Engagement dynamics for e-marketing show both promise and pitfalls.

December 1, 2018 Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research, Sales e-Mail Engagement, E-Mail Marketing, e-Marketing, Opt-In E-mail, Return Path

Getting opt-in permission from customers and prospects to receive future e-mail communications might be considered the holy grail of marketing. When granted e-mail access, companies can pinpoint-target their communications to a quality audience at a small fraction of the cost of other marketing tactics.

So, an important function of most marketing departments is to build a robust opt-in e-mail database – the more names the better – to receive future e-communications.

But a recent study by e-mail deliverability specialist Return Path on the dynamics of new subscriber engagement shows that the early days of e-mail engagement can be fraught with peril.

To collect its findings, Return Path analyzed nearly 1,400 brands that use its proprietary consumer network data for Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL subscribers, then published the results in its Lifecycle Benchmark report.

To begin with, Return Path found that fewer than half of new e-mail subscribers provide an active e-address when opting in to receive communications. The remainder provide an address that is either inactive, or rarely checked.

What this means is that fewer than half of all new signups are destined to interact with any future e-communications.

Another key finding from the Return Path study is that the complaint rate is high in the first days following the opt-in to receive communications. The complaint rate averages ~4% during the first month, although this figure falls to 1% during the first year. (Complaint rates for “mature” opt-in names are far lower – averaging less than 0.2% overall.)

More positively, Return Path’s research found that average first-touch read rates are significantly higher among new opt-in contacts: ~39% initially and ~35% over the first 20 days. That compares to an overall read rate average of just ~22%.

As for longer-term experience, the Return Path findings show that ~56% of new opt-ins stay for 12 months rather than unsubscribing. Moreover, ~31% of the new opt-ins continue to engage with the e-communications after the first year.

So, a mixed bag of results – ones that show both promise and pitfalls. To access more findings from Return Path’s research, click here to request a report summary.

“Same old, same old”: Retailers are sending the same e-mails to the same people.

October 28, 2018 Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales e-Marketing, Gartner, Online Retail, Retail, Retargeting

As with so many aspects of marketing these days, data segmentation is key to the success of retailers’ sales efforts.

E-marketing may well be the most cost-effective method for reaching customers and driving business, but a recent analysis by Gartner of retail e-marketing activities shows that many retailers are employing tactics that are neither well-targeted … nor particularly compelling.

The Gartner analysis was performed earlier this year and published in a report titled Discount Emails — The New Playbook. The analysis covered more than 98,000 e-mail campaigns conducted by 100 national retail brands.

Trumpeting discounts is one of the oldest tactics in marketing, of course, so it comes as little surprise that those sales messages are pervasive in e-marketing as well.

In fact, Gartner finds that more than half of all e-mail campaigns by retailers feature discounts in their subject lines. Those discount messages are typically sent to nearly 40% of the retailers’ e-mail list — meaning that discount messaging targets broad segments of customers.

Gartner finds that those discount offers generate a ~16% open rate, on average.

Contrast this with retargeting and remarketing e-mails. They make up a much smaller fraction of the e-mail volume, but pull much higher open rates (around 31%). Abandoned shopping cart e-mails generate an even higher average open rate of 32%.

“Welcome” e-mails tend to do well, too — in the 25% to 30% open rate range.

Gartner’s conclusion is as follows:

“Brands that employ less frequent, but timely, relevant e-mails triggered by customer site engagement or transaction outperform their peers.”

Gartner also found that the average national retail brand has more than 25% of its e-mail database overlapping with other national retailer e-lists, making it even more important for brands to differentiate the language of their e-mail subject lines and to engage in more data-driven e-mail targeting in order for their marketing to stand out from the pack.

Let’s see if the national retail brands get better at this over the coming year.

Changing Cross-Currents in E-Mail Marketing

January 4, 2018 Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Sales Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Mix, E-Mail Marketing, e-Marketing, marketing

Many marketers find it one of the easiest marketing tactics to execute … but also one of the least effective in terms of results.

In the realm of digital marketing, e-mail marketing has to be one of the most mature choices of tactics these days. It’s been around for a long time, and its relatively small hard-dollar costs make it one a natural “go-to” marketing tactic for many companies.

But today, a declining percentage of marketers see e-mail as one of their most effective tactics in the digital marketing arsenal.

So, what’s the problem? Many companies have the technology and skills in place to perform e-mail programs using in-house resources. That’s the good news.

