Marketing with Technology and More

Email Success Secrets when Images are set to off

Send out an effective email marketing message is not as easy as it used to be.  At SubscriberMail we have just completed a survey of executives and 63% of them have images turned off as the default on their email clients.  What this means for marketers is that despite all the effort you go to in order to make the message look great in the inbox, it is often lost when it arrives.

The SubscriberMail team has learned many great ways to optimize your messages, and today we released a new whitepaper titled The Great Suppression: Five Strategies to engage audience members when images are Suppressed by Mail Clients.  You are welcome to download a complimentary copy.  As a matter of fact, you may want to check out our entire White Paper Library, filled with great email content.

The Web - Instant Market Research

I love the power of the web for feedback.  I had a community project I was involved in, and as part of that project I needed to conduct a simple survey.   Before the web, undertaking this task would have been daunting.  I would have had to print up surveys send them out (if I could afford the postage).  Then wait until the surveys were returned and then tabulate them.  If I wanted to get more details, I could get really fancy and run cross tabs. The cost of doing this kind of research was out of the scope of most community organizations (and many marketers).

Tonight, I sat down at my computer, used Zoomerang to put together a very simple survey.  I used our SubscriberMail system to send a message to the community (who had opted in to hear from us).  Literally five minutes after I launched the survey, the data started to pour in.  I can easily run cross tabs, and I can automatically send a follow-up email to anyone who has not clicked through to the survey.

As a marketer...what is not to love.

DMNews Article on Email Marketing in a Down Economy

When the economy goes South as it unfortunately appears to be doing, marketers need to scramble to get better ROI from fewer marketing investments.  I recently wrote an article for DMNews that discusses the steps smart marketers are taking now to use email marketing as a great tool as the economy tightens.  You can read the article titled "Email Marketing - A Bright Star in a Down Economy" here.

Order Takers and Realtors - Seth says Quit!

Everyone in marketing knows that Seth Godin is the father or permission marketing.  His post today takes his discussion of permission one step further.  He was speaking to a group of Realtors.  Knowing Realtor’s, I’m sure he really got there attention when he told them to “quit now.”  He’s right on the money however.  His point is that a massive swath of the Realtor world (and other worlds too) are nothing more than order takers who pass out business cards with their picture on them and wait for the phone to ring.

It is interesting when you look at markets how few Realtors ever stand out beyond the standard Real Estate magazine advert, or open house sign.  I’ve vacationed often in Maui, where Realtors are as abundant as tourists.  It is difficult for anyone to stand out above the fray, yet over the past couple of years, there is a pair of Realtors there that have caught my attention because of their outstanding use of digital marketing. 

Tom Muldoon and Sean Crowley are like everyone else on the island trying to sell a little piece of Paradise to the visitors to the 50th state.  However, they have become the property experts in an area know as Wailea.  Instead of just sending out listing, they produce full-color, digital reports with detailed market statistics, area information and resale information.  They have a blog that talka about more than how great they are with new listings.

A friend of mine owns a condo on the island, and when they decided to put it on the market, they selected Tom and Sean.  They have created a fantastic web site for the property, and are using 37Signal’s Base Camp to communicate with the owner.  Tom and Sean are definitely not Realtors that are going to be impacted by a downturn in real-estate sales like others in the market.  All they need is a SubscriberMail newsletter, and their marketing will be perfect.

Going back to Seth for a moment, he points to Daily Candy as a great model to follow if you are looking to “talk about what matters” to your audience.  See my posting about Daily Candy’s CEO Pete Sheinbaum at the EEC on how they do this.

We Can't Always Be Right

Everyone makes mistakes, it is how you handle them that is important.  One company I dealt with today did a really stellar job.  You can be the best marketer in the world, but how your company handles a problem or mistake delivers more marketing clout than anything you and the world’s best agency could put together.

The company is ProFlowers.  I started dealing with them after I received some flowers sent to me by my friend and business colleague Zane Safrit at Conference Calls Unlimited.  The flowers were so nice and well delivered that I asked him about them.  He sang the praises of their support and quality.  So I gave them a try, and have been pleased with their work. 

Last week I sent some flowers to a colleague as a thank you for something.  They were scheduled to arrive on the 19th.  Today I received an email from the company that stated:

We're writing to let you know that, due to quality control issues, the Star Struck Beauty you ordered will not be arriving on the date you requested and will instead arrive on 2/20/2008.
         
We are terribly sorry for this change. This shouldn't have happened, but it did and we take full responsibility.
               
Please let us make this right for you. Call us today at 1-800-ProFlowers (800-776-3569) or email us at wecare@proflowers.com and let us know what we can do. We will do everything in our power to make sure you're happy with your entire ProFlowers experience.
         
I want to personally assure you on behalf of the entire team here at ProFlowers that we're working to get to the root cause of these problems you experienced—and any problem that stops us from meeting your expectations.
            
When mistakes happen, it's disheartening for all of us, because it means we've let you down. And our whole goal, our entire purpose, is to serve you and help you make the special people in your life feel all the more special.
         
If you have already spoken with a customer service representative about this, disregard this email and—more importantly—rest assured that progress is already being made.
         
If there’s anything else we can do for you, please call us at 1-800-ProFlowers (800-776-3569) or email us at wecare@proflowersc.om and let us know.

