NFL.com Gets High Scores on Engaging Emails

Challenge: Email deliverability is now dependent on a sender’s ability to deliver engaging content to subscribers. Since engagement has become a key ingredient in ISP’s reputation scores, marketers need to up their game to play by the changing rules or risk poor ROI rates on campaigns.

As we reported in a previous blog, 70-75% of Email Subscribers are Inactive, marketers need to capture attention and invite engagement due to Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL now incorporating a new algorithm that includes the original guidelines for identifying SPAM, plus active engagement rates. 

While marketers are using many other forms of communication, email still continues to be a prime vehicle for customer interactions. In the Salesforce.com Exacttarget Marketing Cloud 2014 State of Marketing study that polled over 2,600 mid- to senior-level marketing managers cross all industries; 

» 67 percent of marketers say their number one priority for 2014 is to increase sales directly attributable to digital marketing campaigns,

» 64 percent are focused on increasing email click throughs and open rates.

In our ERDM Voice of Customer (VoC) research findings we learned what customers want relative to email:

»  Consumers expect companies to use their preferences to deliver increasingly personalized offers, communications, and experiences.

»  As a result of preference-based interactions, consumers are more willing to respond to communications and offers.

»  Customers look to personalized follow-up emails as value-added triggers to go online and evaluate relevant products.

»  Customers want more than just buying history-based emails.

»  Create opt-in preference databases to drive true personalization of communications and offers.

The NFL.com Newsletter, winner of the MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2013, took relevancy to a whole new level. Subscribers get real-time content about their designated favorite teams, and even receive countdowns to game time. Fans depend on these emails to stay abreast of timing for the next big kick-off.

These efforts resulted in doubled newsletter open rates and increased click through rates of 26%.

The 5 winning reasons given for choosing the NFL.com as the best in show winner were:

1. They explored new ways to engage and interact with their audience.

2. They had a goal to create email that was relevant and targeted as possible.

3. They tailored each email on a personalized level.

4. They wanted the emails to be useful.

5. They took into consideration the different vehicles that might be used to read an email and made the messages easy to navigate and easy to read.

On the NFL.com site visitors can register via a preference center to supply personalized information such as favorite team and opt-in to the newsletter.

3 Takeaways:

1. Keep in mind the new rules for email deliverability that take into consideration both recipient interaction as well as content engagement. Develop new strategies that encourage interaction through deeply personalized messaging.

2. Customers are willing to provide in-depth information in exchange for receiving value-added information. For consumers, the rationale for providing preference information is to receive increasingly relevant offers, communications, and experiences.

3. Understand how your customers read their emails—is it on a computer, tablet, or mobile device? Design emails that will enable your message to display correctly for maximum interaction opportunities.

Preference Centers: Are CMOs Overlooking Their Importance?

A good preference center is akin to a good first date. It is all about initial appropriateness, understanding, and communication. Once accomplished, you have earned the right to a second date and deeper levels of discussion.         

“Is Your Preference Center Hurting Your Customer Experience?”--the first article in this two-part series--discussed why marketing executives should be concerned about the role of preference centers in enabling their companies to capture the deep customer insights necessary to drive personalized communications.

This article focuses on recommendations from CMOs and senior execs regarding preference center functions and experiences that are critical--whether you are about to build a new center or make improvements to an existing one.

Before You Invest. . .Research When Thomson Reuters decided to build a preference center, research was its first step. “We did market research ahead of deploying our new email preference center,” said Diangelo Tyler, Thomson Reuters’ director of online marketing. “Our objective was to determine what was most important to the customer.”

Tyler offered the following tips:

• Do your homework prior to building the preference center. Refined requirements are the key to success.
• Seek answers to the tough questions.
• Keep in mind that the preference center is for the customer, and they hold the power of voice.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Opt-Outs
Tyler went on to discuss a topic noted by many of the CMOs who my company, ERDM, interviewed while preparing this article. “It’s better to be transparent and open about your intent. It was critical that we make it as quick and simple as possible for our customers to manage their preferences and [for] marketers to get access to their permissions,” he said.