The not-so-good news is that more companies are seeing their e-mail programs becoming less effective — for a variety of reasons. Among them are these:

E-mail filtering technology is making it more difficult to land e-mails into inboxes.
Privacy regulations are becoming more stringent.
Overuse of this marketing tactic means more e-mail messages than ever from more companies are being deployed – and with that, more of them are being ignored by recipients.
While e-mail used to be the only digital direct marketing game in town, today there are a bigger variety of ways to engage with customers and prospects.
Building a high-performing e-mail list that also conforms to regulatory stipulations is more challenging than ever.

This last point is particularly nettlesome for marketers: Data quality and data management are considered among the most difficult challenges for marketers – and also among the least effective in terms of their success.

So, in some ways the factors affecting the use of e-mail marketing are working at cross-purposes. E-mail marketing is easier to execute than other digital marketing endeavors … but as for its effectiveness, many marketers rate other tactics higher, including content marketing and search engine optimization.

In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how attitudes and behaviors regarding e-mail continue to evolve. Will this time-honored tactic decline in importance, or find new life? Stay tuned …

Tripping the E-Mail Spam Alarm

March 29, 2015March 30, 2015 Phillip Nones Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Creative and Production, Direct Marketing, Marketing Communications, Social Commentary Direct Marketing, E-Mail Marketing, E-Mail Spam, e-Marketing, MailJet, Marcomm, marketing, marketing communications, Spam, Spam Alarm, Spam Alerts

Today, it’s more than just the “usual suspect” keywords that are landing e-mails in the junk folder.

Most of us are aware of the kinds of words that trip spam alarms and cause e-mails to be sent straight to the junk folder – or not to be delivered at all.

How about these for starters:

Cash
Congratulations
Discount
Free
Income
Make Money
Urgent
Viagra
$$ / $$$

But research done by MailJet, an international e-mail service provider, looked at more than 14 billion e-mail communiqués and found that a bunch of other keywords are setting off alarm bells nearly as often as terms like “Urgent” or “Viagra.”

… Especially when considering the business categories that are so active in e-mail communications — retail goods, pharmaceuticals, providers of personal services, and the like.

Some of the other terms MailJet has found to be nearly as “toxic” are these:

Dear Friend
FedEx
Increase Sales
Increase Traffic
Internet Marketing
Invoice
Lead Generation
Lose Weight
Marketing Solutions
Online Degree
Online Pharmacy
Order
PayPal
Search Engine Optimization
Sign Up
Trial Offer
Visa/Mastercard
Winning

… And there are more, of course – including various permutations of the words and phrases above.

The inevitable conclusion: It’s becoming more difficult all the time to use the most common phrases in “subject” lines and “from” lines that’ll land your e-mail in someone’s inbox successfully.

And getting into the inbox just the first step, of course. The next is motivating the recipient to actually open your e-mail and engage with it, which are additional hurdles in themselves.

What words or phrases have you found to be surprisingly problematic in getting your e-mails delivered to your customers’ inboxes? How have you dealt with it? Please share your experiences with other readers here.

Cue up the e-mail Rogues’ Gallery: Here’s what people are purging from their inboxes.

January 22, 2014January 22, 2014 Phillip Nones Advertising, Branding, Business, Marketing Communications, Social Commentary, Uncategorized Advertising, Business, E-Mail Marketing, e-Marketing, marketing, Nones, Unroll.me, Unsubscribe Rates

Anyone who’s had an e-mail account for any length of time likely faces ever-increasing inbox volumes.

And trying to keep those groaning inboxes in check can be a never-ending task. Now a recent report gives us clues as to what e-mails are being purged most frequently by recipients.

It’s been released by Unroll.Me, a service that scans users’ e-mail accounts for all of the lists to which they are subscribed — knowingly or not. It then gives people the opportunity to unsubscribe, or to consolidate groups of e-mails into a single regular update.

It turns out, many people are unwittingly “subscribed” to receive e-mails from vendors based on something as benign as making a single online purchase. So Unroll.Me finds a substantial incidence of people taking unsubscribe actions when given the chance.

Unroll.Me’s report claims that it prevented more than 1 billion e-mails, offers and updates from reaching inboxes last year via its service.

Of particular interest than the overall volume is the list of e-marketers that have been dissed the most by customers.

Leading the list is 1-800-Flowers. A whopping ~53% of Unroll.Me users had those e-mails stopped during 2013.

