Don’t wait for the perfect time or tool to end batch and blast emails and, instead, send prospects and customers relevant information now. That’s the word from Diana Primeau, Director of Membership Services, CBS Interactive, parent company of CNET, the world’s largest tech media source for news, reviews and downloads.
Primeau offered these tips:
Sometimes people fall out of love … with your newsletters and email marketing.
Or change jobs. Or email providers. There are a million reasons why they stop reading and engaging with your emails.
This is why email marketers need to run win-back campaigns. That is, reaching out to inactive subscribers and compelling or convincing them to re-engage with your email sends.
If they don’t re-engage, it’s time for a list cleansing — no longer sending emails to this group.
A smaller, but higher-quality, email list
The end result can be painful in some ways; it will likely result in a smaller email list (and the older the list is, the more shrinkage you will experience).
This is only painful because we all like big numbers. We like to tell our CMO, our clients and brag to our childhood friends at the high school reunion (hey, when they’re all doctors, you gotta brag about something) about how we run email marketing to a list of 1,000 … 10,000 … no … one million email subscribers.
One of the most difficult aspects of list cleansing isn’t always the drop in numbers — it’s convincing senior leadership why it’s necessary.
During MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, sat down in the Media Center with Jeffrey Anderson, Digital Marketing Manager, A Place For Mom. The company is a for-profit senior care referral service.
Anderson explained why it’s important to cleanse your list of inactive users and how you can convince the senior leadership of your organization that list cleansing is imperative to staying relevant in today’s ecommerce marketplace.
How does a marketer know when it’s time to start cleansing their lists?
I would think that anyone with a list that’s significantly old should look at removing subscribers that are inactive and not engaged. Definite indicators include really low open rates. If your open rate is just below benchmark despite having consistently good content, there’s probably some dead weight.
A few moments after her featured speaker session at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Shawna Dahlin, Senior Email Marketing Manager, Microsoft Store, sat down at the Media Center with MarketingSherpa Reporter Courtney Eckerle to discuss why it’s so important for marketers to recognize problems and implement changes to their email campaigns as soon as they can.
Why shouldn’t marketers wait until everything is set up perfectly to implement program changes?
“It’s never too soon to start being relevant to your customer,” Shawna explained.
A lot of lists are “leaky buckets.” With every email send that isn’t relevant to the customer, you risk losing them forever. With the technology available today, marketers now have the ability to use data to find out what their customers are interested in and segment their email sends to make those sends more personalized.
Even the tiniest bit of data can be converted into a big win. “You can’t wait. You’ll have to do everything you can to be ever, just a little bit, more relevant so you don’t lose them out of your database,” she said.
If you haven’t noticed, #SherpaEmail has taken over Twitter.
Well, maybe not in a break-the-Internet scale of Kim Kardashian, but your marketing peers have been tweeting their hearts out with all the good information they’ve learned at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015.
With Day 2 of Summit underway, we wanted to share some key nuggets your peers found valuable on Day 1. (I might have smuggled a few of my own in too.) Check out some key takeaways from each of yesterday’s insightful sessions.
Humanizing Your Email Program: How to transcend the digital revolution by using the essential ability to communicate person-to-person
Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute
Flint revealed four fundamental principles that guide effective communication and provided examples of how these principles can be used to transform your entire email program.
“People don’t build relationships with companies or organizations. People build relationships with people.” @FlintsNotes #SherpaEmail — Rachel Perry (@rperry110) February 24, 2015
There is a gap between what you know and what you need to know about your customer. Testing is the bridge between the two. #SherpaEmail — Ann Pohl (@nanoanno) February 24, 2015
Use tests to aggregate customer wisdom. Become the customer expert/the customer philosopher. #SherpaEmail #wise — Amy Schamp (@THEschamp) February 24, 2015
The lift alone won’t help you in the long run. Your tests must be designed to know “why”! Then you can apply to later efforts #SherpaEmail — MarketingSherpa (@MarketingSherpa) February 24, 2015
Any data that can’t help you predict customer behavior is useless. #SherpaEmail — Scott Cohen (@scottcohen13) February 24, 2015
#testify RT @DelaQuist: @jacaldwell Actually its worse most marketers think Segmentation IS personalization #SherpaEmail — John Caldwell (@jacaldwell) February 24, 2015
Unless you are executing batch-and-blast email campaigns (and I sincerely hope that you aren’t), your email strategy probably involves some level of personalization or at least getting relevant email content to the right person. In order to achieve either of those goals, the starting point is your email subscriber list and having that list segmented so you can pick and choose who in your database receives each email send.
Lists can be segmented many different ways, and obviously the more record fields you have on each person in your list, the easier it is to segment based on criteria such as geographical location, job title, industry and possibly even transaction history.
To provide a few ideas of how your peers are segmenting their lists for email campaigns, here are three examples taken from MarketingSherpa Newsletter case studies. Hopefully you will discover insights that are inspirational or maybe even something you can immediately apply to your own email efforts.
Tip #1. Utilize behavioral data for segmentation
This tip comes from an article titled, “Segmentation: How a small office supply ecommerce site boosted revenue 25% by sending more emails,” covering JAM Paper & Envelope, a New York City-based brick-and-mortar that added ecommerce in 2007. Andrew Jacobs, Director of Ecommerce, JAM Paper, said, “Essentially, we come up with one email a week, or every two weeks, or even a month if we didn’t have time, and we would send it out. We would just cross our fingers and hope for the best,” referring to the company’s initial batch-and-blast approach to email.
