February 2012 Archives

The EEC and DMA hosted a jam packed three days of learning and networking last week. There were so many industry experts and case studies, it was hard to narrow it down, but here are my top takeaways from the event.

• Your competition is everyone in the inbox: This is something we don't normally think about, but you are competing against all of the emails a person is signed up for along with emails from their friends, family and co-workers. Put yourself at your customer's keyboard and think if you would like your email. Would you open the email over everything else you have in your inbox? It is important to treat the ability to get into your customer's inbox as a privilege that you don't want to lose.
• Mobile enabled email: Don't be lazy about designing for mobile. This was a theme in multiple sessions. Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave Marketing quoted, "A machine is broken when it no longer does what it was designed to do." You need your content to be readable, clickable and relevant for the user on the go. According to Comscore, 89.6 million Americans used mobile to access email last year. In man on the street interviews showed during the conference, people stated that they delete emails that don't look good on their mobile devices.
• Focus on quality not quantity: One industry expert stated, "Email acquisition is like crack and has become a game of quantity over quality". For example, vegans will sign up for an Omaha Steaks sweepstakes to win an iPad and hit spam complaint the next day, or may stay on your list without purchasing anything, hurting your results and ROI. Plus, an iPad sweeps is going to get you big results, but unless you are Apple, it isn't necessarily aligned with your brand. We spend all this time and money acquiring email addresses and 50-60% of email lists end up being inactive. We think about sending promotions and discounts, but not the long term relationship. That all sounds negative, but Simms Jenkins is "bullish on email acquisition for the first time in ten years."
• Relevancy is key: Giving your customers choice and some control over the types of communications they receive through preference centers helps to provide additional opportunities for engagement and segmentation. Your customer will provide the information necessary to get relevant content, but make sure you don't overpromise in your preference center and ask for information you don't plan to deliver on. For example, if you ask for your customer's birthday, you need to be sure to send them a birthday email. Another surprising takeaway for me was the focus on opt down strategies. The most common reasons for attrition are frequency, relevancy and subscription choices, so giving your customers a choice can save from 15-40% of these potential unsubscribes. Relevancy is not only key for email but for all of your digital channels. Rick Heffernan from MetLife spoke with Ed Henrich of Responsys about improving your triggered emails with highly targeted display ads to the same audience, helping to reinforce your message.
• Make sure to market in your transaction emails: Transactional emails can be a big moneymaker, but are often ignored. They have a 60% open rate and simply adding a promotional message can increase revenue by 20%. Even credit card decline emails can make money because the person goes back to the site to put in the correct number and ends up buying additional items. Don't waste the email real estate you have (typically 30%) to cross-sell and upsell relevant products. Zappos and eBay do a great job in their transactional emails - this is your opportunity to promote to people that might not be opted in to your email list.
• Target your inactive audience differently: Tread lightly with your inactive audience so you don't negatively impact deliverability, and be sure to segment this audience out of your regular mailing list. Eric Kirby of Connection Engines and Haley Osher of HauteLook showed some sophisticated modeling that maximizes inactive segments by only mailing inactives who are likely to respond or buy.
• Extend your reach with social: The average Facebook user has 190 friends. If you send your email to 100,000 people and get .5% to share, you just about doubled your reach. And, don't forget that social is not just Facebook and Twitter, but includes sites like TripAdvisor and anywhere your brand or product is being discussed. Give your social followers a reason and opportunity to sign up for emails on your social sites and use your emails to add fans. But, be careful with being too promotional in social channels since people prefer to receive promotional information via email. Jessica Harley from Gilt Group said that selling on Facebook "was like trying to sell stuff to people while they are hanging out with their friends at a bar."

The Email Evolution Conference provided me with great takeaways to share with my colleagues and clients to help them become better interactive marketers. This was my first time at the EEC and definitely won't be my last.

All of the 2012 presidential candidates - including Barack Obama - are heavily into email marketing and social media. I've subscribed to most of their lists out of curiosity and received many long "letters," appeals for donations and defenses against media attacks from some candidates, with relative silence from others. While I haven't seen much in the way of email marketing innovations or engaging creative, the political email campaigns do stand out at their first step: the email signup.

