Sign up boxes just aren't enough

On many sites, you'll see a sign up box for the email list. Something like this



This is very problematic.

• How often is GAP going to email me?
• What is the "special welcome offer?"
• What is the value I will receive?
• Why, exactly, should I give them my email address???
  

This can be improved dramatically

For the GAP, and many others, you should link to a page with the details about the email newsletter program. Give the person an option where they can find out more, without giving you their email address.

Because most email marketers over send, people are growing more reluctant to sign up on email lists.

This email newsletter page should list out the following.

What the benefit IS

You need to sell. What is the benefit to the person for joining yet another email list? This is getting to be a tougher sell each day due to the over-sending nature of many businesses.

Tell them why signing up for your newsletter will make their life better. Focus on benefits, not features.

Frequency newsletters are sent

A best practice is to let your subscribers choose how often they want to receive emails.
Most importantly, tell them the maximum frequency they will receive emails from you.
(It is OK to send less frequent.)

State your privacy policy

If you have a privacy policy page, then link to it. Otherwise, have some text near the sign
up form that describes the privacy of the subscriber's email address. (You won’t sell it or
rent it or do anything evil.)

Don't require too much information (at the start)

You can always ask for more information after you have established a relationship.
Remember, it's a value proposition. You show that you can provide value, your
subscribers will offer up more of their information (about who they are and what they
want). Then you can use those details to send them more targeted messages in the future.
At sign up, ask for email address, first name, and last name. Only ask for more if you
absolutely, positively can use it to their benefit – like a restaurant asking for the birthday.

Don't offer a sign up gift

Many organizations offer a sign up promotion. These can be abused and all too often they
attract people not interested in receiving your newsletter, just in receiving the free sign up
gift. The value from the email should be what convinces someone to subscribe, not the
free gift upon sign up.

Sign Up Cards

Sign up cards are very useful for many retail businesses. Like the online sign up page,
the sign up card should not ask for too much information.

Sign up cards, more than online forms, have a bit higher error rate due to problems
reading what the person has written. If practical, it is best to have the person who
receives the card do a quick “spot check” to make sure the writing is legible. Otherwise
you could end up sending to the wrong email address and be seen as a spammer.

Content Writing Tip - Article Titles

People scan email newsletters. They don't read them.

You can help with scanning through:

• Use of a Table of Contents
• Lists
• Bold
  
• Font size
• Links
• Use of white space

Article Titles are a Key for Scanning
For two reasons. Titles are typically:

• in the Table of Contents
• the largest font in the newsletter

So, article titles have a prominent role in helping your subscribers scan through and then eventually read your newsletter.

If you don't help your subscribers SCAN, they won't read ANYTHING.

You can't force your readers to read the whole newsletter by making it less scannable. That isn't an option. They will either scan it, or skip it. So you don't really have a choice.

Here's the Tip

Think of your article titles the way a newspaper editor thinks of the titles on a newspaper front page.

Minimal words for maximum effect. Words that grab attention. You're not looking for a complete sentence and not even a complete thought.

You simply want to get the scanner's (subscriber) attention. They're moving at Mach 3 through your email, so catch them with a word or phrase that will pique their interest.

If you can slow them down with a title, they might actually read some of the bolded words or the links and some lists. Eventually, heck, they might even read the article and click on a link to your site! w00t, the holy grail of email marketing!

The Online Generation Gap Narrows

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project as reported on eMarketer.

...more than one-half of those ages 65 to 69 are online as well, and Internet-using 70-to-74-year-olds make up 45% of people that age

Hey, that's good news. Almost half of the people 70-74 use the internet! And, the two most used items are web browsing and email.

For those of you with customers in the older categories, this is important and increases the value of your email marketing programs. Unlike the younger generations who have partially moved away from email as a primary communications tool toward RSS feeds, twitter, and other social media information mechanisms, older people generally use just a web browser and the email program.

This trend will only continue as the population ages, and this bodes well for email marketers and the utility of email marketing.

The dreaded no-reply email

The other day I subscribed to a daily newsletter from a new "social media" website. Let me first emphasize that this is a new website - they have just become beta. So, they're not big, they're a small startup.

I tried to reply to one of the emails they send each day. And I quickly discovered they send these using a no-reply address. Meaning I COULDN'T reply.

And that broke my brain. This is a company which is all about web 2.0 and the new communication mechanisms available. Yet they have broken the single most used communication process of the internet!!! Why would they do this? People have been sending and replying to emails for decades now. Decades. And it works.

Email replies are free feedback

Letting your customers reply to the emails you sent is like getting free feedback. I don't know about you, but I LOVE talking with my email marketing customers. I get specific feedback on what they're looking for, the problems they're trying to solve, and their business situation. All of that is incredibly useful for me in creating new features and marketing my service.

I would never, ever think of breaking the reply-to of my email newsletter or the welcome emails my system sends when people sign up. NEVER. In fact, I explicitly state that they can simply reply to the confirmation email if they have any questions. Sometimes they do.

