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Think about how many emails you sent yesterday. Now think about how many your company sent yesterday — to customers and coworkers. Probably thousands of unique emails, right? That is a mountain of content, but little of it gets used for marketing.

I spoke last week with Chris Baggott, CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium (also co-founder of ExactTarget). During our discussion, Baggott pointed out two content-rich resources that marketers often overlook: their email marketing campaigns, and their social media profiles.

Marketing emails, for example, often tell a story or feature content that is not published elsewhere. The content is not indexed by search engines — but it could be if published online.

Also, the comments and conversations on your Facebook profile typically never escape the walled garden. But you can grab that content and incorporate it into your marketing.

“We’re working on breaking down content silos to be able to pull content from anywhere and distribute content anywhere,” Baggott says.

Here are some examples Baggott provided of how some companies are breaking down content silos and combining email marketing, social marketing, natural search and content marketing:

Publishing emails for long-tail search

One of Baggott’s first points was that a company’s emails are a huge untapped resource for content. Of course, there are your marketing emails, as mentioned above. But even your sales and customer service emails can be published.

Sales and service teams write thousands of emails to answer customers’ questions. Questions such as:

• What is the best product for my situation?
• When would I have to update my product?
• Will this product work while I’m traveling?

The answers to these questions are extremely specific to each customer’s situation. If published, they’re potentially valuable for long-tail (low volume, highly qualified) search traffic. What is the best parka for sub-zero temperatures? That sounds like a Google search to me…

Of course, not every email you send will be valuable. They should be screened before publishing, but you could identify several emails to publish each day.

Collecting and leveraging user-generated content

Baggott also mentioned an email strategy to gather and use content in your program. Here’s the process he laid out:

1. Send a triggered email asking customers for reviews, testimonials, or other types of user-generated content. These emails can be sent after customers use a product, such as after they’ve stayed in a hotel room.
2. Publish that content online to help attract natural search traffic and encourage visitors to sign up for your emails.
3. Send another triggered email asking customers to share their content with friends on social networks.
4. Use the content in marketing emails or nurturing campaigns.

The content generated, again, will be very specific to each customer’s situation. If you have good information in your database, you can match the content to subscribers’ attributes and use it to send them targeted, highly relevant messages.

“One of the biggest problems we’ve always had with dynamic content [in email marketing] is the content,” Baggott says. “The problem isn’t that I don’t have enough data, or the tools to make it easy to send relevant emails. The problem is that I don’t have enough relevant content to send to the right person.”

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Your email database is the foundation of your email marketing. Haphazardly adding names can invite irrelevant subscribers and invalid email addresses — which weaken your foundation.

Inspired by our upcoming Optimization Summit, I went back to my notes from our recent Email Summit to reinforce what I learned about email deliverability. I found some great information on bad email addresses and list hygiene from an expert panel.

Jack Hogan, CTO and Co-Founder, Lifescript, a women’s health website, presented his team’s work with FreshAddress, an email list hygiene provider. Austin Bliss, President, FreshAddress, was also on hand and noted:

“People make typos all the time… You want to keep that address out of your list because it’s not going to help you. And no amount of deliverability tweaking later is going to help you if the initial email address is bad.”

Hogan and Bliss highlighted four types of bad email addresses removed from Lifescript’s database. Take a look to see if your list has any of these:

Role Accounts

These email addresses are maintained by a website or company for specific purpose. Examples include:

• info@example.com
• admin@example.com
• press@example.com
• abuse@example.com

These addresses are often maintained by a group, not an individual. So if you send an email to one of these addresses, it will not likely be relevant to all the owners and can make your message susceptible to being deleted or marked as spam.

Furthermore, these addresses are often publicly available on websites, which means they’re easily picked up by spammers. Email services are aware of this trend and monitor emails sent to role accounts. Emailing a high number of role accounts in your campaigns will likely harm your reputation among email services.

Syntax Errors and Typos

These invalid addresses are genuine mistakes. People frequently mistype their email address. Even if they are asked to write the address twice, it is very easy for someone to type it incorrectly the first time and copy-and-paste the mistake into the second form field.

How bad could this problem be?

