FREEDyourMind

The Value of Customer Feedback with Email Newsletters

(note: I'd originally made this example anonymous, but changed it to make it clear I was talking about chef's.)

We all get a lot of email. A lot of spam, a lot of offers from retailers we’ve done business with before, a lot of coupons, sale reminders, and new product offerings. A member of my staff, Sarah, was telling me this morning that she just started to go a little crazy with the volume of promotional emails she was getting in her personal account. It had gotten to the point that of 100+ daily emails to her personal account, less than a dozen were from friend and family and the rest were spam or promotional emails. Usually, she just deletes all the unwanted mail in one shot without reading it, but last week she hit a breaking point and decided she would try to unsubscribe from every email newsletter as in came in, in an effort to reduce the amount of email she was getting. What can I say, she’s a little high strung, and I mean that fondly.

One of the emails she was getting was from Chef’s Catalog. She shops from Chef’s pretty regularly and almost decided to stay on the email list, but resolved to eliminate ALL promotional emails. So she clicked “unsubscribe.” First, she was taken to this screen:

Unsubscribe/Update Email Preferences Dear Subscriber: You have reached the chefscatalog.com email preferences management page. If you no longer wish to hear from us, or wish to adjust the number of emails we send you, please check the appropriate options below: Our records list your email address as: XXXX@YYY.ZZZ Too many e-mails? I would like to receive fewer emails from chefscatalog.com (to 2 times per month)   Unsubscribe I no longer wish to hear from chefscatalog.com   Change of e-mail address Share your new address with us and we'll make you stay in the loop for Chefs e-mail communications. We'll process the change immediately so you don't miss a single e-mail. Old e-mail: XXXX@YYY.ZZZ New e-mail:

 First of all, I’ve never seen a company give you the option to choose either to unsubscribe totally or to just get fewer emails. What a great idea! There could be a lot of people out there who want to have some communication with a company they like and have done business with, but just want it to be infrequent. I’d love to know from Chef’s if they have many people sign up for that option. That’s an easy, easy change e-retailers could make to their site to discourage total defection from opt-in email marketing while still providing customers with the sense that they have some control over how much email they get.

Because she works for ForeSee Results and our whole business is online customer satisfaction, Sarah was curious to see what would happen next. If she clicked the button saying she wanted fewer emails, she just got a “thank you” screen. If she clicked that she wanted to be totally unsubscribed, she got a very short survey asking for feedback on why she was unsubscribing:

THANK YOU! You have been unsubscribed from the chefscatalog.com email list. We would appreciate it if you took a moment to tell us why you no longer wish to hear from us:     I receive too many emails from chefs     I am having difficulty receiving or viewing chefs emails     I would like these emails if they were more personalized for my needs specifically     I would have liked to see more free content and/or exclusive offers in the emails     Other (Please feel free to explain below)

Not being someone who goes on “unsubscription” tears, I wouldn’t know, but Sarah said this was the only time (of maybe 50-75 unsubscriptions over the last week?) she was asked WHY she was unsubscribing. And she was unsubscribing from email newsletters from dozens of top retailers and news sites who should have pretty sophisticated approaches to retention, loyalty, and email marketing programs. Again, what a great idea to try and get some sense of why people don’t want to get the emails any more. This gives Chef’s actionable insight: if a significant number of people are hitting any of the first for radio buttons, Chef’s can make changes that might prevent further opt-outs. Why isn’t everyone doing this?

We actually did some work with Border’s (you can read the case study in STORES Magazine) to assess how useful their email newsletters were and whether coupons or content were better at driving store traffic and building long-term loyalty. So assessing email newsletters is not unprecedented, but I like the idea of assessing defectors to try and make improvements.

I guess the point is, for such a mature and developed industry, there are still clearly so many cutting edge practices when it comes to assessing online marketing initiatives. And they are easy to do and give you so much valuable info! Sarah also mentioned that probably less than 1/5 of unsubscribe screens take you back to the company’s home page, which seems like a very obvious best practice. The vast majority just take you to a screen that says you have successfully unsubscribed. Whereas, if they took you immediately back to the home page, there is at least a small chance that you would say to yourself, “Now that’s taken care of and I won’t be getting any more pesky emails . . . and oh, wow, that suede jacket sure looks nice…and it’s on sale!”

Some of our recent research shows that promotional emails are one of the most valuable sources of high-quality traffic for e-retailers. 26% of site browsers report that they came because of an email (compared to 10% from a search engine and 10% from a recommendation), and those that do come because of a promotional email are much more likely to be satisfied, likely to buy, likely to be loyal, etc. So this is a huge area of opportunity for these companies. Even small innovations, like those of Chefs, above, could translate to big numbers in sales. In fact, Sarah said she had a great experience with Chef’s website and customer service last Christmas, and the fact that they handled something so simple (opting out of email newsletters) with some regard to her satisfaction made her more likely to shop from them in the future. And this from someone who was unsubscribing from their emails! A great example of turning a potentially negative interaction into a positive one.