JAM Paper’s campaigns included a “lapsed purchase” send to anyone who hadn’t bought anything for 17 months, but the team decided segment beyond just a certain timeframe and began taking individual behavior into account for the campaign.
This meant looking at each customer’s buying behavior. Some bought monthly, or even weekly, while others bought only once a year. The team calculated the average time between orders for each customer and began sending the “lapsed purchase” email once each person passed their individual threshold. This tactic yielded a 45% conversion rate — the highest among all of JAM Paper’s email campaigns.
Tip #2. Mine social media for customer segmentation data
In the case study, “Email Marketing Segmentation: Clothing brand uses social behavioral data to drive a 141% increase in revenue,” Johnny Cupcakes, a mid-sized apparel retailer, linked its customer database to social media engagement of its individual customers, analyzing 19 million public social expressions.
These posts led to insights on data points such as:
Gender was seen as the key data point to uncover from the effort and was actually taken directly from social media profiles if that information was available. One of the insights into customer interests was that a lot of Johnny Cupcakes’ customers were sports fans.
The team decided to test these insights by promoting a baseball-themed shirt to the sports fan segment of its list.
Men on the list were sent an email featuring a male model and a shirt cut for men:
At IRCE 2014, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, sat down with Pete Prestipino, Editor-in-Chief, Website Magazine, to discuss email marketing strategy in a constantly connected world.
“Customers are omnichannel,” Pete explained. “So retailers today … really need to focus on building a very rich profile of the user to understand exactly where they’re coming from at the exact time, and historically where they’ve spent their online consumptive behavior.”
When it comes to connecting via email, Pete recommended asking yourself three things:
1. How often will we be sending? How often do we need to send?
Determining how often your customers will hear from you is essential in developing a strategy. Pete indicated that all forms of email — including order confirmations — are included in this plan. All correspondence that necessarily comes on behalf of your company is included as a marketing email send.
2. How can email reflect the product?
“Selling a grand piano is a lot different from selling a pair of shoes,” Pete said. The product should indicate how often you should be in contact with your customers. Large or complex purchases may need more content, testimonials and consideration than a 10% off promotional email every three months.
3. What do we need to accomplish?
This question transcends the content and design aspects of your marketing emails and strikes right to the core of your message: Why? Closely linked to your value proposition, this question should be the crux of your campaign. Is this a complex sale, where you have to build trust or a rapport, or is it a simpler sales process?
At Email Summit 2014, MarketingSherpa Reporter Allison Banko interviewed email marketing experts, asking, “What elements do you think are important to implement into your email campaigns this year?”
While responses to the question varied by industry and company size, experts remained keen on delivering constantly diversified experiences for customers.
Identifying elements of email that marketers can harness to see improvements in their campaigns captures the spirit of Email Summit. Leveraging experts that live, breathe and sweat email marketing to help attendees improve their email is a highlight marketers take back to the office.
The big takeaway: Find a way to break through the noise of the inbox.
“We’re going to continue to try to find ways to get close to our users so they feel like we understand them,” Ryan Blomberg, Director of Engineering, Eventful, answered when asked how he’s planning on improving his already award-winning personalization campaign.
Watch this compilation video below for more detailed tips on tactics that you can implement in your own email campaigns.
At Email Summit 2015, experts will share their top takeaway of 2014 in six minutes or less on stage during our Quick Tips session. In these sessions, experts will be working against the clock to communicate their biggest lesson from 2014 and what they mean for your email campaigns.
You might also like
Marketing Research Chart: How do marketers perceive the ROI of email marketing? [MarketingSherpa chart]
Email Personalization: 750% higher CTR and more revenue for ecommerce site [MarketingSherpa case study]
Segmentation and Personalization: How Eventful transformed its email program and increased purchases by 66% [MarketingSherpa video archive]
Email Marketing: 5 tactics to personalize your email message for better results [MarketingSherpa webinar archive]
At Email Summit 2014, marketers were asked: what do you think the relationship between social media and email will be in 2014?
Now that Email Summit 2015 is right around the corner, let’s take a look back a few of those predictions:
One-way message turned two-way conversation
“For the first time, I’m becoming an optimist about what the capabilities are going to be,” said Dave Sierk, Email Strategy and Analytics, Dell.
As a self-described pessimist, email, it seemed, allowed for one-way communication only.
However, with the rise of social media, Dave explained, “We’re getting pretty pumped about how we can make social a two-way street,” and turn social media followers into email subscribers.
Slow social adoption as brands transition into the realm
“Email isn’t going away – it’s not dead … but we haven’t gotten to the point where we have the adoption rates in social media on both the user side and marketing or company side,” explained Shirley Salmeron, Northeast Sales Director, Teradata.
She described the experiences as “siloed,” and although they might flow together in the future, as of 2014, “[marketers] haven’t bridged the gap.”
When Marcia Oakes, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Calendars.com, was challenged with the task of defining the company’s email campaign, she dove at the chance of evolving the campaign from promotions to engagement.
Marcia and her team hoped to develop a newsletter that people wanted to read and a way to “engage with subscribers without asking them to open up their wallets.”
The result was a newsletter with refreshing and relevant content that resonated with the customer.
Find your voice
The team at Calendars.com used a calendar format as a template for the newsletter send. Not only was this visually different than other emails in the inbox, but it was very fitting for the brand.
They also used a previously shelved trademark phrase, “Flip Day,” to describe the newsletter send. (Flip Day, if you’re wondering, is the ceremonial and satisfying day that you flip your calendar from one month to another.)
By using this resource they already had, it empowered the team to communicate with their audience in a purposeful way, without promoting products.
