MarketingSherpa Blog

Looking toward the upcoming MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, February 19-22, I want to present some research on consumer opinions about email marketing conducted by Emailvision and YouGov.

The survey was conducted online in early November 2012 through the YouGov Plc GB panel involving consumers in the United Kingdom. Panelists received emails inviting them to take part in the research. The total sample size of 2,001 adults was weighted to be representative of all Great Britain (GB) adults (defined as 18+ from the UK panel).

To provide insight into what the research uncovered and to offer advice on what B2C marketers can take away from the results, I reached out to Leah Anathan, Corporate Marketing Director, Emailvision.

First, the results of the survey …

The YouGov and Emailvision research sheds light on the missteps marketers might be taking that can bring about brand resentment. After asking consumers for their opinions on marketing correspondence, the study found the following:

• 75% reported they would resent a brand after being bombarded by emails.
• 71% cited receiving unsolicited messages as a reason to become resentful.
• 50% felt getting their name wrong was a reason to think less of the brand.
• 40% remarked that getting gender wrong would have a negative impact.

With better segmentation and targeting, marketers can avoid these pitfalls; however, this is a challenge when consumers remain unwilling to give even basic information:

• Only 28% indicated they would be willing to share their name.
• Only 37% would be willing to share their age.
• Only 38% would disclose their gender.

Read more…

Note: This email was automatically generated from a mailbox that is not monitored.

Ouch!

How often have you seen this line in an email you’ve received from a company? Even worse, are you guilty of including this line in your own email marketing?

When your customer sees that line, she basically hears, “Dearest Customer, We don’t really care.”

Email marketing should be a conversation

Think about it. When you ask a customer or potential customer to sign up for your email newsletter or other email list, you’re essentially asking them, “Can I have a conversation with you?” When they say “yes,” they are taking a leap of faith.

Will you send valuable information that helps them solves problems or meet their goals?

Or will you spam them with endless offers?

Or even worse, send them down the road to perdition and really betray their trust by selling that email address?

By cutting off the conversation before it begins, you question their decision to trust you.

This further worsens if it is in a transactional email, say, with a receipt for a purchase. Here, they took an even bigger leap of faith, gave you hard-earned money on the hope that the product will be as good as you say it is, and they’ll receive it when you say they will.

  Read more…

In part one of this blog post, Rick Jensen, Senior Vice President, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Constant Contact, provided his thoughts on where SMB marketers should focus their efforts in 2013.

Both of these MarketingSherpa Blog posts were prompted by research from AWeber, which found 68% of small businesses plan on increasing the marketing budget in 2013. That prompted me to reach out to experts in the SMB sector for tips and tactics specific for SMB marketers.

Today’s post offers more details from the AWeber research, along with more insight from industry experts.

The AWeber research was conducted during November and December of 2012, via an interstitial greeting AWeber customers received when logging into the company’s system. Visitors were invited to participate in the research, and 3,159 completed the survey. The methodology included randomized multiple choice options presented to respondents.

Here is an infographic summarizing the results of the survey:

Data and infographic by AWeber

Read more…

When I went to the movies over the holidays, I saw the preview for the new Steve Carrell movie — “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” — about a magician.

Maybe it’s the fact that a good illusionist has to get the audience to opt in to the performance. Or maybe it’s because the trailer featured many scenes in Las Vegas, site of the upcoming Email Summit 2013.

Either way, it got me thinking of some of the key tactics every email marketer should know. So I turned to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Handbook – Second Edition to pull out some basics.

For example, while every magician should know The Best Coin Fold and The Mystery of Princess Karnac, every email marketer should know …

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As we build the content for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, we are focusing on the five key goals of successful email marketing programs.

We are also including the two elements necessary to optimize these goals – measuring and testing.

So in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll provide some suggested reading and resources to help you to prepare for next month’s Email Summit and improve your email marketing – no matter on which goal or element you are currently focusing.