Each candidate website features a prominent email signup screen, often with engaging copy. As someone who has visited the sites of scores of retail and B2B companies with the sole purpose of joining an email list (I say this as a marketer, not as a shopper), it's clear that politicians are head and shoulders above the crowd in this regard.

Some examples:



Mitt Romney offers visitors "updates from Mitt's campaign."

Rick Santorum invites us to "join the fight.

Until recently, Obama's page encouraged subscribers to join the "Truth Team," though his campaign now features a picture of his family and the question "Are you in?"









To be fair, people visiting, say, Mitt Romney's campaign page are likely more open to getting involved than say, people perusing women's clothing sites in search of the perfect cardigan. Maybe it's more appropriate to shove the email signup screen in the faces of the politically minded. On the other hand, if someone visits the Banana Republic website, it's probably because they think Banana Republic offers something that they like, and they might be interested in getting email updates. And yet I don't think we can expect shoppers to scroll down to the bottom of the homepage to enter their email address into a footer bar, especially if they aren't looking for it. I wonder how it might affect brand engagement if brands were more upfront with email and social signup opportunities. 

This post is from Rishad Tobaccowala's Reinventing Blog. Rishad is Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer of VivaKi.

As we enter 2012, here is a perspective on the five key arenas that marketers will grapple with:

Marketing as Mobilization: In a world of Twitter, Facebook, Google + and other social platforms, marketing will increasingly resemble political campaigns with Brands mobilizing and incentivizing their advocates to market to their friends and communities. They will also staff up to quickly address and limit the impact of negative streams of publicity such as complaints before they hurt the brand. The emphasis will be on marketing in real time, providing clear value and recognizing that what people say about a brand is more important than what a brand says about itself. Engaging the "peoples network" will be as, if not more critical than leveraging television, retail and other media networks. To do this many companies will recognize that the key challenge is not to develop a Facebook presence but update the corporate communications, legal and marketing infrastructure of their organizations and those of their partners.

Marketing to a New Mindset: Today, all around the world, people are not just more empowered and informed but they also are far less trusting of business and political organizations, leaders of all sorts and flatulence filled, florid, fancy marketing. They are looking for authenticity, community, value, relevance and simplicity. There is a gaping divide between the rulers and the ruled, between marketers, and customers and between the senior leaders and the rank and file. It is going to be critical to get real and stop repeating old shibboleths or behaving in ways that make so many leaders caricatures of themselves. Get real. Get great. Or you may be forced to get out. Personal re-invention is critical.

Marketing's future will be increasingly determined outside the confines of the "marketing industry": In addition to empowered customers, the biggest challenges to the status quo will continue to come from outside the marketing industry. Remember the day that meetings of industry groups were quite incestuous and closed? Those days changed as digital media eroded the differences between video, print and audio. Today, magazines and newspapers and television are all multimedia organizations broadening their competitive and opportunity set. Not so long ago "outsiders" like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Facebook became the future of the industry. We expect this trend will continue with a vengeance with Adobe, IBM and many others from the tech industry bringing forth one front while names we have never heard of from both global markets and garages will continue to press us to stop thinking narrowly and becoming more open in both mindset and partnering. It is no surprise that the International Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas next week will be as important as Cannes to the advertising industry.

Significant Restructuring of Marketing Organizations of All Types: Todays marketing organizations at clients, agencies and suppliers are struggling to cope because they lack the right talent, organizational and service/product mix that they need to compete in an age of marketing as mobilization and to an highly empowered customer with a changing mindset. Marketing will have to be world class within organizations since it will be a critical part of the future of all companies. We will begin in 2012 to see significant restructuring and blowing up of existing marketing hierarchies and leaders. It will be messy, bloody and chaotic but the future does not fit in the mindsets or containers of the past and what will need to be done will be done.

Marketing basics will grow more important: In a fragmenting and fast moving world brands will matter more since brands are the ultimate search engines and navigation lighthouses. The great ones are trust marks. Storytelling will continue to be critical and there will be new ways to not just tell stories but have others participate in the stories. Joan Didion wrote "we tell ourselves stories in order to live" and in many ways brands that are alive and vital are stories. Finally the science of marketing particularly finding the right audience in the right mindset and right context to engage in story and brand building will be even more important and fortunately we will have amazing new technologies to make it happen.

