MarketingSherpa Blog

For everyone who made it out to the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 this past week at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, you know ;). And everyone who couldn’t attend this year, you missed some great sessions, case studies, speeches and interaction with around 750 of your peers.

What happens in Vegas …

Unless some #SherpaEMAIL folks hit me up *cough @mgieva @martinlieberman cough* this is my evening in #SinCity - phintch

Everyone probably knows the second half of this advertising tagline (hint: what happens, stays), but that’s pretty hard to achieve with real-time blogging (I had posts up on Flint McGlaughlin and David Meerman Scott‘s talks with almost no lead time) from both Sherpa and attendees, crazy-active Twitter hashtag activity (#SherpaEmail) and entire rooms of marketers uploading pictures and video all day long.

We even brought along some of our optimization experts from MECLABS to do one-on-one live optimization of email, landing pages and more (see below) …

Crowdsourced takeaways

A great thing about a successful Email Summit filled with engaged attendees is that reactions to individual sessions and the entire event go online in real-time.

Here’s just a small sample from all the great material this Summit generated:

The #sherpaemail Daily

Email Summit notes shared by Alison Chandler, Marketing Manager American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here’s some of the material Alison is sharing:

• Slides: http://www.sherpastore.com/related-page-3921.html
• MarketingSherpa’s  2011 Award Winners Special Report – PDF
  http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31815
• Wrapups across the web
  MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways
  http://emailblog.eu/2011/01/26/marketingsherpa-email-summit-takeaways/

  Photos
  http://hashalbum.com/sherpaemail

  Smart Network Data Services
  https://postmaster.live.com/snds/

• Exclusive content gives people a reason to fork over their email addresses. Make at least some of the content in your emails available ONLY to email subscribers (such as special discounts), or FIRST to email subscribers (such as the chance to buy tickets before the general population).

And be sure to check out Alison’s “random gems” at the link.

Key MarketingSherpa Email Summit takeaways from Emailblog.eu — this is a great collection of Twitter commentary

Live Blog: How Pandora Uses Email Marketing to Keep You Listening from EE Tech News

More from EE Tech News — Live Blog: Email Marketing Summit, Real-Time Marketing and PR & Inbound Marketing

Summit panelist, Ardath Albee — Make 3rd Party Content an Opportunity Not a Necessity

4 Email Marketing Challenges and How to Tackle Them from Magdalena Georgieva at HubSpot

And do hit the official MarketingSherpa Twitter account to find retweets of even more crowdsourced content and photos from the Summit.

#SherpaEmail

Of course a blog of crowdsourced material would not be complete without taking in all the activity at the Summit’s Twitter hashtag — #SherpaEmail. Some numbers for the seven-day period from 1/21 to 1/27:

• 2,295 tweets
• 389 contributors
• 327.9 tweets per day

Here’s a sample from the top ten tweeters (and yes, I somehow made it onto this list):

• d’OH! We need to educate on the difference btwn spam & unsub. RT @Listrak: 30% of people use spam button to unsubscribe. Ouch.#SherpaEmail – @martinlieberman
• Caesars generated 100K mobile opt-ins easily. Have had 100K app downloads in last year. 15K people have used mobile check-in. #sherpaemail – @kristinhersant
• Simple but effective. Put a newsletter subscribe on every interaction: Signatures, receipts, door clings, splash pages, … #SherpaEmail – @Kvanbeeck
• Think twice about list rentals and purchases, they don’t perform well. Build out your house list, performs MUCH better. #SherpaEmail – @marthalisa
• Post-modern consumers don’t believe marketers. Don’t sell, say. #sherpaemail #emailmarketing – @coskier
• Implement comprehensive email hygiene and correction to maximize the number of addresses on your list. #SherpaEmail – @Listrak
• B2B email addresses tend to be longer thus more prone to typos. #SherpaEmail – @MelanieAt
• What comes first? Message or medium? Start with the message & decide on best medium #SherpaEmail – @knuss
• MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 One-on-One Case Study http://t.co/H3rRa1R #SherpaEmail – @davidkonline
• ‘Email is a conversation, not a magazine ad.’ #SherpaEmail – @shannonholato

Optimizing swag

The “more” up there in the live optimation section leads to something probably near, and dear, to most conference and expo veterans’ hearts — swag. At lunch on Wednesday, me and my editor — and Director of Editorial Content MarketingSherpa — Daniel Burstein, sat with Karen Rubin and Magdalena Georgieva of HubSpot and Jessica Best of emfluence and did a little swag optimization.

Sure MECLABS Research Managers and the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal are the go-to people when you need a better-performing landing page, but who should you turn to in order to make cool swag even cooler? Marketing experts, that’s who.

I’m taking full credit for this one:

Optimizing Swag Real Time (#osrt) at #SherpaEmail @davidkonline: Add a USB drive for an #emailgeek #swissarmyknife - bestofjess

How to optimize this swag from emfluence Interactive Marketing? Easy. Lose the letter opener and add a USB flash drive on the other side of the keyboard brush, and leave the screen cleaner strip alone. Done and done, and voila, you have a Geek Swiss Army Knife. Ah, swag optimization at its best.