Many marketers shy away from creating truly customer-focused preference centers because they fear mass opt-outs. However, giving customers the ability to provide you with their preferences regarding communications and experiences actually provides you with a powerful competitive advantage.

Per findings from our Voice of Customer Relationship (VoC) research, customers and prospects consistently stated they were willing to provide trusted brands with deeper levels of information in exchange for more personalized information and experiences.

B2B and B2C consumers cited that willingness so frequently we gave it a name: the Reciprocity of Value Equation. Following are some key VoC findings regarding Reciprocity of Value:

• Consumers recognize that to receive or access relevant information, they must provide preference information.
• If they trust the brand and receive a useful value proposition, then consumers will opt-in to sharing increasingly detailed preference information.
• Reciprocity is seen as a valuable exchange of information. This information will constantly change, grow, and be enriched through ongoing interactions with consumers.
  
• This customer-driven information exchange results in uniquely accurate databases that consistently achieve 25 percent to 50 percent increases in revenue.

“The key is to establish an ongoing dialogue with the customer. As they give personal information to you, they are building a relationship with your brand,” said Jennifer Downes, director of direct response marketing at Lenovo NA. “Critical to the learning process is the level of engagement that a customer has with your preference center. The customer must perceive value in your preference center so they proactively update their preferences as they evolve in their journey.”

Another issue marketers face in this space is compliance. “We have to comply with telemarketing regulations and the new cell phone rules, so we’ve used this opportunity to build customer preferences for phone contact,” explained Jane Bulman, VP of telesales at Comcast. “We ask them and are transparent about the benefits of future calls--special offers and notifications about new products, for example. Over 70 percent who purchased previously said, ‘Yes, contact me again.’ If we ask how customers want to be contacted--and for what purposes--we gain marketing efficiency, customers welcome the call, and we follow the law.”

Preference-Based, Not Transaction-Based, Data Is Key It is important for executives to realize that transaction-based spray-and-pray blasts are causing significant damage to their brands. Irrelevant communications are training customers to associate their e-mail and direct mail with “delete” or “throwaway” behaviors.

Per our VoC research findings, consumers believe that transaction-based data is inadequate and an inaccurate indicator of their true preferences regarding future communications they would consider relevant. They stated repeatedly that they want brands to treat them “as more than just a sale.”

Rather, they want relevant and engaging communications:

• “I want more than just buying history-based e-mail.”
• “With today’s technology, I expect the experiences and e-mail to reflect my preferences.”
• “I think being able to select just what I’m interested in would be very helpful. It would mean a lot less searching on the Web site and a lot less email I don’t usually open anyway.”

Key Takeaways

Following are recommendations regarding what you need to consider in order to develop a high-quality preference center. These were provided by Scott Frey, a preference management innovator and president and CEO of Possible Now, which provides enterprise preference management solutions.

Tip 1: Account for all of the systems currently in use to collect and store preference information from customers. There are multiple touch points--e-mail, mail, point of sale, social, and mobile--that must be taken into account to ensure the preference center is as comprehensive and effective as possible.

Tip 2: Understand the business rules and needs of the business owners. An effective preference center must take into account all of the existing business rules and needs of the business owners who are impacted by the data collected by the preference center. Bringing those parties together early and keeping them informed throughout the build of the preference center is crucial.

Tip 3: Start with the end in mind. Creating a plan for how the information collected through the preference center will impact marketing campaigns and customer correspondence assures that all of the right elements are accounted for in the preference center and provides a guideline for reporting.

Tip 4: Viewing from the customer’s perspective. Companies must think about building preference centers from the customer’s (user’s) perspective. Avoid internal language and make sure the preference choices are clear and descriptive. The content within the preference center is important to the center’s effectiveness in decreasing opt-outs and increasing opt-ins.

