MarketingSherpa Blog

Three years ago, I had lunch with a pair of European email marketers who were attending our Email Summit in Miami. They’d traveled all the way across the ocean to learn about advanced email techniques from U.S.-based marketers who were, in their opinion, way ahead of their peers in Europe.

At the time, they told me that most European companies thought email was “just a cheap, blast-everyone technique.”

Sure, it was one team’s anecdotal take, but since then it seems that Europe is catching up in terms of understanding the strategic role that email can play, and the advanced tactics that make the channel such a powerful marketing tool.

Next week, MarketingSherpa is hosting our second-annual Email Marketing Germany Summit in Munich, and I’ve been checking out a new survey on German email marketing tactics that will be shared there.

One of the most telling datapoints:
o 53% of German email marketers now personalize email content

And even marketers who haven’t yet adopted advanced tactics seem to know where they should be heading:
o 49% want to automate Lead Generation
o 44% want to report on ROI for email marketing

Those results back up what I’ve seen as a reporter and editor here at Sherpa, where European campaigns often get featured as Case Studies, or earn recognition in our annual Email Marketing Awards program. It looks to me like “batch-and-blast” is a phrase that email marketers are striking from their lexicons, no matter what their language.

But I’m curious to hear thoughts from our Europe-based readers, or U.S.-based marketers who conduct a lot of international campaigns. How has the European email marketing landscape changed in recent years, and how does the level of sophistication compare among the regions? Feel free to share your take in the comments section.

Social is sexy; email is not. Social is alive and well; email is dead. This is the perception, but it’s not reality.

Smart marketers know that social and email work together well, and that by leveraging that relationship they can make both their social media and email marketing strategies more effective. This is just one topic I’ll be covering in the MarketingSherpa Email Essentials 2010 Workshop Training, taking place in 10 locations around the United States beginning in this month.

The strategic link between social and email is supported by “View from the Social Inbox 2010”, released by Merkle last month. It builds on the findings published by MarketingSherpa earlier this year, and by Silverpop in their “Emails Gone Viral: Measuring ‘Share to Social’ Performance” late last year.

Merkle found that people who use social media actually check their email more frequently than those that do not: 42% of social media users check their email four times a day or more, compared to just 27% of those that don’t use social media.

Even better news for marketers: 63% of those surveyed said that they use the same email account for social media messages as they do to opt-in to permission based email.

So those social media users are checking their email inboxes more frequently – and your marketing messages are more likely to be seen and acted upon.

In fact, a recent MarketingSherpa study found that 75% of daily social media users said that email is the best way for companies to communicate with them, compared to 65% of all email users. And 49% of Twitter users said they made an online purchase because of an email, compared to 33% of all email users

The Silverpop study found that social media share links included in email messages were receiving clickthrough rates of 0.5%. It may not sound like much, but it is significantly higher than the clickthrough rates on the “forward this email to a friend” links that marketers have been using for years.

When someone shares your email message on a social network, it’s the ultimate viral marketing. With very little effort your message has the potential to reach all of the recipients’ friends and contacts on that network. Silverpop estimates that posted messages have an average increase in reach of more than 24.3%, based on original email messages delivered.

Better yet, they feel that this is a conservative estimate – and that as social network usage grows, so will this figure.

Social networks and email feed each other – it’s the ultimate symbiotic relationship. But just knowing that isn’t enough. You have to know how to do it correctly to make it work. What type of content is most likely to shared? How can you make it as easy as possible for people to share it? How can you build a relationship with your recipients that will make them want to share your information? We’ll cover this and lots more in the training workshop.

Five years ago we weren’t talking about social networks in conjunction with email marketing. Now it’s a hot topic, one that every email marketer should be leveraging to its fullest.

Editor’s Note: Jeanne Jennings will be teaching MarketingSherpa’s Email Essentials Workshop Training series in 10 locations from March through August, and will be blogging about her experiences in the various cities. We’re excited to have her on board and contributing to the blog.

Natural search marketers have been in a precarious position for the last few years. Much of the data they’re using is supplied by search engines, and some of that data is fuzzy at best.

