Stephanie Kidder Avid / Pinnacle Director, WW E-commerce Sales and Marketing,
Email Marketing Pioneer
“
At Avid/Pinnacle, we rely on Emailvision technology to automate and deliver our global email marketing campaigns
�
To download a free information pack on email marketing, go to www. emailvision.com/infopack
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Over 4500 satisfied marketers worldwide
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Retention Email Marketing FOR
DUMmIES
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by Emailvision
A John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, Publication
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies® Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ England For details on how to create a custom For Dummies book for your business or organisation, contact CorporateDevelopment@wiley.com. For information about licensing the For Dummies brand for products or services, contact BrandedRights&Licenses@Wiley.com. Visit our Home Page on www.customdummies.com Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex, England All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 4LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England, or emailed to permreq@wiley.com, or faxed to (44) 1243 770620. Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER, THE AUTHOR, AND ANYONE ELSE INVOLVED IN PREPARING THIS WORK MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. ISBN: 978-0-470-66474-2 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Page Bros, Norwich 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 About This Book ........................................................................ 1 Foolish Assumptions ................................................................. 1 How This Book is Organized .................................................... 2 Icons Used in This Book ............................................................ 4 Where to Go from Here ............................................................ 4
Chapter 1: Exploring the World of Retention Email Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 Reaching Customers Online ..................................................... 5 Differentiating Acquisition and Retention Marketing............ 6 Recognizing the Importance of Retention Email Marketing.................................................... 7 Making Use of the Pros............................................................ 10
Chapter 2: Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Coming Up with Broad-Based Objectives ............................. 11 Taking Six Steps to Narrow Your Objectives ....................... 12 Segmenting Your Email List .................................................... 15 Planning Your Email Campaign ............................................. 16 Interpreting and Reacting To Your Results .......................... 17
Chapter 3: Designing and Crafting Your Email. . . . . . . .21 Deciding Theme, Format and Design..................................... 22 Writing Copy that Drives Action ............................................ 27 Starting with Headers that Get Noticed ................................ 29 Personalizing Your Emails ...................................................... 32
Chapter 4: Marketing through Transactional Email . . .33 Demonstrating Transactional Email ...................................... 33 Appreciating the Benefits of Transactional Email Marketing.................................................................... 34 Inserting Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Offers in Transactional Email ............................................................. 36
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
Chapter 5: Keeping in Touch throughout the Customer Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 Looking at the Customer Lifecycle ........................................ 40 Automating Messages during the Customer Lifecycle ........ 41 Recapturing Distracted Customers ...................................... 42
Chapter 6: Making Sure Your Emails Get Delivered . . .43 Complying with the CAN-SPAM Act ....................................... 44 Becoming a Trusted Sender ................................................... 46 Instituting Best Practices for Deliverability ......................... 49
Chapter 7: The Top Ten Email Marketing Blunders . . .53 EX¢E$$IVE PUNCTU@TION**!!! .............................................. 53 Long Articles that Seem to Never End and Keep On Going While Saying Basically the Same Thing Over and Over Again ..................................................................... 54 Unfamiliar From Address ........................................................ 54 ‘Click Here’ Links...................................................................... 55 Distracting Images ................................................................... 55 Boring Subject Lines ................................................................ 55 Links that Surprise the Reader............................................... 56 Unfamiliar Advertising ............................................................ 56 Repetitive Messages ................................................................ 57 Cluttered Layout ...................................................................... 57
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Introduction
W
elcome to Retention Email Marketing For Dummies. In the quest to increase sales from existing customers and keep customers loyal for life, companies big and small are recognizing the power of retention email marketing. Due to its capability to effectively target customers and deliver superior return on investment, retention email marketing is becoming the cornerstone of the online marketing mix. You can use acquisition email marketing in the quest of acquiring new customers, and turn to retention email marketing to service, increase revenue, optimize profits and drive customer satisfaction from existing customers. And retaining customers is any business’s primary goals.
About This Book Retention email marketing has many aspects – from developing a strategy to copy writing the email to writing an effective subject line. This book serves as a guide encapsulating the key aspects of retention email marketing so that you can understand and use every aspect effectively. This book draws upon years of experience from various email marketing campaigns across a range of companies to provide effective strategies and best practices that you can leverage to improve your company’s online marketing strategy immediately.