In conclusion, keep in mind that preference centers enable you to deliver truly personalized offers, communications, and experiences. These, in turn, will drive significant increases in response to cross-sell offers, new product introductions, and loyalty-building initiatives.

“As our markets become increasingly fragmented on interests and needs, delivering the right message at the right time in the right way will be impossible without a solid preference management practice,” said Denice Hasty, Comcast’s SVP of consumer marketing.

How Viral Emails Can Drive More Sales than Promotional Emails

The Challenge: Viral emails can often generate greater response and revenue than sales-focused emails. Following are examples and tips for sending engaging/interactive emails that do not contain sales pitches or feature products.

Airbnb Case Study

The holidays are an important time for the travel company Airbnb. They recognized that holiday greeting emails are very common and devised a unique campaign. They developed a way not just to send a holiday message, but an interactive campaign that encouraged customers to send a thank you note to travel hosts that assisted Airbnb’s travelers during the year. The email was sent with the purpose of getting the audience to engage with one another, not to drive revenue.

Response and engagement rates were very strong:

• 52.3% open rate — up from the previous average of 27% to 30% on regular marketing emails.

• 26.5% click through rate — increase over the 8% to 12% on regular marketing emails.

• The subscribers who used the tool sent an average of 7.5 emails.

• Airbnb increased sales with 600 bookings as a result of this non-promotional email.

Career Builder Case Study

Career Builder tied in a very successful viral email campaign to their widely acclaimed Super Bowl ad featuring chimpanzees performing common office duties. The campaign was named Monk-E-Mail and uses personalization to engage email subscribers and ease of use to ensure follow through of customizing and forwarding emails.

The engagement and increase in the site’s popularity as a result of the campaign was staggering:

• CareerBuilder was rated the #1 career site.

• 29 million unique users visited the site within the first four months (25% increase in traffic); more than 55 million total visitors.

• More than 150 million Monk-e-Mails have been sent and played.

• 22% of message recipients went on to send their own messages.

5 TAKEAWAYS:

1. Timing is important. Airbnb is in an industry where travel is not an everyday event; the holiday email campaign was good timing because December is a time for travel or planning future travel.

2. Personalization is key. Airbnb pre-populated the emails with each customer’s bookings from the previous year and included images of each user’s profile, making it easy to send the message.

3. Be Humorous. As CareerBuilder showed, a viral email is your chance to lose the serious sales attitude.

4. Ease of Use is essential to enable a high volume of viral actions.

5. Do Not Muddy the Message. Once you decide to go non-promotional, do not include any promotional content. Concentrate on the focus of engagement.

70-75% of Email Subscribers are Inactive: Tips for Improvements

The Challenge: Per recent guidelines, you will be penalized if your emails do not have adequate levels of deliverability and “engagement”. Consider the following options to optimize your lists to increase open rates and engagement.

New rules regarding deliverability and engagement

Per our previous blog, recently most email service providers converted to a new algorithm that calculates deliverability using a combination of the original email delivery rules plus new “engagement” factors: open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints. With these new human behaviors factored into the equation of deliverability, future emails that you send may be considered SPAM or not delivered at all, even to subscribers who signed-up to receive your emails.

70-75% of most email subscribers are inactive

List hygiene is not just about removing undeliverable emails, bounces and unsubscribes. It is also requires re-engaging inactive subscribers and the tricky task of asking subscribers if they still want to receive your emails. It’s scary to think about getting people to unsubscribe, but is necessary in today’s email climate; especially when you consider that 70 – 75% of most email subscribers are inactive. It becomes a waste of resources, money, and hurts the overall deliverability of your list.

When you remove inactives and non-responders there a number of added benefits to your email campaign. In addition to a better delivery rate, you will have lowered costs and increased ease of segmentation and analysis. Not only are you paying to send to these subscribers, you are wasting time managing a larger email list, and then you are penalized for sending too many emails that are left unopened and unengaged.