“I saw 500 different ways yahoo.com was entered into our address book,” Hogan says.

The problem with these addresses is that they are often from people who are legitimately trying to subscribe to your newsletter — and they never receive it. This can create a bad impression with your brand. Furthermore, email services do not like receiving a high-volume of emails sent to invalid accounts and can mark-down your reputation in response.

Fake Addresses

These addresses are entered by people who do not want to give a valid email address. For whatever reason, they wanted to complete the signup process without providing a personal email. Instead, they made something up, such as:

• nope@gmail.com
• null@void.com
• asdf@yahoo.com
• nowaybuddy@getlost.com

One reason you might receive a high number of fake addresses is by requiring people to provide an address to complete an unrelated task, such as to enter a contest. The person is not interested in a newsletter or promotions — they just want to enter the contest, so they invent a fake address.

Lifescript mainly collects email addresses from people subscribing to its newsletters — but it still saw these bogus addresses in its database. Even though this does not make sense, it happens.

As mentioned above, sending emails to a high number of invalid addresses can tarnish your reputation.

Spam Traps

Email services and other companies create these addresses and publish them online as bait for spammers. Then they wait for someone to find the addresses and start sending unsolicited emails. This helps the companies identify spam.

Emailing one or more spam traps can hurt your reputation. The trouble, though, is these emails can find their way into legitimate company’s lists via:

• Poor sources — such as a purchased lists from a disreputable company
• Poisoning — a malicious competitor or an upset customer can identify a spam trap and sign it up for your emails.

Some spam traps are obvious, such as abuse@example.com, but most are kept secret. Otherwise, they would not be effective. This can make them difficult to identify. However, they’re not likely to be active, responsive subscribers, so you should be targeting them for removal based on inactivity anyway.

You can find out more about email deliverability at our upcoming webinar:
Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation
(Thursday, April 21, 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EDT)

Related resources

MarketingSherpa Optimization Summit 2011

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

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s ‘Priority Inbox’

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Third-Party Links and Email Deliverability: 4 Tips to protect your reputation

Soap Photo by: Horia Varlan on Flickr

Email deliverability is best managed proactively. You cannot respond to bounces and spam complaints if you’re not aware of them. Performance should be monitored. Problems should be fixed.

Deliverability is a primary concern for a company like Zozi. The deals website offers discounts on local activities such as kayaking and wine tasting. Well over half of its transactions are generated through email, says Ryan Morris, Director of Content, Zozi.

Last year, before Zozi sent emails focusing only on deals, it had a newsletter that offered travel information and updates with a funny tone. Zozi’s marketers learned more about deliverability through this newsletter with tests like the one described below.

Monitor deliverability with a seed list

Morris maintained a list of email accounts to which he’d send draft versions of the newsletter (also called a seed list). He had several accounts at the email services (such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) that represented the bulk of Zozi’s email database.

Morris could login to each account and see if the newsletter arrived, rendered well and landed in the inbox or junk box. His diligence helped Zozi uncover deliverability problems before campaigns launched (Zozi has since started using Mail Monitor to test and monitor email delivery).

– Third-party photo trouble

Last year, one test email did not arrive in the inbox for about 50% to 60% of Zozi’s test list. Morris researched possible problems with the email and asked Zozi’s engineers for ideas.

“We learned that in our email for that particular day, we linked to a photo. We ended up hosting that photo at an image hosting website because, at the time, we did not have abilities on our own site to host images and create unique URLs,” he says.

“It was the first time we had done that, and it absolutely reined terror on deliverability… We ended up removing that portion of the content and sending another test… After that, we hit 100% deliverability.”

Two key deliverability takeaways

Zozi’s experience highlights two key points in email deliverability:

1. Test deliverability before an email is sent to subscribers. There are many factors that determine whether your email arrives in the inbox. You are likely to miss one at some point and should err on the side of caution. Your team can build a test list such as the one described above in a matter of hours, which is a good start.
2. Deliverability depends on more than reputation. Email services look at the reputation of every website to which you link. Furthermore, if you send emails from a shared IP address, then you also share your reputation with every sender on that IP.