 

UK Puts Restrictions on WOM Marketing

Starting May 26, the U.K. is putting strict restrictions on word-of-mouth marketing and making it a criminal offense for marketers to misrepresent themselves as consumers, according to Ad Age. A new law will make it illegal for brands to seed positive messages online without making the origin of the message clear. Apparently this legislation has already been in place throughout the rest of Europe since January 1.

This is pretty interesting and pretty revolutionary. I think there would be a lot of people in jail right now or fined to the hilt if such a law were passed in the U.S.!

Word of mouth marketing has become such a difficult area to navigate precisely because so many companies participate dishonestly. Just look at reviews on Amazon.com and ask yourself how many of them are real and not from the company itself, trying to drum up support and interest.

I think usually, consumers can tell when they’re being duped, and the loss of loyalty and the backlash from being discovered is worse than any fine the government might impose. But I also think marketers get away with this A LOT of times when consumers don’t necessarily figure it out. There are ad agencies and marketing agencies that have made a name for themselves by designing and implementing campaigns that are designed to look “grassroots” and “viral.” It’s a whole industry here in the U.S.

I still think that at the end of the day, people will take advantage of any open system—it’s human nature. For now, WOM still works, and as a result, it’s valuable. As long as WOM recommendations are a valuable commodity, there will be people manipulating it for their own means, just like everything else in human history.

Measuring Word of Mouth

I have a longer version of the article on measuring Word of Mouth that I wrote for DM News available if this is a topic of interest to you. We had to cut the one that appeared in print a bit for space reasons. Just shoot me an email or leave a comment and I'll send it to you. It should also be available soon on our website.

ACSI Results Released Today

Wow, a USA Today article about today’s ACSI report shows that customer satisfaction with airlines is at its lowest level since 2001. Of course, if you have flown anywhere recently, that probably doesn’t surprise you. Our local Detroit carrier, Northwest, dropped 6.6% this year!

Today’s ACSI scores also reported on hotels, restaurants (full-service and fast food), cable and satellite, telecom, utilities, and healthcare. These are all offline scores, but the web can have a huge impact on offline behaviors, and the web is what we focus on. In fact, we see that usually websites have higher customer sat than call centers and brick and mortar locations because they are convenient and the service quality is more consistent. So if you’re in one of these perennially low-scoring industries (airlines, cable, satellite, etc), you could be well-served to monitor customer sat on your website just so you can show management how much better the online channel performs. It can be a great way to justify investment in your website and to show the value of what you and your team are providing to overall operations.

Netflix Retains Top E-Retailer Title

We've been measuring satisfaction with the top e-retailers for four years now (as defined by Internet Retailer's top 500 Guide). We did the top 40 for two years, and due to popular demand, we increased that to the Top 100 last year.

So, just in case we weren't busy enough hosting our annual user conference this week, we thought it would be fun to also release the Top 100 today (actually, it was timed to be in conjunction with the release of Internet Retailer's Top 500).

Satisfaction with e-retail overall is up 1.4% to 75 (we used the ACSI methodology and its 100-point scale to do the research, as always). 45 of the 100 sites have higher scores this year (many with huge year-over-year increases) and 17 had lower scores.

Other interesting findings:

• Netflix (86), QVC.com (84), and Amazon (83) hold the top three spots for the fourth year in a row. Netflix has been #1 for four years in a row, and QVC and Amazon have traded back and forth between the #2 and #3 spots. But the consistency of these top sites is amazing-they are setting the standards and expectations for sites across industries.

• Online satisfaction (as measured by ACSI) drives loyalty and sales: highly satisfied online shoppers are 69% more likely to purchase from the retailer next time they're in the market for similar merchandise, 75% more likely to purchase online, 42% more likely purchase offline, and 75% more likely to recommend the retailer. How's that for proof to management that customer satisfaction is a key indicator of online success?

Download the report (for free!) to see who comes out on top in individual head-to-head matchups: Apple vs. HP vs. Gateway; Best Buy vs. Circuit City; Home Depot vs, Lowe's; Nordstrom vs. Neiman Marcus vs. Saks; LLBean vs. Coldwater Creek vs. JCrew; Drugstore.com vs. CVS vs. Walgreens; Netflix vs. Blockbuster; etc. There are 100 of them rated, after all. Almost all of the major e-retailer categories are represented. So check it out if your company is on the list or if you want to benchmark against these top-selling e-retailers. You can also read about it in Computerworld, ClickZ, and Network World, among other places. We have free reports available on the Top 100 overall, along with special reports on apparel/accessories e-retailers and computers/electronics e-retailers.

True North: Day 2

I have a million things I want to blog about after sitting in on these two days of sessions with clients. I'm not so good at the "live blogging" thing, but a quick recap of Day 2, in the meantime:

We had a great session on how to keep management's attention on the customer and on satisfaction metrics, with insights from Bert DuMars, from Newell Rubbermaid, Jack Dunlavery from Citi Credit Cards, Kevin Ertell from Borders, and Pam Hedman from St. John Health. (If any of you other than Bert have a blog, let me know so I can link to you!). These folks had some great ideas on how to do this . . . my favorite was termed "infiltrating minds," and I'll have to do a separate post on that one!