Re-engagement campaigns

Instead of just purging inactive subscribers, you should first test a re-engagement campaign. Pulling one off tactfully requires finesse. This is easier when you know your audience and run test campaigns to see which tactic performs best. Some ideas for re-engagement emails are to include catchy subject lines such as:

“Are You Breaking Up With Us?”

“Are we still friends?”

“Are You Mad at Us?

The body of the email should explain the message and provide multiple options: opt-out, and various ways to opt-in: subscribe to only some topics, adjust frequency, or connect on different platforms and social arenas.

TAKEAWAYS FOR EMAIL MARKETERS:

» Start your email relationship effectively: capture attention and invite engagement with a quality welcome series.

» Test to determine the most important areas of interest. This should drive engaging content and subject lines.

» Segment and personalize your emails so you deliver the greatest relevance to each individual subscriber.

» Analyze inactive users and begin sending re-engagement emails as soon as possible so that inactive users do not remain on your list for too long.

Spike in Email Undeliverables: 5 Tips for Increasing Delivery

The Challenge: Major email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL have implemented new algorithms for email deliverability based on “engagement”. If your emails are not triggering sufficient interaction, they are likely not to be delivered.

Recently, most email service providers have converted to a new customized algorithm that calculates deliverability using a combination of the original email delivery rules plus new “engagement” factors: open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints. With these new human behaviors factored into the equation of deliverability, future emails that you send may be considered SPAM or not delivered at all, even to subscribers who signed-up to receive your emails. Email marketing service MailChimp explains an even more damaging point “if enough recipients click the ‘spam’ button on your email, the providers assume that no one else would want that email either.” Read Google’s white paper on deliverability and the Priority Inbox.

What can you do to improve engagement? Here are 5 tactics:

1. At a minimum, follow basic list management best practices, such as keeping your list opt-in only, honor unsubscribe requests and remove undelivered emails from your list. MailChimp suggests using a double opt-in method to further improve engagement metrics.

2. Motivate new customers to engage with you. Silverpop recommends a quality welcome series.

3. The strategists at Econsultancy suggest “Combining behavioral data and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) creates Engagement-RFM (eRFM). Using this methodology can improve the accuracy of segmentation, strengthen influence and engagement, and lead to an increased ROI.”

4. Use personalization and dynamic content. Leverage this information to deploy personalized communications for significant events such as customer appreciation messages, unexpected “surprise and delight” communications, birthdays, post purchase “thank-you’s”, and dropped cart messages.

5. Reward email actions like opens, clicks, and shares. Marketing Profs highlights how companies like GameStop and Southwest Airlines are experiencing success with engagement by tracking subscriber’s interactions and awarding loyalty program points.

Key Takeaways:

1. Sending “spray and pray” emails will damage your brand, hurt your reputation, and compromise future deliverability of legitimate emails.

2. Provide value-added information. Per recent findings from recent Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm, customers are willing to provide in-depth information in exchange for receiving value-added information. For consumers, the rationale for providing preference information is to receive increasingly relevant offers, communications, and experiences.

3. Segmentation is more essential than ever. Develop increasingly specific customer and prospect segments so you can send highly targeted emails that are of interest to each recipient in your sub-segmented groups.

4 Tips for Earning Consumer Preference Data

The Challenge: Marketers everywhere are fighting an uphill battle: trying to deliver more personalized communications but lacking the accurate data to do so. Without that information marketers are still stuck sending ‘Spray and Pray’ blasts of email.

According to Toronto-based anti-spam filtering and web security services provider, Perimetic, “roughly 130 billion spam emails are sent, worldwide, per day, accounting for roughly 70% of global emailing activity.”

The goal of consumer-provided preference data is to deliver personally relevant offers, communications, and experiences. However instead of making consumers comfortable with sharing personal information, the ‘Spray and Pray’ practices of marketers have caused consumers not to trust them. This certainly applies to providing them with personal information.

Based on Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm, we have learned that there are 4 ways that brands can earn consumer preference data. These findings were consistent across B2B and B2C research.