These efforts led to this Twitter exchange:

• Optimizing Swag Real Time (#osrt) at#SherpaEmail @davidkonline: Add a USB drive for an #emailgeek#swissarmyknifehttp://twitpic.com/3tnzc8 – @bestofjess
• Had fun optimizing #SherpaEmail schwag @ lunch w/ @KarenRubin@mgieva @DavidKOnline Stop by Emfluence booth for Swiss Army Knife for Geeks – @DanielBurstein
• @bestofjess @DanielBurstein @mgieva@davidkonline My vote is for#optimizedswag – @karenrubin
• @DanielBurstein @mgieva@davidkonline @KarenRubin what other #osrt? Oh! An on/off volume switch for the slingshot monkey. #optimizedswag – @bestofjess

So you can see we have something of a swag-optimizing super group. If you were at MarketingSherpa Email Summit and have your own swag optimization suggestions, feel free to tweet them using #optimizedswag.

And, who could leave out — or forget — the Slingshot SEO monkey:

“I’m walking through the airport and every so often my suitcase screams like a monkey. #sherpaEmail” – @karenrubin

Related resources

Live optimization with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin at Email Summit 2011

Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 One-on-One Case Study

Email Summit Case Study: National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation

Email marketing strategy independent consultant and MarketingSherpa email marketing trainer, Jeanne Jennings, wrapped up MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas with a great presentation that offered some quick hit advice illustrated by several case studies.

Make it so

Jeanne opened the session by outlining the four challenges of email marketing:

1. Strategy
2. Relevance
3. Deliverability
4. Return on investment

And she immediately went into the differences between strategy and tactics. In fact, Jeanne admitted when she starts working on an email campaign and starts blocking out the strategy, doing the big picture works gets her so excited she starts getting into tactics too quickly and has to draw back.

Her main definition of strategy is, “A plan of action to achieve a specific goal,” and her description of tactics was to quote Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise — “Make it so.” Strategy is the plan, or blueprint, of your email marketing campaign, and tactics are the steps or stages you take to turn that strategy into reality.

The case study

The first study she presented was an email campaign for the National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation conducted this past holiday season. The NEAMB provides programs and services to the 3.2 million members of the National Education Association. This particular case study is focused on two of the seven steps of efficient email strategy — performing a SWOT analysis and developing a content strategy.

The control for this case study was a catalog list email that often ran several pages, making holiday offers hard to find. The test against the control took a page from the Groupon handbook with a clear offer, and content that based on Jeanne’s description I call “Groupon-lite.”

SWOT analysis

• Strengths — members have highly favorable impression of association, great holiday offers for members, recipients historically responded to discounts, new CMO encourages new idea
• Weaknesses — email had been catalog of offers, limited internal resources and budget for content, limited budget for content freelancers, concern that members are being overrun with mail decreasing response rates, no explicit opt-in; opt-out email permission
• Opportunities — Groupon and other deal emails are popular, people are actively looking to save money in this economy, busy professionals (teachers) are looking for ways to reduce holiday stress, shopping online is becoming more and more popular
• Threats — all the other holiday offer emails, differentiate from those; general inbox clutter makes members look for mail messages, some deals offered by retailers aren’t exclusive to organization

Here are the parameters Jeanne set up for the test email: weekly send; 100% opt-in; content strategy — engaging quotes,  gift ideas; single discount offer; low -resource content marketing;  quotes and tips from staff; differentiation from National Education Association’s Member Benefits Corporation control and other retail messages.

The quantifiable results

“Holiday cheer” test v. control

• Open rate up 214%
• Clickthrough rate up 105%
• Decrease of 34% in click-to-open because the click rate was so much higher than control

“Holiday cheer” v. internal benchmarks

• Open rate up 185%
• Clickthrough rate up 337%
• Click-to-open up 49%

Jeanne mentioned that conversion data is not available yet for this study.

Roll your sleeves up and get a full day of email training with Jeanne through MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Essentials Workshop Training. The next dates include Chicago on Tuesday, April 21, and San Francisco on Thursday, March 10.

Related resources

Ten Numbers Every Email Marketer Should Commit to Memory

Email Marketing: “I am not dead yet”

Welcome Messages: Are You Making a Good First Impression on New Opt-ins?

How a 6 Email Series Increased Unique Key Clickthrough Reach by Nearly 400% Over a Single Email

(photo credit: MYMRMARK)

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and author of Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. He describes himself as a recovering VP of Marketing, and as the keynote speaker he pumped up the crowd at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Real-Time Marketing and PR

David shared a number of examples of actual real-time marketing and engagement, and one had a little relevance to the Summit because the event driving the effort happened in Las Vegas. At the end of last August, Paris Hilton was arrested in Las Vegas for possession of cocaine.

Paris Hilton and Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas

Wynn Resorts immediately sent out a press release stating that she was banned from their properties. The immediate result was that most stories covering the arrest also mentioned that Wynn Resorts banned Hilton as well. Over 5,000 stories were written right after the arrest and a Google search today using this string, “paris hilton arrest las vegas wynn banned” pulls up over 500,000 hits. Wynn resorts took advantage of a real-time event to drive promotion in the form of traditional media coverage.

David said speed and agility are a decisive competitive advantage. Reacting to, and focusing on, what is happening in the news can apply to both email and marketing campaigns. He added that too many companies are run by “MBAs and spreadsheets,” and are looking at data from last week, last month or even last year, and forecasting out as far as five years. He said he didn’t have anything against long-term planning, but David asks, “What about now?” Focus on today.

The Gap logo change

To provide another example of just how fast things happen in real-time, David talked about The Gap changing its logo. The change set off a firestorm of traditional and social media coverage, and most of that coverage was negative. The entire process from logo change, loud and energetic negative reaction, and The Gap announcing it was keeping its old logo happened over four days.

