The Apple iPhone 5 is coming to NZ and most website owners are missing out on the opportunity this represents as it adds to the rushing tide of Kiwi Smartphone use.The Apple iPhone 5 is coming to NZ and most website owners are missing out on the opportunity this represents as it adds to the rushing tide of Kiwi Smartphone use.
But first let’s just cast our mind back to when it all started. It wasn’t all that long ago. In fact the first iPhone advertising screened in the US on February 25, 2007 during the 79th Academy Awards. Back then it was Nokia this and Erickson Sony that. Phones were getting smaller and my Motorola Razr was black, sleek and fitted nicely into any pocket. It was exactly what I needed in a phone.
Which was fine until the Apple advertising started and things phone related changed forever. Now you didn’t have a phone in your pocket you had an internet connected screen. And let’s not forget the camera that came with it too. (Now I’m told that 90% of the photos taken in 2011 were from Smartphone’s.)
All this meant near commercial death to any phone manufacturers that were all about raised buttons, blurry cameras and postage stamp sized screens. Samsung came along for the connected screen ride, as has HTC – names you probably would have never heard of five years ago in NZ. Thankfully our local mobile networks have managed to keep pace and the cost and speed of mobile web access has broadly kept up to ensure the screen phone manufacturers promise was made good.
So what does that mean for your average website owner?
Firstly there’s probably a lot more people looking at your website, reading your email and clicking on your ads through the view of a mobile screen than ever before. Thankfully the top analytics tracking tools – like Google Analytics – will tell you how many visit your website. And great email tracking tools like Litmus will reveal those reading your email message “a la mobile phone” and Google let’s you target your AdWords advertising to attract just these types of visitors.
The tools are there to find and target this group but how many are using them properly? From our experience very few. (Possibly less than one in ten.) For instance when was the last time you looked at your website via a Smartphone screen to see how it looks? And how about running an AdWords campaign to just this mobile group and sending them through to a site set up for thumbs and not mice?
Which all means for the savvy website marketer there’s an opportunity to be had. Now’s the time to be going after this growing group of mobile prospects while your competitors remain transfixed to their tethered friends. Building a mobile version website isn’t as hard as you think. For a start you need a lot less content and the call to actions can be a lot simpler to produce. Don’t think intricate forms to complete – do think big buttons that fire up a “call now” action. And let’s not forget videos too. With the advent of super clear resolution screens they are a delight full screen on a phone.
Email marketing to a mobile audience is simpler too. Here, like their mobile web browsing cousins, the focus is on providing simple vertical streams of content with easy to follow “thumb sized” click options.
So why not dive into your Google Analytics reports this week to see the percentage of visitors that arrive at your website via a mobile screen? And for the next email sent – why not include a smart little piece of code to tell you who read your latest missive on their phone instead of their PC?
Then if the numbers stack up then why not kick off with a simple but effective mobile website marketing experience?
Five Common Stumbling Blocks to Optimising a High Volume Email Campaign Management Process and How to Avoid Them
We always recommend email marketing to be part of every online marketing plan. Somewhere, in some way, there will be a requirement to talk to either prospects or customers on a reasonably regular basis via email. For most companies this means one campaign being dispatched to one list, most likely once a month. This article is not for them.
Nope, here we are talking about chunky businesses with an email marketing list in the hundreds of thousands with a requirement to talk to these people multiple times each month. In this case, the requirements are rather unique. And having successfully operated in this email marketing services space for many years, here’s our take on the common mistakes people make when trying to optimise a process like this.
Stumbling Block #1: Relying on email to manage your email campaign
It may all start with one email with the campaign brief attached. From there other emails are sent back and forwards as the brief has more details added. Then the creative samples are emailed back as attachments. Then these are moved into the HTML build process with URL links sent for feedback . again via another email. And still another email that communicates that first proofs are on their way.
A barrage of email messages all tied to the one campaign and all hidden in each personfs Inbox for only them to be aware of. This is an environment that is a) hard to manage b) easy for details to be lost along the way and, finally, c) makes auditing the flow of communication responsible for delivering the campaign difficult if not impossible to achieve.
From our experience the best solution for the task at hand is a web-based, job management-style application that allows everyone involved in the campaign to see exactly what has been communicated to whom and when. It needs to be simple to use and easy to manage. Once operating, it incorporates all the communication for the campaign . starting with the initial creative briefing and ending with the message confirming the campaign has been dispatched. Itfs all there in one place. And if someone has to take leave midway through a campaign, then the job can be assigned to others without any campaign communication being lost in the process.