[A personal note about 1-800-Flowers: Over the past five years, our family has used this service to order flowers twice a year (Christmas and birthday) to exactly one person. For those twice-a-year transactions, I estimate conservatively that we receive more than 200 e-mail solicitations each year — most with breathless offers promising deep discounts on orders. Do those offers make us more inclined to purchase from them? Hardly.]

According ton Unroll.Me, other e-marketers that experienced high unsubscribe rates in 2013 include:

Ticketweb: ~48% unsubscribe rate
ProFlowers: ~45%
Expedia: ~45%
Active.com: ~45%
Oriental Trading: ~44%

At the other end of the scale are companies and services that remain subscribed to by two-thirds or more of those who received their e-mails.

This “Star Gallery” is made up of Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. What these e-mailers share in common is that they are social platforms, with engagement and interest levels higher because of the topics involved (friends, acquaintances, contacts and shared interests).

In other words, it’s the people they know, not the things companies want to sell them.

Now, back to the purging …

Sometimes “permission slips” aren’t enough when it comes to e-mail deliverability.

March 28, 2012 Phillip Nones Uncategorized B-to-B Marketing, Direct Marketing, E-Mail Deliverability, E-Mail Marketing, e-Marketing, Junk Mail, marketing, Nones Notes, Phillip Nones, Return Path, Spam Filtering

In case you’ve been wondering how much marketing e-mail actually reaches its intended targets, a recently released benchmark report from e-mail scoring and certification services provider Return Path has some answers. It finds that only about 75% of “permissioned” e-mails are actually making their way through.

That means one in every four e-mails are either hitting a spam or junk folder, or are being blocked by ISP-level filtering.

The report was based on analysis of data from Return Path’s Mailbox Monitor service, which tracks the delivery, filtering and blocking rates for more than 600,000 e-mail campaigns.

Interestingly, the delivery stats for business-to-business marketing e-mail aren’t much lower than for business-to-consumer e-mail. This was considered somewhat surprising because of company-level filtering systems like Postini, MessageLabs and Symantec that are installed at many large corporations. Presumably, they do a more thorough job of filtering e-correspondence.

The Return Path report also included a few cautionary notes for marketers:

 Many e-mailers believe that whatever gets deployed and doesn’t bounce must be reaching inboxes. But senders are notified only when the e-mail is a hard bounce – not if it has ended up in a spam or junk folder.

 Relying on rented e-mail files in the B-to-B world can be dangerous, as those files can be riddled with spam traps. Commercial entities are always on the search for new prospects and leads … but merging a good in-house list with a few of these bad boy rental lists can result in compromising the entire database.

 In the consumer sector, many marketers aren’t paying close enough attention to inbox placement rates. For example, data about Gmail shows that while many marketers are ostensibly achieving a 90%+ deliverability rate, fewer than one in five of those emails are actually being directed to the “priority” inboxes within Gmail as designated by the recipients. And you can bet that precious few of the other ~80% are getting any sort of attention at all from consumers.

More details about the Return Path report can be found here – well-worth checking out.

Personalized e-mail campaigns? Nothing personal … but it’s not that important.

September 13, 2011 Phillip Nones Uncategorized Advertising, Business, Direct Marketing, e-Mail Metrics, e-Mail Personalization, e-Marketing, marketing, News, Thoughts

It’s been a nagging question about direct marketing for years now: To what degree does personalizing a mass marketing program improve audience engagement and action?

Back in the old days, personalization was difficult to pull off, because the limitations of printing meant that the way people’s names were inserted into letters looked awkward and even jarring – different typeface, different ink concentration, etc.

Instead of creating a positive impact that suggested a personal relationship with the recipient, the effect was often just the opposite: the ill-fitting interpolations screaming “mass mailer.”

Today, with so many marketers targeting consumers electronically versus via postal mail, personalization has become a common technique used for the same purpose: to draw the reader’s attention by making the e-communiqué “unique” to him or her. Plus, it’s much easier to accomplish.

But how is this working out in the digital age? The latest e-mail marketing metrics report from email marketing and newsletter services provider MailerMailer, LLC, issued in July 2011, uses data compiled from more than 977 million opt-in e-mail newsletters in a sampling of over 1,600 customers. It found that adding the recipient’s first or last name to the subject line of an e-mail often generates negative, not positive results.

On the other hand, personalization within the message portion of the e-mail makes it a tad more likely to lead the recipient to interact with the message.