David asked the audience, “Is there anything you could have done with this?” for Summit attendees to think about opportunities with their own businesses and how they might use an event like The Gap logo change, and he pointed out that the event would have played out differently even two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and other online tools have changed the timeline of how the public reacted to the new logo.

(photo credit: @ContactLab)

Real-time guidelines

David said the way to start the process of real-time marketing is set guidelines in the company that allows for employees to take advantage of, and react to, real-time events. He pointed out that news happens all the time. The CEO might be away at a conference, or it might be the middle of the night, or during dinner after business hours.

To truly implement real-time marketing, the triggering event needs to be addressed immediately, and not have to wait for business hours and approval within the company.

Comments from the Twitter feed:

• Nobody cares about your products, except you. Create interesting content! #dmscott#Sherpaemail — @BjarteFalck (Bjarte Falck Olsen)
• Offer valuable content – not incentives. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
• Don’t “do” social media. Make it a part of who you are. (via @dmscott)#SherpaEmail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
• Create interesting content for your audience to share. People love to share valuable or funny information. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
• Hard to separate work/personal on social media. Just be an authentic human being. (via @dmscott) #sherpaemail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
• “virtually everyone is online.” @dmscott. Love it! #sherpaemail — @jenniebennie (Jennie Beyer)

(photo credit: @mattmcn)

Related resources

David’s blog, Web Ink Now

Improve Your Copywriting with Help from Social Media: 7 Tactics from David Meerman Scott

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

Email Marketing Manager: Look past campaigns to boost your career

There is a certain tribe of marketers out there that are Pied Pipers for a new way of thinking. Email is dead. Get social.

Well, there are many metrics I can give to refute that stance, but here’s my favorite – paid attendance to next week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 is up 40% from last year.

Horn tooting done, my point is that the best strategy for most marketers is to engage in both email AND social media marketing, despite what the rhetoric-filled and biased bloggers out there may say. This may not be shocking news to you. Your bigger question is likely – but how?

Well, that’s why we have the Email Summit to begin with, to learn from all the high-performing marketers out there. So, I turned to Lindsay Massey, Marketing Director, Freshpair to share some techniques and tactics that might help your efforts.

Lindsay is a panelist for the how-to panel at Email Summit entitled, “Growing Email Lists and Engaging Customers with Social Media.” Freshpair.com is a leading intimate apparel retailer. You can find them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. But first, read on…

So, the first thing that jumps out at me from your successful campaign is that Facebook is the “next big thing” in email, while email is supposedly “dead.” Yet, essentially, to me your campaign was really just a traditional email send where Facebook was the conversion goal. “Dead” delivers I guess? How did you approach this send similar to other promotional sends, and in what ways was it different?

Lindsay Massey: We look at email and social as great complements to each other, and we definitely don’t see email as “dead.” After all, how does Facebook notify you that you have new comments or messages? Email!

By engaging our email subscribers in another relevant channel, we are able to interact with them on a more personal level, share unique content to generate buzz and ultimately engage more people in our brand. We approached this send like other promotional sends that are part of a larger campaign in that we developed an offer, segmented our list to target customers with the highest propensity to participate and, where this message would be relevant, created supporting content on Facebook and tracked the results.

This email campaign was different from other promotional sends in that the main goal was to encourage people to follow us on Facebook rather than go straight to freshpair.com. We measured the success differently than other campaigns – number of fans in addition to standard email KPIs.

Why email? Why not, say, Twitter?

LM: We definitely promote our Facebook presence on Twitter as well. The email was just one piece of our overall campaign. We chose to promote Facebook over Twitter for this particular campaign, mainly because Facebook allows you to customize the experience more than Twitter.

We were able to show more content tying back to the email. As soon as a customer fanned us, we were able to display new content that gave them the offer and let them click to freshpair.com to shop. A different approach could definitely be utilized on Twitter and would be a great follow-up campaign.

What is the importance of a Facebook fan-acquisition campaign? What is the value of a Facebook fan?

LM: For us, the goal of a Facebook presence is to strengthen our brand and reach new customers. By encouraging our existing customers and brand loyalists to join, we are able to build our relationship with them, as well as encourage them to share us with their friends.

Buying intimate apparel online can be challenging, so we try to educate fans with photos and take on a friendly tone by sharing funny statistics, like what percentage of people own a lucky pair of underwear. By keeping followers engaged and giving them unique content, we leave a favorable impression, so they remember us when it’s time for a fresh pair!

When it comes to measuring social media, the focus must go beyond traditional e-commerce analytics. We use Omniture to gauge the impact of our Facebook presence, specifically the conversion rates of visitors coming from Facebook. However, we consider Facebook to be more of a branding tool, so the exact value of a Facebook fan goes beyond the data in Omniture.

We also look at fan count and interactions. The customer insight you gather through social media will help you develop strategies across all marketing channels to get new customers in the door and keep them in the door. For example, we test different types of content within posts to see what people are most interested in interacting with. We then use this to inform marketing campaigns to further shape our other social initiatives.

Why aren’t social media sharing buttons enough?

LM: The social media sharing buttons are also important, and we include those in our campaigns as well. However, we see the main content receive the majority of clicks, while the share buttons receive a very small fraction of the clicks in each email campaign. We felt it was important to dedicate an entire campaign to acquire fans, but we also continue to push social through emails and onsite messaging as well.

