FREEDyourMind

Email Marketing: Best Practices

In a recent post, I mentioned that our research at ForeSee Results shows pretty convincingly that email marketing is still the most effective paid tool that online marketers have at their disposal (more effective than traditional or advertising, social media, search engine marketing, etc.)

So I thought I'd share these 11 best practices for email marketing published in iMedia by eROI's Ryan Buchanan. It's a very tactical approach and includes some sound advice. Check it out.

I'd add this to Ryan's 11th point, "Test it and Tune it..." Beyond A/B testing, you can actually use voice of customer to evaluate the success or failure of an email campaign. This type of evaluation goes beyond just the normal click through and conversion statistics, but helps you get an understanding on the longer term and broader reach impact of an email campaign.  More importantly, VOC can identify specific ways to improve email marketing so that you get better results based on what kind of behavior you're hoping to elicit. Want people to buy more as a result of emails? Visit the store? Open an account? Subscribe to a loyalty program? Voice of customer can pinpoint what kinds of changes will make those behaviors more and less likely to happen.

An example: we worked with a e-retailer who had 20 million people subscribed to their email newsletters, with above-average open rates in the range of 20-30%. They coupons in the newsletters drive millions of dollars in in-store sales, but the newsletters also included quite a bit of content that this retailer thought would be relevant to its loyal subscribers.

We segmented the newsletter subscribers into two groups: those that wanted content and those that wanted coupons. Four out of five subscribers said they visit a store because of the coupon while only two of five visited a store because of the content in the newsletters. A lot of companies would stop there and assume that resources should allocated disproportionately to coupons and away from newsletter content.

Instead, this company went further and determined that newsletter subscribers who liked content were far more likely to actually buy something. The data showed them that they needed to make content more prominent in the newsletters while also keeping the coupons. A reduced focus on content in the email marketing could have been a terrible mistake.

So make the most of email marketing. I promise it still works (for now at least!) despite the naysayers who are eager to proclaim its demise because they think everyone is on Facebook instead of on email.

Perception is Better Then Reality

I had an interesting conversation at an industry event a short while ago that is worth sharing.  To protect the innocent, let's use the name Sam.  Sam was questioning the value of voice of customer analytics.  His premise was "why do I care what they say, I care what they do.  Satisfaction, attitude and perception are soft and fluffy.  Give me hard data that I can rely on, clicks, hits, page views, conversion rates and sales."

My answer -- perception is reality, better yet, perception is better then reality.

Well, what do you think?  Which is correct?

Let's dive a little deeper.  I can understand where Sam is coming from.  Real numbers are good.  I know when I am looking at our financials I want real numbers, not opinions and perceptions.  I know when I am looking at the shrinking stock market, I want real numbers, not excuses and opinions.  So why do I want perceptions, intent, attitudes and opinions when talking about something as important as the success of my website. 

There is more to the visitor then today.  There is tomorrow - what the visitor will do in the future - will they return, recommend my site to others, will they be loyal?  There has been a lot of work done in years past on the lifetime value of a customer.  That is an important concept. 

What the visitor will do in the future is directly dependent on their perception of the experience today.

The visitor may have bought today.  But will they buy tomorrow?  If they were satisfied they will. If they were not satisfied they won't buy from you in the future - they will go elsewhere.  The visitor's perception of the experience (their satisfaction) will determine what they do in the future.  Their perception of the experience is far more important then the actual and factual experience.

KPI's Are Old School: Let's Focus on KSI's

A lot of smart, good, well-respected people talk about key performance indicators (KPI's), including Eric Peterson's excellent Big Book of KPI's. So I don't want to knock KPI's. And for a long time, KPI's have often been an excellent measure, but of performance, not necessarily success.

Maybe this is an issue of semantics, but I don't think so. I want to make a case that KPI's should be supplemented with KSI's (key SUCCESS indicators).

When you're measuring performance, you're looking at what has already happened. Things like how long it takes a page to load, how many visitors, bounce rates, search results . . . all those things reflect what has already happened.

The problem is, we measure what we know how to measure: performance. Measuring success is a much harder thing to get your mind wrapped around. Sure, you can measure sales as an indicator of success, but even that reflects what has already happened. Conversion rate is another good example that tends more towards being an indicator of success than just performance, but again is backward looking. And for that matter, conversion rate can often be a very misleading metric.  If you've ever heard me speak, you've probably heard me ask: how can you steer a car in the right direction if you're always looking in the rear-view mirror?