Stumbling Block #2: Not placing enough focus on process and systems
I’m not exactly sure of the average number of discussions that are required to take a campaign brief to a dispatched successful campaign. It would be a lot. Most of our own campaigns show job tickets listing out messages that run to three or four pages long.
Naturally, throughout all this therefs a lot that can go wrong. And email marketing is a cruel task master with the speed at which it makes any errors known. Only a bullet-proof process that is understood and operated by all involved will survive situations like these. A process that has the right people following the right set of tasks the right way for every campaign they touch. It doesnft matter how great the data selection was or how good the creative looked . all this expertise will go to waste without a reliable process to ensure the campaign build and dispatch was managed successfully.
After managing hundreds of successful campaigns we think we have that process nailed. Nevertheless, we still take all new clients through each and every stage piece by piece to ensure it will work as planned when matched to their unique needs. All because we know that solid processes, understood by everyone, produce solid results.
Stumbling Block #3: Thinking that the software vendor must be the software manager too
Most email marketing in this area requires the use of the top end of email marketing software. And the fact is that the world leaders in this space are not based in NZ. So support might come from the nearest location, which may be either Australia or Singapore. This can be a pain when it’s 8:30 am on a Monday morning and you need to launch a campaign in 30 minutes and no one is awake.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. There are companies, like our own, who have expertise in a range of email marketing tools, some of which they sell directly as well as those that they just support. For instance, we promote about four different email marketing tools and support another two.
These last two are high-end North American solutions. They are ideally suited to those with a large list and a desire to dispatch highly relevant email marketing. One in particular we have used on behalf of our clients for many years now. And while we invest our time and money to attend the vendor’s overseas conferences to learn the latest and greatest of their offerings, we will never be involved in the direct selling of their solution.
So, our customers can access the power of a top-end, complex, email marketing software solution with the added benefit of an independent, locally based support partner to help them drive it.
Stumbling Block #4: Not taking the time to test
Funnily enough, when you have an efficient way to manage campaign communication (see #1) coupled with a solid, reliable process to underpin your build process (see #2) the time it takes to send out a campaign seems to decrease. This allows you to either a) sneak off for a quick afternoon coffee or b) schedule in some campaign testing strategies.
So let’s go with b – because without testing you are guessing. But before you can test you need time, which is why the previous stumbling blocks need work first.
Then you can start with your hypothesis (what you hope will happen through the tests you want to run), which you match with your proposed method to follow. Most top-level email marketing tools include features to make the tactical part of this work easier than it used to be.
Now lists can be split into three (10%, 10% and the remaining 80% for the winning option) and set to “auto” to capture the results from the first two campaigns and then to pick a winner to send to the remaining majority.
If you look back over the last 12 months and see campaigns that are really no different to those you are running now then you aren’t testing enough.
Stumbling Block #5: Not monitoring the process as well as the outcomes
When there’s a lot to get done it’s easy to finish one campaign and head straight onto the next with scant regard to what was learnt before. All this tactical activity can leave little time to sit back and review any insights from the last 15 campaigns.
Now there are some obvious and not so obvious areas to include in reviews like these. Naturally, it makes sense to review all the main stats for the send. Opens, click throughs, bounces and, of course, conversions are all there waiting to be placed in a spreadsheet and reviewed. But what about the process that was responsible for delivering these campaigns? Where’s the analysis to be found to deliver gradual improvements here?
Not many take the time to do this work. So they don’t look into areas such as the number of times the briefing document is changed during the creative build and the creative time this wastes. Or the unnecessary mistakes made in the HTML creation. Or even the time wasted by the proofing team to locate test records to deliver emails for all versions of the dynamic content. All these are small, gritty problems that take time to improve but once done can deliver massive gains in process efficiency.
Managing one successful email campaign between two people can be a challenge. Managing 15 campaigns each week across multiple teams all residing in alternative operations – and all with 100% accuracy –̶̶̶ well, that’s a completely different space to operate within.
Here at Permission we have successfully operated in this space since 2004. We believe that by working with us you will optimise the full potential of the campaign management process, which will allow you the time to improve the overall effectiveness of your email marketing. Contact us today at sales@permission.co.nz if this interests you.
Each month we invite customers along to our conference call. This month we talked about the use of Video in your Online Marketing. At the start of the call we run through any “new stuff” that we think is worthy of attention. Here’s a clip of the “new stuff” we covered in July.
I am reliably told that successful baking is a lot like chemistry. All you need to do is follow the instructions, add in the right ingredients in the right order and you are all set to create the same successful outcome of your “experiment” every time. Somehow, it never seems to work the same way for me. Either I rush things and miss something out or, even worse, mistake one thing (think salt) for another (think sugar) and a disaster is on the way.