It’s important to note that one dedicated email is not enough. Acquiring Facebook fans or Twitter followers should be an ongoing effort across channels in order to see the best results. Social isn’t just about sharing content, it’s also about extending interaction to new spheres and providing additional value to your fans. Share buttons are limited in that they don’t allow you to proactively communicate with interested parties and build your brand.

What is the downside of a dedicated send to try to attract Facebook fans?

LM: We didn’t see a downside to this specific campaign. The unsubscribe rate was not higher than a regular promotional send, and the segment of customers we mailed was highly engaged. The subject line actually led to an open rate that was 40% higher than average.

For all the marketing VPs and directors out there, what are the biggest lessons they should take away from your success?

LM: Email can be a very effective driver for Social. Before you begin a Facebook acquisition campaign, be sure you have a clear goal and strategy in place, as well as a supporting content strategy for your Facebook page.

Also, you could start small with a test to your most engaged customers to gauge response before you roll it out to a larger list. Then continue to marry your email and social strategies, so customers can get the information they want in the form they like best.

One of the things that we struggle with is catering to multiple demographics – some people want to see pictures of men in underwear and some people want advice on which bras go with what. Before you push your social presence to your entire list, make sure that you have a defined content strategy (either focus on one demo or have something for everyone so no one feels left out).

As for Facebook specifically:

• Be sure to develop a clear strategy for Facebook overall, so new and existing fans continue to be engaged. If you are just on Facebook to be on Facebook or because your competitors are there, take a step back and rethink your long-term strategy.
• Be sure to devote resources once your strategy is in place, so your Facebook page stays current. Take time to engage with your fans and continue to provide them with unique and interesting content.
• Promote your acquisition campaign across multiple marketing channels – not just email, and be sure to track your results.

Related Resources

Email Marketing: Finding the time to improve results

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training

Email Marketing: A customer-focused mindset at ATP World Tour

The answer from one marketing automation vendor might surprise you.

During an interview with Kristin Zhivago, President Zhivago Management Partners, for a Sherpa B2B article, Guided by Buyers: Four tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy (members’ library), she mentioned that marketing has undergone a sea-change in focus from 80% creative and 20% logistics in the past, to today where those numbers are exactly flipped. I recently had the chance to speak with Phil Fernandez, President and CEO Marketo, and a 26-year Silicon Valley vet with a present and past riddled with marketing software companies. I guessed this “80/20 rule” was a topic right up his alley.

We covered a wide range of marketing subjects, and in passing I mentioned the 80/20 rule presented by Zhivago and Phil immediately offered his opinion on the topic. We didn’t want to sidetrack our talk at the time so I told Phil we’d get back together and revisit his thoughts. This quick interview is the result.

A surprise that opens a debate

Phil’s answer was more than a little shocking coming from a marketing automation guy, and not an agency, since he sells data and logistics … or so I thought. Read on to find out what the CEO of Marketo thinks about the art of marketing versus the science of marketing.

His response opens a debate on the state of marketing today — is it more data- or creative-driven? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments section.

During our conversation a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Kristin Zhivago told me marketing once was 80% creative and 20% logistics and data-driven, and now that number has flipped to where logistics and data make up 80% of a marketer’s world and creative is only 20%. You strongly disagreed. Tell me why.

Phil Fernandez: At Marketo, we obviously evangelize marketing automation and analytics as critical components to drive significantly better marketing performance and ultimately greater revenue growth. I regularly advise corporate management to embrace a more metrics- and data-driven sales and marketing culture – what I like to call “hard marketing.”

So it may come as a surprise, especially from the CEO of a leading technology company that builds products for marketers, that I fundamentally disagree with the premise that marketing has flipped to a world where creative is only 20% of the craft of marketing.

There is no question that the sophisticated marketing automation and analytical solutions available today, such as Marketo’s, are imperative for successful marketing. However, it is incorrect to suggest that the adoption of technology solutions has made creative less important. In fact, I’d argue that the creative side of marketing is more important than ever! Why? Two reasons, one tactical and one strategic.

Tell me more about why the creative side of marketing is more important than ever.

PF: First, we need to look at how marketing automation (“MA”) tools are changing the job of the marketer. In particular, MA solutions help the marketer to implement a key new business process called Lead Nurturing. In Lead Nurturing, it is the job of the marketing professional to engage across channels and develop a relationship over time with each and every prospective buyer for their product or service. They work to educate the buyer, to assist them in their independent research, and to stay top-of-mind for that magical moment when the buyer is ready to make a decision.

And what is the single most important factor in implementing an effective Lead Nurturing program? It’s content. If a marketer is going to stay in touch with prospective buyers over time, helping to educate them and build trust and awareness, the marketer must deliver a stream of compelling, persuasive and brand-reinforcing content. Effective Lead Nurturing initiatives need a continuous stream of new content to stay fresh and relevant, and the most common reason why MA initiatives fail is a company’s inability to create enough content to build a trusted relationship with prospective buyers.

What defines an effective marketing automation system?

PF: The goal of effective MA solutions needs to be to make it fast and easy to do the logistics and data-driven parts of the job and then fade into the background, so that the marketer has the time to focus on the critical process of creative development.

More strategically, the relationship between buyers and sellers has fundamentally changed with the emergence of the Internet, Google, and more recently, the whole world of social media. The buyer has taken control of the process and only “listens” when and where he/she wants. And we all know that the Internet and social media world is a pretty noisy and chaotic place. This shift has greatly elevated the need to break through with creative, compelling content and big ideas – it’s the only way to get buyers to listen.

