Transcript Twelve New Ideas That Can Substantially Improve Your Email Program Presented to the eMarketing Association October 19, 2005 by Bill Nussey, Silverpop CEO.

Twelve New Ideas That Can Substantially
Improve Your Email Program
Presented to the eMarketing Association
October 19, 2005
by Bill Nussey, Silverpop CEO
Introduction
You can get basic ideas on improving email anywhere
Recent research studies uncover some less obvious and potentially
higher impact areas for improvement
 Chance to look at opportunities more closely
 Help set priorities on which areas can make the biggest impact
(sometimes this isn’t necessarily where you think)
The world of email continues to change
 New challenges force new approaches and new tactics
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Deliverability Ideas
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Deliverability
True or False:
Your Email Service Provider (ESP) is responsible for your
Email delivery
False (mostly)
 An ESP does influence deliverability through their technology and the
best practices they share with you
 However, “I’ll call the ISP and get your messages through” only works
once; after that it’s your problem
 List hygiene and smart practices will do more for your deliverability than
anything an ESP can do for you
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Send a Confirmation Message
Sending a confirmation message after opt-in is one of the easiest
but most overlooked ways to improve deliverability and recipient
satisfaction
The Market Reality
 Less than half of retailers reviewed in a 2005 Silverpop study offered any
kind of confirmation message
Confirmation,
44%
No
Confirmation,
56%
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Silverpop Broken Link Study, 2005
Confirmation Pages
Benefits of confirmation
messages
 Can be used to help with
deliverability
 Provides recipient
immediate feedback that
registration was successful
Best practices on
confirmation messages
 Send them within a minute
 Alert the recipient that they
are coming (80% of retailers
never mentioned a
confirmation was coming)
 Beware of double-opt-in
meeting a spam filter
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Image-Only Messages?
True or False:
Reusing print designs and avoiding content filters by placing text
inside images saves work and improves deliverability
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Avoid Image Only Messages
False (really false)
 Spammers have already
tried this idea and the
latest spam filters regularly
block image-only
messages
 Worse yet, email client
programs like Outlook and
Gmail disable images by
default
 Often the only text a
recipient sees is the
unsubscribe language
(anyone want to guess
what they do?)
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How Do You Really Anger an ISP?
What is worse?
Lots of recipients hitting the spam button OR
Repeatedly sending to addresses that have hard bounced?
Answer
It doesn’t matter, they are both really bad!
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Remove Bounces (Especially Hard Bounces)
Regularly cleaning out bounces from your list is the easiest way to
improve your deliverability. If you are not doing it now, call your ESP
and turn it on immediately.
The Market Reality:
 If someone is knocking on your door and you are not answering then it
means either you’re not home or you don’t want to hear from them.
How Does Bounce Cleaining Work?
 Your ESP should make bounce management automatic and configurable
 Soft bounces are generally retried a few times
 Hard bounces should be removed immediately in most cases
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Ask Recipients To Add You To Their Address Books
Asking a recipient to add you to their address book can dramatically
increase the deliverability and renderability of your messages.
The Market Reality:
 Only 23% of 360 of the largest US companies asked recipients to add
them to their address book
Request for
Address Book
Inclusion, 23%
No Request,
77%
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Silverpop Broken Link Study, 2005
Ask Recipients To Add You To Their Address Books
Benefits of getting “white
listed” with customers
 The graphics in your
message will be displayed
every time (you can also
now measure opens again)
 Your messages will almost
never get bulk-foldered
 Their positive “vote” helps
improve your scores on ISP
spam filters
Best Practices
 Include the request in the
confirmation message
 Visually show the recipients
the steps to add you to
their address book
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Don’t Let Email Relationships Go Stale
Active lists are better than bigger lists. Clean out stale recipients
and beware of records that have gone unused for a while.
Keep Your Lists Active:
 Mail at least every 90 days
 Any addresses not mailed to for 6 months should be quarantined and
resolicited
Keep Your Lists Fresh
 Too many email marketers are measured by the size of the lists they
build so they resist cleaning out non-responders
 Still, define non-responders in a clear way and then try to reactivating
them
 If they still don’t respond, try suppressing them and see what it does to
your deliverability and overall response rates
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Six More Quick Deliverability Tips
Make it so clear and easy to opt out they won’t hit the spam button
Ask for the email address twice just to make sure they got it right
Always use a unique IP address
Try smart opt-in forms that make sure email addresses are valid –
flag obvious mistypes like “@hotmial.com” and “@alo.com”
Don’t make it hard for recipients to change their email address
(include a link for updating account information in every message
you send)
Make sure your ESP is working for you:
 Monitor black lists
 Analyze responses by domain
 Remove obvious “trap” addresses ([email protected])
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List Building Tactics
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Gather Email Opt-ins Throughout Your Site
The more frequent and convenient you make your opt-in
registration, the more people will use it.
The Market Reality
 Surprisingly few companies even gather opt-in registrations properly on
their home pages, let alone the rest of their site
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Silverpop Retail Email Marketing Study, 2005
Home Depot Does It Well…
Every page on
their site contains
an email
registration (even
the registration
page)
They get the email
first before asking
for more
information.
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Keep Your Registration Forms Short And Sweet
The more questions you require at registration, the smaller the
number of consumers who will complete it.