Nevertheless, get it right and what you see in the image at the top of the recipe page should be close to what you take out of the oven. And let’s face it, it’s that image we all want. Yep, a nice thick slab of carrot cake with a very non-healthy spread of cream cheese icing. Yum scrummy. The thought of munching through this makes all the hassle of creating it and cleaning up afterwards worthwhile.
E-commerce websites are nothing like carrot cake. That I know. I also know that their owners all have revenue and profit targets they want them to meet. And for me that’s the picture at the top of the recipe – the bit that gets them excited. However, for many, the bit below – the recipe they need to follow to make the image a reality – that bit is missing. What exactly do they need to do to “bake” their way towards these numbers?
All this came up during a recent customer planning session. We were working through the next 12-month target for a very successful e-commerce website. The target – or the yummy picture that got us all excited – was very enticing too. Double digit growth was expected in both top- and bottom-line numbers. But what was the recipe they were going to follow to make this a reality? There were a few blank looks around the room so I started with the carrot cake analogy and then as a group we worked through designing the recipe they would need.
Fortunately, an e-commerce website requires fewer ingredients than your average carrot cake. The four staples are: visitors, customers, purchases and costs. Of these, it’s the customer part that’s the most important to sort first. The outcomes of the work in this area drive the marketing costs you will need to afford and with it an understanding of the visitor counts this expense needs to generate to make it all work.
So how many customers did they need to achieve their goal? Was it, say, 5000 people spending $150 each or 1000 spending $750 each? And of these customers how many would they expect to buy more than once during the year? And of this group what would their average annual spend be? These are very simple questions that can be deceptive in the amount of work required to find credible answers for. In this case, the client had to go away and analyze their previous 12-month sales figures and then spend a few days drilling through this data to reveal the answers they required.
Fortunately for them they had a great business, selling a great product that customers purchased reasonably frequently during the year. And of these three wins it was probably the last one that was the most important. Repeat purchase e-commerce websites are so much easier to make work. Email marketing fits nicely into this space too. So does paid search. You can afford to enter this market and pay high click costs if you have the promise of a repeat purchase customer at the end of it all.
Conversely, businesses built on once-only purchase activity are a challenge. To make these work the margins need to be good, with strong and obvious points of differentiation to make them sustainable. Both of these are hard to create and even harder to protect.
But as I mentioned earlier, thankfully this wasn’t the case here so we mapped out expected sales from repeat purchasing, allowing for some increase. Some of the margin from this work would support our email marketing efforts – a solution ideal for customer retention. The gap we had left over was a new customer revenue line. This was spread over the months ahead – allowing for some demand fluctuations during the year based on seasonal changes that affected their industry.
Then we had traffic to sort. We had a good understanding of the site’s conversion rates for new customers based on the last 12 months so we could work out these figures and calculate the required visitor growth to make the conversions we wanted a reality. We then split this between SEO and paid search, based on the ability of specific keywords to reliably bring us new customers.
After a couple of relatively focused sessions and some deep analytical work at their end we had our recipe. And yes, it had some assumptions that needed validation as the year progressed. Things like “we expect existing customers to spend 15% more this year due to our improved email marketing” and “our product margins will remain the same”. But still, it was there ready to be worked through during the months ahead.
So are you an e-commerce website owner who just stares at that nice revenue and profit number hoping it will eventuate? Well, now’s the time to stop hoping and start creating the ideal recipe for you and your business. Let me know if you need any help with your ingredients.
Have fun.
Early this month I did the overseas conference thing with email marketing. It was a couple of years since I last attended and a lot had changed in email land since then. So I decided that it was again time to spend 12 hours in a confined silver tube to experience all there was from our North American email marketing services friends.
The customer conference call this month covered some of the details I found but, nevertheless, here are a few “takeaways” that you can apply with your email marketing this month.
1) Batch and blast email messaging will garner less and less prospect attention. There is only so much online attention to go around. And as social media sucks up its growing share and general email volume increases year on year, a poorly targeted, highly generic offer email will get less opens and even less clicks.
The alternative? Highly targeted and relevant offers or, the subject of a number of sessions I sat through, campaigns automatically driven by a change of behavior of the prospect or customer. For instance: when they subscribe; when they buy for the first time; when they would normally purchase a restocking run or even when they add an item to the cart BUT fail to check out. Yes, most of these are technically a lot more challenging than just loading up a list and firing out a message – but that’s going to be the price you need to pay to get the attention you need to make your promotion work.