As a result, the art of marketing (communicating your brand, creating awareness about your unique value proposition and creating marketplace excitement through big ideas) is even more important today than it was a decade ago. If your message and/or content are not resonating with potential buyers, they will purchase from competitors who have done a better job of connecting with them in a relevant, timely and compelling way. That’s why our own marketing team at Marketo spends a lot of time focusing on our brand strategy and developing “magnetic” content via our blogs, webinars, “Definitive Marketing Guidebooks,” videos, events, and yes – advertising.

So both automation tools and the creative side of marketing are important …

PF: Keep in mind, automation and advanced analytics provide marketers speed, precision, and powerful insights into revenue performance. They can even go as far as predicting the amount of revenue a marketing campaign will generate. However, it’s the creative that inspires someone even to consider what you are selling in the first place, and eventually (if you did your job effectively) to buy. Automation and advanced analytics such as we offer at Marketo, give a marketer more productive time to spend on developing compelling creative that will generate the greatest impact. By balancing the “science” of marketing with the essential “art” of the craft, successful marketers are able to accelerate predictable, expanding revenue across the revenue cycle.

Then, what do you think is driving the argument?

PF: As much as anything, it’s probably a factor of today’s technology-driven business environment, where there is an expectation that the right technology can solve pretty much anything. More broadly, since the Industrial Revolution, we have been conditioned to the idea that science and technology replaces the arts and crafts culture that came before it. And in lots of areas, like precision manufacturing, this has been true.

But the world of creating revenue is different. The art of marketing and the art of sales remain very much alive. The good news is that there is a tremendous amount of synergy to be had when companies get this right and the art and creative elements of marketing and sales are combined with hard science and technology that Marketo and others have created. It can seem like the Holy Grail to companies looking to generate more revenue more predictably.

Related Resources

Find Phil’s blog at Revenue Performance

B2B Marketing: What to look for in 2011

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

Inbound Marketing: Invest in content to generate leads

Lead Nurturing and Management Q&A: How to Handle 5 Key Challenges (Members’ library)

photo by Jennifer R.

Increasing your emails’ relevance is one of the most effective ways to improve results — but it is also one of the most challenging, and for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes the largest roadblock isn’t expertise, money or will power — but time. A marketer might know exactly what to do and how to do it, but first has to design the next landing page, create the next PPC ad, finish off some copy, attend a meeting, etc.

Sound familiar?

The good news is that this challenge does not come without opportunity. Simplifying part of your process can be the best thing you’ve done for your email marketing in months.

Production was a nightmare

For example, Brad Hettervik, Product Manager, Marketing Systems, Oversee.net, handles the email marketing at LowFares.com, a travel comparison site owned by Oversee. LowFares.com’s weekly email newsletter, Travel Insider, features travel deals selected from hundreds that are forwarded to Hettervik’s team by its partners.

Before the team streamlined the newsletter’s production, partners sent lists of deals in different formats and through different channels. Team members would have to:
o Manually gather the deals
o Go through the lists
o Check each deal by copy-and-pasting their URLs
o Copy the text of deals they would use
o Apply tracking codes to the URLs
o Create the email newsletter

“We select the top 20 to 30 deals out of potentially thousands of deals. So the production part of that was a huge nightmare,” Hettervik says. “It would take sometimes 15 hours,”

“Some of these deals expire in eight hours or 24 hours, so the speed is very important… [But] the production aspect was so labor intensive that if you wanted to add any more layers of targeting, the complexities got out of control” and some deals would expire before reaching subscribers, Hettervik says.

From 12 hours to 30 minutes

The team has since built an email tool in-house to simplify the process. It is a desktop application that pulls the week’s deals from each partner into a single interface. A marketer can click a check-box to select deals to include in the newsletter. Then, with a single click, it codes the URLs and generates the newsletter’s HTML.

The eight- to 12-hour process could easily be completed by an experienced marketer in 30 minutes, Hettervik says.

“Now that we’re not spending a full day or a day-and-a-half creating [each email], that has allowed us to get more analytical with our reporting…We are able to do a lot more targeting, a lot more testing and now it has actually helped us quite a bit in terms of delivering relevant emails to our user base.”

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training

Email Marketing: A customer-focused mindset at ATP World Tour

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s Priority Inbox

Watching my Jaguars opt for quiet, January Sunday afternoons at home with the family instead of getting pummeled by large men in Arctic conditions (who needs the playoffs, anyway?), I realized that sports is a great example of a product that I care about in a real-time fashion.

So, I asked Philippe Dore, Senior Director, Digital Marketing, ATP World Tour his thoughts about using email as a real-time marketing tool, as well as a few insights about the case study he will be presenting at Email Summit 2011 in Las Vegas, “Executing a B2C Campaign with a Small Team and Low Budget.” It was game, set, match, profit for the men’s pro tennis tour, with an impressive amount of revenue generated per send.

Here’s what Philippe had to say…

At Email Marketing Summit 2011, keynote speaker David Meerman Scott will be discussing real-time marketing. What do you think the role of email is in real-time marketing?

Philippe Dore: I am looking forward to hearing David’s keynote in Las Vegas on this interesting topic. Real-time marketing is becoming quite a buzz word especially with the explosion of social media and the availability of new tools today for marketers to “listen” and engage with their consumers in real-time. There is definitely a need for real-time marketing with email and successful marketers have already been taking advantage of it.