The future of marketing is very bright since it is about identifying and meeting customer requirements and in an age of empowered consumers this skill will be increasingly critical. But, for both marketing and marketers to get to the next level we will have to work hard, learn a lot and change our approaches and mindsets in ways that will truly test our mettle.

 

 

The email marketer is challenged with finding a way to stand out in a sea of competing forces daily. Over the past year, the fad of using special characters within the inbox has begun to grow. This post will talk about the pros and cons of using special characters and provide tips for writing subject lines when setting up your campaign within Responsys Interact.

 

 

Pros of Special Characters:

--    Surprise and delight within the inbox

--    Witty plays on words using special characters such as hearts (♥), stars (★), skull & crossbones
(☠) and others

--    Potential to increase unique open rates

 

Cons of Special Characters:

--    When the size of the special character decreases to fit in the subject line, the character (such as skull & crossbones) could be harder to make out than the more simple characters of hearts or stars.

--    Depending  how your users are viewing your emails (high concentration of BlackBerry) they might not see the witty play on words and will most likely see a "?" or shaded square instead.

--    Overall performance increase is yet to be proven out with the use of special characters.

--    As the fad continues to catch on, your company isn't the only one trying to stand out in the inbox and now you are competing against a new sea of special characters.

--    Overuse can begin to feel spammy and will be ignored similar to exclamation points or ALL CAPS

 

 

Considerations for Deliverability:

For those special characters Responsys has launched and tested, we have not seen any deliverability problems with the major ISPs. However, for those users on corporate accounts using Postini, the campaign did move into their SPAM / BULK folders. Responsys strongly encourages testing internally as well as using a third party (Ex: Return Path) to confirm there are no deliverability complications and to confirm a safe SpamAssassin Score. If a high viewership of users is using mobile devices, do test across each of the mobile devices as well as ISPs to ensure the special character is rendering correctly. BlackBerry, Android and iPhone users will see the special character differently from each other.

 

 

When do you use a special character?

The use of special characters should partner with a promotional campaign instead of a transactional. The promotional campaign could play off of an upcoming holiday or new product, service, or team that is being launched. The special characters can add surprise and delight when delivering positive news or rewards for the user.

 

Examples of holiday related promotions leveraging special characters:

--    Shutterfly, 2/2: Steal their ♥. Steal our savings. Get an extra 20% off Valentine's Sale

--    Lancome, 2/8: Why We ♥ Fashion Week

--    Build-A-Bear Workshop, 2/10: We ♥ savings! Up to $10 off through Valentine's Day.

--    See's, 2/12: LAST DAY! Send your ♥ with See's.

 

Examples of new product, service or team being launched:

--    Free People, 7/5/2011: Rock ★

--    Sephora, 1/30/2012: A little ♥ for you

--    Baby Gap, 2/17/2012: DVF ♥ GapKids Exclusive Collection

 

Keep in mind when using the special character that it needs to be easily read by the user. The user needs to still understand who the email is coming from, what actions they need to take, and why this campaign is important.

--    Include the special character within the first 20 characters to ensure it is being seen whether viewed on a desktop or mobile device.

--    Allow the character to be an obvious replacement of a word (star, heart, love vs. starring, loving, raining, danger).

--    The special character can be used as a design element to start and finish the subject line.

--    Avoid using the special character in place of punctuation.

 

I look forward to seeing which special characters you might begin to leverage within your upcoming campaigns. Perhaps details on Talk Like a Pirate Day (☠), St. Patrick's Day (♣) or the new release of rain apparel (☂) might be arriving in my inbox in the near future.

 

 

 

 

 

Issue:
If you code and send emails, you may have noticed that Yahoo! has been trying to help people notice links inside your email. Unfortunately, Yahoo! helps by recoloring your links and applying a hover style with background color and bottom dotted border. Chances are you didn't really want your links to be styled in such a way, and this article tells you how to avoid that behavior.