2) This was from a presentation on email strategy ̶ three simple questions you should answer BEFORE sending your next email campaign. Is this campaign tied to our overall email campaign and organizational goals? Why should my subscribers care? What are my subscribers to do next? If you can list down some solid answers to these three then all’s looking good.
3) “If you are not testing you are guessing.” A great snippet on an early slide about (surprise, surprise) email testing. We all fall into the busy, busy tactical trap of doing “stuff” to get a campaign out. Nevertheless, it’s the smart ones who can look back over what they used to do three months ago and compare that with what they do now – and see a difference due to the results their tests achieved during this same period.
4) With “relevance” being the catch cry of email marketing improvement, there was some good discussion on the type of content you require to make this a reality. For instance there is “Evergreen Content” that works for everyone and will never change. Then there’s content with a “Long Shelf Life” that works for all but lasts say 3–4 months. Then there’s content just suited to your target segments. By producing content across each of these three areas you can efficiently put together a series of email campaigns without having to create 100% bespoke content for each.
5) And the final point wasn’t really a point – more a realisation that the long-term effectiveness of email marketing will have very little to do with the creative or content of the message itself. It’s more about how well the media integrates with other parts of your online and offline properties. For instance, does your e-commerce tool integrate with your email app so a series of “welcome” messages can be sent to those purchasing for the first time? Or can your room booking engine connect to a tool that allows email messages to be sent to not only confirm a booking but also, five nights before arrival. It’s these nitty gritty points of email integration that will turn what could be a very ineffective batch and blast email strategy into a highly specific and highly profitable behavior-based campaign.
Have fun.
This month’s conference call was all about how to optimize a website for those selling big ticket items. (Customers will be able to access a recording of the call either from the monthly CD they receive or from a link in the customer portal part of our website.)
Selling large, costly and most likely complex products and/or services can be a challenge online. Here prospects don’t decide on a Monday what they want and from whom and by Wednesday have the transaction complete and their solution in their hands. Nope, these decision cycles can take weeks, months or even years to work through. During this time prospects will vacillate from supplier to supplier, option to option, and could well end up not buying off anyone at all.
More often than not the actual decision to buy will NOT be made with a web page and order form in front of your prospect. This might occur over coffee at the dining room table, at the roadside when their car gives up the ghost for the umpteenth time or, with luck, with your salesperson in your office. How and where the sale will end is hard to predict; nevertheless, there’s a very strong chance that it will start online. Here a prospect will kick off some research using trusty Google and a broad category-type keyword like “crm software”.
Hopefully, if you sell CRM software, your website will feature in this list. Now all you need to do is to capture this early level of interest and convert it to actual orders week or months or more later. Up for the challenge? Understandably, there’s a lot to get wrong during this time. But to help you along the way here’s my list of the seven most common mistakes people make, with a short note on how to avoid each of them.
#1 – Failing to include lead nurturing
So they arrive on your website, read your content, perhaps print out a report you offer, and then are gone for another few months as they consider their options. Remembering that these big ticket decisions will take weeks or months to complete, somehow you need to keep in touch as prospects work through their decision. Email marketing is the obvious choice here as long as you have permission to send it. But let’s not forget direct mail or even telemarketing too, or even all three in a neat “mix and match” format.
People lead busy lives and because of that prospects will naturally forget what you told them or what they read on your website. A regular drip feed of content to politely and persistently remind them of all the key facts is required. Do this well and you will have them move from thinking you are just one of many viable alternatives in month one to being convinced you are the best option in month ten.
#2 – A website that talks too much on how you can solve rather than understand a problem
Think of it this way. Say you need a builder to come in and fix a stuck window in your lounge room. It’s a simple job that’s been bugging you for ages and now it’s time to find a builder – any builder really – to get it sorted. Your criteria of who gets the job would probably include things like whether they are local and what their minimum call-out fee is. Simple criteria really to fix what is quite a simple problem.
Compare this with when you need a builder to help you create our ideal home. This requires a completely different list of criteria and there’s a strong chance that the builder that fixed the window is not going to be the one to build the home. Now, the ability for them to understand the problem matters more than where they operate from and even what they charge. (No point in paying less for something you don’t want.)
So home-building builders would be well served by a website that explains the process they follow to listen and understand what their prospects want. Ideally this content would be supported with some testimonial proof from happy customers that say they did exactly that. This leads me nicely onto my next point.
