Can you teach me?”

Many participants were aghast that a brand was sending so much email, but as the marketer explained how they had gradually worked up to that impressive frequency, the initial audience apprehension at the volume gradually evolved into understanding. And then they went straight to envy.

That was half the lesson from this marketer – that increasing email frequency is possible. Despite the research showing inbox overload, the pundits’ claims of channel fickleness, and the anecdotes we all hear (and share) about kicking brands to our inbox curb, it is still possible to pump up email volume, deriving more of whatever value the email channel provides to your company.

Of course, what that specific value is depends on your company and how you use email. If you’re a publisher generating ad revenue from your newsletters or the websites they drive traffic to, increasing frequency translates directly into increased revenues. If you are a retailer, conference producer, travel site or any other e-commerce business, more emails can translate directly into more sales. And if you’re neither of the above but use newsletters and other emails to maintain engagement or move customers closer to highly considered purchases, increased frequency can lift results there as well. The first step in increasing frequency is to determine what results you want to lift, so you know which email(s) to multiply.

Here are a handful of other tactics to help you find your optimal email frequency:

1. Just try it. It may be you’re already below your optimal sending frequency, so before changing up your content strategy and adding new rules, test sending at a sustained higher frequency to a segment of your list. The impact of more emails (particularly the negative) may not be felt right away, so run your test to the same segment for at least five new messages. Track your key metrics – including unsubscribes – over the entire period and look for burgeoning trends.

2. Add empathic content. If your current content strategy is not expandable into higher frequency (e.g., if you are a conference producer already sending a Register Today email every week for three months leading up to your event), look to create a new newsletter for the same audience with content that leans more toward their business needs than your own. Your goal here is less to drive clicks, registrations and purchases than it is to increase relevance for your brand and protect its mindshare in the inbox. Emails that ask your subscribers to do or buy something often work better when they are not the only messages subscribers receive from you (which is also one of the reasons why social complements email so well).

3. Go narrower. Broad content is designed to hold a little appeal for as many subscribers as possible. It’s hard to unsubscribe from newsletters that may have something of interest each time they are sent. But it’s  equally difficult to get excited about receiving them and to truly anticipate their contents. On the other hand, narrower content appeals to fewer people, but with a much stronger pull. If you have a broad newsletter, try increasing frequency with an additional installment containing a deeper dive on niche topics. For example, if you publish a newsletter on energy and utilities, add one focused exclusively on solar power. If your conference marketing messages typically include the entire agenda, create some instead on what will be discussed within a single session.

4. Go wider. Many brands create all the content they distribute via email, using messages to drive traffic back to their own websites exclusively. Increasing frequency is therefore bottlenecked by the availability of proprietary content; you can only send out as much as you create. Another option is to curate complementary content. Add an ancillary newsletter on the exact same topic as your current one, but with articles collected from around the Web. Many brands already do this with their Twitter accounts, so rolling all of this up into a weekly or even daily email digest is not altogether onerous.

5. Normalize your analytics. Remember that since you are giving your subscribers an extra bite at the apple, your results for each individual message will probably not equal what you were seeing with your existing frequency. For example, if you expected 1,000 clicks from a message you sent every Monday, and you switch to Monday and Thursday sends, you might see your clicks on Monday drop to 750 and then drop further still to 500 on Thursday. In aggregate though, your increased frequency has found 250 incremental clicks. Weigh that against unsubscribes and the added resources of creating and sending that extra message to determine if you have increased ROI.

Posted in Best Practices, Content Strategy, Published Articles | Comments Off

37 Things You Know About Your Email Subscribers

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

The article I wrote for MediaPost this week is all about ways to better target our email subscribers. Have a look at the list below and see if anything inspires you to create a message that will engage your audience in a new way.

37 Things You Know About Your Email Subscribers
by Mike May
Published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 6-27-12

Relevance is the most valued currency in modern email marketing. With countless messages from as many brands reaching your subscribers across multiple channels, the only way to make an impact is to either be highly targeted or exceedingly lucky. Since I’m not writing for the Rabbit’s Foot Insider this week, I’ll focus instead on the former: targeting.

Plainly, your messages stand a much better chance of being opened, read and clicked if you write them with some understanding of who your subscribers are. Whether you realize it or not, you already possess a ton of targetable information about your audience. If you’re stuck for some targeting inspiration, have a look at the list below. How many of these do (or could) you know the answer to, and how might your messages change if you composed them around this subscriber intelligence?