Adam Audette, in a Search Engine Land post today, goes as far as calling some of the data unreliable and “downright misleading.” However, Audette astutely notes that marketers need the data even if they don’t completely trust it.

What’s a marketer to do? Here are Audette’s suggestions for the SEO metrics you should track:
o Percentage of overall site traffic from search
o Percentage share of each engine
o Free search traffic at the keyword level, clustering related terms
o Difference between branded and non-branded search traffic

Metrics that he implies are far less reliable:
o Ranking reports
o Indexed page counts
o Backlink counts
o Toolbar PageRank

For marketers, I would add conversion data to Audette’s list of primary metrics to measure — especially conversion data for non-branded keywords. If you’re a natural search marketer, any conversions you can prove came through non-branded keyword searches point directly to money you are bringing the company.

Branded search conversions are great, but they show that the searcher already knew your brand. The searcher has likely been reached by another marketing channel. A non-branded conversion implies that someone chose you over the competitors also listed in the results.

Which metrics do you consider vital? And how reliable are they?

Measuring your marketing is the only way to know which efforts are working and which are wasting money. Even if you can’t measure every impact, you should track as much as possible.

After looking at some data from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, I wonder how many campaigns are only half-measured, with half their impact open to anyone’s guess.

When asked ‘What is your organization monitoring and measuring to quantify social media impact?’ 50% or more respondents said they were tracking:
o Visitors and traffic sources
o Followers, fans and members numbers
o Commentary about brand or product
o Sentiment around brand or product.

Fewer than 50% of respondents said they were tracking:
o Search engine rank
o Lead generation
o Progress toward social media objectives
o Engagement with influential bloggers, journalists, Twitterers, etc.
o Sales conversion and other ROI metrics
o Competitive share of social media coverage
o Criteria to identify and profile audiences

Astoundingly, only 35% of respondents said they were tracking sales conversion and other ROI metrics related to social media.

Getting more website traffic, Facebook fans and comments is very good. But if you’re not sure whether that’s having an effect on lead generation or sales, many executives will ask: what’s the point?

Marketers across the globe are finding use with social media. But if you want the rest of your organization to take it seriously and to invest more in the channel, you should learn as much about its impact as possible. The data talks.

If social media is helping you learn more about your audience, get data on how that knowledge is improving your marketing. If it’s helping your brand’s image, find a way to quantify it. Hypothetical evidence is as solid as a wet paper towel compared to hard data.

Is your team measuring its social media impact? If not, what’s holding you back? Let us know in the comments…

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so I admit I wasn’t paying much attention when Google added Buzz to my personal Gmail account last week. Then I started seeing blog posts and articles outlining some pretty serious privacy concerns about the new social networking feature — and they got my attention.

Sure enough, when I clicked on the Buzz icon in my account I saw that Google had manufactured a list of followers for me, and a list of people to follow, all based on names in my inbox. Some of those names represented friends of mine, who I didn’t mind sharing information with — but some certainly weren’t friends.

Then it hit me: I’d just been opted-in to a social network without my permission.

I wasn’t pleased, and spent a long time trying to figure out how to un-enroll in Buzz. Turns out, lots of people are mad – suing mad, as a matter of fact.

So, Google’s big misstep is a great reminder for other marketers: Social media and email work because they represent permission-based marketing channels. Prospects and customers have to proactively reach out and say, “Yes, I want to hear from you” by subscribing to your email newsletter, becoming a Facebook friend, following you on Twitter, and so on.

So if you’re launching new social media features or thinking about ways to get social media followers onto your email lists, don’t assume every name in your database is open for enrollment. For example, a lot of B2B vendors are launching branded, private social networks. Don’t be like Google and automatically create accounts for every prospect in your database.

Just ask them first. It’s so much easier than countering a firestorm of bad PR and potential lawsuits.

A well-timed and well-crafted message always has a chance to generate buzz through social media. If people like your message enough, they’ll send it to their friends. But they have to see it first.

