MarketingSherpa Blog

Just got a note from Clif Bar customer service in response to a query about their product that I posted using their site form yesterday. If you are in charge of deciding what your customer service email should look like, you might want to steal an idea from them:

1. The “From” was a real person’s name. In fact it’s the name of the person who signed the letter.

2. The subject line simply read: CLIF BAR INC which is pretty bare bones, but since they didn’t use their brand name in the “from” line sticking it prominently in the subject line was mission critical. Also, because it didn’t use up all 30 charactors or so that I can see of subject lines in my inbox, it actually really stood out due to brevity. Plus it just looked honest. So despite the fact that I get so much spam these days I often enough delete “real” messages by mistake that get caught up in it, I noticed this one.

3. The letter was in text-only. No HTML.

4. The letter started with a few lines of white space, which caught my attention because it was, well, odd. Then there was today’s date, then a few more lines of white space and then a salutation “Dear Anne”…. and oh I get it, it’s a real letter!

You know, suddenly it felt very honest and respectful and pleasant. Especially after spam overload.

5. After giving me some advice about my question (including handy links) the last paragraph gave me a toll free phone number to call plus an email address if I had any more questions.

6. Just like a “real letter” it ended with a “Sincerely,” and then a real person’s name and title there at Clif.

If you were out on vacation last week, you may have missed what was probably the most important news for email marketers and email newsletter publishers: The fact that Yahoo is altering the actual words in your subject lines and emails on occasion to avoid security problems. Some pretty ordinary words are changed; stuff you might never expect. I highly recommend you check out the best round-up article on this problem that I’ve seen, from at Ezine-Tips. It includes stories from marketers describing how this Yahoo problem is affecting their mailings already.

Is using company “letterhead” in email smart or dumb? I know some of the email vendors are pushing it hard because they want to sell you on the capability. Some marketers like it because it “feels” professional. But I’m highly, highly skeptical of this tactic for 2002 anyway.

Today I got two notes from marketers using “letterhead;” one had their logo at the top of the email, the other used a vertical logo. Both were in HTML (of course) which meant they also dictated what typeface their letters appeared in. In both cases, I very nearly hit “delete” when I saw the graphic come up in my Outlook preview box. It looked like marketing email. Not a personal letter.

For now I’d reserve use of “letterhead” style email for stuff that’s obviously a mass communication (one to many) and not one-to-one. I’d also test it against a control non-letterhead group before blindly using it, no matter how pretty, neat, or professional you think it looks.

This past week, I was an invited speaker at the DMAW (Direct Marketing Association of Washington DC) annual conference. It is actually a bigger show than you might think because some powerhouse marketers are HQed in the region, including AOL, National Geographic, USA Today, Time Life Books, US News & World Report, as well as most of America’s associations and non-profits.

It was kind of a weird experience for me. Partly because the last DMAW function I was invited to speak at was about 10 years ago when I won their Bronze Maxi Award for a “breakthrough” direct marketing campaign I’d devised sending out 3.5″ floppy disks to promote sales of a CD ROM. About 1/3 of the copy in the package was dedicated to “what is a CD ROM?” because few people knew.

(I still have my winner’s plaque proudly displayed, propped up on a table in my office. You can’t hang the darn thing because it’s got a solid lead post office box stuck on the front which must weigh about 5 pounds. God only knows what future generations raised in e-only will make of it.)

It was also weird because, although it seemed like 50% or more of the speakers focused on Internet and email marketing, only two of the 40-something exhibitors were online marketing-related. I walked past booth after booth of envelope printers and the like. Speeches -> exhibit hall = disconnect.

Last but not least, partly because we at Sherpa suffer from the same affliction that I think everyone writing an email newsletter or hosting a radio show does: not viscerally believing our audience is out there listening. It’s one thing to write words onto your computer screen or speak into a mike. It’s another thing to face a real-life audience and have half of them nodding when you mention recent stories, because they read you.

If you write an email newsletter or any email or direct response marketing campaign for your organization, I urge you to get out there occasionally. Because it’s too easy to be divorced from reality and lose your step.

Last week we conducted a survey of more than 1,500 email marketers to learn what they are planning on spending more money in and what their current results are. (The detailed results will be announced at the end of this month in MArketingSherpa, which you can sign up for free here.) As I was glancing over results, I noticed good news and very bad news for email newsletter publishers who sell ads.

The good news is that more than 1/3 of marketers surveyed say they are planning to significantly increase advertising in email newsletters. The very bad news is, a large number of marketers reported their current ezine ad click through rates were 10 or 15%. Based on doing a gazillion Case Studies, I know that number should be closer to 0.5-3%.

There was no incentive or reason for survey takers to give crazy wild inflated numbers like that. All answers were strictly anonymous.

I called my pal Todd Kellner over at Opt-Influence (a big ezine ad sales
network) to ask what his take was. He told me that he is heard plenty of marketers say the same thing. It was not a freakish answer confined to our survey.

He figures that some ezine ad sellers are artificially inflating numbers to keep customers happy. One way is to lie about your circulation rate. Tell ad buyers you have say, 20,000 opt-ins when you actually have 40,000. When they do the math to get click % they will think it is twice as high as it really was. I knew about this already because it is a tactic much used by the less savory element in the email list rental biz as well.

Then Todd told me something I did not know. It turns out some publishers report click rates to advertisers based on the percent of opened emails that were clicked on. If they sent the issue to 20,000 people and 10,000 actually opened it and then 200 clicked on the ad, the publisher tells the advertiser they got a 2% click through rate, instead of the 1% click through based on the 20,000.