The bottom line is that behavioral data is backward looking. Important data, yes. Valuable data, yes. Insightful data, yes. But it doesn't help you as much as it could. The other issue is that behavioral data doesn't really measure the success of the experience and therefore the long-term value to the organization.

Satisfaction data, when measured correctly, is forward looking. Academic studies show that certain satisfaction methodologies can actually predict the future. They can tell you what your customers are likely to do tomorrow.

Some examples of KSI's: satisfaction, purchase intent, likelihood to recommend, likelihood to use the website as a primary channel, etc. In other words, KSI's = future behaviors.

Marrying Online Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Interactive Promotions

Jeff Blackman is the CFO at ForeSee Results, and will be a guest blogger at FreedYourMind. This is his first post.

Hi everyone.  My name is Jeff Blackman, and I am honored to be a guest blogger on freedyourmind.com. I’m the new CFO at ForeSee, and this is my first blog entry, so you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t use proper “blog” etiquette – if there is such a thing!  Having been associated with both ForeSee Results and with ePrize (the market leaders in online customer satisfaction and interactive promotions respectively), it strikes me that a natural synergistic relationship exists between these services.  While measuring online customer sat and engaging in online promotions are both powerful in and of themselves, the combination is truly 1+1=3.  After all – one of the primary intents of an interactive promotion is to engage your customers to increase awareness and perception of your brand.  How best to determine if the promotion is achieving these goals than through measuring a visitor’s experience via a customer sat survey that is scientific enough to be able to predict customer behavior?

For example, you may know that 200,000 consumers registered for your promotion and your goal may have been 300,000.  On the surface this appears to be disappointing – right?  Not necessarily – the real question is: Did the consumer‘s perception of your brand increase and thus are they more likely to engage with your brand in the future?  A pre and post customer sat measure would give you the answer.  The fact of the matter is that if your brand’s perception / satisfaction increased significantly with a high percentage of the 200,000 registrants the promotion was probably a winner. And you should go beyond satisfaction… the ACSI methodology that ForeSee Results uses can actually tell you if people who registered for the promotion are more or less likely to buy, be loyal, recommend you, etc.

As we all know, the goal is not just the number of registrants but the intersection between the number of qualified registrants and the (hopefully) positive impact to customer sat that you generate.  As has been proven time and time again, there is a strong link between consumer satisfaction and financial results.

Furthermore, a customer satisfaction survey coupled with an interactive promotion will allow you to gain deeper insight into your customer’s mindset.  In the attempt to keep registration pages as lean as possible to increase participation, many critical data points are understandably not collected.   Besides the core questions that are part of the model, customized survey questions can help answer questions such as where the consumer was driven from (a key stat as we all know that it is imperative to “promote” your promotion properly).  In addition you may want to know if the customers were driven by an attraction to the brand (higher quality leads) or by the incentive itself which may have attracted gamers to your site, who will puff up your number of participants but may not be likely to buy or recommend.  This information will allow you to customize your next interactive promotion – in terms of look, feel and prize, in order to drive even more participation and higher quality leads.  It is these higher quality leads which will drive your ROI (and likely allow you to lobby for an increase in your marketing budget).  While we have seen clients take advantage of the synergistic effects of these two services – all indications show that this trend will continue to increase significantly over the next year as brand managers are being asked to prove that their interactive promotions are achieving the goal of increasing awareness and perception of their brand. 

Justifying Creative Risk and Innovation with Metrics

Shane Atchison (of Zaaz) made a point in his keynote address at our True North conference that has had me thinking: you can use metrics to justify (and even encourage!) creative risks.

Creative types are sometimes the last people to want to rely on voice of customer feedback, but trust me, it can help make the business case for innovation. If, for example, you want to take some design risks or innovate a new feature or function on your site, your VOC analytics can show upper management that customer sat with those elements is low, and that changing them could have a huge impact on retention, loyalty, and purchase behavior. Then the proof will be in the pudding: make the changes and see how the numbers shift.

One of our clients, Ask.com tried their first "3D" redesign as an AB test against their existing site design. They were able to use our satisfaction data to register higher satisfaction and project higher loyalty and retention for the new design. They took it all the way to the top and used the satisfaction metrics in their business case because over the years, they've seen customer satisfaction be a leading indicator of loyalty and retention. They got approval to roll out the last design last April . . . to rave reviews. Satisfaction with their site continued to climb, validating the innovation from the site visitors' point of view.

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.