#3 – A website with a paucity of social proof
It’s not that purchasers of big ticket items are less trusting of suppliers than their small ticket cousins. Oh well, let’s face it, they are. Making the wrong decision here is a problem. It’s not that easy to take your recently built home back and ask for a replacement. Or pull out a multi-million dollar CRM system because it doesn’t do exactly what you wanted it to.
So buyers take more care and are naturally pleasantly reassured when they read the successful stories of others who can attest to the process or product doing exactly what they are being told it will do. For instance, if your website says that your $8000 ride-on lawnmower will easily manage long grass on sloping terrain then that’s fine. But if a customer sends in a video of them using the machine doing exactly this AND raves about the finish it leaves behind then this is so much more believable.
#4 – Failing to offer impartial, valuable information for buyers who are interested but not yet ready to buy
Just by the nature of the long sales cycle that big ticket items operate within, more people will arrive at your website interested than those who are ready to buy. The proportions could be 10 to 1, 50 to 1, or even 100 to 1, depending on your business category and the marketing they have received before arriving.
Now I realize that persuading those ready to buy now to contact you is a very big priority. But very close behind this is developing a system to do the same for those interested – the vast majority of your site traffic.
To achieve this you could offer them an impartial buyer’s guide, technically detailed white papers or even complimentary CDs of prior coaching sessions. During the customer conference call I mentioned over 25 different types of content you can offer for this stage. They span all types of media choices and formats but all have the same thing in common – they offer interested prospects something of real value.
This is not the time for product catalogues or a full-on sales pitch in print. Prospects are not ready for this yet. First, you need to win them over with some meaty, valuable and timely content that helps them during the research and information-gathering stage they are in now.
#5 – Failing to answer the top questions prospects have during their buying process
We covered this one at length during the coaching call. The key points are that there will be a list of questions – probably less than 5 – that the majority of prospects will need answering BEFORE they will even consider you as a valid supplier. The first job is to use some effective but relatively easy to run research to find out what these questions are.
The obvious next step is to answer them completely during your sales process. For instance, business owner purchasers of accounting services may have at the top of their list the ability for their supplier to explain complex issues in simple to understand language. So accountants selling services into this space would be wise to own a website that does exactly this.
#6 – Prospects doing the hard work of translating features into benefits
This is sales training 101 but still we can all slip back into old habits – especially when we are writing website content. So let us be clear – it’s not about you and what you do – it’s about them and how their life will be different after using you. For instance, you may run quarterly seminars where all clients are invited to meet and mingle with other business owners like them. That’s a feature. There are a ton of benefits this could flow into. One may be for attendees to learn from others just like them who have experienced the same problems and have gone on to solve them in new and innovative ways.
#7 – Failing to add value to entice people to leap from the online world to the offline one
In most cases for big ticket items you will need to transition your ongoing online lead nurturing communications into real face-to-face sales talk. This is a critical stage. Do it correctly and all your prior online work is worthwhile – make a mess of it and all this was for naught. You can improve your chances of success here by “selling” the act. For instance, why not rev up a simple “call us for a free quote on your payroll processing needs” into something like “call for your 20 point payroll industry benchmark review”. Ideally, this statement would be delivered on its own landing page that explains exactly what will be delivered, by whom and the benefits others have gained by doing the same.
So there you have it, seven mistakes to avoid when selling big ticket items online. I hope you weren’t making all of them? Contact us today if you would like a complimentary assessment of your efforts so far.
Have fun.
I received my first HTML email marketing message in 1999. I had just been hired to establish an email marketing technology start up. It was during the “dotcom” craze – a time flush with cash but funnily enough devoid of any SPAM. The business I worked for was part of a small “stable” of Internet start ups, funded by some very wealthy people.
Our offices were split across two floors of a six storey building overlooking Auckland’s waterfront. A perfectly good lift took us from the ground floor carpark to our office. Nevertheless it was decided that it was too much effort to ferry us between floors. So a brand new architect-designed marble stair case was cut into the two concrete floors. No expense was spared.
How times have changed. I can assure you there are no marble stair cases at Permission HQ! And while there are billions of HTML based emails flying around the planet, SPAM makes up the high percentage. But through all this email continues to hold its own against the other options available.
To do this it has managed to flex and wane to meet the growing demands placed on it by marketers wanting to communicate ever more complex messages. Here’s my take on three core stages of complexity that most marketers work through.
Stage one – let’s get started.
This is where intentions meet actions and the first few email campaigns are the result. It’s the classic “load and blast” stage where one message is sent to the one list. The content is written to appeal to everyone and designed to look both colorful (with HTML formatting) and functional (with a complementary text version). Legally, things are taken care of with the appropriate unsubscribe option and details of who sent it, where they are located and why the subscriber received it in the first place.