The Marketing Reality:
 A test conducted by MarketingSherpa and Netline showed a 50%
improvement in registration completion when the number of questions
was reduced.
Percentage of registrants that
completed the process
75%
50%
The short form contained 6 text
fields and a set of radio buttons
The long form added another 20
radio button options
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Short Form
Long Form
Keep Your Registration Forms Short And Sweet
Good News From the Real World:
 According to Silverpop’s 2005 Retail Email Marketing Study, 76% of
retailers asked only for email or email and a short set of questions
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Silverpop Retail Email Marketing Study, 2005
Nine More Quick Tips on List Building
There are many legitimate and effective ways to build your list…
1. Append email addresses to your offline customer data
2. Co-registration
3. Internal cross promotion
4. Viral marketing
5. Email Change of Address
6. Direct Marketing
7. Point of sale/sales person
8. Customer service/technical support
9. Product registration
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Creating Content
That Works
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Think About Your Landing Pages
Landing pages are one of the most overlooked aspects of email
marketing (and other marketing) programs.
The Market Reality:
 A report released by MarketingSherpa found that conversions could
regularly be increased by 40% through simple manipulation of landing
pages
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MarketingSherpa Landing Page Study, 2005
How Do We REALLY Look At A Landing Page?
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MarketingSherpa Landing Page Study, 2005
MarketingSherpa’s Five Step Program
1
2
3
4
5
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Acknowledge the Bail Factor
Make the headline match the copy in your ad
Keep your “hero shot” on the left
Your hotlinked copy needs to be powerful
and prompt action
Offer something useful and unexpected on
your Thank you page
http://www.sherpastore.com/c/a.pl?1006&p.cfm/
Make Use Of Dynamic Content And Segmentation
By applying basic segmentation and dynamic content, email
marketers can see substantial gains in their response rates
The Market Reality:
 In a recent study by JupiterResearch, only 26% of email marketers
employ any kind of dynamic content (this may even by high)
42%
32%
26%
Currently use Plan to use in 12 No plans to use
Dynamic Content
months
Dynamic Content
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The ROI of Email Relevance, JupiterResearch, 2005
Dynamic Content Really Works
Broadcast
Email
Dynamic content emails are opened 50%
more often than broadcast email
Dynamic
Content
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
Broadcast
Email
Dynamic content emails are clicked on
26% more than broadcast email
Dynamic
Content
0.0% 2.0%
4.0% 6.0% 8.0% 10.0% 12.0% 14.0%
Broadcast
Email
Dynamic content emails drive a 145%
increase in conversions over broadcast
email
Dynamic
Content
0.0%
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0.5%
1.0%
1.5%
2.0%
2.5%
3.0%
The ROI of Email Relevance, JupiterResearch, 2005
Build Your Content For The Real World
Your recipients will only see a portion of your message. Design your
content to reflect preview panes and scrolling windows (“above the
fold”)
Which one of
these are you
more likely
to open and
read?
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The Most Important
Tactic of All
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Testing Your Messages
Even basic testing can have a profound impact on response rates.
The trouble is that it requires some effort.
The Market Reality:
 Only 40% of email marketers do any kind of testing on regular basis
Regular
Testing, 40%
No Regular
Testing, 60%
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Effective Email Marketing, JupiterResearch, 2004
What Parts of A Campaign Can You Test?
The most commonly
used types of testing
include:
Other testable aspects of your campaign include:
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Offer
Message layout
Design
Day of week
Time of day
Duration before follow up
The Quiet Revolution In Email and Marketing Metrics Study, MarketingSherpa, 2003
Does Testing Make a Difference?
JupiterResearch surveyed over 600 email marketers to see what it
took to break through the magic 3% conversion threshold. Here’s
what they found:
The percentage of marketers breaking
through 3% that did no testing
The percentage of marketers breaking
through 3% that used nth testing
34%
46%
57%
The bottom line: advanced testing can
improve conversions by 23 percentage
points providing a 68% improvement
68%
The percentage of marketers breaking
the 3% barrier using A/B testing
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Effective Email Marketing, JupiterResearch, 2004
Wrapping It Up
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The Bottom Line
Personalization, avoiding spam-words and basic targeting will
always improve your results
However, in the increasingly sophisticated world of email marketing,
a new generation of smart tactics are emerging that can make as big
or bigger difference over what we’ve done for the last 3 years
Email marketing requires constant education and research. Check
out some of the following sources to stay current
 JupiterResearch
 www.MarketingSherpa.com
 www.ClickZ.com
 The Quiet Revolution In Email
(and my blog, www.QuietRevolutionInEmail.com)
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Questions?
Silverpop’s Broken Link Study
360 companies in nine industry
segments
 Automotive
 Consumer Goods
 Financial Services
 Food & Beverage
 Healthcare
 Media & Entertainment
 Retail
 Technology
 Travel & Leisure
Email Clients Evaluated
 AOL 8.0
 AOL 9.0
 Earthlink
 Gmail
 Hotmail
 Outlook 2003
 Outlook Express 6
 Yahoo!
Overall, 496 messages were received and examined over the course
of the study
Released in October 2005
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Silverpop’s Retail Email Marketing Study
257 retails that ran websites
 Online retailers
 Offline retails
 Department stores
 Catalogs
Surprisingly, only 175 or 68% had email opt-ins publicly available on
their site.
Released in May 2005
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