Why this campaign is special?
Alex Volocaru | Loren, I know who you are, but for .ro I need a general bio … who you are, how you got started, why you keep making email marketing, what inspires you most, and any other bits you’d like to include.
Loren McDonald | I have been in marketing and consuting for 25 years and in the Internet space since the 1990s. I first dabbled in email marketing at USWeb/CKS in 1998 but fell in love with the medium in late 2000. What drove my excitement and passion for email was its immediacy, targeting capabilities and ability to measure a wide array of customer actions. Currently in my role as VP, Industry Relations at Silverpop, I spend a great deal of my time helping marketers see the value of email and engagement marketing techniques and how to deploy best practices. What motivates me now is helping marketers take email to the next level by integrating it with other communication channels including social media and incorporating it as a foundation in B2B lead nurturing programs.
Alex Volocaru | We know both that the email marketing has gone from a simple service a huge sphere based on strategy and loyalty. There is no development without creativity and originality, that might offer both the leader position and the newsletter spirit. The newsletter gives value and first of all must be based on that foundation of resources capable of creating a design and a clean HTML code, which is a small part of the puzzle needed for a successful identification of the message transmitted towards the subscriber.
In order to register opens, clicks, recommendations or any other statistics, it is important to keep the message and the HTML code in a clean environment that is relevant for the reader. Whenever you say „subscribe to newsletter” you must prove this through quality, knowledge and value in order to create a long term relationship and create a competitive advantage that can sent to the readers emotional messages.
What are your favorite email designs, campaigns and metrics that you enjoy speak on or create?
Loren McDonald | I’m concerned about the kinds of metrics that marketers use to measure whether an email campaign succeeded or failed. There are two basic kinds of metrics: “output” metrics, which measure whether a campaign met its business goals, and “process” metrics, which measure the mechanics of a campaign, such as the delivery rate, clicks and opens, bounces or unsubscribes.
Marketers need to stop using process metrics to measure campaign success and focus instead on output metrics, such as revenue generation, customer leads, improvement in customer satisfaction or whatever the most important business goals might be.
Process metrics do have a place in email marketing, but marketers should use them only to help guide them on ways to improve their messages, such as how to improve email rendering and click-throughs, minimize unsubscribes and improve deliverability.
I explain the problem of output versus process metrics in more detail in this Email Insider column, “Business, NOT Email, Metrics Drive and Measure Success”
On email design: People are busy. You have only a few second to capture their attention. The email industry is moving toward short-and-sweet emails that are intended to capture readers’ attention and information and drive them to the Web site for greater details.
Because image-blocking and use of preview panes are so prevalent now, you must design your emails so that readers can see your most important information, such as your brand, product information and call to action in the preview pane without images.
You can stil design with HTML, but you must place the most important information in text so it can be viewed without images on, and put your call to action in the top half of the email so readers who view only a portion of the image in the preview pane will see it.
For campaigns, I am encouraging email marketers to move away from one-off, “batch and blast” emails to lifecycle or triggered, behavior-based programs that are much more relevant to their subscribers. These kinds of campaigns deliver significantly better results and fewer spam camplaints.
Alex Volocaru | Email marketers continue to live with the myth that the bigger the list size the better, which is not true. You are agree with me on the fact that the list can be with 200 subscribers with 80% ROI increases, and you can also have 2.000 subscribers, but with 10% ROI increases? Is that worth it? If you know a similar campaign … please make a short brief.
Loren McDonald | I absolutely agree, Alex, that the industry is focused way too much on growing the size of their lists, rather than the quality of their list. For example, the size of the list is not as important as the percentage of your list that is actively engaged with your messages and acting on them. Having a million addresses on your list is great, but if only 20-30 percent are engaged (which can be typical), your focus needs to switch to re-engagement. Return on investment is higher when you retain and engage existing customers rather constantly having to replace inactive customers and spending money on acquiring new subscribers.
Alex Volocaru | At 1EEC @StephanieSAM tweeted this tip „deliverability & sender reputation are ongoing, must be monitored/managed every day.” True, but email marketers don’t know what this mean and why they need advanced features for monitoring also to have hight-performance emails.
Loren McDonald | Many email marketers blame someone else, such as an ISP or their ESP, if they have deliverability problems. The truth is that email marketers control almost all aspects of their deliverability destiny through of their email practices.
There’s no reason that marketers who are having inbox deliverability rates of 80 percent or less can’t improve their performance to 95 percent or better if they work with their service providers, follow best practices, and monitor their inbox delivery, content and possible blacklisting with a third-party service like Return Path or Pivotal Veracity.
I provide more information in this article: “Six Sigma Deliverability — Why Not 100% Delivery Rate?”
Alex Volocaru | Again, at 1EEC was a interesting debate on Single vs. Double Opt-In. I recommend Double Opt-In, wich is critical for a clean and quality list, here we need to pay more attention, agree with me? Of course, if you want a simple subscription you can use Single Opt-In, but for more safe and to develop a quality list, we need Double Opt-In.
Loren McDonald | I’m a fan of double opt-in but I also tend to agree with those who say you can’t separate your opt-in process from the “Single versus Double Opt-In” debate.
If you aren’t using prechecked boxes to collect permission and if you are a trusted brand, and you offer a clear value proposition, telling people exactly what kind of email you will send, and if you use some kind of syntax verification that can prevent incorrect or mistyped email addreses, single opt-in is probably fine.
But, if you are an aggressive emailer, acquiring addresses through third parties and using prechecked boxes and are very aggressive on acquisition, then you should use double opt-in to ensure your emails are truly wanted and to minimize spam complaints. Yes, you will have a smaller list than if you use single opt-in, but you will have a higher quality list.