All this is usually dispatched using a hosted web service, in such a way that it looks like it has come from the business. Before it’s sent a few test emails are generally dispatched to three or four different email clients, just to ensure it looks OK.
Once the “send” button is pressed the reporting begins. The technology usually shows who opened the message, if they clicked on any of the links and whether they decided to end it there and unsubscribe.
Ideally the list will grow by new subscribers joining via a web form hosted on the website. Those that unsubscribe are automatically removed, as are those that either a) have their email message “bounce” more than a set times per month or b) if they are automatically deemed as having an address that will never work.
It’s all very functional. But still there’s a lot to learn for the newbie email marketer so the first few campaigns take longer than you would think. Then they get into some sort of a rhythm, and the campaigns start to take on a momentum of their own. Dispatching one a month doesn’t seem too hard. The beast has been created. Now all you need to do is produce the content to keep it happy – which is the real time commitment.
Stage two – Let’s become relevant
The bridge from stage one to stage two is usually preceded by someone standing back from the tactical day to day experience to review progress. So they dive into all the stats, costs and time invested to see where’s the room for improvement. Not everyone does this. A fair chunk remain in stage one forever – which is fine. For them this is enough work thank you very much, and the results? Well they’re OK – nothing amazing – but still OK.
Nevertheless, the rest head off into the land of increasing complexity, hunting out higher returns on their email marketing time and money. Most start by altering how they define who gets what message. In stage one just being a subscriber counted you in. This is changed so that age, gender and perhaps location are used to define who gets what. No longer is it one message for everyone – improving message relevance is the goal here.
Sometimes an upgrade in email sending technology is required to work in this stage. Not every tool can send out different types of message within the one send. This makes proofing the message a bit harder too, so a seed list is created that ensures all the different variations are seen during the testing phase. Tests are now sent to 30 or 40 different email clients to ensure that a high proportion of the list can see what they should.
The web form on the website gets a remodel too. Now it is placed in a more prominent position and perhaps a subscription offer is run to drive list growth. And while previously a new subscription was met with just a simple “Thank You” page on the website, in stage two an automated “welcome” email message is dispatched. (As an aside, this type of message usually has a 25%– 50% increase in open rate from any campaign message you send them, the simple reason being because it’s expected.)
Knowing if all this extra work is worthwhile requires an upgrade in message tracking also. All the traffic generated by these stage two campaigns is configured to sit nicely within their own analytics “bucket”. Now the marketer can correctly match up sales or conversions to the email campaign responsible for them. So simple sums like campaign sales less campaign costs become a breeze to run.
It’s a more complex space to work within, but usually the rewards are there to make it worthwhile – with higher opens, clicks and conversions than stage one.
Stage Three – the death of the campaign
This is not the stage for those wanting the easy life. There’s more technology and marketing headaches in here than you can shake a stick at. And I realize this contradicts what most email tech vendors will tell you. But after living in this place for a small selection of clients for a few years I have seen what it requires to make it work well.
The critical difference between this stage and the two prior is that your campaigns are no longer driven by what you do, but by what your subscriber does. You set up the rules, define the messages, make the technology “talk” amongst itself and then sit back and let the subscriber experience it all in its wonderful form.
So for instance you could set up a campaign that welcomes new customers to your business via a series of five email messages which begins when they make the first transaction on your website. Or if they haven’t purchased for three months, when they used to regularly, they are sent a special offer to get them purchasing again. Another stage three message could be sent out to those e-commerce customers who placed a product in their shopping cart but didn’t make it all the way to complete the transaction. You could have a myriad of fully automated campaigns working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A complete “lights out” marketing operation that runs with no manual involvement. Sound attractive?
Well before you get too excited, do realize that there’s a jungle of technology to work through to make these operate properly. Email tools need to talk to billing systems and possibly e-commerce applications. Yes, it’s set and forget, but with a fair amount of time spent on the setting.
Still, once you get there your campaign statistics can soar upwards. A 2x increase in open rates when compared to normal load and blast strategies is not unheard of. Click through and end conversion rates can also leave the earlier stages for dead. There is work involved, but there are also results.
So there you have it. Your three stages of email marketing complexity. Some marketers will live at stage one – others will operate campaigns across all three levels. Very few will not do any. Why not start exploring the merits of the stage ahead of you this month?
Last month’s article on email marketing and the conference call on the same subject area achieved the desired result.Afew more customers have launched their first email marketing campaign and are now starting to reap some of the many rewards this strategy can produce.All good news.