Next up was a great case study from Bruce Rogers at Forbes on how they used a Usability Audit to fine-tune performance of their luxury travel site. It takes a brave man to let Jennifer Bailey, our lead on usability, air his "usability violations" for the greater good and education. A few people told me this was one of their favorite sessions because they saw how actionable the usability audit can be.

We closed the morning with a great case study from Maryssa Miller at Lacoste, who showed why customer satisfaction is just as important, if not more so, for a luxury brand whose customers may have even higher expectations of the online experience. She showed us how some very, very simple insights into what their customers want and expect has had a big impact.

I told my marketing team this morning--this conference was so great that I think we should do one again next month! They shot me a dirty look for that one, but truly, we all had a really good time and hopefully learned a lot from each other.

True North: Day 1

I don't have much time before heading off to Day 2 of our user conference, True North, but wanted to get in a quick word about Day 1. We have a great turnout, and I always love meeting our clients and hearing what's on their minds, how they use our data, and what they think we could or should be doing differently. We've gotten some great ideas in the past by listening to what our customers need.

Our keynote yesterday was Shane Atchison from Zaaz, who talked about all the cutting-edge ways that companies can marry analytics and creative to get the best end result. The refrain was optimize, optimize, optimize.

David VanAmburg showed us why customer satisfaction is especially important when the economy is faltering . . . research from Michigan actually shows that customers will spend money with companies that satisfy them whether or not they have it!

The panel on customer-guided site redesign was great, and our user-panels always generate the most discussion and questions. While I'm sure everyone loves to hear what we think about customer satisfaction, they really get the most from their peers. Matt Cardwell from Quicken Loans, John Fitzgerald from Automotive News, and Paul Iagnocco from Kellogg shared details of how they used our data to inform major changes. I had heard some of those details but not all of them.

After lunch, Carla Borsoi from Ask.com did a case study about how Ask used satisfaction data to guide a major relaunch, and she shared some insights about how U.S. and U.K. searches and searchers differ.

We did a benchmarking panel including Harvey Tzucker from CMS talking about rewarding affiliate sites based on c-sat scores.

That afternoon, there were sessions on the link between customer sat and financials, how to get management buy-in, the ACSI methodology, and multi-channel measurement strategies, all of which I plan to be blogging about in more depth in the near future. And I want to write more about the insights each of these speakers shared, but I am late to breakfast...more later...

True North: Next Week

Well folks, we’re gearing up for our second user group, to be held next week in Ann Arbor. We called it: True North: Charting a Customer- Centric Course to Online Success. It will be two days of case studies, practical advice, panel discussions, and expert insights about how to use voice of customer to guide a successful e-business strategy. Our keynote is Shane Atchison, co-founder of Zazz and co-author of Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smarter Business Decisions.

We have a great line up of speakers and panelists, including:

• American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) – David Van Amburg, Managing Director

• Ask.com - Carla Borsoi, VP of Research and Analytics

• Automotive News - John Fitzgerald

• Borders – Kevin Ertell, VP of E-Commerce

• Forbes.com – Bruce Rogers, Vice President of Marketing

• Kellogg Company – Paul Iagnocco, Director, Ebusiness

• Quicken Loans – Matt Cardwell, Website Marketing Director

• ForeSee Results - Russ Merz, PhD, Research Director

• St. John Health System –  Pam Hedman, Interactive Marketing Manager

I don’t know how much time I’ll have for blogging, but I’ll definitely try to check in. These conferences are useful to our clients because they get to share best practices and see how others are implementing change, but it’s useful for me, too, to hear what’s on clients’ minds and what’s keeping them up at night.

Hope to see you next week in Ann Arbor!

Web Analytics Wednesday . . . on Tuesday

It was great to be able to participate in and help sponsor the Web Analytics Wednesday gathering in San Francisco during the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.  Eric Peterson along with others pulled off the largest Web Analytics Wednesday in history...and it was held on a Tuesday!  Just goes to show you what an open bar can do!  There was great conversation and some fun!

Takeaways from eMetrics San Francisco

Just back last night from the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco. I had the honor of speaking after Tom Davenport; celebrated author of Competing on Analytics: the New Science of Winning.  Tom's presentation was excellent and gave the conference a great foundation and focus.  Tom did a good job of explaining the potential competitive advantage that can be gained by using analytics in both your strategic and tactical decisions, with great examples from companies like Netflix; Harrahs and even the Boston Red Sox.

This year's summit centered on bringing multiple metrics together, including customer satisfaction/voice of customer.  It reminded me of the early days at the eMetrics conferences where the focus was almost exclusively on clickstream analytics.  It is great to see the industry moving forward and as a result providing better insight.  If you haven't checked it out yet, there is a great white paper on the web metric ecosystem by Eric Peterson.  You can get a copy here.

Congratulations to Jim Sterne for once again putting on a great event that not only helps educate the newcomers to the web analytics/metrics world, but also provides a great forum for those of us that have been around this industry for a while.