In the (slightly edited) words of the great George Washington: “Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own [email] reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

You can find out more about email deliverability at our upcoming webinar:
Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation
(Thursday, April  21, 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EDT)

Related resources:

Email Deliverability: Getting into Gmail’s ‘Priority Inbox’

Email Marketing: Improve deliverability by deleting subscribers?

Email Marketing: Your deliverability questions answered

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top Tactics to Improve Relevancy and Deliverability

Members Library — Email Marketing: FedEx increases deliverability and clickthrough rate with preference centers

Members Library — Third-Party Links and Email Deliverability: 4 Tips to protect your reputation

Seeds photo by: flickrich

Washington photo by: Joye~

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. The most significant challenge to effective email marketing is targeting recipients with relevant content, according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

The most effective tactic for increasing relevance is to send triggered emails, according to the report. In fact, 70% of consumer-marketers using email reported the tactic as “very effective” and 47% of B2B email marketers agreed.

“Remarketing” emails are a type of triggered message that can be very effective. One example is an email sent after a customer abandons a shopping cart. The message lists the items left behind and encourages the customer to return and complete the purchase.

Charles Nicholls, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, SeeWhy, and his company specialize in abandoned-cart emails. Below, we’ve included his comments and tactics for improving your own.

Strong performance from relevant emails

An effective remarketing email is closely tied a customers’ recent activity, which makes it very relevant. On a basic level, an abandoned-cart email should:
•    Clearly be from your company
•    List the products left behind
•    Supply useful information (such as a link back to the abandoned cart and your contact info)

In February, SeeWhy crunched data from emails sent in response to 65,000 abandoned shopping carts across its roughly 1,000 clients (overwhelmingly B2C companies). The average metrics are much stronger than industry benchmarks, which Nicholls attributes to the high relevance of the emails.

“You can write remarketing emails that will annoy and drive-up unsubscribe rates up,” he says. “The key is to do it in such a way that you’re really delivering a great service to the customer and they really appreciate it.”

How to Design Remarketing Emails

Here’s Nicholls’ advice for starting and improving your abandoned-shopping-cart emails:

1. Send the first email immediately

Ample industry research, including research from MarketingExperiments, emphasizes that the email should be sent immediately after the customer abandons the cart. Even waiting a single hour can pound your performance.

2. Provide a service, not a sales pitch

The email should be service-oriented, Nicholls says. “This is not a glossy promotion designed by an advertising agency.”

Tell customers that they left their cart and you want to help. Provide relevant information, list your contact information and add a link directly back to the abandoned cart.

“We tend to focus more on a text-based presentation, really delivering a customer service message where the content is incredibly personal and relevant,” Nicholls says. “Images that get used tend to be fairly limited.”

3. Start with a three-email sequence

The most important email is delivered immediately after a customer abandons a cart, Nicholls says. Beyond that, he suggests his clients start with a three email series with the following timing:
•    Email #1: Sent immediately
•    Email #2: Sent 23 hours after first email
•    Email #3: Sent 6 days and 23 hours after second email

“That gives them a starting point and they can test from there.”

4. Avoid discounts

The top two reasons customers abandon carts, Nicholls says, are price and timing. You can overcome the price issue by offering a discount, but this should be avoided. You’re likely to win back customers, but you’re also likely to condition them to abandon more carts in the future.

“Many campaigns work incredibly well without offering any promotions at all. That’s because customers clearly already have some intent.”

If you want to test a discount, Nicholls suggests doing so in the third and final email of a sequence.

5. Test timing and messaging

Of course, these tactics are only a starting point. Nicholls suggests marketers run tests to find the best approaches to fit their markets. One test he suggests applies to companies that offer free shipping after a certain price level.

“If the site has free shipping after $100, then for cart values greater than $100 we would send a different email that reiterates that their cart already qualifies for free shipping. Those types of things become really important when you get into the whole promotions area.”

Related resources

All New MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Advance Practices Handbook

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Shopping Cart Recovery Tested

Chart: Top tactics for delivering relevant email content

Members Library — Webinar Replay: Top email tactics to improve relevancy and deliverability

Photo attribution: kevindean

I’m a huge skeptic by nature. Moon landing? Pshh. More like a studio production in Houston. But, Karen Rubin really won me over with this talk at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit…

Our own Adam T. Sutton recently wrote about this topic on the MarketingSherpa blog – Email Marketing: An inbound tactic?