4 Key Takeaways for Marketers:

1. Demonstrate to Consumers That You’ll Safeguard Their Information and Use it in a Responsible Way.
Successfully doing so requires that you follow two important steps:

•  One, promise consumers that you’ll safeguard their personal preferences by assuring them at each stage of the sign-up process and in all subsequent messages.

•  Two, follow through on that promise.

Violating these steps can do serious harm to brands. Conversely, demonstrating that you’re trustworthy will only help to strengthen the consumer-brand relationship.

2. Assure Consumers That “Responsible” Means That You’ll Never Rent or Sell Their Information to Third Parties.
This assurance cannot be subtle: it must be undeniable.

Email Marketing Services Provider, MailChimp, offers a great example of this. The message on their website support page is plain and unmistakable: “MailChimp does not provide, sell, share, or rent lists. Ever.”

It’s that kind of conciseness that puts consumers’ minds at ease. Do it.

3. Honor Consumer Expectations That Preference Data Will Be Used to Drive Increasingly Targeted Offers.
Aligning your brand with this expectation requires that you demonstrate your commitment to honor expectations from the outset of a relationship.

Boston Store’s Fashion and Sales News email sign-up form requests customers to provide the store with 10 essential preference criteria, thereby assuring customers that they’ll only receive relevant offers.

We applaud Boston Store for using detailed preference criteria to deliver a more personal experience.

4. Clearly Demonstrate to the Consumer That You’re Working to Provide an Improved Experience With Their Preference Information.
If value is not obvious, consumers will assume that you’ve betrayed their trust.

This expectation of relevance applies to both online and offline experiences and communications. Be sure that you’re demonstrating the value to the consumer consistently and over time. There’s a lot of bad history you need to overcome.

We urge you to test these 4 Tips. Per the experience of our clients, your customers will reward you with increased loyalty and sales.

E-Mail: 3 Best Practices for Driving Engagement

The Challenge: Email is an essential element of almost every marketer’s multi-channel mix. But, it needs to do a better job of engaging readers. Here are 3 best practices.

Per the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Council, 67% of marketers worldwide rated email as the most successful digital marketing tactic. In today’s competitive marketing arena, however, the key to that success hinges on being able to engage your customers. According to ExactTarget, engagement and customer revenue are directly connected to the relevance of your content. RealMagnet holds a similar view, stating that relevant content is fundamental when it comes to maximizing the lifetime value of your customers.

ExactTarget’s research has shown that as marketers increase the level of relevance, the potential to drive revenue increases exponentially as marketers begin to utilize more personalized, one-to-one marketing tactics. Our own Voice of Customer research indicates a similar finding; the value consumers receive in exchange for providing their information must be obvious and compelling. To overcome the legacy of receiving untargeted and irrelevant communications, consumers must see an obvious increase in relevance.

The following 3 best practices about engaging your customers via e-mail will help you deliver obvious value and relevance. Remember: if the value is not obvious, consumers will assume you have betrayed their trust and expectations.

3 Best Practices for Engaging Customers
via E-mail

1. Segment your communications.
Use every piece of relevant data you have about your customers. Their gender, job title, hobbies, interests, purchase history, browsing habits, and social media presence all provide essential insights. Use this information to create messages tailored to their daily needs and expectations.

2. Integrate your e-mail marketing and CRM (customer relationship management) systems.
Instead of spreading customer data across multiple third-party and in-house CRMs (staff-compiled databases), you should consolidate your customer data into one integrated system. Doing so makes it easier to personalize your marketing to create precise segments, acquire new leads, and nurture leads through your sales cycle.

3. Test to discover what works.
Run an A/B test each time you create a new marketing piece, so that you can maximize your level of engagement. Test various subject lines and content - such as sales copy, promotional offers, and calls-to-action - to see what performs best. Simple tests like these are easy to perform and guarantee that you’re delivering the most relevant content that you can offer. You can also give consumers the ability to hear from you through multiple channels by sporadically testing the promotion of other channels within all of your social networks.