And here's a really important metric. The people that reply to that confirmation email (when they sign up) almost ALWAYS become customers. Why? Because they ask some questions and I reply directly to each of their questions. And then BOOM, they purchase my service.

For me, having people purchase my product is pretty important. And if answering a few emails is all it takes to make a sale, then hell, email away. So why do some small businesses disable the reply-to?

You're Not That Big

I think small companies look to big companies for how they should do things. They see Amazaon.com or some other big web based business breaking the reply-to and they think "well, this is what the big guys do, so maye I should as well." At least that is what I'm guessing.

But you're not that big. Even if you are HUGE, with millions of customers, you should still not break the reply-to, which I'll explain later.

So, you're a small web based business. Please, do NOT do what the big lazy businesses do. You should be extremely happy anytime anyone sends you an email.

Dialogue is the best way to get business and email is the easiest way to start a dialogue with a customer.

You should be encouraging replies, not breaking them with a no-reply email.

Even if you ARE big, don't be Lazy

Any business that sends emails from a no-reply address is either stupid or lazy.

Or both.

And I don't care how many emails they send.

Before you start ranting about the volume of emails that they send and the cost of processing all those inbound emails, lemme just point out that I'm not stupid (although I am lazy) and I'm also a bit of a programmer.

So, how do you handle all these inbound emails if you can't have a person or people replying to each of them?

Simple. First, you have software parse the incoming email looking for questions. You run those questions through software which attempts to find items in a knowledge base which address your question. Trouble ticket software does this already. So, if you have a trouble ticket system, you could route these incoming replies into that system. Most of them have email gateways.

Also, smart software would differentiate between emails that have short questions and emails that have multiple paragraphs. Short questions can have an auto response back with links to the knowledge base based on the software's analysis of the question - exactly like the fancy trouble ticket systems in use today. Long replies (whatever you define as long) are probably worth reading by a person. So you can route those to a real person.

OR, if you're really cool, you could use the Mechanical Turk to tag those emails and then have software route those emails based on the human tagging of the Turk

See what I'm getting at?

Don't be lazy. And don't be stupid. Be Smart. Email replies are golden. They come from current or potential customers.

Let me say that again. Email replies come from current or potential customers.

And if customers are important to you, then treat these emails according to the value they could provide.

The Real Value of an Email Address

Background

An ongoing discussion in the email marketing world is the following question.

"How much is an email address worth?"

(click here to see how prevalent this question is)

And the answers you find will range from $1 on up.

All of those answers are somewhat wrong. Sorry to say.

The Value of an Email Address Is...

Nothing.

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

You don't believe me? Ok, how about this. Here's an email address: bill@microsoft.com. How about another: steve@apple.com.

Here's a whole bunch.

joe.blow@comcast.info
miriam.johnson@foobar.org
philip.h.crawford@myspace.com

You get the picture? You can buy email addresses (of real people) from spammers for less than a tenth of a cent. Yep, that cheap. And a tenth of a cent rounds to zero for most businesses.

But now you're probably saying "hold on!, I have an email list and you email marketers tell me the ROI is SO great, so my list must be worth something."

Oh, and it is. It's likely worth a lot, read on.

It Isn't the Email Address

The value of a subscriber is in the relationship. The reason you place no value on the email addresses I provided above is because you have no relationship with them.

And if all you have is an email address that someone submitted in a signup form, do you really have enough information to engage them? Think about it this way, if you are sitting at a table with someone and the only thing you know is their first name, can the two of you really have a conversation? Not two way you can't. Sure, you can tell that person a lot of stuff - and this is what most beginner marketers do, but you can't really have a two way conversation, which is the key to email marketing.

So, let's get back to your list. If all you have is an email address, you know there was some reason they thought they could get value from your marketing emails. That's really it. Unless you have more information about them (think columns in your list spreadsheet), you won't be able to engage them. I've written before about list size and that it has more than one dimension.

An engaged subscriber is not simply an email address. It is a person. It's you, it's me, your mom, brother, cousin, friend, neighbor. And none of us, (none) wants you to send us impersonal email blasts. You don't, I don't.

The Value of an Engaged Subscriber List

Let's try a thought experiment.

Let's say you own a restaurant and each month you get the good chance to sit down at a table and tell one of your friends about the upcoming specials, events, and anything else going on with your restaurant. Your friend has "subscribed" to these monthly chats. First, imagine that during these chats you ask your friend no questions - you simply talk at him/her for 15 straight minutes. You wouldn't do that right? Ok, cool. So you would ask questions. You'd probably ask them about their experience the last time they were at your restaurant and you might ask them if there was anything missing from your restaurant that would interest them. Right?

So, from these chat sessions, what value do you think you'd get? First, your friend would probably eat at your restaurant more often, right? Maybe once more per year? Twice? Four times? What is that incremental increase worth to you?

Also, you'd receive valuable information about deficiencies in your restaurant. You value customer comments, I hope, yes? Great, then you'd get that value as well.

