MarketingSherpa Blog

Groupon is one of the biggest email marketing success stories you’ll ever hear. The daily deal company launched in November 2008 and was dubbed the fastest growing company ever last year by Forbes. Much of that growth is powered by targeted email messaging.

Today, Groupon sends about 5 billion emails each month, according to John Becvar, Sr. Director of Relationship Marketing at Groupon. I was lucky enough to hear Becvar comment on the company’s growth and email strategy during a panel session at ExactTarget’s Connections 2011 last week.

“We really began with no personalization and no segmentation,” Becvar said.

Becvar joined Groupon almost two years ago, back when its site featured a single deal each day in markets such as greater Chicago, with no deals on the weekends. Today, Groupon offers about 1,000 deals in the Chicago area in a given week, Becvar said.

“When I joined we had about 2 million subscribers. Based on our most-recent finding, we have over 115 million subscribers … We were in 20-some-odd markets when I joined. Now we’re in 45 countries and 500 markets … So we’ve obviously had to do a little bit of segmentation and personalization to stay relevant,” Becvar said.

Becvar described four types of segmentation Groupon uses for its email marketing: Read more…

New products with lots of features can be intimidating. A learning curve has to be overcome before customers can fall in love and recommend the product to a friend. And I can think of few products that are as feature-laden as Microsoft Office 2010.

After teaching about email marketing at ExactTarget’s Connections 2011 on the latest stop of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop, I’ve been soaking in all of the email marketing content presented here. Diana Lawson’s case study really stood out to me because it was a great example of how to use email to enamor customers with a feature-rich product.

The senior product manager at Microsoft presented a case study yesterday describing how her team launched a lifecycle email program to build loyalty among Microsoft Office 2010’s newest customers.

“We need people to get the value of Microsoft Office right away… So there’s no buyer’s remorse, and more a feeling of ‘I am so glad I bought this,'” Lawson says.

The emails deliver targeted how-to content and videos for five months. One of their main goals is to improve relationships with customers by offering helpful content from team leaders behind Office 2010.

Here’s how the lifecycle emails work (results below): Read more…

Internal challenges are among the hardest to overcome when trying to improve your email marketing. You can know everything about improving results, but if your leaders are unwilling to commit the resources, or have a fundamental misunderstanding about email, then you have some convincing to do.

One of the most common misunderstandings I have heard at our Email Marketing Workshops is that some companies “do not believe in” suppressing parts of their list. The leaders essentially force the marketers to batch and blast, thinking it is always better to have more eyeballs on a message than fewer.

This, however, is a huge misconception. Email marketing is not advertising. If you send a message that is irrelevant to a large portion of your list, then you are encouraging recipients to click “spam” and ignore you in the future. Practiced consistently, this can be toxic to your database. Read more…

Email marketers, start your engines! The MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Awards contest is now under way. Enter today for your chance to win this year’s grand prize – a paid trip for two to Email Summit 2012 in Las Vegas. The contest is sponsored by Responsys, and entry is free-of-charge.

I recently received a stark reminder of the types of emails we look for in our “Best Email Innovation” category. Anna Yeaman, Creative Director at Style Campaign, described to me a technology her team developed that can dynamically update an email’s images at the time of opening.

For example, Style Campaign tested this system last year by sending a holiday email to its subscribers. The email gradually revealed a fun holiday image over the course of the day. Subscribers could see a little more of the image each time they checked the email, even if they had previously checked a few seconds earlier. The campaign featured a new image each day for five days.

“This was the first deployment of our dynamic imaging technology. We really wanted to test the whole proof-of-concept and see if we could get users to re-open the same email again and again over a period of time,” Yeaman says.

The test proved successful. Stats include: Read more…

One of the most interesting things about life is that we change. Our interests change. Our habits change. Our jobs and locations change. So it goes without saying that our email subscribers will change. The question is whether you can change with them.

Now, I am not advocating that you launch a “singles” newsletter every time a subscriber gets a divorce. However, it can be helpful to make your email program flexible enough to accommodate subscribers’ changing needs.