There are some really good examples, especially in my industry (sports). Most major sports league in this country capitalize on the ‘live’ moment and send merchandise email offers immediately following the completion of a significant event like the Super Bowl or NBA Playoffs. It works very well in our sports and entertainment industry where we capitalize on consumer passion.

We’ve done similar promotions here at ATP World Tour with real-time marketing emails after significant events. As soon as Rafael Nadal won Wimbledon earlier this year, we had a splash page on our website and an email was sent with “Nadal Wins Wimbledon – See Him Back In London This November.”

Another example is when our players qualify for our season-ending championships: “Federer Qualifies For London.” Those messages not only let the consumers know the news, but invite them to consume more content – whether it is buying a ticket for an upcoming event or simply read a special story or feature on our website. We catch them in the heat of the moment and that is a great thing.

We’re also looking at mobile/text alerts, which has great potential for real-time marketing.

In the case study you’re presenting at Email Summit 2011, you started with zero opt-ins, yet you chose to build your own list instead of buying a list. Why?

PD: Yes, having a clean list of fans who wish to receive our content is important to us. We prefer quality over quantity so we are not interested in purchasing lists. Our email program welcome message, a Marketing Sherpa award winner, even tells the consumers that we know what it’s like to get a lot of emails so we encourage them to “customize their email experience”! Not many marketers do that.

You derived $21.82 in revenue per message sent. I just want to clarify that for a moment because I think that’s quite phenomenal. That is per individual message sent. Do you think you could have achieved this kind of success with a similar campaign in a different medium, or is there an intrinsic aspect of email marketing that helped deliver this impressive response?

PD: This is another example of real-time marketing. The example you are referring to is from a triggered welcome message on opt-in. Not only did we get the person’s email and start the digital relationship, but we were able to capitalize on the moment and achieve a high conversion rate. Email was definitely the perfect medium for our campaign in this case.

And I’m guessing the cost to send each individual email message was significantly less than $21.82…so the ROI must have been quite impressive?

PD: Yes, our cost of sending is our regular email service provider (ESP) cost per message sent. All our emails campaigns are done in-house.

While we received many speaking submissions from agencies on behalf of client-side marketers, yours was one of the few that came directly from the marketer with a campaign that was performed entirely in-house. So, I’m guessing you’ve gotten your hands dirty, so to speak.

While many marketing VPs and directors focus on the big picture and leave the details to someone else, what tactical know-how do you think they should be careful not to overlook? What details would you advise a marketer with an agency to focus on?

PD: Yes, email marketing is still fairly new for us since we’ve only been doing it since 2008 if you can believe it. It is now an integral part of our digital strategy so I am staying close to it. We even had our CMO weighing in on subject lines last year!

Marketers should make sure to keep a consumer-focus mindset when doing email marketing. We do not send any messages that we would not want to receive ourselves. It is also important to look at metrics frequently and improve email after email.

Related Resources

Email List Reactivation Incentives: Gift cards vs. whitepaper vs. nothing

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Why should I help you?

Email Summit ’11: Tackling the Top Email Challenges with All-New Research, Case Studies and Training — Sign up today (1/14/2011) and get a $25 Caesars Palace gift card

So, how’s this for a business model? An “ongoing T-shirt design competition.”

Well, that’s the way Threadless keeps hip people in hip T-shirts. And with a business model like that, you need A LOT of engagement and interaction with your customers…key marketing buzzwords for 2011.

To get a behind-the-scenes look at how the online T-shirt retailer works its mojo, you can attend the “Growing Email Lists and Engaging Customers with Social Media” how-to panel at Email Summit 2011 in Las Vegas (January 24-26). Liz Ryan, Email Marketing Manager, Threadless, will be one of the panelists.

To give us a quick glimpse into the Threadless marketing machine (or, perhaps, marketing loom), Liz was kind enough to answer the following  questions…

Threadless has more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter. What can you possibly be tweeting about that’s so interesting?

Liz Ryan: We wouldn’t have much to say if it weren’t for our awesome community. The majority of our tweets focus on our community-submitted tee shirt designs, voting, and community events. We also of course tweet about any specials on pricing, shipping and new products.

Sometimes we tweet on things going on at HQ, live stream of a band playing in the warehouse, DJ or holiday party. Other times it’s an interview with our founder, Jake Nickell, an event we’re participating in, or a Threadspotting – celebrities in Threadless shirts.

Our marketing team has autonomy over the channels we manage. So there is a flexibility and authenticity to the way we manage social media. We tweet about what we want to tweet about without approvals, executive sign offs and strict calendars.

It’s collaborative in that email, social, public relations and advertising work together to make sure messaging is cohesive, but other than that we have complete control over our channels.

Part of your panel is about “…and Engaging Customers with Social Media.” When we hear about social media, we hear a lot about engagement. But how can marketers move customers beyond just engagement to action?

LR: Give them something to take action on.

As marketers, we’re used to pushing information at consumers. We have to change that dynamic and give them something worth pulling and something worth doing:

• Open dialog – At Threadless, we provide an opportunity to have an open dialog with the Threadless team and other community members and an opportunity to take action. That might mean buying a tee shirt, but we also place a high priority on inspiring our community to submit a design, or to vote on designs, or comment on designs, or blog, or come out to a stop on our tour, or post a photo.
• Incentives – We not only provide information about what’s going on with Threadless, but we give our community incentives to take action on promotions – whether it’s a giveaway on Twitter, trivia on Facebook, or responding to a blog post.
• Don’t micro-manage – We don’t micro-manage our community involvement on comments to each other regarding their work. We give our community the power and voice to be Threadless and they take it from there.