Foolish Assumptions While writing this book we made some assumptions about your knowledge of email marketing, why you might be interested in this book and what you want to get out of it.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies We assume that your reason for picking up this book may be one or more of the following: ✓ You’re looking to engage customers in an effective and relevant manner with email. ✓ You want to avoid common pitfalls that befall many marketers. ✓ You want practical steps to maximize return on investment in email marketing. ✓ You want to simplify and automate the email process where possible. ✓ You’re interested in measuring the return on investment for email marketing. ✓ You want to understand how you can successfully reach the inboxes of your customers and have them open and read your message.
How This Book is Organized This book is divided into seven chapters, each covering a different aspect of retention email marketing.
Chapter 1: Exploring the World of Retention Email Marketing This chapter introduces you to retention email marketing and explains the value of retention email marketing for your business.
Chapter 2: Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy In this chapter we show you step by step how to plan a retention email campaign and use objectives to maximize return on investment.
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Introduction
Chapter 3: Designing and Crafting Your Email This chapter tells you how to create high-impact designs and develop effective content personalized for the recipient.
Chapter 4: Marketing through Transactional Email This chapter covers how you can insert marketing messages into transactional email messages and drive additional sales with up-sell and cross-sell offers.
Chapter 5: Keeping in Touch throughout the Customer Lifecycle In this chapter we explain the different aspects of the customer lifecycle and shows how you can automate targeted messages to drive revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
Chapter 6: Making Sure Your Emails Get Delivered This chapter shows how you can overcome challenges to successfully reach the inbox of the intended recipient while complying with regulations.
Chapter 7: The Top Ten Email Marketing Blunders Understand the most common mistakes in email marketing and how you can avoid them in this final chapter of the book.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
Icons Used in This Book Those little pictures in the margins are a For Dummies staple that point out information of special use. The icons we use in this book are: The knotted string highlights particularly important information to remember. The information next to this icon is on-target advice you can put to practical use. The bomb signals something to be careful about and highlights behaviours to avoid.
Where to Go from Here Check out the section headings in this book and start reading wherever you like. This book is written with a sequential logic, but if you want to jump to a specific topic you can start anywhere to extract good ideas you can leverage immediately. If you want more information and advice, or the latest in email marketing, visit www.emailvision.com.
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Chapter 1
Exploring the World of Retention Email Marketing In This Chapter ▶ Looking at online marketing methods ▶ Understanding acquisition and retention marketing ▶ Realizing the benefits of retention email marketing for business
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ou live in an online world. You share information on social networks online, get news online, read messages from friends and family online and work online. Increasingly, you take your online world and connections everywhere you go on your mobile smartphone, which has access to the Internet on the go. With more and more people living and working more online, businesses are moving their marketing strategies and plans online. This chapter introduces the basics of reaching and marketing to customers online.
Reaching Customers Online A business has many ways to reach customers online. Some of the most popular include: ✓ Hosting an informational website on your company that highlights its products and services. ✓ Placing banner advertisements on websites that customers of the business may visit. ✓ Using email messages to send targeted and useful content to consumers who have opted to receive communications from the company – a practice called email marketing.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies Each one of these online marketing strategies has its own benefits and shortcomings, but some stand out due to their usefulness and superior measurable return on investment. Analyze your business’s marketing objectives and choose a mix of online strategies that suits you best. A local restaurant may find banner advertising in a website which has visitors from across the nation to be expensive and a poor return on investment. Selecting the online strategy that has the flexibility and capability to target the right audience and which provides superior return on investment is crucial for the success of your business.