Remember, too, that the spam laws in some countries require double opt-in. More information in this article: “Why Aren’t You Using Double Opt-in?”
Alex Volocaru | The Spam Filters regularly rank our reputation, email campaigns needs great PR, we have to build a long-term relationship with the subscribers, like my status on twitter (@AlexVolocaru | Email marketing is a relationship, let’s not forget this), but what you do when you have a new customer and you have to import the email list, hmm … let’s say 23,504 subscribers.
Important to know that the email list was made with a subscription form on the customer website, but with NO email confirmation, nothing. After the import process you receive a rate of 60% hard bounce, with 4xx or 5xx error messages.
Loren McDonald | Any time you import a new list, especially an offline list such as an internal company list or a group of addresses collected at a trade show or any other list of addresses that have not been opted in from a Web form, check for list quality before you upload it to your database or send email to it:
a) Scrub the list for correct syntax (the name plus the domain name in the email address).
b) Check the list against your own suppression (do-not-email) list to make sure none of the addresses was unsubscribed or associated with spam complaints.
c) Test a sampling from the list as part of a regular mailing, and monitor the activity from those addresses, looking for opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces or spam complaints.
Depending on how you gathered those names, conducting an opt-in campaign first before sending your regular messages may be the best approach.
Alex Volocaru | The most important consideration when either buying or renting a list is that all members opted in to receive communication from relevant third parties, agree with me? If members did not opt in in this manner then you run the very real risk of having emails blocked and other problems like spam complaints. What is your advice here, because in .ro is a lot of spam and marketers who don’t understand the email rules.
Loren McDonald | First, don’t ever buy a list. It’s very doubtful that the address ownany consumers aver gave such open-ended permission to receive email from any compan out there. You’re just asking for trouble via spam complaints, bounces and blacklisting.
List rental, however, when done correctly using verifiable permission, is still a viable way to build a list and acquire new customers, but you must know the brand and reputation of the company offering the list and how those addresses were gathered. I recommend working with a list broker who can vouch for the list’s quality: how long the names have been on the list, how often this list is mailed to, past performance, etc.
Also, most list owners will let you rent a portion of the list, typically a minimum of 5,000 addresses, to test its performance. This allows you to compare performance of one list to others before committing to renting the entire list.
Alex Volocaru | We know also we have Spam complaints, like your status @LorenMcDonald, wich is a direct message from ISP to us, when a subscriber click on the „Report spam” button in email. Email is a science and an art, but only when we respect our subscribers. How you describe the spam compliant when we have a active unsubscribe link in email and 5-10% of subscribers click also on „report spam”?
Loren McDonald | More than with any other marketing channel, the customer is in control of the email relationship. This is one of the great things about email. The fact that many customers will still use the spam-complaint button instead of unsubscribing from email they don’t want means that they don’t trust the sender, or the unsubscribe process, or both.
In many instances, they don’t have a strong relationship with the brand and sender. They’re feeling spammed, because they are receiving too many emails, or too many irrelevant emails. Or, the sender makes the unsubscribe link hard to find. So, it’s easier for the recipient to click the spam-complaint button. All of these factors drive the decision to complain rather than unsubscribe.
Although no marketer likes receiving spam complaints, I do believe you can use them to help improve your email program and thus reduce the number you get going forward. I explain more about that here: “Why I Love Spam Complaints (And You Should Too)”
Alex Volocaru | One of the important keys in email marketing is segmentation. If we no have data, we no have segmentation, true? We can easily customize the email content, it’s not that hard and ROI will be on the rise. The campaigns has to say more than just „click here if you want to see our newsletter” (outside of email). I wonder if marketers know this key, but they don’t realize it how important is, or?
Loren McDonald | I think most email marketers know that they need to use segmentation to see increased ROI on their email messages. A study by JupiterResearch shows that lifecycle messages deliver five times the ROI of single-message email programs, and emails trigged by clickstream activity on a Web site deliver nine times the ROI of single-message, or “batch-and-blast” campaigns.
In reality, segmentation takes more time, resources and knowledge. Also, email marketing is still delivering really good results without using segmentation, and marketers often find it’s difficult to get resources reallocated within their budgets for a more sophisticated approach.
What’s most important here is just to get started with a simple approach. Start small. For example, segment your list according to a basic factor such as gender or product interest, and send a different version of your creative copy to each segment.
If you don’t collect this information at opt-in or further along in your relationship with your customers or subscribers, you can still segment by using list factors such as age (how long the email address has been on your list) or list activity (one version to your more active subscribers, another to your inactive readers).
Again, the important thing is just to get started, to begin sending messages to smaller segments of your list and to reallocate budget resources to support segmentation. You will see greatly improved results when you do.
Alex Volocaru | Finally, how do you combine hight customer expectations with the challenges that go along with sending, delivering, and tracking emails, and when we can say „This campaign is special”?
Loren McDonald | How do you define what’s a special campaign? To me it’s not a high open rate or a high click-through rate. Instead, it’s being able to measure whether you delivered on your core business objectives such as revenues, upselling, improved customer retention or satisfaction rates, cost reduction, etc.
Putting the resources together to create world-class emails programs that engage customers and deliver a high ROI is the goal of every email marketer. There is no easy way to get there, but in fact to simply work to test, measure and improve every part of your email program. But doing so should provide great rewards to the marketer and their employer.
Loren McDonald | VP, Industry Relations at Silverpop (www.silverpop.com)
Alex Volocaru | Chief Email & Media Marketing Officer
1EEC | Email Evolution Conference 2009 defines 3 days of focused learning, networking, and exploring at the only conference for – and by – email marketers.