During a call with Gary Wohlfeill, Creative Director, Moosejaw Mountaineering, I realized that getting attention is easier through some channels than others. Wohlfeill and I discussed his team’s recent holiday promotion (keep an eye on our free newsletters for the article). They ran the effort mostly through Facebook and Twitter.

Leading up to launch, the team sent messages through the social channels to build anticipation. They got some attention through Facebook, but it was harder to gain traction in Twitter, Wohlfeill says.

“Twitter is much more like a river. You drop a pebble in the river and you have to be standing there to see it go by. So you have to drop a lot of pebbles to reach a lot of people.”

Wherever you send a message, it’s going to have to compete for attention. Whether it’s a billboard competing with highway traffic, or an email competing with an inbox, competition is there.

Twitter, it seems, thrives on limited attention. Being seen can be a challenge. And once you’re seen, you can only hold attention for 140 characters–unless you get a click.

Two good ways to increase your chances at capturing more attention:
1. Be interesting enough to entice people to share with friends
2. Link to relevant content

Super Bowl XLIV is just around the corner, and one marketing team is hoping to repeat last year’s game day win.

Denny’s is inviting America to visit its restaurants on Tuesday, Feb. 9, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. for a free Original Grand Slam Breakfast. The team will announce the offer with a funny television commercial during the Super Bowl’s third quarter. Check out this teaser commercial.

The team ran a similar effort last year, using a Super Bowl ad to help pull in more than 2 million hungry customers for free Grand Slams during the single-day event.

We reported their strategy after the results were in. Denny’s realized a 39% net brand improvement score, the third highest of all of Super Bowl XLIII’s advertisers, according to a comScore post-Super-Bowl survey. They also captured more than 50,000 website hits, and a ton of free press.

“We hit a chord with people and resonated with people on a sort of warmth and kindness perspective. We had literally thousands of emails and phone calls from consumers, even some that didn’t go to the event, thanking Denny’s for giving a free breakfast,” said Mark Chmiel, EVP, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer, Denny’s, when we spoke with him last year.

Minor problems are inevitable when 2 million people show up for a free meal. Here are two snags the team hit last year and how they handled them:

1. Cold feet

At the last minute, one franchisee started charging customers $1.99 for a Grand Slam. The team sent people to the store to prevent customer backlash and bad PR. They stood at the door and handed out coupons for free Grand Slams, redeemable at any Denny’s. They also mentioned that the franchisee was violating an agreement.

2. Long lines

“We did have a free coupon in case some people felt the lines were too long or that they had to get to work…They could come back within the next two weeks to have a free Grand Slam,” Chmiel said.

As you can see, Denny’s effort is focused on building brand affinity. They do not want anyone turned away and disappointed. Last year, they leveraged their good will to capture a massive amount of free press–and you can expect the same this year. This will not be the last time you hear about Denny’s feeding America.

This week we’re looking back on MarketingSherpa’s fifth annual Email Marketing Summit and what we learned from the over 600 marketers who came to Miami.

Take a look at our full wrap-up report with seven takeaways. It’s perfect for attendees who want to revisit key themes, and for those who couldn’t make it this year. We also published an article featuring Summit keynote speaker Joseph Jaffe, Chief Interrupter, Powered Inc. Jaffe launched his new book, “Flip the Funnel,” at the Summit.

Personally, I thought the Summit was a fantastic event loaded with cutting edge thought leadership and advice for running outstanding email marketing campaigns.

One interesting bit I noticed came from two back-to-back consumer marketing sessions where speakers mentioned the dreaded “list blasting” tactic. The broadcast tactic of sending a single email to an un-segmented list is thought to be an ineffective approach left behind years ago.

“Blast does horrible things to our industry in perception,” said Loren McDonald, VP, Industry Relations, Silverpop in a panel discussion. “But no matter how sophisticated you are, there is still some broadcasting.”

Although segmenting and sending targeted messages is a superior strategy, sending an occasional blast email to subscribers is acceptable — but it must be very occasional. The superiority of segmenting and targeting over broadcasting was emphasized by a session immediately following McDonald’s panel.