Differentiating Acquisition and Retention Marketing Acquisition marketing and retention marketing are two methods you use in different stages of marketing to a customer: ✓ Acquisition marketing employs marketing strategies to acquire new customers for the company’s product or service. ✓ Retention marketing uses marketing strategies to keep a person or business as a continued customer for the company’s products and services, sell additional products and services and/or increase the usage of the company services. To give a practical example of both types of marketing, consider a magazine subscription: You receive an email message regarding an exciting offer for a magazine subscription. You sign up for a one-year subscription, so the publisher’s acquisition email marketing campaign worked. At the end of the year the publisher sends you another email message reminding you of the benefits of the magazine and reminds you to renew the subscription. You renew for the next year, and the publisher has retained you as a customer using the retention marketing email message. A company needs both acquisition and retention marketing to grow the business. Acquisition marketing brings in new
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Chapter 1: Exploring the World of Retention Email Marketing customers and is essential to grow the business. Retention marketing keeps current customers, who can increase profitability and ensure continued growth. (Chapter 6 explains all the stages of the customer lifecycle.) Design a marketing plan that balances acquisition and retention marketing to ensure maximum return for the business. When designing a marketing plan, pay attention to the differences between retention and acquisition marketing as shown in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1
Differences between Acquisition and Retention Marketing Acquisition Marketing
Retention Marketing
Purpose
Target potential consumers Minimize current cusnot yet with the company. tomer defection from the company and drive additional revenue from current customers.
Objective
Introduce the company, its products and services to potential customers.
Build customer loyalty.
Uses Data To‌
Data gives the company only a broad idea of the customer segment, so use a broad approach to successfully reach the potential customer.
Data on existing customer behavior and interactions helps the company predict the needs and likes of the customer to design an effective retention marketing campaign.
Recognizing the Importance of Retention Email Marketing Mobile phone companies, cable TV services and credit card companies operate in highly competitive markets in which most of their revenue is derived from customers who continue to use their products and services. These types of
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies companies need to ensure that their customers remain loyal users or their revenues will decline. An effective way to retain customers is through retention email marketing strategies. Restaurants, amusement parks and movie theaters are also highly competitive and need to ensure the customer is not only loyal, but visits them or uses their service on a frequent basis. Retention marketing to promote repeated visits is essential. The customer has many choices when it comes to spending their money, and leveraging retention email marketing targeted offers can increase visits and promote visits during off-peak times. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is the leading global trade association of business and nonprofit organizations using multichannel direct marketing tools and techniques. The DMA represents more than 3,400 companies worldwide. Its extensive research on online marketing found the return on investment on email marketing in 2008 was $45.06 for every dollar spent. The study also found that, in comparison, non-email Internet marketing only delivered $19.94 for every dollar spent. The DMA information clearly shows the power of and superior return on investment of email marketing, which should be an essential component of every online marketing plan. Email marketing can be an extremely effective retention marketing tool, and can be used in a cost effective manner. You can combine email marketing with other online and offline marketing strategies to create a powerful marketing mix that enhances the effectiveness of the combined marketing strategy.
Realizing the value Retention email marketing can provide high return on investment. Your business can increase revenue and drive profits with retention email marketing by: ✓ Leveraging email marketing, one of the most inexpensive and effective channels to reach the customer. ✓ Increasing profits for the company by specifically targeting highly profitable customers who provide the best margins.
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Chapter 1: Exploring the World of Retention Email Marketing ✓ Designing a periodic automatic email campaign to build customer loyalty. ✓ Customizing an email campaign specific to the products or services the customer has shown preference to. ✓ Increasing interaction with the customer and gaining insight via surveys and interactive messages. ✓ Selling new products and services in a cost effective manner using periodic promotions or offers. Improve the effectiveness of retention email marketing messages in your business by using the customer name in the subject line. For example you can design an email subject line like: ‘Exclusive Offers for Mr. Customer based on your recent purchase’ – Chapter 3 offers more tips on personalizing your emails.
