Does marketing increase revenue? Or is it a cost center?
A recent study from ITC and Velocify says it definitely works.
The two companies surveyed more than 1,000 insurance agencies. Continue reading
Eight years ago United Airlines found itself in the middle of a social media kerfuffle when Canadian folk singer Dave Carroll’s guitar was broken by baggage handlers. Now they’re in the thick of it again.
A few months after his guitar was broken, and the airline refused to compensate him (he says because he didn’t make a claim with 24 hours), Carroll posted a Continue reading
I recently ran across a feature I’d never seen before on the Yahoo news site: real-time sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis can be a really valuable tool, such as when a company is evaluating social media conversation about it. Some high end programs also provide purchase and churn intent and predictive analytics about individual behavior. Those programs can start at few thousand dollars a month on up. Continue reading
A few weeks ago I wrote about how viewership of NFL games, including the Super Bowl, has been declining for two or three years. Well, the NFL isn’t going to sit back and do nothing. The league office probably knows more about marketing than it does about football. Continue reading
One of the reasons I enjoy sports is because they sometimes serve as a kind of management simulator. For example, Michael Lewis’ great book, Moneyball, is not just about how the Oakland Athletics baseball team selected players, it’s also about how any company can compute the value that an employee adds to the company – and beyond that, how rationally or emotionally we make decisions. Continue reading
Today is St. Patrick’s Day and it’s time for the wearin’ of the green! Or not.
In China “wearing a green hat” is an expression for a man being cheated on by his wife or girlfriend, because the Chinese word sounds similar to the word for cuckold. Continue reading
NSFW = Not Safe for Work
If you’re offended by swearing or near nudity, you may want to skip this one.
Some years ago a marketing writer showed me a draft of copy for a client (not my client) which had numerous swear words in it. I said I was kind of surprised, and he said that the client had said it was perfectly fine. But a few weeks later he told me that the client had taken out all of the swearing before the final copy.
These days that might not happen.
Look at the title of this podcast from leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz
Or this ad copy that mimics the “Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn” ending of “Gone with the Wind” – – a line that was considered scandalous in its day.
Or the name of this company:
This B2B British marketing agency, which counts Salesforce among its clients, seems totally comfortable with swearing.
A hundred years ago a nearly fully clad woman showing a little ankle in an ad might have been thought shocking but, as Cole Porter said, these days anything goes. Today near nudity is common (just as long as a woman’s nipple is ever so slightly covered, which has prompted some women – including women models – to back the Free The Nipple campaign for equality with men’s nipples).
Topless beaches have long been more common in Europe, as has nudity in advertising. But a study in three European countries found that women reacted more negatively to female nudity in ads than men did. It didn’t test for how men and women felt about male nudity in ads, although one study found that men and women are less comfortable with male nudity in general. And sexual preference comes into the nudity equation, too. It’s complicated.
As with everything else in marketing, context should be your guide. You might use swearing or near nudity to market to a younger or hipper demographic. Or a more male audience: the suggestiveness of GoDaddy ads never seemed to hurt them, but I assume that they were targeting a predominantly male IT clientele. But neither swearing nor anything suggestive would be a good idea if your audience, for example, has many religiously conservative members.
What is obscene? A college theater professor of mine said that it comes from the Greek for “off stage” – something that should not be shown on the stage. For the Greeks that included violence, too. I do not find that explanation in the dictionary which says it comes from the classical Latin meaning “inauspicious, ill-omened, filthy, disgusting, indecent, lewd”.
Is this ad more obscene than anything above?
This is part of chapter 7 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.
Email is the 800-pound gorilla of Bullseye Marketing.
- If you build your list from customers and prospects, you should have an excellent list. You are sending messages primarily to people who you have already done business with you or are interested enough in you that they have asked to receive your emails
- You can segment and personalize so that people are getting the most tailored, valuable messages.
- Over 99% of the people that you send an email to will receive it.
- You have the tools and metrics to constantly improve your email campaigns to make them increasingly more effective
- Good emails get high response rates: not just opens, but clicks, forwards and – most importantly – conversions
- It is inexpensive. You pay for staff time and creative, of course, but compared to the high cost of physical direct mail and some other channels, an email program is a bargain.
Even Millennials, who are rumored to prefer tools like Snapchat and Instagram, like brands to use emails – and engage with them.[i]
So let’s talk about what goes into making email marketing work for you.
Build your own list
The first rule of 21st century email marketing is to build your own list. As described in the previous chapter, give people who come to your website many opportunities to opt-in to receiving your emails. Offer them 10% off their first purchase, or a free ebook, or a webinar – whatever works for your customers. Have your salespeople collect business cards and systematically enter them into your CRM.