Here are the open rates MailerMailer found based on the degree of personalization:

 Subject line personalized: 4.1% open rate
 Both subject line and message personalized: 4.6% open rate
 Message personalized: 12.6% open rate
 No personalization at all: 11.4% open rate

[MailerMailer claims that personalized subject lines perform less favorably because this has been such a common tactic used by spammers in recent years. I claims the method has been so overused, recipients now associate all such e-mails as spam.]

And what about clickthrough rates — the more important metric? MailerMailer’s findings track neatly with the open rate trends, as follows:

 Subject line personalized: 0.8% clickthrough rate
 Both subject line and message personalized: 1.1% clickthrough rate
 Message personalized: 3.0% clickthrough rate
 No personalization at all: 3.0% clickthrough rate

So another thing the MailerMailer report is telling us is that the effort to personalize e-mails may not be worth it in the end. It’s true that a slightly higher open rate may occur with personalized message content … but the clickthrough rate, which is the more important metric, doesn’t budge at all with personalization versus without it.

So it would seem that personalizing e-mails isn’t something that’s going to “make or break” your direct marketing campaign’s success rate. Better to focus on the other classic success factors: the message, the offer, and the target recipients list. You know … just like always.

E-mail early birds? The worm may be turning differently.

April 5, 2011April 5, 2011 Phillip Nones Uncategorized Advertising, B-to-B, B-to-B Advertising, B-to-B Marketing, BtoB, BtoB Marketing, Business, Business-to-Business, Clickthrough Rates, Consumer Advertising, Consumer Marketing, E-Advertising, E-Commerce, E-Communications, e-mail, E-Mail Marketing, e-Marketing, E-Sales, John Murphy, marketing, News, Nones, Nones Notes, NonesNotes, Online Marketing, Open Rates, Phillip Nones, ReachMail, Thoughts

One of the great benefits of the “online everything” world in which we now live is the ability to evaluate nearly anything about marketing not with hunches or speculation, but with hard data.

A perennial question is what time of day is best to deploy marketing e-mails to customers and prospects. The higher the propensity to open and read these messages, you’re closer to the goal of converting eyeballs to clickthroughs … and to sales.

ReachMail, a Chicago-based e-mail service provider, recently studied a large sampling (~650,000) of the millions of consumer and business marketing e-mail messages it sends out for clients daily in order to determine open rate differences based on the time of day. It normalized the data to account for different time zones.

What ReachMail found was that there are differing peak open rate times on weekends versus on weekdays:

 Weekdays: Peak e-mail open rates are between ~11:30 am and ~2:00 pm.

 Weekends: E-mail open rates begin trending upward at ~11:30 am, but don’t peak until ~4:00 pm.

John Murphy, ReachMail’s president, had this to say about people’s weekday e-mail open rate behaviors: “You would think it would spike in the morning, but they’re looking at work e-mails in the morning. Once they’ve cleared out their inbox, they’re looking at marketing e-mails in the afternoon.”

ReachMail’s conclusion: It’s best to deploy weekday e-mails between 10:00 am and Noon. For weekend e-mails, deploy them between Noon and 3:00 pm.

And this additional tidbit also: Don’t assume e-mails sent during the week will perform better than those deployed over the weekend. “People’s engagement rates are up there on the weekend,” Murphy maintains. “It’s our habit of checking e-mail all the time.”

He’s sure right about that.

Changing the Subject (Line)

August 23, 2010 Phillip Nones Uncategorized Advertising, Business, Communications, Direct Mail, Direct Mail Marketing, Direct Marketing, e-mail, E-Mail Marketing, E-Mail Marketing Metrics, e-Marketing, MailerMailer, Marcom, Marcomm, marketing, marketing communications, Marketing Metrics, Media, News, Nones, Nones Notes, NonesNotes, Phillip Nones, Promotion, Technology, Thoughts

One of the reasons e-mail marketing has become so huge is because it’s so darned cheap. Compared to postal mail, e-mail costs just pennies. That means most marketers can achieve a better ROI for just a mediocre e-mail campaign compared to even the most successful direct mail effort.

However, a common complaint about e-mail versus postal mail is visibility. Since most viewers choose not to have their preview pane feature turned on, they must physically open an e-mail before they can view any of its contents.

This “one-step removed” dynamic means that many people never get to see and read a marketing message that would otherwise stand out if it showed up in someone’s postal mail delivery as a postcard or self-mailer promo piece.

In this scenario, the e-mail subject line becomes a huge “gatekeeper” element. What the subject says and how it’s said can make a difference in e-mail open and clickthrough rates. But just how much?