Appreciating the cost effectiveness Research shows that it costs four to seven times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one. So it is important to ensure that you actively target all your customers in a retention email campaign. The following list contains examples of how companies can save money by retaining existing customers as opposed to acquiring new customers: ✓ Credit card companies do not have to conduct expensive credit checks or incur costs of creating and mailing the cards. ✓ Mobile phone companies do not have to incur expenses in provisioning a new account and preferences through their systems or providing a discounted mobile phone. ✓ Cable TV companies do not have to send extremely expensive installers on site to setup the service. ✓ Financial services companies do not have to spend expensive time explaining the benefits and risks of the company’s products and services that may be required by law.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
Making Use of the Pros Email Service Providers (ESPs) offer tools, services and best practices to enable a company to successfully design, automate and launch email marketing campaigns to their customers and prospects. You face many challenges in launching a successful email marketing campaign. You need to comply with CAN-SPAM regulations (we talk about these in Chapter 6), and overcome complexities in deliverability to successfully reach the inbox of the intended recipient, just to start with. Luckily, partnering with a reputable ESP, such as Emailvision, can help you navigate away from the obstacles and sail smoothly toward sales of a profitable type.
Source Forrester - September 2009 ‘The ROI Of Email Relevance, 2009’
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Chapter 2
Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy In This Chapter ▶ Defining and refining your objectives ▶ Creating your campaign ▶ Reading your results
A
fter you recognize the value and high return on investment of retention email marketing campaigns (as we explain in Chapter 1), you’re ready to understand the steps to take to develop and launch an effective retention email campaign. This chapter tells you how to create a sound retention marketing campaign so your emails can help you achieve your business goals.
Coming Up with Broad-Based Objectives Setting objectives helps ensure that prospects and customers can do something intelligent and positive with your email marketing campaigns. No doubt your number-one objective is to make money with your business. Of course, you probably have other reasons to run your business: the freedom and flexibility of being your
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies own boss or maybe to keep from languishing in a cubicle. Whatever the reason, your business has to make money. Making money is a very broad-based objective. Broad-based objectives are goals you state apart from the supporting details necessary to achieve the goal. Keeping broad-based objectives in mind is a good way to keep your email marketing strategy focused on the big picture. However, broad-based objectives are more useful for making decisions when you define them clearly so that you can add the appropriate supporting details later. Defining your objectives helps you to determine: ✓ What types of content to put in your emails ✓ How many emails you need to send ✓ How often you need to send emails ✓ To whom to send your emails ✓ When to change or refine your strategy The next sections help you state broad-based email objectives in clear terms so you can use them to help identify the steps involved in accomplishing each objective.
Taking Six Steps to Narrow Your Objectives Narrowly defined objectives are far more useful than broadbased objectives for making decisions about delivering specific email content. After you define broad-based objectives, the next step is to restate them in more meaningful ways and match them with specific tasks designed to help achieve them. Stating and restating objectives, as the steps in the next sections advise, can be a lot of work, but the results are well worth the effort. The more closely your email content resembles your objectives, the more your audience is able to clearly identify the purpose of your email and act toward the accomplishment of your objective without distraction.
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Chapter 2: Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy
Step 1: Set the ultimate goal of your objective Before you start narrowing your broad-based objective, write it down for a starting point. You can use a pad of paper, a white board, or a computer. As you progress through the six steps, rewrite your new objective to replace the preceding broad-based objective, as in the following example: ✓ Original objective: I want to get more people to eat at my restaurant. ✓ Restated objective: I want to get more people to eat at my restaurant so that I can sell more pancakes.
Step 2: Identify your target audience Some objectives go unachieved simply because the audience isn’t willing or able to help you accomplish the objective. Understanding the appropriate audience helps you to create email content that speaks to specific interests and needs within a particular group. Restating your objective with your audience in mind should get you thinking about what kind of language to use in your emails and how to design the look and feel so your audience identifies with your content. Restated objective: I want to get more families with teenagers to eat at my restaurant so that I can sell more pancakes.
Step 3: Provide a reason to take action Consumers make purchasing decisions only because they want to or feel they have to. Your customers won’t help you reach your objective unless you demonstrate why they want
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies or need to act on the content of your message. Stating your objective with your audience’s motivations in mind helps your objective, and your content, to focus on giving real value to your audience. Zero in on your offer in this step. Restated objective: I want to offer free coffee with any pancake purchase to get more families with teenagers to eat at my restaurant so that I can sell more pancakes.