How do you make your email program more flexible? You can start by having a good preference center that clearly explains your options. Here’s a good example from AAA (click this link to visit the full preferences page): Read more…

Remember when you were a kid and thought your parents were getting you the greatest present in the world? Maybe you were expecting a BB gun or a pony, but they got you socks instead? Or some other lame present?

Think back to that exact moment when you saw the present and thought “How did they fit a pony into that tiny box?” Then you opened it, blew out your candles, and wished for new parents.

That feeling of crushing disappointment should remind you of what it is like to have your expectations overlooked. That memory can help you improve the quality of your email database.

When people opt-into your emails, they have expectations of what they will receive. Your subscribers will probably not throw a temper tantrum and hurl cake on the walls if you miss their expectations. However, they will be more inclined to ignore your emails and mark them as spam, which undermines your email marketing.

The solution is to very clearly explain your email program at the point of opt-in. This will correctly set people’s expectations. They can decide if your emails have something they want. If they want it, great; they can sign up and become active subscribers. If they don’t want it, great; they will not sign up and not add to the dead weight in your database.

Here’s a good example of how CIO, an IT-management publication, sets expectations for its newsletters (click the image for a larger view). Read more…

We reported in MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report that the biggest challenge marketers’ face is targeting recipients with highly relevant content. I do not foresee this moving out of top tier of challenges due to the complexity of reaching a unique subscriber with the exact information they need to help he or she succeed

Crafting an email message that connects with the reader at the moment he or she choose to open the email is difficult. Nevertheless, the alternative of sending irrelevant emails puts a brand’s image, reputation and subscriber relationships at risk.

Relevancy is #1 Challenge

Today, some 70 million US consumers access their email inboxes through a mobile device, and subscribers’ bottomless appetites for multi-tasking, whether it be on a phone, tablet, or laptop during office meetings or in front of the television, make it impossible for companies to capture a reader’s full attention. To break through the clutter, email messages must be easy to engage with, relevant and clear.

A company that sends timely email messages with pinpoint accuracy will not only stand out from the competition, but may be the only brand to make it to their subscribers’ inboxes.

Webmail clients Hotmail and Gmail are using engagement metrics (open, delete, reply, etc.) to determine when and where email is delivered. B2B marketers also need to keep these trends in mind when planning their email campaigns. HubSpot found that 88 percent of email users do not have a separate work and home address. Many employees like to use webmail addressesto have the ability to share larger files over corporate email.

To meet customers’ rising demands for relevant and engaging communications, marketers can focus on three key elements:

• Content
• Segmentation
• Time

All three are essential. If one element is missing, the email can become irrelevant to the reader. Let me show you a recent first-rate email series that fell just short of the goal for my family.

Moving beyond a single data point for determining relevancy

A year ago, my wife joined the Chuck E. Cheese’s email club to receive coupons and free tokens for our kids. In exchange for her email address and dates of our children’s birthdays, we receive emails twice a month promoting their latest coupons or specials. The emails nicely tie into holidays, school calendars, or kid activities, like receiving a bonus of tokens for cleaning their rooms.

As you might expect, with the information of my children’s birthdays, Chuck E. Cheese’s sends a few emails leading up to the big day. About thirty days before my son’s birthday we received this email with the personalized subject line “[Parent’s name], Get 100 Bonus Birthday Tokens for [Child’s name].” I did not speak with Chuck E. Cheese’s, but from the numerous party invitations my kids have received from their classmates starting in preschool, these emails are very successful at enticing parents to book birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s locations.

The week of my son’s birthday, my wife received an email with the subject line “Happy Birthday to [Child’s name] from Chuck E. Cheese’s..” The principle message was to wish my son a happy birthday and encourage us to stop in and play some games with complimentary tokens.

Close behind and at the top of the email was the copy “Haven’t planned a party yet for [Child’s name]? No worries, it’s never too late to reserve a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Last minute walk-in parties are always welcome, so come on in and celebrate!”

