MarketingSherpa Blog

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

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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.

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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.

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Pilots have it easy. All they do is flip on the autopilot, order some Sleepytime® tea from the galley, and get a little shuteye, snoozing across the Atlantic, until they land at Schiphol (word of caution: this is based on my utter lack of knowledge of what pilots actually do … but thanks for getting us there safely).

In all seriousness, marketers have an autopilot, too … of sorts – the automated, event-triggered email. When I read Megan McCardle’s line in Newsweek, “Looking for a fail-safe plan to get rich without working?” I thought, “That could almost be a description of triggered emails.”

Think about it: Triggered emails offer the Holy Grail of email marketing that is so difficult to achieve – relevant, timely information.

I sign up to your email address, you welcome me … right at the moment I am most interested in receiving emails from you. And, perhaps, I hop right on a promotion in that welcome email, since you’re reaching me at the peak of my interest in your company (hey, I just signed up for your list).

Or I abandon a shopping cart because the product is 20% too expensive and then, poof, like magic, I get a 20% discount code in my inbox.

Or it’s my birthday, and you give me a free bottle of prosecco or wine to celebrate (hey, I’m going out tonight anyway), as Pizza Express did for Kate …

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Editor’s Note: One of the prizes of winning the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards is the chance for a guest post here on the MarketingSherpa blog. Today’s post is by Amanda Gagnon of the AWeber Communications blog, chosen as best email marketing blog … by you.

It’s critical for any marketing email to be labeled with an appealing, even gripping, subject line. Since the subject line acts as the email’s introduction, if it deflects attention, the rest of the message never gets seen.

The question is, what do consumers find appealing? What grips them?

The AWeber team investigated results from recent email broadcasts promoting posts on our blog to find out.

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“This never would have been attempted with a film camera,” posted Tom, one of my Facebook friends, in response to a recent status update. He was referring to a posted image of photographer John Baldessari’s “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts).”

I guess 36 attempts sounded like a lot. However, what Tom didn’t know was the photo was taken in 1973 – before either of us was born, and before people were bombarded with information in the form of images, advertisements and email.

The point is that digital media continues to rapidly change people’s expectations. We (speaking as both marketers and consumers) know how little effort it takes to shoot 36 or even 3,600 digital images, or send the same amount of automated email messages. But that doesn’t mean marketers can (or should) give up on such forms of mass communication.

I’m talking about that oh-so-familiar marketing tactic that precariously sits somewhere between your outbound and inbound campaigns – EMAIL. We need every possible approach to draw customers to our company sites and storefronts. So why ditch email? Why not instead create emails that customers crave?

According to “How to Improve the Value of Your Email List,” a recent webinar led by MECLABS Senior Research Analyst W. Jeffrey Rice, marketers can work to develop this desire in customers – not by coercion, but rather by engaging customers in a two-way communication.

During the webinar, Jeff explained how we can transcend the broadcast, scattershot model of advertising from the Mad Men days, and treat email like the nuanced, targeted digital platform it is:

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Our job is to help you do your job better. One way we do that is through events, like the upcoming Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas.

You can help make this event more valuable for yourself and fellow marketers by taking a few minutes to fill out the survey below.

As a thank you, you’ll receive a FREE copy of MarketingSherpa’s 30-Minute Marketer: How to Segment Your Email List for Better Results.

Related Resources:

Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, Feb. 12-15, 2013

Email Summit 2012: Top 5 takeaways from the industry’s largest research-based event

Email Summit: Integrating mobile, social and email marketing channels

“Content is the best sales tool in the world.”

After exploring his analytics, Marcus Sheridan, co-owner, River Pools and Spas, discovered that potential customers who viewed 30 pages on his website had an 80% closing rate, compared to the average closing rate of 15-20%.

Alongside Luke Thorpe, MECLABS’ Multimedia Specialist, I grabbed Marcus before his Email Summit 2012 keynote, to hear his ideas of content tipping points.

You can see Marcus Sheridan’s full keynote, along with seven other sessions on the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 DVD.

Related Resources:

Most Emails Stink as a Sales Tool. Here’s Why… (via The Sales Lion)

Content Marketing and SEO: The world doesn’t need another blog post

Brand-side Marketing How-to: 6 content marketing lessons learned from a B2B IT company

Overall Content Marketing Strategy Leads to 2,000% Lift in Blog Traffic, 40% Boost in Revenue

Marketing Intelligence: 3 ways to better serve your customers (and your bottom line)

At Email Summit 2012, Luke Thorpe, Multimedia Specialist, MECLABS, grabbed his camera, I grabbed a mic, and we traveled the vast recesses of the expo floor at Caesars Palace to ask attendees and sponsors where the low-hanging fruit is for email marketers. Here’s what they had to say …