Nevertheless, there are a few customers out there – we know who you are 🙂 – who are stubbornly refusing to move forward into the land of email.So for them I present these six online marketing myths all busted with an explanation on how an effective email marketing strategy can come to their aid.
Myth #1: Everyone visiting your website is ready to buy
A good e-commerce website will covert at 5% – leaving 95% able to visit and leave, hopefully to return at some time in the near future.Hope is nice but how about you replace this with a persuasive email subscription form to cajole them into joining your email newsletter list? A credible 15% may take you up on this option, moving your total conversion rate up to a very respectable 20%.But, more importantly, you can message them on a friendly frequency in the hope that this time they are more likely to buy than they were when they subscribed.
Myth #2: All prospects will say yes to your proposal
Similar to Myth #1 but more suited to those who sell face-to-face.Now I must admit that some timeshare salespeople of old may have come close to a 100% conversion rate but legislation has now sorted out that way of selling.So normal people selling normal products may close 25-50% and even 75% of sales but there will still be those that need to be nurtured after the presentation.That’s where a permission-compliant email newsletter can work its magic to move people along the buying process, gradually nudging them closer towards the line of commitment.
Myth #3: Your customers will remember you and your company
They won’t.There’s too much going on in their lives to make what you do that important for them.Somehow you need to drop effortlessly into their Inbox life every month or so and share something of interest.Email is easy for them to “consume”, simple for you to construct and a short click away from something that can sell. (Yes, that’s your “salesperson” website.)
Myth #4: Offers are only to be sent to those who are focused on buying a bargain
Walk around any Warehouse store and look at the people filling the aisles.There’s every demographic you can imagine.And all are there because they want to be where “Everyone gets a bargain”.So take care before dismissing that offers always bring in the wrong type of customer.Many a retail fortune has been made by those who understood the value of an offer to bring in the right type of customer, who then decides to purchase the right high-margin product.
Myth #5: People will bookmark your website URL
When was the last time you bookmarked a supplier’s website?Probably a long time ago.Your customers and prospects are the same.So you need to actively work on strategies to bring them back again and again.Yes, you can support Google’s growing fleet of jets by using the AdWords system but email marketing is a much more cost-effective strategy to bring them back.
Myth #6: Customers will decide when they are ready to buy and NOTHING you can do will influence when this occurs
Customers need convincing.And yes, it could start with deciding that it is time to buy something in your category and then work its way all the way down to the finer details of the sale such as the colour of the seat leather. Short, direct messages of persuasion sent via email can add some strength to your argument that moves them closer to you and not your competitors.
So there you have it.If you don’t already have email marketing as part of your online marketing mix then please write down the answer to these questions.
Send your answers to chris@permission.co.nz and let’s get this thing started.
Another twelve months of email marketing lie ahead but should you carry on in January just as you ended in December?
The start of a New Year is a great time to take stock of the last 12 months of email marketing statistics to determine what trends, if any, signify the need for an email marketing strategy review.
To start this process I suggest you tabulate the key email messaging statistics for last year’s campaigns including invalids, bounces, opens, clicks and unsubscribes.
Firstly, let’s start with invalids and opens. Any trends you see in these two values should match any changes you have made in your data collection and management methods.
For instance, if you collected a large number of new email addresses through a trade show in June by asking prospects to write their details onto a card then, when you emailed them with July’s newsletter, both invalid and bounce percentages should have risen due to this quick but notoriously unreliable method of data collection.
Likewise, if you started to collect permission for your email newsletter online by asking subscribers to fill in a form on which they confirmed their email address twice then your invalid and bounce rates should have been seen to slowly fall.
If the values of both invalids and bounces have remained relatively flat, with your bounce rate being below 2.5% and your invalid rate below 2% then all is fine. Your work here may be on finding new methods to re-activate those already in these two groups.
Managing the re-activation of bounced email addresses is not the easiest of tasks in which to achieve and as such is frequently missed. Perhaps this is the year that you instigate a process that helps to find these lost subscribers?
When tracking your open rates you may see a slow decline. Don’t be too concerned – this is due to an increasing percentage of subscribers using email clients that suppress images by default. (The open rate statistic is gathered by tracking a subscriber’s ability to download an image that is specific to them but otherwise hidden in the email content.)
However, if the last 12 months’ figures show a falling open rate that is greater than a 5% change then your issues may lie with your content rather than any industry-wide issue and further investigation will be required.
