MarketingSherpa Blog

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their mobile email marketing efforts …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s mobile EMAIL messages?

Impact of the device itself on mobile email interaction

“I suspect the cost of service for data plans may impact and somewhat curb the degree of interaction on mobile devices,” said Lucia Panini, Marketing and Communications Manager, Betty Wright Swim Center –  Abilities United. “The other factor could be optimization of display, which should become a lesser or no issue with the most recent large-screen phones.”

31% of email marketers do not know their mobile email open rate

“I’m most surprised that a full third of marketers don’t even know if their emails are being opened on mobile! With all the attention ‘mobile’ received in 2012, I would expect that number to be lower. Tracking clickthroughs seem to be a bit harder – I’d be eager to hear how other folks are accomplishing this, technology-wise,” said Justine Jordan, Marketing Director, Litmus.

Read more…

Looking toward the upcoming MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, February 19-22, I want to present some research on consumer opinions about email marketing conducted by Emailvision and YouGov.

The survey was conducted online in early November 2012 through the YouGov Plc GB panel involving consumers in the United Kingdom. Panelists received emails inviting them to take part in the research. The total sample size of 2,001 adults was weighted to be representative of all Great Britain (GB) adults (defined as 18+ from the UK panel).

To provide insight into what the research uncovered and to offer advice on what B2C marketers can take away from the results, I reached out to Leah Anathan, Corporate Marketing Director, Emailvision.

First, the results of the survey …

The YouGov and Emailvision research sheds light on the missteps marketers might be taking that can bring about brand resentment. After asking consumers for their opinions on marketing correspondence, the study found the following:

• 75% reported they would resent a brand after being bombarded by emails.
• 71% cited receiving unsolicited messages as a reason to become resentful.
• 50% felt getting their name wrong was a reason to think less of the brand.
• 40% remarked that getting gender wrong would have a negative impact.

With better segmentation and targeting, marketers can avoid these pitfalls; however, this is a challenge when consumers remain unwilling to give even basic information:

• Only 28% indicated they would be willing to share their name.
• Only 37% would be willing to share their age.
• Only 38% would disclose their gender.

Read more…

Note: This email was automatically generated from a mailbox that is not monitored.

Ouch!

How often have you seen this line in an email you’ve received from a company? Even worse, are you guilty of including this line in your own email marketing?

When your customer sees that line, she basically hears, “Dearest Customer, We don’t really care.”

Email marketing should be a conversation

Think about it. When you ask a customer or potential customer to sign up for your email newsletter or other email list, you’re essentially asking them, “Can I have a conversation with you?” When they say “yes,” they are taking a leap of faith.

Will you send valuable information that helps them solves problems or meet their goals?

Or will you spam them with endless offers?

Or even worse, send them down the road to perdition and really betray their trust by selling that email address?

By cutting off the conversation before it begins, you question their decision to trust you.

This further worsens if it is in a transactional email, say, with a receipt for a purchase. Here, they took an even bigger leap of faith, gave you hard-earned money on the hope that the product will be as good as you say it is, and they’ll receive it when you say they will.

  Read more…

When I went to the movies over the holidays, I saw the preview for the new Steve Carrell movie — “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” — about a magician.

Maybe it’s the fact that a good illusionist has to get the audience to opt in to the performance. Or maybe it’s because the trailer featured many scenes in Las Vegas, site of the upcoming Email Summit 2013.

Either way, it got me thinking of some of the key tactics every email marketer should know. So I turned to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Handbook – Second Edition to pull out some basics.

For example, while every magician should know The Best Coin Fold and The Mystery of Princess Karnac, every email marketer should know …

  Read more…

As we build the content for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, we are focusing on the five key goals of successful email marketing programs.

We are also including the two elements necessary to optimize these goals – measuring and testing.

So in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll provide some suggested reading and resources to help you to prepare for next month’s Email Summit and improve your email marketing – no matter on which goal or element you are currently focusing.

Capture

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Email List Growth: 230% more readers from six-channel test

New Chart: Integrating Social Media with Other Marketing Tactics

Deliver

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

Open

Case Study: Creativity vs. clarity in email subject lines

Email Personalization: 137% increase in open rate from personal note approach

Click

Email Marketing: Video email doubles clickthrough rate for Ragan Communications

Close

Email Marketing: 208% higher conversion rate for targeted emails over batch-and-blast

Measure

Reader Mail: Understanding differences in clickthrough rates and open rates

Test

Email Testing: More specific subject line improves open rate by more than 35%

Most email marketing campaigns (but not all) focus on three goals:

• Getting the recipient to open the email
• Taking the next step by following the call-to-action in the email
• Clicking through to the final destination, which is often a specific landing page on the website with an action to be taken, such as filling out a registration form

The key performance indicators for email marketing are often open rate and clickthrough rate, and then that final conversion on the website, which can take a number of different forms. A consumer marketing email effort might seek out an immediate purchase, where as a B2B campaign might look for additional information on the email subscriber to more fully populate a database record.