More Information:
Occasionally the Yahoo! email platform recognizes key phrases in your links. If/when it does, Yahoo! inserts a span inside of your link with a class name of yshortcuts. An attempted fix I've seen includes styling the yshortcuts class inside of a style tag. This would work if it weren't for the fact that Yahoo! renames every class you put in your style tag and in your html. This renaming ensures that your classes work consistently in your email, but it also prevents you from styling any of the Yahoo!-added classes. I've added posted a gif (woo animations ;) ) to the right that highlights parts of the code- the first and third examples color the link as it is supposed to be (red, with no underline), and the second example, using the class styling method, does not work.

Simplest Fix:
Put a span tag inside your own link. You don't need to apply any styles to it, although you can if you really want to. I suspect  this prevents Yahoo! regexes from recognizing particular keywords inside your link, but it's hard to tell what goes on inside a black box.

There's lots of buzz about building a brand relationship through the social media channel, but lately I've noticed a few brands that have been doing an exceptional job of cultivating this

relationship through their blog.

Here's a great example from Chaco, who recently dedicated an entire email to calling out one of their blog posts (see left). Chaco has covered a lot of ground with this post; they've created awareness of their repair program, which happens to be a huge incentive to buying their products, and they featured authentic, compelling stories of real customers and their connection to the brand. As an added touch, the hero of the email includes a picture submitted by their customers wearing Chaco sandals.

UPDATE: On a related branding note, you may have seen my blog post about Patagonia's sustainability campaign a few months ago. Fast Company recently ranked Patagonia 14^th on their list of "The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies" for 'Selling More by Encouraging Customers to Buy Less' and cited a 30% increase in sales in each of the past two years. Looks like maybe it pays to do the right thing.

• I like how Ballard Designs encouraged subscribers to join their social networks (including Pinterest!) with this creative, textured email -- and I LOVE the banner at the bottom asking me to add my birthday to my customer profile for a special birthday surprise!
  
  
• J.Jill suggested two casual looks for Superbowl Sunday using both the Giants and Patriots team colors. A pretty creative tie-in.
  
  
• This email from Burton does a great job of using animation to call out features of their new jacket.  Check out the email here, and the gif here.
  
  
• TO THE BATPAGE >>  This Batman promo from MSN is great!  It's eye-catching, breaks away from a traditional frame to utilize inbox space nicely, and even includes a directional line to guide your eye through the content.  Really great stuff.
  
  
• Honda sent a pre-release of their epic Ferris Bueller Superbowl commercial to subscribers a week before the big game.   And for that, I say danke schoen.
  
  
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• Pun of the month goes to Piperlime!  And this one's a twofer. 
  
  
• Lucky Jeans announced their new blog launch through a personal letter from their style director.
  
  
• This email from J.Jill does a great job of incorporating a video gif into the hero, and I also love the series of static images below that helps convey the concept for Outlook users (who can't see the gif).
  
  
• Neiman Marcus also featured a few video gifs this month, to highlight some clips from Milan Fashion Week.  In this case, the gifs really help to show the flow and movement of the fabric on the runway. Check out the email here, and the gif here.
  
  
• There's nothing worse than someone forgetting your name.  Dell's attempt to add value through personalization backfired because they didn't have my information.
  
  
• Gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches are a hot topic these days, and Crate & Barrel does a good job of serving up this cheesetastic email with a recipe and a special section for "What you need to prep this recipe."  Nice way to pull a themed email together.
  
  
• JCPenney sent this somewhat cryptic email with a lot of "NOs" and a mysterious message that "Things are changing 2.1.12." What the email is referring to is JCPenney's new marketing approach, and the blowing up of their old brand.  I'm really excited to see what these changes will mean for their email program.  [Spoiler: of their first three emails in February, two have been animated, and one is a horizontal scroller - way to come out of the gate swinging!] 
  
  
  

• "Dude food" - it's "Mantastic!" -- Some really cute copywriting in this football themed Betty Crocker email.
  
  
• West Elm did a great job of using popular bloggers to show their office furniture in real-life applications.  They used bloggers to choose gift ideas over the holiday season last year, too.
  
  
• This Harley-Davidson email includes a really neat animated gif to show all the different customization options.  See the email here, and the gif here.
  
  
• Clorox Classrooms asked subscribers to "Give us a grade!" in a survey request email.  Very cute copy.
  
  
• The Container Store made Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list, for the thirteenth time in a row - and sent a fun shout out email to celebrate.
  