Let us face it, even if you are clear somewhere in your media kit about what you base the click percent on, most advertisers do not read the fine print. They read a spreadsheet that somebody else put together with a list of the circulation of all the pubs they placed ads in and the results. More than likely that spreadsheet will read: 20,000 circ 2% click through. You know it and I know it.

In the end it hurts all the other publishers who report, well, more honestly. It trashes text-only publishers who can not report on open rates at all.

Anyway, here is a link to Todd’s column in Ezine-Tips where he scooped me on this story two days ago because I was dumb enough to call him for a quote and then not get around to blogging it until now.

http://www.ezinetips.com/articles/revenue/20020716.shtml
http://www.MarketingSherpa.com

Is the magic width for emailed marketing campaigns thinner than we think? This morning I got a personal (i.e. not a marketing broadcast) email from long-time Net marketing guru Ken McCarthy and noticed he does something that a few other of the smartest online marketers I know do, he sets his text letter charactor width at 50.

The general rule of thumb for text-message width (as opposed to HTML) is to have your break at 60 or 65 charactors. This means when you’re writing in Word and set your typeface to Courier 10 point, your right hand margin will be at about 5 1/2 inches. If it’s any further over, you’ll get weird line breaks when you put your message into the text of an email message and send it out.

The text-line length rule most people use for their newsletters, their autoresponder messages, and their broadcast marketing campaigns sent in text, is determined by what email technology will do. Not by what’s best for the human beings reading your message.

Studies by the newspaper industry years before the Internet came along showed that people have a much easier time reading when articles are in thin columns. That’s why you don’t get newspapers with stories running the width of the page. Readability.

My question today is, do the old Net marketing gurus know something we don’t know about readability and text-messages? (Heck this might also affect your HTML message, because it’s about width of copy columns.)

Several semi-newly free-to-paid site/ezine publishers have been complaining to me recently about fall-off in their conversion rates. The usual story goes: they switched from free to paid. At first lots of people switched over, about x% of readers a week.
Big excitement, champagne corks a’poppin. Then suddenly a let down. Conversions were slowing rapidly. Less and less fresh cash coming in. Why? why? why?

To which I say, you should have been expecting this. Situation normal. In fact you can spreadsheet this stuff out ahead of time.
It’s not perfect, but at least it will give you some idea of what to expect.

Here’s how:

1. Columns: create a series of columns for each month from the month you plan to announce your switch to paid (if you’re smart you’ll pre-announce it with a special price for early birds) until 12 months after the switch date (or however further you want to go). Reserve your first column at the left for row titles, and your second column for numbers you plan to use as multipliers. Months start in column three.

2. Rows: obviously your first row is titles for all the columns.

Row #2 is labled “new free readers/new traffic.” In this row you want to put the amount of fresh brand new, unique, people who will either sign up for your newsletter or visit your site in that month. For the first month conversions start, assume everyone is new because your entire list is new to this subscription offer. In future months only true newbies are “new.”

Row #3 is labled “% 30day paid.” This means the % of your total newbie file (not total readers unless they all count as “new” per
above) who you think will convert to being paid subscribers in the first 30 days of seeing your lovely site/ezine/offer.

Row #4 is labled “% 60 day paid.” This means the % of your total newbie file from the prior month’s newbie column (now in their 30-60 lifespan) who will convert to buying now.

Row #5 is labled “% 90 day paid.” This is the % of your newbie file from two month’s prior newbie column (now in their 60-90 day
lifespan) who will convert to buying this month.

Row #6 is labled : # subs sold. This is where you add up the numbers of converted subscribers in each column from rows 3,4,5 to get the total number of subscription units sold that month.

Row #7 is labled: Cash. This is where you multiply the number in row #6 by your annual subscription price.

If you are selling by the month instead or in addition to annually, you’ll need to add:

Row #6a: Total Mo/Mo #. This is your total number of month-to- month subscribers that month. You determine this by multiplying last month’s total by the percent you think will “stick” (I often assume 80% of each month’s total will stick the following month) and adding that to the total number of new units added on this month.

Row #6b: Mo/Mo $. This is the number above multiplied by your monthly subscription rate.

There you have it. My down’n’dirty subscription calculation spreadsheet. When you pop your numbers in you’ll be surprised to see how obvious the whole cash flow thing is. Of course after a few months your new subscription conversions will fall, because you’ll probably have far fewer new free readers to feed into the conversion hopper!

Reasons why this recession makes no sense: According to June 2002 round-up figures released this afternoon by comScore (which bought the related numbers reporting part of Jupiter/Media Metrix earlier this year), year-over-year US consumer online spending zoomed up 46% to $7.8 billion and non-travel sales rose 28% to $9.7 billion. Even apparel rose 7% to $1.3 billion.

BUT, consumer electronics were down year over year 11% to $716 million, and music declined 28% to $193 million. So American consumers will fly to the beach, and pop for a brand new swimsuit, but hey save money online by replaying last year’s CDs on last year’s CD player.

I just wish these numbers were easy to compare against sales in the offline world. Now, that would be truly interesting.

Idea of the day: I just got a sale email in HTML format from Eddie Bauer. Like many reretailers, they included key links across the top of the email after their logo at the top left corner. However, they did something really clever. Instead of just letting the links stand on their own, they added a bit of action-oriented copy just before them. It reads “Start Shopping” .

This makes good sense, you’ve got to ask for that click. Why be passive about it?

How do you get your email newsletter readers to pay attention to a non-issue email from you, and reduce the potential of spam complaints from the ultra-picky “I only signed up for issues” crowd? I just got a broadcast message with a great subject line from Roxanne Christensen, Editor of InfoCommerce Report. The subject line was “Non-Routine Message to Our Subscribers”

It made me open (despite getting more than 800 emails per day to wade through). Bravo.