As you might agree, these are excellent emails containing personalized and relevant information, and are delivered at appropriate times leading up to a child’s birthday.

So why did they fall short of relevancy for my family? Well, I guess you would classify us as outliers; we planned our son’s birthday 90 days out at an indoor gymnasium. (Full disclosure: Chuck E. Cheese’s does send half-birthday email cards, but we are not that organized, and yes, in the copy, Chuck E. Cheese’s promotes walk-in half-birthday celebrations).

I am confident Chuck E. Cheese’s identified two groups of parents/guardians with their internal sales data: a profile of party purchasers that plan within 30 days and another that plans the week leading up to the event. Combined with the child’s birthdates collected during email registration, Chuck E. Cheese’s sends highly relevant and targeted communications with these two types of buyers.

Moving forward, Chuck E. Cheese’s may choose to expand their email program to cater to “overly-organized” parents. An email message sent 90 days prior to the celebration, with more highlights on specific cake, food, and party favor options may appeal to this customer profile who enjoy delving into the details of the planning process.

Mining for data

For marketers, the quest for relevancy and engagement is not complete until a one-to-one relationship is established. Due to budget and resource constraints, this is an unrealistic goal for most companies. That should not discourage marketers from moving towards one-to-fewer, even if their budget doesn’t allow for a true one-to-one relationship to develop. Remember, with each successful email campaign targeted to a select customer profile, brands can expand their reach and look at new segments of their customer base to exploit, such as outliers like my family.

To do that, organizations need to go beyond traditional demographics like birthdates to understand their customer’s motivations. I do not think you would ever want to have an email preference center with a checkbox to identify your customers as an early bird, prompt, or fashionably late party planner. But that doesn’t mean such valuable information is out of your reach.

In addition to your email database, mining all of the in-house data found inside CRM, sCRM, web analytics or financial software systems may be beneficial. When you begin, search four categories of data; endemic, transactional, behavioral and computed.

Endemic data is data unique to a particular record. Examples are contact and demographic information commonly collected during registration or  in a brands preference center.

Transactional data consists of data captured during any transaction a customer has with an organization. Financial software is the most common source of transactional data, but transactional data can also encompass a subscriber’s IP address.

Behavioral data is perhaps the most actionable of all database information and can come from a wide variety of both online and offline sources. Website clicks, email opens, calls to customer service, and redemption of coupons at store locations are all examples of behavioral data.

Computed data is the outcome when one or more variables are used to create a third variable.

For example, the variable of “number of miles from a retail store” is computed data, and is the difference of the distance between the customer and store’s address.

Mining these four types of data will uncover insights into your customers and understand the steps they take to make a purchase. At MarketingSherpa, we recently launched our annual Email Marketing Benchmark Survey to identify the barriers that exist in preventing subscriber engagement and the best practices to increase the velocity and accuracy of email communications. I encourage you to participate to help us learn more from marketers like you who are in the trenches, battling for relevancy every day. In exchange for your valuable time, we will provide you a complimentary copy of our Special Report: CMO Perspectives on Email Deliverability.

Related sources

Email Deliverability: How a marketing vendor with 99 percent delivery rates treats single opt-in lists vs. double opt-in lists

Email List Growth: Finding low-cost and no-cost ways to grow your database

Email Marketing: Three lessons learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

New Chart: Most effective email list growth tactics

I’m sure you’ve seen these blog posts before. They’re looking for a hook, so they throw a topical subject in the title to get you to click, and then share the deep marketing wisdom that you would naturally expect to learn from Charlie Sheen, The Bronx Zoo Cobra, and Justin Bieber.

I thought of this topic the other day because we actually did something I just knew we would never do on MarketingSherpa. We published those two proper nouns – Justin and Bieber – right next to each other.

In fairness, it was in an excellent email marketing case study about a very impressive trigger alert program, and Justin Bieber was only used as an example of search keywords this events company was targeting. But you better believe Senior Reporter Adam Sutton endured a relentless week of teasing for including the Biebs in his case study. There were the Photoshopped pictures. There were “Belieber” taunts.