For those with a relatively consistent email list, e.g. a monthly newsletter, I would advise reviewing each email send with a view to splitting subscribers who have opened the message into two groups – new and existing subscribers. (New being those who see this month’s edition as their first.)
The data may show a disproportionate number of new subscribers opening the message compared with those already on the list. This reveals content that appeals the first few times it is received but then quickly wanes as editions continue to roll out.
If there is no conclusive evidence based on splitting the open rate by the recency of subscription, try to look further into the make up of those opening across multiple editions to see if there is some sort of common ‘opener subscriber’ profile.
Conversely, for those not opening – are there any specific characteristics in this group, e.g. high value customers, low value customers? For some reason the communication is not continuing to resonate with a specific audience segment(s).
If one of the common components of your ‘non-opener profile’ is the ISP they are using to collect their email through then you could be having issues with successful deliverability to this audience. Check to ensure that you have a number of seed addresses for this ISP and run some of your own tests using the content of prior editions to see if this is the problem.
For those newsletters that rely on a website to hold most of their content, click-through rates are strong gauges of content comprehension. These statistics are not artificially deflated by any outside technology trends and as such can be viewed as a true reflection on the success of your email communication methods.
A twelve-month review of what content generates the most click throughs will help to further cement your understanding of the content your email audience finds the most appealing. Likewise, the converse statistic will guide you on what not to include in your next edition.
Falling click-through rates are a concern. As for falling open rates, it helps to find any common subscriber profiles among those doing more or less clicking.
To help you some email dispatch tools automatically show the percentage of existing and new clickers as individual tools for each campaign. In this case editions that show an even split between new and old clickers reveal content that is appealing to both subscriber groups. Other tools just bundle your clickers into the one aggregate group for you to split out yourself.
I see the unsubscribe action as being somewhat like the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff of inattention. Falling open and click-through rates are the precursor to people taking up this option. A high proportion of those not opening or clicking will have mentally unsubscribed to your communications well before they choose to click on your link to confirm their status.
That said, after plotting your twelve-month unsubscribe trend you should see a relatively steady set of unsubscribe figures – any sharp increases are strong cause for concern.
So there you go – just a few quick ways to ensure your email marketing efforts for the next 12 months are built on your learning from those before allowing for any tweaks, where required, to your overall communication strategy.
Serving nice coffee is one of the many benefits that bricks and mortar shops have over their web cousins. One other less obvious are the roads and pathways that line their front door.
From these roads, malls and neighbourhoods people have no option but to drive, walk and ride past their shop. For customers these nearby excursions serve as a gentle reminder to drop in and pick up something. For prospects it could be the chance to peer through the window to check things out. All this “foot traffic” helps make the mantra for many a successful physical store be location, location, location.
But what about those same stores online?
Some mistakenly call the Internet the information superhighway. But I see no ordered way in which people traverse from website to website. To me it’s more a spider’s web of individual paths than an group treck across well worn roads.
So if there are no highways or malls to help bring people back to the front of a web store what can store owners use in their place?
Well for those online retailers that are well funded there is always traditional media advertising. Billboards seem to be the flavour of the month at the moment for those owners with deep pockets. The ads look good in whatever form they take – the agency is your best friend but you need a storehouse of cash to keep this strategy going to create ongoing traffic.
Then there’s online advertising. Here you can take those billboards, face them towards the web and see what happens. Banners of all shapes and sizes can be wrapped around high traffic sites to hook people back. Yes banners, remember those squares of advertising that you mentally block out when bouncing from website to website?
Paid search advertising is another tool to entice new and repeat visitors – especially if your site is hard to find in the generic search options. But those keywords are rising in both popularity and cost.
So all of these options will bring first time visitors to your site for a varying amount of cost per visit but having to continue to invest in any of them to make visitors return is too costly for most to achieve.
This is where effective email marketing can be rather handy.
Email is by far the cheapest and most effective way to call people back to your website. Asking, cajouling, begging and bribing all website visitors to subcribe to your email list has to be high up on your website goals.
Well written email newsletters create their own virtual “foot traffic” by enticing visitors to return to your website pages through the links contained in your copy.
But while this logic is sound and the Internet is abound with successful case studies of email marketing being used this way it still amazes me how many website fail to entice their visitors to join any email newsletter of sorts.
Yes they have billboards extolling their website, some even tell their story with television but when you visit there is no “hard to say no” option to join a newsletter so they can bring you back for cents when they brought you there with dollars.
It doesn’t take much to design an email communication that has strong appeal and set up a web form to capture subscriptions.
Please make sure it’s part of your website strategy – and failing that make mine a flat white when I drop by your bricks and mortar store next time.