So you see, the value of a subscriber depends totally on how much you know about that subscriber and the level of engagement you have with that subscriber. No engagement, no value.

Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Open Rates Have Lost Their Usefulness

Some Background

How opens are tracked. There are basically two ways:

• A small invisible image called a web beacon is inserted in the email. This image is specific to a subscriber so when they open the email and their software requests the image from the sending server, the software knows what subscriber downloaded the image. And the open is recorded.
• If a subscriber clicks a link in the email and the link is tracked (which hopefully your ESP is doing), then an open is recorded. Not all service providers have this implemented and if yours doesn't, they are lame. It makes no sense for a click to be tracked and an open to not be recorded. Our software does this.

What is the problem with tracking open rates?

Many times the email is opened and read, but an open is not recorded. Here are the ways:

• Web beacons are stripped by the email software. Yes, beacons are reasonably easy to identify and the software simply strips them out. The subscriber can have images displayed, but since the web beacon was stripped out, no open is recorded.
• The subscriber reads the email with images off. Many email programs have images off by default and if your email is primarily text, the subscriber may not display images - they might simply read the email with images off.
• The subscriber has a blackberry or other device and reads the text only.

Other times the image is downloaded, but the email is not read:

• The subscriber is using Outlook with the preview pane and images are enabled. They don't actually open the email, but the web beacon is downloaded and an open is recorded.
• The email server of the subscriber automatically downloads all images within the subscribers email. We can see this happens because on some domains, all opens occur within seconds of the actual sent time. That wouldn't consistently happen unless a machine was doing the downloading of the web beacon.
  
• The subscriber opens the email and they have images enabled, but they don't read it at all.
  

So What Does It All Mean?

It means you should stop paying attention to the actual number. The only thing important about open rates is a way to measure list fatigue and if you are performing A/B testing. And even with list fatigue you need to be careful, because your open rate could be declining due to the increased use of image blocking software.


So What Should You Focus On?

Clicks. And Sales (or donations). Basically you should track actions by the subscriber because that is what you're trying to do. By focusing on clicks, you will use more links (one of the most common errors is having too few of links in the content) and then, using google analytics, you can also track what the subscriber does once they are on your website.

And by the way, clicks should always be tracked as a percentage of the number of emails sent (less the bounces).

But this requires a whole new article, which I will write in the near future.

Pavlov's Dog: Conditioning Your Subscribers

Have you ever signed up for a newsletter only to receive irrelevant emails from the sender? How many months do you give them before you stop opening them?

And let me ask you this. Do their boring, irrelevant, highly sales oriented emails add positively to your thinking about their brand? (No, right?)

There is a marketing term called "top of mind" that leads many marketers to think that if they don't send emails often enough, their customers will forget about them and they will no longer be "top of mind." This thinking is completely backwards. Top of Mind is established by engagement. By creating a valuable two way conversation with your customers where they feel you listen to them. Where they don't simply feel like Just Another Customer.

Yet Another Boring Email

Every email you send you should be concerned about sending Yet Another Boring Email (yabe). Because if you do, you will be training your customers to stop reading your emails. You will be training them to ignore you. And this is a very costly mistake as it will take much more time and money to win back their attention than it was in the first place to convince them to sign up.

People (your customers) are much like Pavlov's dogs. We do learn and we respond to conditioning. Send me 3 emails in a row that are not relevant to me and I might stop reading every one. I might open a few more in the future, but if those are not relevant you've probably lost me as a subscriber - and this causes list fatigue.

And if you are like me, you rarely go back to reading an email newsletter once you stop reading it.


Synopsis:

• Beware of conditioning them to ignore/not open your emails
• Condition them to open the email (with value)
  

Over time, they will learn based on the value you provide that your emails are worth their time. Otherwise, they will learn that your emails are NOT worth their time.

Your choice.

Apple, Inc. : Lousy Email Marketers

An example this month that bigger doesn't necessarily lead to being better. I'm an apple fan, it's what I'm using as I write this post. I purchased a shiny new MacBook Pro about a year ago with all the bells and whistles. And I love it.

Apple does many things very well. And they do marketing (the interruption type) very, very well.

Apple is lousy at email marketing
At least they send lousy marketing emails to me.

Lets start with this email (screenshot below) they sent me no more than 3 months after I spent $3,000 on my new MacBook. Notice that:

• The email looks beautiful. Perfect actually.
• They are advertising a new MacBook
  

And what I mean by new, is the MacBook that is newer than the one I purchased. And they're even marketing that the price is lower than before.

That's right. They're marketing to me. Ineptly, but marketing it is, and what they're marketing is a replacement to the laptop I had purchased less than 3 months before.



Let me say that again. They sent me an email basically saying "Hey Phil, look at the new, new MacBook. It's faster than the one you bought a couple of months ago and costs less!!"

I was dumbfounded. Why would they do that? If they hoped to make me feel special, well of course that didn't happen. To Apple, it is clear that I'm just an email address.