Why? Because, and here is my indefensible blog post (with a hearty tip o’ the hat to Esquire magazine), marketers can’t learn anything from Justin Bieber. Or Lady Gaga. Or that kid who got his 15 minutes of fame for pretending to be in stuck in a weather balloon.

Think about it, what are 3 lessons from Charlie Sheen? 1. Be born to a famous dad. 2. Get a formulaic but highly rated sitcom. 3. Have an extremely weird but very public meltdown (using social media)

Does this really help your marketing campaigns? Get some ideas to generate more leads? Increase sales?

So, here’s the approach we take at MarketingSherpa. Perhaps the best people to learn marketing lessons from are…wait for it…actual marketers. That’s why we survey more than 10,000 marketers every year for our benchmark reports. That’s why we conduct more than 200 interviews every year for our free marketing newsletters. That’s why we invite dozens of marketers to present their case studies to their peers at our summits. And that’s why I’m writing this blog post today.

So, if I had to break down five marketing lessons I’ve learned from marketers, I would say…

1. Successful marketing comes from hard work, not “secrets” and “tricks”

Internet marketing is flat out hard work. The successful marketers I’ve seen go-to-market with a regimented marketing plan.

They understand what KPIs are key to their success – both the intermediate metrics that will help them make course corrections, as well as the key results that are critical to their business leaders.

They find ways to tear down artificial silos in their organization – between Sales and Marketing, between online marketing and offline marketing, between email marketing and social media marketing – to facilitate a cohesive funnel that drives customers to conversion.

They tame unwieldy, disjointed technology platforms to create tools that improve marketing campaigns and create clear, unified reports. They do this even though they don’t have a tech background. They do this even if it means having long conversations with IT about why Ubuntu is better than Windows.

But they don’t have “secrets to Internet marketing success.” And they don’t have “10 supercool tricks to boosting SEO.” They have war stories. And if you can get just a few minutes in their busy day to hear them, you just might learn something.

The battles are won in the trenches.

2. Your customers don’t care about your emails, your PPC ads, or even your TV campaign

They don’t even care about all that fun inbound stuff like your blog posts or YouTube videos. And they certainly don’t care about the latest features of your product, your mission statement, or your corporate structure.

They care about doing their jobs better. They care about having clean water for their kids. And they care about taking their wife out for a 12^th anniversary dinner that she’ll never forget.

Never confuse a feature with a benefit. And never confuse a marketing “benefit” with what really matters to your customers.

3. Successful marketers have losses

This is marketing, folks. You don’t have to be one of the “crazy ones,” but you do need to push the limit on what your company thinks is possible.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, “There is no effort without error or shortcoming.”

If you don’t have losses – a “negative lift” on a test, a failed product launch – you’re not pushing hard enough. And if you don’t have losses, you’re not really learning anything. You’re just guessing.

The great thing about digital marketing is that it has never been easier to learn about your customers. You’ve got real-time data you can analyze and an endless possibility of tests you can run. Test two headlines you simply can’t decide between, two offers, two entirely different approaches against each other in a real-world, real-time environment and let your customers tell you which one is better. Test new landing pages against your top performers.

Sure, it’s scary, you might lose. But if you do it right, you’ll definitely learn.

4. Strategy is better than skill

This is something that I’ve heard Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, say in almost every meeting I’ve had with him. Drill it into your team as well.

Marketers are all too used to having a goal placed in front of them – double leads, gain market share – and churning and burning and blasting and using every tool they can think of to hit that number. Just…one…more…email send…will do the trick.

Sometimes it helps to step back and look at the big picture. Is it worth scrapping and fighting for a tenth of a point of market share with your fiercest competitors? Are you inundating your lists with offers?

Take the time to step back from the marketing machine and determine what your value proposition truly is. Don’t dictate your value to your customers. Discover what they find valuable about your products and services. Why do they put their job on the line to hire your consultants? Why do they part with their precious cash to buy your products?

As with any job, you can work harder, or you can work smarter.