Skeptic that I am, I had Adam thoroughly tone down that post. I did not buy into email marketing as an inbound tactic.

“Bah, all vendors just try to show how everything they could possibly make money from fits into their branded word of the day. Now get me photos of that Spiderman!” I said in my best grumpy editor voice.

But, when Karen Rubin, Product Owner, HubSpot, spoke at Email Summit 2011, she said something that really made my ears perk up (about seven minutes into the above video)…

“Those house email lists, that’s really inbound marketing. When you think about it, those are people asking to hear from you. They want to get more information. So, you’re not interrupting them when you go in their inboxes.”

Inbound & Down

So, basically there are two opposing schools of thought circling around the Interwebs right now:

• “Email is dying” and on its way down
• Email marketing, at least when done right, is really inbound marketing – a hot and growing marketing tactic

Or perhaps both are true? List buying is dying, while house lists continue to be effective?

In your experience as a professional marketer, which statement do you think is the most true:

• Email is going the way of bell bottoms and Hammer pants
• Email marketing is a form of inbound marketing – hot, profitable, muy caliente
• Email marketing isn’t one thing – list buying is dying, but house lists are as profitable as ever (Kaching!)

(We welcome you to use the comments section and tell us which of the three statements you think is the most accurate and why)

Related resources

Optimization Summit 2011 – June 1 -3

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Growing Email Lists with Social Media

The Role of Email Marketing in an Inbound Marketing World – Karen Rubin

So it’s early morning breakfast time at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas…day 2. Being the grumpy morning person I am, I’m just stumbling over to try to grab one of those tasting looking Danishes when our keynote speaker, David Meerman Scott, comes up to me very excited about a video idea, something that vaguely reminded me of the Beastie Boys.

Now, when a guy of David’s caliber has an idea, I want to hear it…and share it with you. Well, actually, let me just show you a trailer for what he came up with…

As I said when I introduced David at the Email Summit, we brought him in to help inspire marketers to take a fresh look at how they approach their marketing efforts. And kudos to David for holding himself to the same standard, breaking down the paradigm of what a professional speaker’s video could look like.

If you like the above trailer, feel free to watch the complete keynote speech, which was just released today.

As marketers, sometimes we get so tied up in a campaign mentality, a mode of working that dates back to the days of print and broadcast, of setting your marketing, days, weeks, even months ahead of time with no ability to make changes. In the age of the Internet and social media, David suggests you can no longer approach marketing in a “set it and forget it” fashion.

His keynote is a fitting example of the John Maynard Keynes quote, “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”

Related resources

MarketingSherpa MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2011 – June 1 -3

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit – March 21-22, 2011

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

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Awards

Email Marketing: Why should I help you?

We live in a global market. Gas prices in Indiana are affected by demand in China. Customer service calls from Florida are routed to India. And the New York Stock Exchange is merging with a company from Germany.

This is not the only piece of German news to cross my desk lately. We had a good group of German marketers at our Email Summit in Las Vegas. And several Germans won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award this year.

Globalization’s implications are huge and affect nearly everything. One great benefit, I’m starting to realize, is that marketers from across the globe can learn from each other (if only I could speak German!).

Check out some of these Email Marketing Awards winners from the land of lederhosen:

Bigger and better email lists

As the only entrant to win multiple awards this year, Germany-based promio.net had great insights to share. And they were not the only German winners.

Honorable Mention: Best email innovation
•    Agency: promio.net
•    Client: IDG Germany

Marketers at promio.net combined IDG’s separate subscription management pages into a single page, which increased subscriptions per user by 3%. The results show that making it easy for customers to unsubscribe does not always shrink lists — it just makes happier subscribers.

Honorable Mention: Best email integration
•    Agency: promio.net
•    Client: Nürburgring Automotive

Confronted with a list of email addresses that were gathered offline and had sat unused for months, the marketers at promio.net crafted a plan. They sent an opt-in newsletter to the old names, saw good results, and have since established a regular double-opt-in process for offline signups. Now addresses gathered offline are regularly added to Nürburgring Automotive’s database.