Threadless is a “community-centered online apparel store.” I got that information, by the way, from Wikipedia, which, of course, is also collaborative. Marketers are increasingly looking to leverage community-based models – from creating Super Bowls ads to creating, as you do, T-shirts. And, when you think community, most people naturally think of social media. But is an email list a community as well?

LR: Absolutely, email is the original social media. As email marketers, we struggle with making email a two-way interaction. There have been groups and listserv since email was invented, but how do you scale that to one million plus email subscribers?

It’s important we don’t silo email as a solitary channel. At Threadless, we use email to help guide subscribers to our site with newsletters that highlight our latest designs.

We encourage discussion about the designs, the company and our community through blogs and social media channels. It doesn’t make sense to ask one million subscribers to respond to an email, so it alone is not always a two-way channel, but absolutely we respond to emails if someone does reply to our email.

We also respond to our community’s preferences to not receive all our emails or to get info on new designs through social channels only, or maybe you only want to hear about sales. Great! Email is a channel by which we can serve our community, and through that sell some tee shirts.

Your community of 1.3 million regularly votes on their favorite T-shirts. Why? In other words, in possibly a combination to my two previous questions, what motivates them to act?

LR: We give them the platform by which to act, and they are motivated by each other, the community itself. They’re generally supportive of one another’s efforts and feel the need to give feedback to fellow artists. They also feel emboldened to choose new tees to be printed. Their participation can directly affect which shirts are available to buy.

Since you are essentially crowdsourcing your main products, your T-shirt creators aren’t punching a clock at Threadless HQ, I would imagine you would want to keep a pretty close eye on the competition. After all, they could steal not just some of your best product ideas, but also the very people who created the T-shirt designs. What kind of competitive analysis do you perform?

LR: We keep an eye out on other graphic tee companies, but because our business model is ever evolving, we don’t worry so much about what other companies are doing as much as our focus on giving our community what they want – multiple platforms to display their art while providing outlets to give and receive feedback to each other.

I do however receive emails from other tee-shirt lines. In general I am constantly monitoring retailers’ email programs to see what others in the space are doing in terms of messaging, cadence and any deliverability issues they may have.

My favorite T-shirt on Threadless is…

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator

What’s yours?

LR: As a zombie culture fan, I love The Horde. As a mom, I’m really into the Threadless Kids! line, especially the new longsleeves. Running Rhino is one of my all time favorite designs.

Related Resources

Social Marketing: Twitter contest boosts followers 43%

Social Media Marketing: How enterprise-level social media managers handle negative sentiment

Improve Your Facebook Profile to Increase Consumer Interaction: 4 Tactics (Members’ Library)

New MarketingSherpa Inbound Marketing Newsletter

Twitter ‘Teaser’ Campaign Supports One-Day Sale: 5 Steps to a 4% Conversion from Tweets (Members’ Library)

Google recently published some detailed research on Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature. The four-page PDF includes some key features and specific calculations that power the email-filtering function.

I am honestly shocked at the level of detail provided. Readers with a math background might be able to further deconstruct the supplied equations, but the explanatory information alone provides a wealth of information.

Here’s what jumped out at me from the “Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox” PDF:

‘Many Hundreds’ of Data Points

Priority Inbox ranks mail by the probability that the user will perform an action on that mail. The calculation is made on a per-user basis and is based on hundreds of data points.

There are several categories of data points, or “features,” used to determine whether a message is marked as “unread” or “everything else.”

Here are the categories:

o Social Features – based on the degree of interaction between the sender and the recipient, such as the percentage of a sender’s mail that’s read by the recipient. “Opening a mail is a strong signal of importance.”

o Content features – headers and terms in a message that are highly correlated with the recipient acting (or not acting) with a message.

o Thread features – the users’ interaction with the thread so far, such as if the user began the thread or has replied.

o Label features – the labels that the user applies to messages using filters.

Time is of the Essence

A stated goal is “to predict the probability that the user will interact with the mail” within a set time frame, giving the mail’s rank.

I am not a math wizard — but it appears that your messages will have a higher likelihood of being prioritized in the inboxes of users who typically open and/or act on them quicker than other messages they receive.

More “False Negatives” than “Positives”

If Priority Inbox makes a mistake, it is more likely to let an unimportant message into the inbox than it is to boot an important message into “everything else.”

“The false negative rate is 3- to 4-times the false positive rate,” according to the document. When tested on a control group, the system’s accuracy was about 80%, plus or minus 5%.

Changing Behavior

Google analyzed the amount of time some employees spent on email with and without Priority Inbox. Priority Inbox users spent 6% less time reading email, and 13% less time reading unimportant email. They were also more confident to delete email.

If this trend holds true across all Gmail users, companies sending irrelevant emails will notice even lower response rates from Gmail users over time.

Bottom Line: Keep on rocking

There is nothing in this document that should concern email marketers with effective programs. Gmail’s Priority Inbox will measure the high interaction rates your team achieves and categorize your messages accordingly.

For marketers whose email programs lack relevancy and value, this document should be one of many wake-up calls you’ve received to overhaul your program. Our Email Summit is less than two weeks away and you can learn a lot from the hundreds of marketers in attendance.

Related resources

The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox PDF

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 in Las Vegas

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Why should I help you?

“And I still…haven’t found…what I’m looking for.” Hopefully Bono wasn’t talking about your website.