Wow.  What a way to handle a problem.  Step forward, admit it and see how you can make it right.  They are only off by a day, and in this case it doesn’t matter, but if this was a birthday or something, it would be a big deal, and they let me know in time to make a change.  Great customer service…great marketing.

A World Without Email Connections

Once and a while something really strikes you about how far we have come in s short time in the web world.  Today I was doing some general cleaning and stumbled across a cache of old articles I had written.  In the early days of the web I wrote for a wide variety of national magazines (Inc. for example) to an eclectic mix of trade publications (I mean how many of you have a subscription from the National Lubricating and Grease Institute).

As I thumbed through the pile, my eyes came across an article I wrote in the summer of 1996.  I had surveyed a group of mid-sized CEO’s for a speech that I was going to give, and found that fully 72 percent of them had implemented an email system that allowed employees to communicate with each other internally.  However, only 36 percent of those systems were connected to the outside world so that email could be sent from company to company. 

For those of us who deal in the business of sending email, it is impossible to comprehend that a world existed just over a decade ago where our products would not have been able to reach a majority of the business population at work.  Does anyone remember the days when a company would have a single e-mail address (usually an AOL one), and any incoming mail would be printed out by an administrative assistant and distributed to the proper department.

Thank goodness for progress…I have to go check my email now.

A No-Tan-Line Bikini and 70 Passionate Women

What would valentines day be without some candy, but this candy is a bit different. I had an opportunity to hear Pete Sheinbaum, the CEO of Daily Candy speak at the EEC conference yesterday. For those of you not familiar with it, Daily Candy is an email newsletter that is a must-read for women (and some men) who want to be in-the-know about fashion and trends in leading cities. What makes the newsletter unique is the amazing subscriber growth and success it has experienced.

Pete gave a wonderful presentation. He shared how the newsletter got started when one of the founders heard about a no-tan-line bikini that was very cool, and sent it out to the initial 70 subscribers. In almost no time, the subscriber base grew to 35,000. There was one key to growth. Find really cool stuff, and write about it. Whether it was fashion, restaurants or food, if it was great, and you told your audience about it, they were bound to pass it along to friends, and a community formed. Not an online one, but a thriving, vibrant, real community. One where the retort, “did you read about X in Daily Candy,” is as common as “Hello.”

It is very easy to try too hard to sell online, and not realize that online media can sometimes be used much more effectively to fuel passion (and the community can then do the selling). While this is no small task, sometimes with the right combination of smarts and luck, someone really hits a home run. Daily Candy did.

Good Quality permission and relevancy - data revealed

A couple of great data points out of today’s opening keynote at the EEC. If you need more ammo on the need to build a quality email list and create campaigns with a high level of relevancy here it is.

- 80 percent of consumers make a decision about deleting a message without opening it
- 79 percent hit the delete button when they don’t know the sender
- 64 percent never even look in their bulk folder

Email Experience Conference Kicks Off

I am in San Diego at the Email Experience Conference.  This is an exciting event as it is really the first time that this organization has ever really focused any true energy on this channel.  I spoke on the first day at the Email Boot Camp with fellow email industry veteran’s Austin Bliss of FreshAddress and Karen Talevera of SynchronicityMarketing.  What was exciting about the session is that it was filled with individuals from great companies who are new to the email channel.  It reinforces what we have been saying about email marketing.  The industry is growing and the opportunity for companies that want to figure out how to use it properly are great.

The first night kicked off with a cruise of San Diego harbor.  It was the perfect way to start this conference.  Participation was great (the boat was filled to capacity), and everyone had an opportunity to mingle and network in a wonderful setting without any distractions (other than the beautiful skyline).  I have to say being out of Chicago where the windchill hit 40 below, also was an added bonus.

I’ll try to provide more updates on the conference as the week goes on.

The Power of Seven Words

Wow!  When the team at SubscriberMail assembled our latest white paper titled “The Seven Dirty Words You Shouldn’t Say in Subject Lines (Plus 100 others you shouldn’t use either)”, we had no idea they would draw the level of interest and discussion they have.

I’d like to make sure you understand what this list is (and what it is not).  The list is not (as reported by some media outlets) a list of words that will definitely get your email blocked by spam filters.  Will these words have an impact, yes.  Some spam filters examine the subject line, and these words will weigh in the scoring.  These words also should be avoided because of the potential of filtering on another level, the human one.  This is where some of the discussion about this list misses the mark.

In our experience the subject line can make or break an email campaign.  Creativity and testing are critical components to the success of an email.  While it is easy to use many of the words and phrases on the list, they could eliminate a message from connecting to the recipient on many levels, so why risk using them. 

Tom Gray who writes The Evolving Internet Marketer gets it.  His key point: never use words in your subject line that YOU would block.   

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports also is on target when he points out in his post that there is a danger in over emphasizing one aspect (subject line words in this case).  Delivery is a dynamic puzzle of interconnected pieces.  You have to address all of the issues.

Melinda Krueger, aka the “Email Diva,” states “there is far more to deliverability that the 7 dirty words would have you believe.”  I completely agree with her point that email deliverability is about many different factors.  Our white paper never mentioned deliverability.  While banning dirty words is a start, best practices require email senders to test subject lines, use dynamic content and remain relevant if they want their emails delivered.

I also agree that you should use an email service provider (ESP) to help with your deliverability.  Of course (with great bias) I think that ESP should be SubscriberMail.