A new E-mail Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, a firm providing e-mail marketing and newsletter services, provides some interesting clues. MailerMailer has been producing these reports since 2003. This report, the tenth one issued, was developed by analyzing a sampling of ~900 million e-mail messages sent through MailerMailer throughout the year 2009.

Among the elements tracked were the words used in e-mail subject lines. MailerMailer found that the most popular terms contained in the subject lines were:

 Coupons
 Daily
 Free
 News
 Newsletter
 Report
 Today
 Update
 Week (weekly)
 Year

Notice how each of these terms conveys a sense of WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and/or a sense of time sensitivity. Interestingly, despite a prevailing concern that using the word “free” in the subject line risks more spam filtering, MailerMailer found that this term was one of the ten most popular terms used in subject lines during 2009.

And what about subject line length? The report found that shorter subject lines (containing less than 35 characters) outperformed longer ones. That’s generally just four or five words along with the corresponding spaces between them.

And the difference MailerMailer observed was significant: E-mails with shorter subject lines experienced an average open rate of ~17.5%, while those with longer subject lines had an open rate of only ~11.5%.

The same differential was found with clickthrough rates. For the e-mails with shorter subject lines the average clickthrough rate was ~2.7% … versus ~1.6% for e-mails with longer subject lines.

The MailerMailer report concludes that while composing shorter subject lines may be difficult to do (well), going through that exercise is well worth the extra effort. The results from ~900 million e-mails prove it.

How the B-to-B Sales Process is Changing

August 15, 2010September 1, 2010 Phillip Nones Uncategorized Adam Needles, B-to-B, B-to-B Communications, B-to-B Sales, Blogosphere, Blogs, Business, Business-to-Business, Business-to-Business Communications, Business-to-Business Sales, CBD, Colman Brohan Davis, Commercial Marketing, Commercial Sales, Communications, Digital Marketing, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, e-Marketing, e-Research for Marketing, E-RM, Industrial Marketing, Industrial Sales, marketing communications, Media, News, Nones, Nones Notes, NonesNotes, Offline Communications, Online Communications, Phillip Nones, Sales, Silverpop, Technology, Thoughts, Twitter

In my 20+ years in industrial, commercial and other non-consumer marketing communications, I’ve witnessed more than a few “big trends” affecting the nature of the selling process in the business realm.

One of the biggest of these is the approach that customers take when evaluating products and services they might be interested in purchasing. Recent research findings about these behaviors has been published that sheds more interesting light on where things are at the moment.

A survey of ~300 B-to-B managers was conducted in late 2009 by e-Research for Marketing (E-RM) for Colman Brohan Davis, a Chicago-based marketing organization. This survey, which was limited to respondents age 35 or younger, found that only a few of the 13 tools used to research products and services represented “traditional media” – print-based resources, trade shows, or consulting with industry colleagues by phone or in person.

Furthermore, the study found that even these four tactics are losing their importance compared to the use of online social networks, which were exploding in usage.

These survey results reminded me of a comment made by Adam Needles, director of B-to-B field marketing at Silverpop, an e-mail marketing company based in Atlanta. “Somewhere around age 30 to 35, you can draw a line in the sand between people who are used to calling around to get everything and [where it’s been] all about relationships face-to-face.”

In contrast, Needles has this to say about younger staffers who conduct a great deal of the buying cycle online: “You have people whose expectation is that companies should put everything on their web sites; they should be getting real-time feeds and information, and companies should be totally integrated into … the blogosphere.”

Younger staffers tend to be influencers more than decision-makers. But this is not to diminish their importance, as they are the ones charged with conducting the research and drafting investigative report summaries and preliminary recommendations. Ferreting out information through resources like webinars and social platforms such as Twitter and blog posts, while it may seem exotic and less consequential to older colleagues, is not at all foreign to these staffers.

And we shouldn’t forget that today’s “influencer” at a company is very likely tomorrow’s “decision-maker.”

Which gets us back to the ER-M study. One big takeaway from that research was that customers are looking into all the corners of offine and online communications to find the information they feel they need to make risk-averse and “CYA” decisions that are also the successful ones that pay off well – hence building their reputations inside their company.

Tactics like direct mail marketing may seem old-hat or even quaint, but they can still be quite effective, while e-mail marketing, while fast and cheap, elicits resistance from some because they feel inundated with marketing materials that are irrelevant to their needs.

I guess it’s yet more challenging news for already-fractured marketing communications program tactics that continue to be under tight budget constraints.