  
• charity: water always does such a nice job with their newsletters, and this year-end wrap-up was no exception.  Nicely done!
  
  
• Brooks Brothers promotes their monogrammed shirts with a little presidential trivia.
  
  
  

• These boots were made for horizontal scrolling at DSW.
  
  
• Helzberg Diamonds also tried out a horizontal scroller this month - with clear arrows and a flowing ribbon image to help encourage the scroll.
  
  
• This Banana Republic email is NOT a side-scroller, but the cut-off images on the right and the arrow are reminiscent of one, indicating there's more to see.
  
  
• Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle... West Elm proves you don't always have to get complicated with animation to add a little delight. See the email here, and the animation in action here.
  
  
• If one nav is good, then FIVE is better!  Backcountry included 5 sets of winter gear links divided by outdoor conditions (and a thermometer to show the temps).  Cool way to shop.
  
  
• Ugg Australia made an interesting attempt to mobilize this recent email.  It seems what they were trying to achieve was an email that would scale nicely into an iPhone - so they created a 640px email with HUGE text and images that would scale down to the iPhone's 320px mobile screen beautifully.  Unfortunately, while the iPhone experience will be great, that's about the only advantage to this.  Android devices do not scale (and only display the first 480px of screen width) and the desktop version appears awkward this way, stretching all the way down to 2,600px in length.  A better bet for optimizing across devices would have been to design the email for 480px of width, which would still appear great on an Android and a desktop, while scaling to look fine on an iPhone as well.
  
  
• Charles David's "sale got even bigger" and so did their email - coming in at a whopping 760px wide.
  
  
• Dillards accidentally sent an email to thank me for purchasing something I did not purchase. They promptly sent out an "oopsy" email - and also replaced the image in the original email with one that said "oops! We sent you this email by mistake."  Although I appreciate their prompt recognition of the error, their oopsy is still missing a clear apology for the mistake/inconvenience.
  
  
• In what might be the most relevant email -- ever, Albertsons sent me a reminder to pick up some supplies before our big northwest snowstorm last month.  Really, so smart!  

From: ModCloth.com
Subject Line: To: You. From: Your Not-So-Secret Admirer.
Date: Sunday, January 22, 2012

I'm not one to be wooed by most lovey-dovey Valentine's Day messaging. . .but I am one to be wooed by ModCloth.com. In this email, ModCloth.com manages to participate in the red-and-pink spirit of Valentine's Day while offering a little something extra: smart copy. From the unique formatting of the subject line to the inclusive, alliterative question at the bottom - "Need prezzies for a pal or paramour?" - ModCloth.com gets flirty without losing any of their brand's clever voice.

On the heels of ranking #1 in "The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Vendors, 2012" report for the fourth consecutive time, Responsys has been named a "Strong Performer" in "The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (CCCM) 2012" report.

One of the industry's foremost independent evaluations of the leading cross-channel campaign management providers, the study looks at how vendors support traditional campaign management capabilities, as well as meet the emerging needs of marketers in cross-channel execution.

Forrester identified Responsys as "a strong choice for interactive marketers," noting "Responsys' continued growth proves that it can sustain the on-demand, interactive CCCM category it created." Forrester also predicts Responsys is "poised to disrupt the campaign management market by delivering integrated campaign execution focused on interactive customer dialogues."

• Forrester found Responsys' Interact Suite customers to be "highly pleased with the product's flexibility, personalization, integration capabilities, and ease of use."
• Responsys customers were very pleased with the company's level of account management and strategic services, citing the company is a "good partner in the evolution of marketing programs."
• Nearly all of Responsys' clients gave high marks to the application's ease of use. One client stated that with Responsys, "campaign design is awesome."
• Clients were well-pleased with the application's cost-to-value ratio. Responsys was the only vendor to achieve the highest score in the cost category (5.0/5.0).

Forrester's findings in both these reports are a strong validation of Responsys' vision and belief that every marketing organization will need an integrated cross-channel marketing platform with strong support for the key interactive channels of email, mobile, social, display, and the web, to reach consumers across the digital customer lifecycle.

Download the full report on our website here: http://responsys.com/land/forrester-cccm.php