When they are leaving your site, you can give them one more opportunity to sign up to receive your content with an exit-intent pop-up.
But don’t buy lists. If you do buy a list, you are likely to find:
- Major email platforms won’t even import it because they have algorithms to detect lists with a high percentage of bad email addresses (after all, you aren’t the first person the list has been sold to).
- If you use one of the email service providers who will work with a bought list, you’ll find that many of the names are bad and get rejected even by them.
- You’ll want to set up a different web domain for those bought list mailings because you don’t want your real domain getting blacklisted as a source of spam.
- You’ll get a historically low response rate to what you send.
- The email list broker will be last seen riding off into the distance, waving your check and laughing maniacally.
If, nonetheless, you decide to go ahead with buying a list, then make sure you do use a different email service provider who will permit its use. And use the email you send to promote a really attractive offer that will entice people to come to your site and use your awesome landing page to opt-in to becoming part of your house list and receiving emails in the future.
Later we’ll talk about a special case in which you didn’t build the list: pre-event lists provided by trade shows and conferences that you’re exhibiting at.
The CAN-SPAM Act
The name of the CAN-SPAM Act was meant to suggest that the law, which took effect in 2003, would “can” (stop) spam. But its regulations are so loose that people immediately started to joke that with it you can spam. Under the law, commercial emails must do the following to avoid being considered spam:
- have accurate header information, such as the From And Reply-To information
- use non-deceptive Subject lines
- identify that the message is an ad
- include the physical address (in the footer, usually)
- provide a way for people to unsubscribe, and honor those requests promptly
- make sure that any company that you hire to do email marketing for you complies with these requirements.
That’s a pretty low bar.
The potential penalties for violating the CAN-SPAM Act are high; each individual email sent is subject to penalties of over $40,000, so you could be in the millions of dollars in penalties for even a single email blast with just a few dozen addresses that are in violation.[ii] And the CAN-SPAM act doesn’t just apply to large/bulk email blasts, it applies to one-to-one “commercial” emails, too, although it seems to be ignored by virtually all companies at that level.
Individuals who receive emails that don’t comply with the requirements cannot sue, and there is a limited right of action by corporations. Most actions are taken by prosecutors or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against large, bulk spammers.
Segment your lists
As a Bullseye marketer, you know that the most important factor in direct response campaigns is the quality of your list. Email programs, when integrated with your data from your marketing automation program, CRM, and other sources, provide very advanced tools to target the right list.
People in different stages of the buying/customer funnel are just one of the segments that you’ll want to create and develop different content for. These stages include:
- contacts
- qualified prospects
- active leads
- customers
You may also have separate segments for partners, the press, analysts, and others.
In some B2B companies they suspend sending some or all marketing messages to people that sales is working on trying to close so as not to create too many or conflicting messages. In other companies sales and marketing work together on ways to accelerate deals through the pipeline.
Beyond these high-level segments, you can segment far more based on the nature of what you’re selling, the size of your lists, and what you find to be effective. Important segments could include:
- demographics (gender, age, location)
- business demographics (size of company, industry, title in company)
- amount and type of interactions with your website, emails and other marketing
- recency, size or type of previous purchases
- self-identified interests: ask people on your email sign-up form which subjects they are interested in getting information about, and let them manage those preference in the future
Three types of marketing data [This could be a sidebar]
You can use three types of data to enhance your customer and prospect targeting.
First party data
First party data is your data. It includes previous customer buying history, how a person interacts with your website, emails and other content (what marketing automation vendor Eloqua calls a person’s “digital body language”), their attendance on webinars and physical events, and so on. First party data rules, and it’s inexpensive for you to gather and use. In Phase 1, you can mostly rely on first party data.
Third party data
You buy third party data data vendors, and it can include more information about the person or account:
- what they’ve bought from others in the past
- their behavior on other websites (have they recently started researching and reading articles about your type of products?)
- what kind of car they drive
- have they filed any patents
And so on. There are thousands of third party data types you could enrich your data with. Tens of thousands of retailers and publishers are pooling their anonymized data in data co-ops.[iii]
Second party data
Second party data is essentially private third party data. Second party data is created and collected in partnership with another company but not distributed broadly by data merchants. For example, if you do a campaign jointly with another company, or if you swap data with another company. You’re getting data directly from the source, not through a data merchant, and it may be deeper and tied to particular individuals.