5. Be the customer advocate

As a marketer, you spend almost every waking moment making a proposition to the customer. That makes every customer your customer. So make sure your company comes through.

Stay in constant contact with customer service, product development, services, manufacturing, and sales to make sure you are truly serving the customer. What are customers complaining about? What are you doing right? How can you make their lives easier, better, smarter, more fun, more fulfilling? Are sales reps over promising? Does everyone understand the value proposition of your brands? Do you all speak with the same voice? Do you walk the walk and live the brand?

Hey, that’s no easy task. But if you’re looking for easy tasks, you’re in the wrong business. See point #1 above.

Your customer is empowered like never before in the history of commerce. Today, you must assume that every customer is a publisher as well. How would you react if you knew the editor of The Wall Street Journal was eating in your restaurant, trying on a suit in your store, or purchasing your software platform? There is no quicker way to sink your brand and your marketing campaign, and the huge amounts of time and money you have invested in them, than by ticking off the editor.

You know what you expect when you’re the customer. Under promise and over deliver.

And to over promise to you, my audience, my customer, I dug up a sixth lesson. But instead of telling you one more thing I’ve learned from you, I asked author and behavioral expert, Beverly Flaxington, what she’s learned from marketers. Beverly has built her career around understanding other people. Here’s what she had to say…

6. Provide your audience the context

In too many cases, a marketer develops information and materials based solely upon the data and information about a particular product or service. The marketing material reads like this: “We do this. This is what we do. This is how we do it.” It’s a great deal of data without a lot of context around why it is important to the targeted audience.

The missing component is the “So what?” What’s so important about how you do what you do? Why should someone care about it? What is it going to do for them and how will it do it? This goes deeper than the idea of selling benefits. It actually asks the marketer to create language that speaks TO an audience about their needs, and helps that audience to easily make a connection as to why what the marketer is proposing is good for them.

As you develop materials or write marketing copy, ask yourself the “So what?” question as you make statements and provide information. Think in terms of “This is good for our audience because…..” The process can be very eye-opening because instead of assuming that someone will get why what you’re saying is so important, you can more likely guarantee they will understand!

Thanks for reading today’s blog post. Stay tuned to the MarketingSherpa blog next week, where we’re going to talk about what marketing lessons you can learn from Michele Bachmann, New Mexico wildfires, and Greek debt.

Related Resources

Evidence-based Marketing: This blog post will not solve your most pressing marketing challenges…yet

Loyalty Marketing: How to get customers to stick around (and keep buying)

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

The Last Blog Post: Marketers must embrace change

A common challenge we’ve heard at our Email Marketing Workshops is that marketers want to know how to effectively grow their email lists. This was true at the Seattle and Boston workshops, and I expect it will continue through Washington, New York, San Diego and Austin.

One tactic we describe is how to leverage existing channels between your brand and your audience to grow your list. Marketers can study how their audiences receive information from their brands and test adding an opt-in request to those channels.

For example, the New York Public Library used its transactional emails to grow its list. The library already sent automated emails to remind patrons that books were due. The marketers tested a simple addition to these emails:

“Get the latest NYPL news and events. Sign up for our newsletter at: [shortlink].”

This two-sentence request increased the library’s opt-ins by 120%.

More than transactional emails

I really like the above example. It shows how a simple idea in an existing channel can grow a database at nearly no cost.

Your company is not likely to be a library, but this idea extends beyond late notices for books. I saw another example while flying to our Email Workshop last week.

I took this picture on a Delta flight from Memphis to Seattle. I was poking through the touch-screen personal television at my seat and noticed, lo and behold, that Delta wanted my email address. As you can see in the second sentence, the page does a good job of emphasizing the value I’ll receive by handing over my information.

Here’s the next screen:

I am not very sharp on the history of in-flight televisions, but I assume these screens were not installed solely to collect travelers’ email addresses. Instead, I assume that the opt-in request was added later at the suggestion of a clever email marketer. This is another example of a company leveraging its existing channels of communication to build its list.