Silver: Best email list-growth campaign
•    Agency: rabbit eMarketing
•    Clients: Avis Autovermietung, ATOUT FRANCE

Marketers at Germany-based rabbit eMarketing designed a virtual road race from Germany to France where contestants had to recruit new players to get closer to the destination. The campaign’s viral design helped attract more contestants and boosted the clients’ lists. The campaign’s emails also had a clean look that caught the eyes of our judges (check out the awards for more details).

Insights are bilingual, I am not

As more great email marketing campaigns and examples come from across the pond, it’s important to remember that not only do we learn from our German friends, but they also learn from us.

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit is almost one month away, and I expect a fantastic give-and-take between the audience and speakers. Although differences in language separate us (and isolate me quite dramatically), we all have the same goal: to get more subscribers and clicks for our programs.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Awards

Growing Email Lists with Social Media

Marketing Intuition (Contest): Which email is more engaging?

Photo by: Digital Sextant

After squinting at my screen for weeks trying to read the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report PDF, I finally have a hard copy sitting on my desk — and it’s bursting with insight.

Having read the executive summary weeks earlier, I flipped through the chapters today and was struck by this stat:

Does your organization have a method for quantifying ROI from email marketing?

• No: 59%
• Yes: 41%

Email marketing can be amazingly efficient. B2C marketers report an average 256% ROI from the channel — pulling in $2.56 for every $1 invested — as mentioned later in the report.

What shocks me is that 59% of email marketers have not gauged their program’s efficiency. This means their company executives are likely unaware of the amazing job they’re doing. Even if executives have seen the clickthrough and conversion rates, they’re likely thinking about that line from Jerry Maguire.

Show me the money

At last week’s Email Marketing Summit, Jeanne Jennings, Independent Consultant and MarketingSherpa Trainer, shot holes in many of the excuses she’s heard for why companies can’t calculate email’s ROI.

Here are three she highlighted:

1. Our Web analytics software doesn’t provide this information
2. We can’t track online sales back to email
3. We don’t have an exact figure for costs

Taking these one at a time, Jennings noted that 1) most analytics solutions can provide the information. Google Analytics does and it’s free. 2) Setting up the tracking is simple. 3) You don’t need exact figures.

“As long as you can compare in an apples-to-apples fashion, that’s enough to get started,” Jennings said.

Judging performance by clickthrough and conversion rates is not enough — you should know the revenue generated, both on a campaign-level and a broader program-level.

Two simple calculations Jennings suggested:

• Return on investment: Net revenue / cost

• Revenue per email sent: Net revenue / # of emails sent

On a campaign-level, these metrics will reveal which campaigns pull in more money — not just more clicks. For your overall program, they quickly convey the importance of your work.

Also: The movers and shakers in your company are going to be much more impressed with figures that include dollar signs.

Show email’s potential

Another way to convince executives of email’s power is to point to success at other companies. Also at the Email Summit last week, Jeff Rohrs, VP, Marketing, ExactTarget, mentioned Groupon as a great example that email marketers could rally around.

Forbes recently dubbed the localized deal-of the-day website the fastest growing company ever, and its success is largely due to great email marketing.

The Wall Street Journal mentioned Groupon’s 50 million email subscribers as a competitive advantage and that some analysts estimate its value at $15 billion.

The executives will care

Once you can clearly attribute revenue and ROI to email, you might be surprised at how much attention you attract from company leaders.

At the Email Summit, Philippe Dore, Senior Director, Digital Marketing, ATP World Tour, presented his team’s email strategy to sell tickets to professional tennis events. A single email drove over $1 million in revenue, and several others brought in over $100,000 each.

The overall email campaign generated about $1.5 million in total. Suddenly, ATP’s executives were interested.

“We have our CMO talking about email marketing and subject lines,” Dore said.

Related resources

Email Marketing Summit 2011: 7 Takeaways to improve results

Email Marketing Awards 2011 Winners Gallery: Top campaigns and best results

Live Optimization with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin at Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

MarketingSherpa Email Essentials Workshop Training with Jeanne Jennings

Photo by: SqueakyMarmot

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

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.

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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