Some companies gather and buy thousands of data points for each contact. By using first-, second- and third-party data, you can significantly improve the segmentation, targeting, personalization and effectiveness of your email and other marketing.
Personalize
Personalization can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of your emails.
Personalization once meant a personal greeting, like “Hi Louis”, or using the person’s name in the Subject line. How 2007.
Your emails will be many times more effective the more that they speak to the current status, pains and interests of the customer. An email in response to an abandoned ecommerce shopping cart is perhaps the ultimate in timely, personalized communication.
Just as an ecommerce site can send emails promoting the types of products that the person has bought in the past or — based on lessons learned from predictive analytics — are likely to buy in the future, B2B companies should personalize their messages.
Based on a person’s website behavior, companies can remind people of their interest in a product when it goes on sale.
By using PURLs (personalized URLs), you can create landing pages with personal headlines, messages, and offers at scale. Beyond email, you can use the same PURL in your omni channel marketing efforts, such as direct mail and messages from your sales reps.
The ultimate in personalization is when you base your entire email strategy on it. Amazon may have a few high-level segments, such as by country, but after that their emails are almost entirely personalized for each of their several hundred million customers based on the massive amount of data Amazon has collected from their browsing and shopping habits, as well as what they can learn about them from other web activity and third-party data.
Use calls to action
If you’re a consultant or otherwise need to promote your industry knowledge and thought leadership, you may be sending regular emails with just your insights and no strong calls to action, sort of like emailed blog posts.
Most companies, though, will be looking for direct, traceable results from their email campaigns such as downloads, event sign-ups, and sales.
Unless you’re an ecommerce company, generally you should only have one call to action per email.
Usually you’ll find that the links/offers at the top of the email get the most clicks. I’ve seen it over and over again. We spend all that time crafting our email masterpieces, but most people don’t read to the end. The lower you go in an email (or on a web page), the fewer clicks your links and buttons will usually get.
So if you do have a single call to action, put the link or button for it at the beginning and end of your email.
How often should you send emails?
A few years ago I saw the CMO of Vistaprint talk, and he said that they had done tests and found that their emails produced the most business if they emailed their customers every day. “I know we shouldn’t do it, but that’s what the data show,” he said. Vistaprint sells to very small business; organizations as different as 1-800-Flowers and WGBH also send out emails daily, or almost daily, to people on their lists. Around holidays like Mother’s Day, some send more than once a day.
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The rate of optimal email frequency is going to be different for every company. Companies send a couple of times a week, once a week, monthly or quarterly. The only way you’ll know what cadence is best for you is to test. Most important, though, is that once you have established a cadence, stick to it.
Generally, you have to expect that .25% or more of your list will unsubscribe each time you send an email. So over time, your email list will become more focused on people who really do want to hear from you. And you should be making enough valuable offers on your website and elsewhere that you can constantly grow your list even with those unsubscribes.
So how often should you email? Most likely it’s far more than you think.
When should you send?
Like the question how often should you send, when you should send can vary significantly depending on who you are marketing to. Generally, email service providers report that open rates are significantly higher on weekdays. Some categories, like emails related to hobbies and ecommerce, perform a bit better on weekends than other categories, but may still not be as good as they are during the week.[i]
Best time of day can vary considerably, too. For example:
- If you’re marketing to business people, you may find that early morning and late afternoon emails get the best response.
- If you’re marketing to doctors who do not read their email during the day, then evening emails may work best
- If you’re marketing to bartenders and others who work at night, then you want to send during the day.
- If you’re marketing to senior executives, many people have found that messages early on Saturday morning are particularly effective because the weekend is when they catch up with their less urgent reading.
There is no magic day/time for all people.
Email programs also give you the option to customize sends by each recipient’s time zone. After all, 8 am in New York is 5 am in San Francisco and 8 pm in Hong Kong. Staggering sends by time zone is a helpful feature if you’re sending to a national or international list.
Run tests and find out what works best for your customers.
Use UTM tracking codes
UTM tracking codes are a way to measure the effectiveness of almost any online marketing program, including your emails.
Even if you’re not familiar with UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module; Urchin was the company that developed the software that eventually became Google Analytics), you may have noticed them in URLs. They show up after the specific page URL and look something like this:
www.yoursite.com/utm_campaign=email
By creating and using custom UTMs, you can track in Google Analytics which website traffic was generated by your emails, social media posts, ads, and so on.
However, they’re not absolutely reliable because people often copy an entire URL, including the UTM code, and send, re-post or re-use it and it will appear in your reports that the traffic came from the original source, not the new source that the URL with UTM was pasted into.
You can easily create URLs with UTMs using Google’s URL Builder.
Some other tools like Hootsuite also provide UTM builders.
And keep in mind that UTMs are case sensitive, so be consistent and always use lower case.
Email data: Open rates aren’t absolutely reliable
Email programs give you many metrics such as delivery rates, open rates, clicks, forwards, bounces, and unsubscribes. That open rate data is not reliable.
There are too many different email clients, and ways to even define what an open is, for open rates to be absolutely meaningful. If your email program says, for example, that 16.8% of recipients opened an email, that’s probably not accurate. It could be more or less.
However, the data are relatively reliable. By that, I mean that if you see that certain topics have higher open rates over time, then since it’s all in one system with a relatively consistent set of recipients you can probably trust that people are especially interested in those topics.
Subject Lines
The most important factor in email opens is the reputation of the sender. If people know that you’re sending them valuable information that they requested, they’ll continue to open your emails. If you send them garbage, they won’t.
That said, different email Subject lines definitely can have a significant impact. Political campaigns raise hundreds of millions of dollars by optimizing their emails and Subject lines. Two Subject lines that were especially effective for the 2012 Obama campaign[i] were, “I will be outspent” and “Hey”.
Personalization is good, especially if you’re going past the first name in Subject line bit. “Louis, your test results are ready.”
Urgency, fear of missing out, status and other appeals may be effective, such as “Last chance” or “Only a few left”
How-tos and numbers are usually effective in blog post headlines and tweets and may work for emails, too, such as, “7 ways to improve your email open rates.”
One study[ii] found that adding a special offer to the Subject line — like free shipping or buy one, get one free — actually produced lower open and conversion rates. Too salesy, I guess.
Like all marketing, message fatigue will eventually set in. Whatever is working now will eventually need to be replaced.
And beyond the Subject line, be attentive to what you say with the first 6 or 7 words of your message because many email programs will display them in the preview of an email client. Use those first few words to give the recipient another reason to open your emails.
Mobile
Half or more of your emails are being read on smartphones, or will be soon, so make sure they look good and work well on mobile.
Next.
Just some of the ways to use email
Here are just a few of the ways that you Bullseye marketers can use emails to promote and grow your business.
Updates/newsletters
Periodic updates on what you’re doing, including links to recent blog posts and product update information, can be greatly beneficial. Just make sure that you’re writing it from the point of view of the customer. Use “How the Patel family lowered their utility bills with new solar panels” rather than “We installed new solar panels for the Patel family.”
Retail promos
Many online retailers send daily, or near daily, emails with that day’s deals.
Test drive sign-ups, and getting started tips
Of course you’ll be sending emails to people who sign up for free product trials. Then also follow up over the next few days with daily tips on how they can get the most out of their trial, as well as a reminder just a few days before the trial will end. You can personalize these with messages, such as, “I see that you’re using X feature a lot. That’s one of my favorites. Here are some tips on how to get the most from it.”
Downloads
Rather than letting people download infographics, white papers, etc., directly from your website, send them an email with a download link. That assures that they will provide a real email address, rather than a@a.com, and even if they sign up on their phone, they will be able to later download the material on their desktop and/or tablet.
Pre-conference promos
If you’re an exhibitor at a conference or trade show, a few weeks before the event you may be given a list of people who have registered. You can send them information about why they should stop by your booth, including your special trade show offer. This is one of those rare cases where you’ll send emails to people who have not yet opted-in to receive yours.
Promote webinars and events
You’ll want to send at least three emails inviting people to your webinars and other events, as well as a reminder email a day or so before the event. You can send an email with a link to a video of the webinar shortly afterward, too.
Automate these multi-email “drip” or “nurture” campaigns with a marketing automation program. You tee up all of the emails in advance with decision tree-like logic: If they responded to message A, then skip messages B and C; if they did not respond to message A, send message B. If they responded affirmatively to messages A, B or C, then send message D, and so on.
And you can use your email lists to create custom lists to target ads to on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Marketing tends to be more effective when customers see your messages in more than one channel, and combining email and targeted ads in this way (with remarketing, which I describe in the next chapter) can be especially inexpensive and effective.
Abandoned shopping carts
This is a no-brainer for any ecommerce company. Send an immediate message to someone who has abandoned their shopping cart with a reminder to finish their purchase. Some companies offer a discount (once) if the person comes back that day to complete the purchase.
Thank yous, rewards to loyal customers
You wouldn’t be there without your customers. Let your most valuable customers know how much you appreciate them with an occasional thank you and reward.