My Imaginary iPod
The last email they sent me was titled "The perfect speakers for your iPod."

The problem is that I don't own an iPod. Oh sure, I suppose Apple knows that most people who own a MacBook also own an iPod and so the number of people like me is rather small - and they're obviously ok with not making me feel special (see above.)

So they sent me this. Again, the email looks perfect. The message is garbage. This is interruption marketing at it's worse.




What these examples show is that whoever is running the email marketing at Apple is still stuck in the interruption marketing mindset. This is probably to be expected. Apple is very good and has had incredible success with their interruption marketing efforts.

But email is about people. And conversations. And engagement.

And Apple is not doing that. They're being lazy and simply sending a monthly email of what they want to tell me.

Just think of the data and the programmers Apple has that could be utilized to send me relevant emails. They've never once asked how my MacBook was performing (I've sent it in for repairs twice.) Apple has never asked me a question or looked for feedback from me. Ever.

My main point with this post is that small marketers can do better than the billion dollar companies. All you need to do is care, really. Just take a few minutes to engage your subscribers and you'd be doing better than Apple, one of the best marketers on the planet.

Email is a "No Blasting Zone"

Many times I've had clients ask me to help "Blast out an email!!"

I have to wonder...

• Do they like to be blasted?
• Do their subscribers like to be blasted?
• How did this idea of blasting ever get started?

Do you like to be blasted?
No, you don't. If another business were to blast your inbox, I'm sure over time you would unsubscribe or block their emails. More importantly, you would almost certainly look negatively on their brand.

Do you want your subscribers to look upon you negatively? (If yes, then blast away.)

Blasting is a one-way interruption mentality
Successful email marketers understand conversation marketing where you engage in a two way dialogue. The more you engage your subscribers and find out what they want, the better you'll be able to satisfy their wants and desires.

And that means more sales (or more donations if you are a non profit.)

Blasting is for amateurs
And those without a long term strategy. And those stuck in an interruption mindset. Shouting the loudest is not the way to get long term loyal customers.

Be a pro. Think ahead, use surveys, ask questions, engage your subscribers to find out what they want. Then use targeting to send customized emails to a subset of your overall list - speaking directly to their needs.

Your subscribers will respond by buying more of your stuff, spreading the word about your brand, and telling you more about what they want and what they like/don't like about what you have to offer.

Sign up Form Best Practices (and some things to avoid)

Email newsletters are one of the most important design elements of a web site.

The easier you make it for people to find, become interested, and sign up for you email newsletter, the faster you will grow your permission based list.

Value proposition: aka "What's in it for me?"
Do you give your email address to any business that asks for it? No, you don't. Most people give out their email address based on an implicit value equation.

There is a cost to giving out your email address because you risk receiving more spam. So what is the benefit? As a marketer, your goal is to convince the person that the benefit of receiving your marketing emails is greater than the cost/risk of providing their email address.

DO These

Link to the sign up form in multiple places
Eye tracking studies have shown that people look for the link to your newsletter sign up in 3 places.

1. Upper right
   
2. Main navigation
3. Footer of every page
   

There is no rule against linking to a web page multiple times from a different page. Also, by using several different links, you can use different words in the text.

Use important words in links to the sign up form
People scan web sites. Different people might scan for different words. The following are the most common phrases when people are scanning for a newsletter sign up. (The best link is usually "Email Newsletter Sign up".)

• Sign up
• Newsletter
• Email
  

Do not use just the branded name of the newsletter. Most people are scanning for the words in the list, so if your sign up link says something like "market watch" and nothing else, it is likely they will miss the link.

Link to the newsletter archive
If you have an archive, link to it so people can make a better decision about whether to subscribe. If you don't have an archive, describe a sample newsletter and include an image.

Say how often newsletters are sent
And if possible, let your subscribers choose how often. Most importantly, tell them the maximum frequency they will receive emails from you. (It is OK to send less frequent.)

State your privacy policy
If you have a privacy policy page, then link to it. Otherwise, have some text near the sign up form that describes the privacy of the subscriber's email address.

Sell a little
Tell them why signing up for your newsletter will make their life better. Focus on benefits, not features.

DON'T Do These

Don't rely only on a sign up box
Remember, first you need to convince the person they should sign up. Having only a sign up box for their email address provides no convincing. It's just plain lazy.


Don't require too much information (at the start)
You can always ask for more information after you have established a relationship. Remember, it's a value proposition. You show that you can provide value, your subscribers will offer up more of their information (about who they are and what they want). Then you can use those details to send them a more targeted message.

At sign up, ask for email address, first name, and last name. Only ask for more if you absolutely, positively need it. I recommend not just asking for email address because then you have absolutely no chance of adding any personalization.

Over time, you can use surveys to build out a subscriber's profile.

Don't offer a sign up gift
Many organizations offer up a sign up promotion. I'm not big on these as they can be abused. The value from the email should be what convinces someone to subscribe, not the freebie upon sign up.

With that said, one gift I advocate for is a birthday gift or other "anniversary" type of gift. This is an excellent way to distinguish email marketing from interruption marketing. Just think how personal the "Happy Birthday Philip" email feels to your subscribers. Restaurants are one of the main beneficiaries of this strategy.

Closing the Loop

Effective communication includes asking as well as telling. If your email marketing program consists only of telling, you may be missing out on a huge opportunity.

I often tell my clients to picture themselves at a table with 3 of their friends. Then to imagine they are telling these friends what is going on with their business - the same information they want to convey in their email marketing efforts. This is the same voice and style they should use when writing their emails.

What they also figure out is the following:

• their friends are going to ask questions
  
• answering the questions helps clarify the message
• they like to ask their friends about past events

Immediately they realize the importance of two way communication.

Feedback, feedback, feedback
When you go to a restaurant, I guarantee you will be asked "How is everything?" at least once during your meal. This feedback is important for the restaurant to improve. Can you imagine a restaurant that never asks for feedback? Can you imagine any business not asking for feedback?

You can't. Which points out how important customer feedback is to all businesses.

Effective ways to get feedback
The simplest way is to ask your subscribers to reply to the email you send. The person has opened the email. All they have to do is click reply and type and they're giving feedback. I'm amazed at how infrequently this is done within email marketing programs. A simple sentence at the bottom of the email - "please reply if you have any questions or comments...." - is all it takes to hear back from one of your subscribers.

And this is not an ordinary subscriber. Anyone who gives you feedback cares at least enough to tell you what they think.

The second best way to get feedback is with focused mini-surveys. Not the generic multi page kind that most businesses use. I'm talking about event specific 3-5 question surveys.

Close the loop
I'll give an example from a restaurant client. Balzac wine bar has a monthly wine dinner. They send information about the wine dinner to their subscriber list at the beginning of each month.

During the wine dinner they ask the attendees if they are on the email list. If they are, they get their name so they can send them a thank you. If not, they ask the customer if they'd wish to join. At the end of the wine dinner they have a list of subscribers who attended the wine dinner.

A few days later they send an email to this targetted subset of their email list. This email contains 3 items.

• First, it says "Thank You" for coming to the wine event
• Second, it asks them to fill out a short 4 question survey about this particular event
• Last, but certainly not least, it tells them about the next wine dinner
  

A few things should be pointed out with this example.

1. The feedback they receive on this event will be actionable and specific. This is the best kind of feedback.
2. Sending to a subset of your list based on data about your subscribers allows you to send very specific emails.
3. When these subscribers fill out the survey, you will have even more information about them - allowing you to tailor an even more customized message to them in the future.
   

Communicating with email marketing is best if the flow is two way. Don't just tell, ask as well. You'll get a lot more value then just "blasting" out a monthly email.

As always, let me know if you have any comments or questions.

List Size: More than One Dimension

How can I grow my list?

You want more subscribers right? The thinking is this: "If I send to more people, I'll have more sales." Yes? But what about the open rate? How many people are reading your current emails?

The problem is there are two parts to the basic equation. The number you send and the action rate - the percentage of people who actually do something from the email.

Most marketers assume the only thing they can change is the number of subscribers, when in fact they have considerable control over the action rate. Simply by sending highly relevant emails they can dramatically improve the percentage of subscribers that do what they want (buy a book, come to a restaurant, donate online,...)

Subscriber Lists Have Width
Yep. Not only should you be interested in acquiring more subscribers, you should be just as interested in acquiring more data about the subscribers you already have.

Why?

1. Email marketing is about having a conversation with people. Unless you know something about those people, how can you have a conversation with them?
   
   
2. Without data about your subscribers you cannot send relevant emails and will almost certainly have gradually deteriorating open rates. In other words, your effective list size will shrink over time.

Effective List Size
Let's say you have 1000 subscribers. Your effective list size is much smaller. Do you know how many of your subscribers have read at least one of your last 3 emails?

How many of your subscribers never read your emails?

For most email marketers, the effective list size is at least 30% less than the number of subscribers in the list. And, this will only get worse if you fail to send highly relevant emails.

Effective list size is what matters. Sending 5,000 emails and having only 20 people click a link is not doing you any good. It costs more money, you are tarnishing your brand, and you are losing out on the opportunity email marketing offers.

Virtuous Cycle of More Subscriber Attributes
The more you know about your subscribers...

The more targeted and relevant your emails are, which leads to...

Less unsubscribes, less list churn, higher open rates, higher click through rates, which means...

Your effective list size is bigger. You have more click-throughs. You have more sales. Your subscribers are happy. You are happy. AND...

With more clicks, and more sales, and more interaction you have more data, which helps you...

Know more about your customers. And the cycle continues.

Real Personalization Takes Work

From my inbox... (the junk folder that is)

Philip, Get your Free Plastic Surgery Consultation Now!

Philip Become a travel agent in just one week!

PHILIP, We help women reduce their debt.

Um. Yeah, personalized subject lines and greetings. Does anyone believe this personalization hides the fact these emails are spam?

These emails even contained "Dear Philip" in the content. I wasn't fooled. You're not fooled. My spam filter wasn't fooled.

Using a subscriber's name is not enough
Even spammers get the first name correct. That ain't personalization. By now, everyone knows just because an email has your name, it doesn't mean it's from someone you know.

Real Personalization is Relevant
Most email marketers know very little about their subscribers. Typically just email address and name. That's it. Sure, they know the person subscribed to their list (Right? We are talking about opt-in subscribers. Yes, we are.), but overall they know very little about the person receiving the email.

And that is the main problem.

You need to know more about your subscribers in order to send them emails they are likely to find relevant.

Great Example
Let's say you are a retailer of music and for each subscriber you know their last purchase. You could then create an email that let's them know about new albums in that same musical genre. It might look like this:

...

Hey Philip

We hope you're enjoying the cd Simple Things by Zero 7 you purchased from us. We wanted to let you know they have a new cd out this year: The Garden by Zero 7.

Have a great summer listening to your favorite music!

.....

This email doesn't even need a name to be personalized. What makes it personalized is that the retailer took the time to recommend a new cd based on my purchase history. Pretty good odds that I'll want to purchase the new cd. AND, all I have to do is click the link to get to the relevant page.

How do they do this? Well, it could be this simple.

1. A new cd comes out.
2. They query their database of all customers who have purchased a cd by that artist.
3. They update the profile of each customer to run the merge
4. Construct an email with the merge fields of [artist] and [newCD]
5. Set "New CD by [artist]" as the subject line
   
6. Run the merge and send

These not the normal steps for most email marketers. They are the normal steps for successful email marketers. Successful email marketers understand that even though sending an email is free (or very inexpensive), they shouldn't ignore the fact that a little hard work can significantly increase sales.

Real personalization takes work, but that work can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

Benefits of Real Personalization

• Less emails will be sent because you are usually sending to a subset of your overall list
• Less list fatigue because emails are highly relevant
• Less spam complaints.
• Less negative impact to your brand from sending non-relevant emails
• MORE SALES

Not a bad deal and well worth the time and effort.

Questions, comments, concerns? Let me hear 'em.

How Frequent is Too Frequent?

The other day I was talking with a customer about her organization's email newsletter - a weekly email to its members - current news and events for the week. She expressed concern that some subscribers considered weekly emails to be too frequent and asked for advice.

Let them choose
Giving her subscribers the option to choose a weekly email or a monthly digest is a simple way to please more subscribers - they simply have to make the choice.

This question is part of a bigger idea I've discussed before which is:

Your subscribers just aren't that into you
Taking a line from the personal relationship field, but equally relevant. You want your subscribers to know everything about your organization - it's what you do.

Your subscribers, on the other hand, have lives outside of their interaction with your organization. It isn't the most important thing on their mind. Really, it isn't.

With this idea, it's usually best to start an email newsletter using a frequency of either quarterly or bi-monthly and then let your most ardent supporters/readers choose to receive it more frequently - if that is an option you want to provide.

It is much easier to let the interested subscribers choose a more frequent newsletter than it is for getting disinterested subscribers to choose a less frequent newsletter. Trust me. They're disinterested (too a degree) which means they probably won't go out of their way to edit their profile - they'll simply not read the emails (which hurts your brand by the way.)

Start with infrequent, work towards frequent
There are actually two reason to do this. The first I've already discussed - easier to move some subscribers to more frequent than it is to move them to less frequent emails.

The other reason to choose this approach is that sending newsletters or marketing emails takes effort. Yes, you can send with a simple click, but coming up with new content week after week (or month after month) is not an easy task. And if you simply rehash old content, your subscribers will see right through this.

So make things easier on yourself and your subscribers, start small (infrequent) move to big (frequent). And along the way, learn a whole lot more about your subscribers (what they want, who they are, etc) so the issue of frequency goes away completely due to the highly relevant nature of your emails.

List Fatigue: Real World Example

The Situation
A client of mine is a franchisee of a national restaurant chain. This company was forced to send marketing emails designed by the corporate headquarters - much to their dismay.

These emails designed and thought up by the national headquarters were highly sales and marketing focused and provided little value to the subscriber. Headquarters' opinion was that the customer gave an email address, giving them a license to send this type of email. My client was correct when he mentioned that to him they seemed like spam - not relevant, highly impersonal, and the worst part, sent too often.

The Result
Over the initial 9 month period of sending these emails, the open rate declined from 60% to less than 35%. My friend wondered if maybe the problem was caused by their email service provider. It wasn't.

How did we know? After his open rate decreased, he began sending a birthday email to this same list. The open rate of that email was consistently above 55% - proving that the lack of opens for the other emails was not caused by technology, but because the subscribers had learned to ignore their spam-like marketing emails.

Effects of List Fatigue
Bad marketing behavior had fatigued their list. What was once an active list of roughly 13,000 subscribers became an active list of 9,000.

A net loss of 4,000 subscribers, even though they added several thousand subscribers during that time! Ouch!

Treat them well
Don't spam them. Sell them what they want. To do that, ask your subscribers questions. Survey them. Use data to keep your emails relevant. The more you know about your subscribers, the more relevant your emails can be written - and the less list fatigue you'll experience.

List Fatigue: The fast way to lose money

What is list fatigue?
A reduction in your active subscribers other than bounced and unsubscribed subscribers.

Not all subscribers are active
Let's say you have a list of 10,000 subscribers and an open rate of 50% - pretty good for a business to consumer list. Upon further analysis over the past 6 months:

• 25% open it every time - your hard core subscribers
• 45% open it occasionally
• 30% never open the email

In this example, active subscribers are 7,000 (70%). The other 30% might be on your list, but they are providing you with no value.

List fatigue is a movement of your subscribers from active to inactive. It is a quiet, but real reduction in your list size.

What causes list fatigue?

• Subscribers changing their email address
• Over-sending
• Non relevant emails

Change of email address
Also known as list churn, for business to consumer lists a typical yearly rate is 20-30% - (yes, that much!). Business to business lists have lower churn because business emails change less often.

For example, if you have a list of 1,000 people, you may lose 300 subscribers during the year simply from changing email addresses. You may not see this in your bounces or unsubscribes because many people simply stop checking their old email accounts.

Over sending
Over sending is in the eyes of the subscriber. If they think you are over-sending, you are over-sending. Your subscribers are not homogeneous, some might prefer to receive emails less often and you should accommodate them.

Non relevant emails
Discussed previously in the A.R.T. article, non relevant emails are the best way to irritate subscribers and turn them from active subscribers to non-active subscribers. It doesn't take many non-relevant emails for a person to decide to start ignoring them.

What you can do
Focus on quality of emails and not quantity.

A quantity mentality will degrade your list over time.

A.R.T.
Send relevant, anticipated emails. As long as your emails are highly relevant, your list fatigue will be much less than the industry standard.

Frequency options
Give your subscribers a frequency option.

Maybe they'd like to receive a monthly email instead of every week. Or maybe once a quarter versus every month. Options are good, free, and easy - so provide them to your subscribers and they will grace you with their active participation.

Remove inactive subscribers
Send a special email to the subscribers who haven't opened an email in many months. Tell them you haven't seen them in awhile and that you are considering removing them from your list. Provide a link for them to confirm they still want to receive emails and ignore if not. Better yet, provide a new frequency option to receive emails less often. After this email, remove those who didn't update their profile. You'll be better off with a smaller, more active list.

The next article will provide a real world example of list fatigue experienced by an actual email marketer.

Email Content Writing Tips

Some simple rules to remember while writing your next newsletter or blast email.

Repetition
Tell them what you're gonna tell them.

Tell them.

Tell them what you told them.

Links, lots and lots of links
Provide them with many links in order to take action. Don't be conservative with links - they help highlight what is important in the email and express the action the user could/should take.

Consistent voice
For most consumer related emails, the voice should be informal and personal (trust me). Email marketing is less formal than most marketing. People like it.

Less words
Write your copy and set it aside. The next day, edit it focusing on removing words. Repeat this process - I'm not kidding.

Use.

Less.

Words.

Whitespace
Whitespace can be used to break up the content into sections, helping the reader understand where one section ends and the next begins.

Lists
Lists work because they are:

• scannable
• noticed
• contain less words

Links, and bolded words
While scanning, people are naturally drawn to bolded words and links. Use both of these to strategically highlight the important information in the email.

Break long articles into chunks
If you have long articles you wish to include in a newsletter, it is much better to have a short introduction to the article within the email with a link to the full details. Think of a newspaper's front page, you get just enough to interest you with the rest of the story inside.

Resources for writing content for the web

Most importantly, how people read on the web
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

Overall web writing knowledge
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/

Advice on emails in particular
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040217.html

More content writing tips
http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol11/email.htm

Any other tips? Disagree or not, let me know.

-Phil

All about A.R.T.

This isn't about graphic design. This is about the 3 rules to follow for ensuring success of your email marketing efforts.

The marketing emails you send should be:

• Anticipated
• Relevant
• Timely

The 3 Rules of Email Marketing. In this case , ART is science.


Anticipated
Anticipated emails are opened. Plain and simple. What is not simple is making them anticipated.

Don't over send.
This is the biggest mistake by marketing beginners. Your subscribers want to hear from you less often than you want to communicate with them. Trust me.

Let them choose frequency.
Monthly, quarterly, before events, etc. Your most interested subscribers may choose to be updated every week. Less interested subscribers maybe once a month.

Provide value.
Every email you send should provide value to person who receives it. It's about them, not you. People are wildly possessive of their inbox. Send them an email in which they receive no value and your brand will suffer.

Every time you send an email a subscriber does not value, the next one will be less anticipated. Too much of this and eventually the emails are unread or unopened.


Relevant
The best way to ensure your emails are anticipated is to make them relevant. The best way to ensure relevancy is through profiling and targeting. Profiling involves gathering more data about your subscribers than simply email address and name. A subscriber profile is built up over time and provides value to both you, the marketer, as well as the subscriber (because they hopefully receive less non-relevant emails from you).

An Example
Let's say you are a restaurant owner and you have birthday in your subscriber profile. Sending a birthday email for a discounted meal, or maybe a free desert is an example of a highly relevant email. I guarantee it will be viewed positively and will increase the chances of the subscriber opening future emails.

Surveys, simple questions, click analysis, and even offline activity can be utilized to add data points to a subscriber profile. I'll write more on this, much more, in future articles since profiling is the single most important aspect of email marketing.


Timely
Timely has to do with giving subscribers enough time to take the action asked for in the email. Using the example above, the birthday email should go out before the subscriber's birthday (of course) and the offer should allow for a bit of scheduling flexibility. Otherwise, the lack of time will be viewed negatively - "you're rushing me".

Sending an email too early can also be problematic. Put yourself in your subscriber's shoes and decide what a normal planning horizon may be. Planning for a birthday meal would have a shorter planning horizon than planning for a ski trip. So the birthday email should go out closer to the birthday than a ski trip offer would to winter.


What about personalized?
You may have read elsewhere about the importance of email personalization. Isn't that the key to email marketing? Personalization is part of making emails relevant, but not fake personalization. Most marketers think of personalization as using the subscriber's name in the subject line or as a greeting in the top of the email. This is not personalization.

Real personalization is when you send a message the subscriber is interested in, which is relevancy. Just because you say "Hi Dave!" in the email does not mean Dave will be interested in the email. Even spammers can use a person's first name and nobody would call those emails personal or personalized.

Anticipated. Relevant. Timely.

The keys to email marketing success.

Simple Design: How Simple?

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I review many email newsletters on a daily basis, most created by non-designers.

The number one mistake? More is not more.

Simple does not mean unattractive, it means...well, simple. Think iPod - simple and professional.

Fewer Colors, not more
The single biggest mistake by amateur designers is to use too many colors. Don't do it.

Pick 2 or 3 colors based on your logo and use a white background. Why white? Because some email programs won't display that nifty dark background. So your white text on a dark background just became white text on a white background. Not so readable.

Also, use colors to distinguish patterns such as one color for article titles and another for subtitles. People scan emails and color can help them scan - if used properly.

Images that do something
Don't use images just to add pizzaz. Images should be important enough to be links to something, not just artwork. Every image should be a link. (Note: You should also plan that your subscriber will have images turned off, so don't rely on images solely.)

Less fonts
This means not only less fonts (tahoma, verdana, helvetica, arial, etc), but also less font sizes. The standard email newsletter can get by with 3 font sizes: one for article headings, one for sub headings, and another size for the content. A fourth font size can be utilized for the fine print.

Easy on the CSS
Emails aren't web pages. You can't be certain how your HTML will be displayed when using CSS because there are so many programs used to read emails. Old school HTML (font tags, tables, bgcolor) is much more predictable. Uncool, but predictable.

Provide a link to a web version
At the top of the email provide a link to a web page version of the newsletter. Browsers are much better at displaying HTML compared with email programs.

Benefits of simple designs

• Take less time to create and edit and zero time to debug in different email clients
  
• Displayed more consistently than "fancy" designs. Your brand suffers when the email newsletter you sent is hacked to pieces in a subscriber's email software.
• Clean and simple copy/design is easier to read. Your subscribers will thank you.

The details of coding
How to do this changes based on the current email programs. Gmail is one of the worst offenders for stripping out CSS related information. So what worked in 2004 won't work now with Gmail. Here is the best article on how to code HTML emails.

- Phil

HTML vs. Text

One debate that never seems to die within the email marketing industry is HTML vs. Text emails.

What is the right answer?

The answer is...

This is the wrong question.

Mass personalization, not intrusion
Email marketing is about using the mass personalization capabilities of software to market differently to customers and potential customers. It is not a different way to use intrusion marketing like tv commercials, billboards, and banner ads. As marketers we need to spend more time (much more time) on segmenting our customers and figuring out ways to learn more about what they want and less time on the display of the message.

Relevancy is key
If an email is incredibly relevant, format and design do not matter. Think about it. If you were in the market for a green widget and some company sent you an email about a sale they were having on widgets at the store 4 blocks from your house and they have the exact color widget you are looking for, would you care if the email was in text or HTML?

Most likely, you'd be amazed at the great service you received from this company for letting you know about this special? Instead of being marketed to, you would consider them to have done you a favor.

Emails that are not relevant to the person can be the best designed HTML email ever and it won't matter - relevancy is key because people simply don't have the time for noise, even if that noise is pretty.

Focus your energy
If you are in the beginning stages of email marketing, spend your time working on building relationships with your subscribers. Create a plan for gathering as much data about them as possible. What they want, what they value. More on how to do this in future articles.

-phil