1. Which ones spent money with you last year?

2. Which ones spent money with you the past three years?

3. Which ones spent money with you last week?

4. Who reads their email on a mobile device?

5. Who subscribed from a mobile device?

6. Who takes a week off in August every year?

7. Who hasn’t clicked on a message from you in the past six months?

8. Who hasn’t opened a message in the past six months?

9. Which ones are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest?

10. Which ones are your Facebook fans, or Twitter followers?

11. Who checks their email on weekends?

12. How many are within 50 miles of your office?

13. How many are within five blocks?

14. Who gets your emails at two separate addresses?

15. Who had a bad experience last time they spent money with you?

16. Who was thrilled the last time they spent money with you?

17. Who looks forward to reading your messages and opens them within 5 minutes of receiving them?

18. Who thinks your messages are boring, but continues to wade through them just in case they find something they need?

19. Which ones spent 3+ minutes or viewed 5+ pages on your website the last time you emailed them?

20. Which ones are actively in the market for your products?

21. Which ones are in the market for your competitors’ products?

22. Which ones are your competitors?

23. Which ones are your employees?

24. Who has been a subscriber for less than a year?

25. Who has subscribed for over three years?

26. Which ones subscribed by actively asking to be added to your list?

27. Who is on the list because you added them after they purchased or downloaded something from you?

28. Who on your list didn’t exactly sign up for it, but probably doesn’t mind getting email from you?

29. What percentage is on the East Coast?

30. What percentages are Central, Mountain or West Coast?

31. How many are international?

32. How many don’t speak English as their first language?

33. How many forward your messages to their friends or colleagues?

34. Who has a great sense of humor, or at least thinks you’re funny?

35. Who responds well to personal invitations or exclusive offers?

36. How many are truly engaged with your organization?

37. How many would be, if you only targeted them in the right way?

Posted in Engagement, Published Articles | Comments Off

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

For my article in MediaPost this week I picked up on a theme I spoke about at last week’s SIPA conference – Signal-to-Noise ratio. We know that all our communications channels rely on strong content, so it’s no wonder that when we create one we like to push it out through all of them. This is one of those practices that fails the “what if everyone does this?” test (which is important because everyone does, and there are more everyones every day). I foresee the rise of channel specific content in the very near future. Read the article to learn why, and what you can do to prepare.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 5-30-12

“We have to let everyone know about this.”

That phrase is common in marketing departments of all sizes, across all verticals, around the world. What “this” is could be a limited-time promotion, the opening of a conference’s registration, the receipt of a prestigious award — you name it. Whatever your brand, there is frequently something pertaining to it that is important enough to share with as many people as possible.

Up until recently, the common rejoinder to that phrase was, “OK, let’s send an email.” Today it is not so simple. Not only do most of us not enjoy 100% open rates consistently; we also do not limit ourselves to an audience in a single channel. So “Let’s send an email” has evolved into “Let’s send an email, put it up on Facebook, tweet it, post it to LinkedIn, pin it and put it on our blog.”

That’s a lot of messages, in a lot of channels. And since we inevitably have audience duplication across channels, it is also a lot of redundance. You can call it “increased frequency” if you like, but before too long your subscribers and fans and followers are going to start referring to it simply as noise.

Play it forward, and the rise of channel-specific content is inevitable. People may like a brand enough to follow it in multiple channels, but repeating the same messages everywhere will prompt your audience to choose one channel over the others, robbing your brand of incremental points of engagement. Today, channel-specific content is a sound marketing practice as it shows respect for the way your audience uses the inbox, Facebook, Twitter and other channels. Soon, however, channel-specific content designed to increase the signal-to-noise ratio will be the cost of doing business for any brand that wants all its channels to be as vibrant, engaged and responsive as possible.

Here are some steps for shifting your communications from pan-channel broadcasting to channel-specific content:

Describe each channel – to your audience and to yourself. When you invite your audience to subscribe, fan or follow, let them know exactly what kind of (unique) content they can expect in each channel. For example, you may use your email list for a weekly newsletter, Twitter for customer service, and Facebook for promotions. Promoting them as such is a form of targeting, as your audience is signing up for the specific content you are providing in each. It also helps build anticipation. This is an easy exercise if you already have some channel-specific content in place. But if all your descriptions look the same, it is a cue that you may be generating too much redundancy in your messaging and need to work on a content strategy that engages your audience in different ways.

Use your email analytics brain (and tools) on social channels to find the best-performing content. You already know how to use email analytics to measure the effectiveness of messages in the inbox. Now, the same sorts of tools are available to measure click-rate, conversion and other engagement metrics for social messages. Using them allows you to see not just how much each channel contributes to your marketing objectives, but also to identify which messages take advantage of each channel’s unique attributes to really shine. This level of intelligence is going to be vital very soon, as marketers will begin limiting messages to the channels in which they work best, in order to make sure that every message contributes meaningfully to its channel’s engagement.

Develop key metrics on channel engagement, not just message effectiveness. Much of the duplication we see across channels now is the result of optimizing at the message level; we try to squeeze as many clicks as possible out of each message by pushing it anywhere we have an audience. Instead, I believe marketers are going to need to focus on optimizing each channel instead of each message. Develop and track a set of key metrics for each message that measures how much engagement you are driving in aggregate across the channel. For example, you might track “Likes per Post” on Facebook, or “Mentions/RTs per Follower per Month” on Twitter. As with email, it is important to balance the near-term needs of your marketing objectives with the long-term health of your marketing programs. Reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and keeping a close eye on how engaged your audiences are across channels will ensure that you can count on each channel to move your business forward this quarter — as well as three years from now.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Content Strategy, Email+Social, Engagement, Published Articles | Comments Off

Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

I spend half of my time thinking about email, and the other half thinking about social media. I probably spend a quarter of the time thinking about mobile as well, 30% on blogging, 20% on webinars and a good tenth of the time on other types of content marketing. Butmost of the time I’m focused exclusively on channel attribution and integration. It’s a wonder, then, that I was able to write a column for MediaPost at all, though no wonder that the topic I chose for this month was resource allocation. Dividing up the pie that is our time across all of the marketing channels we operate in is becoming increasingly complex. With email and social and other forms of content marketing, examining ROI is not enough, as the principal input is not money, but resources. So I propose that we use Return on Resources (ROR) to better measure each channel and ensure they get the attention they deserve.

Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)
by Mike May
Published on 5-2-12 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

Return on investment (ROI) is the metric marketers most commonly use to compare ads, campaigns and even entire channels. ROI makes sense for evaluating marketing when the primary input is external spending: buying media, printing expense, postage, creative costs or sponsorship fees, for example.

Email, however, does not fit neatly into the same model. Sure, there is an expense associated with email, but the principal input into an email campaign — where your audience is earned over time and not bought (or rented) with a lump sum — is the amount of time and energy your company has devoted to it. Because the monetary “investment” denominator in email is comparatively low, using a strict ROI calculation will always allow it to shine. That’s fine with those of us in the email industry, as we always win the ROI contests. But it misrepresents what must actually be invested in email in order for it to perform: the internal resources that nurture and grow the program.

I’m sorry to be the one to blow the whistle on this ROI game email has been winning, but it’s high time we stopped looking at email in the context of ROI altogether. Now is the time to consider a return on resources metric. Am ROR measurement will better evaluate how relevant inputs affect results, which in turn can help ensure that email gets the resources it needs to perform at the highest level.

Here is why evaluating your email program through ROR can make your email program more effective and better understood:

Better absolute gauge of email’s return: Measuring marketing is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to anoint a winner, but to improve each channel. Email’s appeal is not its efficiency, which is what ROI measures. Rather, it is its effectiveness. ROR removes the emphasis from the direct expense and draws attention to what results email actually drives.

More accurate comparison to complementary channels: Email is not alone in benefiting from a ROR measurement. Social media, video, webinars, blogging and other forms of content marketing are similar to email in that the principal input is not money spent, but resources devoted. And in many organizations, the resources devoted to email are also involved in these other initiatives, so ROR helps organizations identify how much of the resource pie each should receive.

Renewed emphasis on the resources needed: I worked in the online advertising industry during its dark years. That industry had a very difficult time recovering once CPMs plummeted. Two things happened when the out-of-pocket expense (the “I” in ROI) for buying online media dropped: 1) ROI naturally increased, even when the actual return from lousy “Punch the Monkey!” ads was also dismal; and 2) Advertisers had a hard time justifying the need for better creative since the media expense was so low, and ROI appeared so high. As a result of the low expense and high ROI, advertisers took their eyes off the ball — not necessarily to have an impressive ROI, but to actually drive results from the channel.

I see the same thing happening in email, even today. Because it costs so little to send a few hundred thousand messages, many marketers do not put the necessary energy and resources into campaign planning, segmenting, content strategy or creative. Focusing on ROR reminds us that the real input in email is not what you pay your ESP, but the years you have spent gaining the permission to contact tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first place.

Improved understanding of scale: Ultimately, marketing metrics of all kinds should drive some action. Analyze your search advertising, for example, and you may find that it has among the highest ROI of all your channels, and that increasing search spending is the best way of spending the extra 10% in your marketing budget next year.

Again, email is different. Only in the largest organizations can an increase of 10% actually be actionable. If the staff tending email and/or social channels is small (and it is commonly part of a single person, right?) any change to the “budget” simply translates into “you need to spend more time doing this.” Email suffers when email marketers are responsible for a lot more than email, so better evaluating the return on the time marketers put into email can help protect the channel’s claim to that time. Keeping the emphasis on the actual results is the only way to affect headcount (or reallocate other responsibilities) in a way to scale email aggressively, which will lift email’s results more than squeezing more blood from the stone in the cubicle by the kitchen.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Published Articles, ROI | Comments Off

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