Of course, the key to any email marketing program is getting the recipient to take that first action – opening the email. Without an open, there can be no clickthrough and certainly no final conversion on the website.

With that in mind, improving email open rates should be a priority for email marketers. Based on tweets as a very loose metric, MarketingSherpa Blog posts like “Infographic: Email open rates by time of day,” published at the end of October, and “Email Personalization: 137% increase in open rate from personal note approach,” from a couple of weeks ago, show email open rate is a popular topic with our audience.

To offer our blog readers more on email open rates, I had the chance to speak with Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD and Software Advice Advisory Board Member.  Read more…

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at a recent email marketing send to promote a MarketingSherpa webinar about social media, sponsored by Eloqua. I wanted to share it with you, because while it was quite simple to do, the results were pretty impressive.

Before we get into it, I want to stress that this was not intended to be a valid A/B split test (there is a validity threat that I’ll get to in a moment), so take the results with a grain of salt. However, it is a good example of sending different versions of an email to different segments of a list. For that reason, this is a tactic we do think is worth trying (and perhaps testing) with your own lists.

TEMPLATE VERSION

From: MarketingSherpa [reply@reply.marketingsherpa.com]

Subject Line: [Webinar] 4 steps to drive a measureable social strategy

Click to enlarge

Read more…

At MarketingSherpa, our benchmark reports provide marketing executives and practitioners with extensive reference guides for strategic decision-making and tactical planning. The survey for our Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report is currently open (feel free to share you insights — respondents receive a free copy of the special report, Evaluating Website Optimization), and we’re currently working on the survey for our next benchmark report on email marketing.

What questions would you like asked in the Email Marketing Benchmark Survey?

Here’s where you come in. What email marketing information would help you do your job better?

Please use the comments section of this blog post to share your feedback, and we’ll take your insights into consideration as we shape a survey that we hope yields valuable data to help you do your job better.

Here’s a little more background to help as you consider this request. Marketers tell us they use these benchmark reports to:

• Prepare budgets
• Make informed business decisions
• Develop marketing plan forecasts
• Support proposals with data and charts

To help you see the result of these survey questions, here are a few charts from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

MarketingSherpa has been covering email marketing for a long time. And, while we’re always interested in the latest tactics, marketers still must never overlook the basics.

For example, email timing. Searching through the MarketingSherpa Article Archive, I found this blog post from 2003, which refers to a case study where time of day helped a marketer garner open rates higher than 70%.

When is the best time to send an email?

This topic is definitely the “Email Marketing 101” question about which any marketer breaking into major email campaigns still wants information.

To take a more quantitative dive into the question of timing email, GetResponse Email Marketing decided to go into its substantial dataset for some research.

This involved analyzing 21 million messages sent from U.S. email accounts during the first quarter of 2012 to determine the top result for the following metrics:

• Open time
• Click-through time
• Recipients’ top engagement time  Read more…

Each year, the tactics, strategies and best practices in email marketing continue to evolve. And, in turn, the annual MarketingSherpa Email Awards showcase campaigns that – creatively and strategically – move beyond “batch-and-blast” to utilize fresh tactics and drive great results.

With the Email Awards 2013 (sponsored by Responsys) entry period about to wrap up (you have until this Monday, October 1, to get your entries in), we think it’s a perfect time to revisit one of last year’s “Best-in-Show” winning campaigns. The campaign can provide some ideas about what makes a winner to those last-minute entrants still sitting on the fence and wondering if they should give it a go.

(Of course, if you want to just skip to the head of the line and go right to the entry form, we won’t try to stop you. Just don’t forget to read the Terms and Conditions before you go.)

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Okay, good. You’ve decided to stick around. Using a winning 2012 campaign as our launching point, let’s dive into the key elements of an Email Awards submission.

Traditionally, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they develop contests to draw attention to their email programs. 2012 “B2B Best-in-Show” winner Citrix Online took a different approach, choosing to instead focus on creating and sending valuable content, which was easily shareable for existing subscribers.

Here are some of the criteria Citrix demonstrated en route to a convincing win from within a very competitive category in 2012.

Read more…