According to the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Report, customers who use the search box on ecommerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers. Yet, 52% of marketers graded their internal search a ‘D’ or  ‘F.’

On Monday, I’ll be presenting on the “Exploring On-site Search with eTail, BabyAge.com and MarketingSherpa” webinar with Jack Kiefer, Founder and CEO, BabyAge.com, and Kelly Hushin, Editor, the eTail Blog.

But before we share some of our research and case studies about on-site search, we wanted to hear what you had to say…

Four major points

1. Understanding of misspellings and synonyms

Search today must tolerate typing errors, spelling mistakes, and other altered forms, without requiring a preset dictionary. We use our patented algorithm(FACT) to first of all understand what visitors are looking for in a shop. Phonetic is king.

On BabyAge.com when you search for “armchair” instead of “arm chair” you get no results. It looks like BabyAge.com is trying to maintain search by manual optimization because “sleighbed” works!

So you can point out the long tail of search again. Same for fischer-price instead of fisher-price or “chocolat” instead of “chocolate” or “sumer” instead of “summer”.

What about “schanon” instead of “shannon”? It doesn’t work. In Europe, we deal with many languages and understanding the phonetic is really important. Even spaces matter – “infantseat” (21 results) instead of “infant seat” (1000 results).

2. Relevance

The order of the right products that are displayed on the result page is vital.

Top-sellers and revenue boosters should always be placed on top, while sale items and bad sellers should be placed below the fold or on the next page.

Make sure to show only deliverable products, because nothing is more frustrating for a customer than finding out that the just-found-present takes 5 weeks to deliver.

Use an intelligent result system that incorporates information like relevance, top sellers and availability status, to avoid frustration and to turn more visitors into buyers.

3. Speed and filter

A survey of 600 Internet users showed that more than half felt that a “suggest” feature is “important” to “very important.” An additional 25% found the feature to be “rather important.”

When online retailers provide such a suggest feature, the drop-down menu should note the number of matches for each of the terms listed.

General search terms (such as “shirt” for an online clothing retailer) normally produce a very large number of results. The right filter navigation prepares the list for the user, permits sorting and selections to be made, and displays appropriate navigation tools. The user can now quickly narrow down the results according to brand, price, size or other attributes.

4. Merchandizing and optimization

Today on-site search is one key factor to understand the customer in your online shop. But you should also be able to generate insights from this data and use on-site information to generate AdWord campaigns and optimize, test and configure your shop for a higher conversion rate.

– Mathias Duda, Head of Sales, FACT-Finder

Simple things

There are many simple things companies can do to improve performance of their site search to deliver a more user-friendly experience, and potentially result in higher conversions (for e-commerce sites, in particular). Here are a few of them:

1.  Incorporate rich auto complete

This feature significantly enhances the usability of your site, by not only suggesting possible terms when visitors start typing the first letters of a keyword (like most search engines do today), but also showing images, start reviews, price, discount info, short product description, and even a “buy now” or “check availability button,” without the need to press the search button and wait for the results page to appear. This powerful feature gives people an easier way to click through to the items they’re searching for and typically results in higher conversions.

2.  Test different positions for the search box, and not which positions generate the most search traffic

One online retailer – Black Forest Decor – took this approach, moving its search box from the right-hand upper corner of its site to the center. The company made other changes at the same time, including increasing the size of the search box. The company found that site search revenue per customer increased 84% and the conversion rate increased 34%.

3.  Offer “add to cart/buy now” options directly from the site search results page

Smart e-commerce companies create as few steps as possible from search to checkout. When you allow visitors to add products to shopping carts or to go to checkout directly from search results, they’re more likely to complete the purchase – particularly if they know exactly what they want and they see it in the results at a price they’re comfortable with.

4.  Show ratings and reviews in search results

Site visitors place high value on the opinions and feedback of other people who’ve shopped for similar products or services, and showing the average rating in search results helps them better determine what they want to click on. You should allow visitors to further refine or reorder their search results based on ratings. You should also show, in the search results, the number of reviews that a product has.

5. Be sure to include refinement options that are relevant to the search query

Refinements are a useful way for visitors to narrow down results by certain criteria – for example, brand, gender, price range, etc. Refinements should be relevant to the search term, so will vary from one search to another.

For example, if a visitor to your site has searched for “camera,” it may be useful to have refinement options for the number of megapixels and the screen size. If someone searches for “TV,” then you may want to offer screen size and resolution refinement options. Apparel retailers can offer refinements for men’s and women’s items, as well as size, color, or other relevant attributes.

The trick with refinements is to keep them relevant and useful. This can be done by tracking the most popular and related search terms for each product category, and dynamically creating the refinements based on the keywords that people have entered.

– Shaun Ryan, CEO, SLI Systems

The new slang

Know your audience’s slang. Aside from plain old keywords, there’s going to be all sorts of wacky short-hand terms, acronyms and inside jokes you ought to be aware of. You can nab your market from folks inside the bubble already that way.

– Erica Friedman, President, Yurikon

Related Resources

Internal Search Data Inspires Store Page Re-Designs: 4 steps to boost revenue 50% – Members’ Library

Four Simple Steps to Tweak Site Search Box & Lift Conversions 20% – Members’ Library

How Eretailer Tripled Conversions with Internal Search Changes – Members’ Library

How to Improve Your Company’s Internal Search and Lift ROI – 9 strategies and tips – Members’ Library

How to Use Internal Site Search Data to Revamp Your Home Page: People’s Bank – Members’ Library