Look for relevant audiences

In our Email Marketing Workshop, we spend the first half of the list-growth section emphasizing the importance of list quality and how it can be improved. We really hammer on the point that the size of a database is not as important as its quality.

For example, a large database that is loaded with disinterested subscribers is not going to help your marketing nearly as much as a smaller database with subscribers who are interested in your content and offers. You want high-quality subscribers who enjoy receiving your emails and clicking your links.

One way to help build a quality database is to invite only relevant people into your email program. The two examples mentioned above do just that.

• The New York Public Library’s transactional emails reached people who had books checked out. These people had visited the library, so they might have been interested in receiving news about the organization.

• Delta reached people in-flight on a Delta plane. These people were travelers, and they traveled with Delta, so they might have been interested in receiving offers and updates from the airline.

So when you’re looking to your existing channels to help grow your list, be sure to test the channels that reach the most relevant audiences for your email program. You don’t want to invite just anyone into your database. You want to build a high-quality list.

Related resources:

Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

Members Library — Growing Email Lists with Social Media: KFC’s Facebook tool adds subscribers

New Chart: Most effective email list growth tactics

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

Email Marketing: Three lessons learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

B2B Marketing: Building a quality list

I heard an offhand comment the other day from an agency marketer who said most of her B2B clients focused their email marketing on rented third-party lists (despite her advice). I thought to myself, “Really? That can’t be very effective.” I looked at some data and found I was right.

Although 46 percent of B2B email marketers use third-party lists:

• Only 11 percent score the tactic at “four” or “five” on a five-point scale of effectiveness, with “five” being the most effective, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.
• 57 percent score the tactic at “one” or “two”

These numbers almost completely reverse when we look at B2B marketers emailing to a house list. About 95 percent of B2B email marketers send to their own lists.

• 67 percent consider the tactic a “four” or “five” in terms of effectiveness on a five-point scale, with “five” being the most effective.
• 5 percent consider it a “one” or “two”

For me, these stats help underline the point that high-quality email databases are workhorses in marketing departments, and that marketers need to steer away from thinking about email marketing as advertising.

Love and Respect Your Audience

To elaborate on a point that Brad Bortone made in yesterday’s post, I would like to emphasize that effective email marketing is based on relationships. These relationships hinge on expectations, promises, and trust.

This might sound like fluffy marketing-speak, but bear with me. Specifics are coming.

First, people have expectations when they opt into your email program. You need to clearly set these expectations during the opt-in process by describing:

• The content they’ll receive in your program
• How often they’ll receive emails

Once they opt-in, you’ve officially promised to meet these expectations. If you fulfill your promise and only send what they’ve agreed to, that will build trust. Subscribers will trust your emails will have something they want. That trust translates into higher open and clickthrough rates and helps build an effective program.

If you move outside of the expectations, you are assuming subscribers want something else. You’re breaking your promise, harming your relationship, and undermining trust. You’re encouraging them to click “spam,” ignore your emails, or (at best) opt-out — none of which are good.

So you cannot assume people want your emails. You have to clearly set expectations, keep your promise, build trust and establish good relationships to get good results.

Email Marketing is Not Advertising

Strong email relationships can only come from your house list. On a third-party list, their expectation is to not hear from you. They never opted-in. You’re assuming they want something they’ve never asked for, and you’re encouraging them to click “spam.”

Sure, sending to third-party lists can work. But look at the data above. You’re likely better off investing in your database, segmentation, and relevance.

The mindset that “we’re just going to reach people, even if they’d rather be doing something else,” is an advertising mindset. That’s what marketers do on television. I’d rather be watching Pawn Stars, but instead I’m stuck watching ads.

Advertising is great, but it’s not good email marketing. Good emails are anticipated by subscribers and are relevant to their needs. This is why a good house list is so valuable. Bad emails arrive out of nowhere and interrupt people when they’re doing something else. This is why emailing third-party lists is among the least-effective B2B email marketing tactic today.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Email Marketing: Three lessons learned at the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop

Chart: Top tactics organizations use to improve email relevancy

Email Deliverability: Always test emails that link to third-party sites

MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop