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