Capture

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Email List Growth: 230% more readers from six-channel test

New Chart: Integrating Social Media with Other Marketing Tactics

Deliver

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

Open

Case Study: Creativity vs. clarity in email subject lines

Email Personalization: 137% increase in open rate from personal note approach

Click

Email Marketing: Video email doubles clickthrough rate for Ragan Communications

Close

Email Marketing: 208% higher conversion rate for targeted emails over batch-and-blast

Measure

Reader Mail: Understanding differences in clickthrough rates and open rates

Test

Email Testing: More specific subject line improves open rate by more than 35%

This time last year, we put together the top 11 posts of the MarketingSherpa Blog for 2011, and social media marketing easily dominated the list. In 2012, email marketing put up a good fight, but social media marketing along with other inbound strategies and tactics still took the gold.

This year’s list focused on three areas: inbound, email and customer-centric marketing. Along with a brief summary of each post, you’ll also find some interesting tweets about select posts. Read on for 2012’s most popular MarketingSherpa Blog posts, as determined by your peers.

Inbound Marketing

Blog Awards: The 13 best marketing industry blogs (according to you)

Our top post of 2012 shared the results of the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards, where we announced the 13 winning blogs, in a variety of categories, as decided by you, the MarketingSherpa Blog audience.

“If you’re looking for information to help you improve performance and advance your career, check these blogs out,” said Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, in the post.

Read more…

Most email marketing campaigns (but not all) focus on three goals:

• Getting the recipient to open the email
• Taking the next step by following the call-to-action in the email
• Clicking through to the final destination, which is often a specific landing page on the website with an action to be taken, such as filling out a registration form

The key performance indicators for email marketing are often open rate and clickthrough rate, and then that final conversion on the website, which can take a number of different forms. A consumer marketing email effort might seek out an immediate purchase, where as a B2B campaign might look for additional information on the email subscriber to more fully populate a database record.

Of course, the key to any email marketing program is getting the recipient to take that first action – opening the email. Without an open, there can be no clickthrough and certainly no final conversion on the website.

With that in mind, improving email open rates should be a priority for email marketers. Based on tweets as a very loose metric, MarketingSherpa Blog posts like “Infographic: Email open rates by time of day,” published at the end of October, and “Email Personalization: 137% increase in open rate from personal note approach,” from a couple of weeks ago, show email open rate is a popular topic with our audience.

To offer our blog readers more on email open rates, I had the chance to speak with Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD and Software Advice Advisory Board Member.  Read more…

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

Click to enlarge

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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.

Click to enlarge

Read more…

An email recently came across my inbox with an interesting attachment, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with the MarketingSherpa blog audience, because it’s a positive example for something I’ve seen many marketers struggle with – internal marketing.

In fact, when we asked 1,646 marketers their most pressing challenges in MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Executive Guide to Marketing Personnel, here’s what they had to say …

Chart: What challenges undermine your marketing department’s potential?

Click to enlarge

As you can see, roughly three-quarters or marketers said, “either a lack of funding or resources inhibit our growth and development.” So how can you get the resources and budget you need?

Back to that email I was telling you about. It was from Karen Doolittle, Director, Marketing Research, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Karen said, “While not a member of your organization, I quite often visit your website and attempt to glean information on the current state of affairs of email marketing.”

From the first line alone, I could tell that Karen is, what I like to call, a high-information marketer. The type of marketer that constantly looks for ways to improve her department’s performance. So I’m including her email attachment here, because I think all the other high-information marketers who read the MarketingSherpa blog can learn from it. She called it an …

Email Performance Whitepaper 

As you can see from the above link, what Karen did was quite simple, yet also pretty profound. I’m going to use an old quote that I love from Todd Lebo, Senior Director of Content and Business Development, MECLABS, to explain why, “Business leaders will never storm into the IT department and say, ‘I was taking a shower this morning, and had a great idea for some new PHP code.’ But they will come into the marketing department and say, ‘I was taking a shower this morning and thought of a great idea for an email send or a headline or a print ad.’”

What Karen’s piece says to business leaders is, “Hey, trust us over here; we know what we’re doing. And if you give us the funding and resources we need, we can keep doing it and keep improving.” But it uses data to prove that point, without having to make any claims at all.

Karen was kind enough to hop on the phone with me recently, go over the background of her internal whitepaper, and provide some tips to help you replicate this idea in your own organization. Below are selected edits from our conversation.

Read more…