Joy Cropper, Director, Internet Strategy, Williams Randall Marketing described how her team transformed a blast-based email program for the Indiana Office of Tourism Development into a successful segmented program, dramatically improving results.

Cropper’s team surveyed their list with a $100 gas card contest as an incentive and used the responses to find segmentation opportunities. They then created three new newsletters and asked everyone on the list to re-opt-in.

They went from sending one email 10 times a year to three emails 12 times a year — increasing frequency. The result? The cut their list in half and increased their number of clickthroughs 10-fold.

Two of the latest marketing trends–social networking and SMS messaging–are becoming routine for some marketers, and their roles are becoming more clearly defined.

Chad Hallert, Director, Ecommerce, Eldorado Hotel Casino, and his team have experimented with building and promoting to a list of SMS subscribers since early 2009. In some ways, the team uses SMS similarly to how they use Facebook and Twitter. However, they’ve found SMS messages attract more immediate attention to promotions.

The team’s tried sending channel-specific promotions to SMS subscribers and social followers, but without fantastic results, Hallert says.

“We tried stand alone offers with mobile, social and email…when you break them up to pieces, nothing really competes with email, and the other two don’t look as valuable as they are.”

Instead, the real value of SMS and social are their ability to improve the results of an integrated campaign, Hallert says. He’s seen results improved by 5% to 8% by adding an SMS alert and Facebook updates to campaigns that already included website, paid search and email promotion.

This is due in part, Hallert says, to customers subscribing to more than one promotional outlet. A person who receives a text message and email about an offer is more likely to convert than a person who receives only one of the two.

The marketing power of the team’s SMS subscribers and social followers is likely to improve as the lists grow in size in relation to the team’s email subscribers. Currently, their SMS list is about 10% of their email list in size, Hallert says.

For now, the team is seeing social and mobile marketing add more value to integrated campaigns than the channels could generate by themselves. Watch our consumer marketing newsletter for a case study describing how Hallert’s team leveraged the immediacy of SMS to take advantage of the weather’s impact on hotel bookings.

For this week’s EmailSherpa case study, I had a long conversation with Eric Erwin, EVP Marketing & Product Development, Wilton and Tim Bay, Founding Partner, Shay Digital about the ways email and social media marketing can work together.

I compiled five of their best strategies in the article, available here, but there was another big point that I think is important to remember.

Social media isn’t entirely unknown territory for email marketers. After all, they’re the experts at growing an audience, creating relevant content, experimenting with message timing and frequency, and adjusting tactics based on response rates.

But there is one big adjustment that email marketers might have to make when launching a social media strategy: You have to be comfortable with the idea that you’re no longer in control of the conversation.

“The hardest thing for marketers is to turn over the brand experience to the community and let them define it,” says Erwin.

When creating a Facebook fan page or managing a Twitter feed, you have to avoid making yourself the center of the conversation. Instead, Erwin’s team has found success by listening more than talking, and inserting themselves into discussions when appropriate.

Watching customers discuss how they use Wilton products on Facebook gives his team new ideas for future marketing campaigns. If they see a particular question or challenge continually bubbling up from the community, that becomes fodder for a how-to blog post, or even ideas for a new product.

When they do start a conversation, they make sure to take a step back and let the community dictate where it goes. Yes, there can be some criticism of the brand, but Erwin says that criticism helps them improve the customer experience.

So while it’s a big step to take, it’s one that marketers must accept for a successful push into social media. As Tim Bay of Shay Digital says:

“We recognize that there is a leap of faith, but you can reduce the distance of that leap by doing your homework and then just diving in. If things don’t go well at first, you can adjust.”

Sometimes that leap of faith is so daunting that marketers just can’t bring themselves to make it – and they’re missing an opportunity. That’s why we’re dedicating the second day of our upcoming Email Summit to the convergence of email and social media.

We’ve filled that day with new research presentations, panel discussions and case studies that show how marketers are making email and social media powerful allies. You can check out the agenda here.

If I don’t see you there, feel free to share your own advice on navigating the waters of email and social media in the comments section.