Step 4: Determine how to broadcast your objective Obviously you want people to find out about your objectives by reading one of your emails. It’s a good idea, however, to state your objective in a way that clearly defines how you plan to collect and use the email addresses belonging to the audience you identified in Step 2. At this point, your objective hints at one or more tactics that allow you to take specific actions, but your objective still needs two more refinements before it’s ready to guide your actions through all the steps involved in an email campaign. Restated objective: I want to offer free coffee with any pancake purchase by sending an email to my customer list to get more families with teenagers to eat at my restaurant so that I can sell more pancakes.
Step 5: Determine where to accomplish your objective A transaction needs a place to happen, and you need to guide your audience to the place most likely to help you accomplish your objective. Stating your objective with a place in mind helps to guide your messaging so that your audience understands where to go and how to get there. Stating your objective with a place in mind not only helps you to clarify the steps your customers take, it also helps you to create offers that drive your audience toward the place most likely to encourage them to help you reach your objective.
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Chapter 2: Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy
For example, if the most profitable way to sell your products is in a group demonstration, you can create a bigger incentive for attending a group demonstration than for making an individual appointment. Restated objective: I want to offer free coffee with any pancake purchase by sending an email to my customer list to get more families with teenagers to eat at my restaurant so that I can sell more pancakes in the dining room.
Step 6: Set a timeline for your objective Stating your objectives to include timing helps you to create a sending schedule and to stay focused on it during the creation of multiple emails. Establish an email timing strategy in this step. Final restated objective: I want to offer free coffee with any pancake purchase by sending a weekly email to my customer list on Thursdays and Fridays to get more families with teenagers to eat at my restaurant so that I can sell more pancakes in the dining room. You now have a clearly defined objective that you can use in your retention email marketing campaign.
Segmenting Your Email List One mistake companies often make in retention email marketing is to use a single customer list for all campaigns and offers. Long gone are the days in which such spray and pray tactics are enough to make your campaign successful. Today, savvy marketers know that they need to target and adapt their campaigns according to the various segments within their lists. Email service providers (ESPs) offer tools to identify new marketing segments within your list and build segments based on demographic or behavioral characteristics including opening email, clicking on links to content or offers and purchase history. Correctly defined segments can result in better response to the email.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies After you define the objectives of your retention email marketing campaign, segmenting your email list isn’t hard to do. You can choose from various segmentation methods, but using the following criteria can guide you to the primary targets for your marketing campaign: ✓ Past customer interest in company products and services ✓ Previous customer behavior to marketing ✓ Customer demographic information Mixing and matching the characteristics in the following list offers numerous ways to create targeted segments for retention email marketing: ✓ Products or services purchased ✓ Frequency of purchases ✓ Value of purchases made in the defined period ✓ Average price of purchase ✓ Reaction to discounts on products or services ✓ Utilization of special promotions such as free shipping ✓ Demographics such as age, gender, income level, family status, education level, occupation, hobbies, interests, and so on. ✓ Geographic segmentation based on location Don’t go overboard creating a large number of segments to start with. Create a few segments, run a test and then subdivide into more granular segments. Automatic segmentation tools and testing tools provided by your ESP can serve you well in this task.
Planning Your Email Campaign The three most important initial steps in building an effective retention email marketing strategy are setting objectives, segmenting your email list and developing appropriate mailing themes. We cover the first two in the preceding sections and the third in the next chapter. The final steps you need to take are listed here:
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Chapter 2: Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy 1. Establish a budget.
It is important to establish a budget for the campaign and also formulate the return on investment you expect from this investment. 2. Develop an interesting subject line. Remember that the subject line is the first thing your customers see. We explore how to craft an effective subject line in the next chapter. 3. Focus on the creative and design. Make sure you use an appealing creative based on the theme and write effective content. Attention spans for emails are limited and you need to make the design appealing so that customers read the message. 4. Test your campaign. Testing is an essential element that unfortunately many skip in a rush to launch a campaign. Test subject lines, from addresses and layout. Chapter 3 talks about testing. 5. Execute your campaign. Time of day and day of the week are important aspects of email marketing. Select a relevant time for your campaign launch based on the location of the recipients. Mondays mornings are typically not good days to get people’s attention! 6. Measure your results and improve your campaign. This critical piece is the focus of the next section.
Interpreting and Reacting To Your Results One of the most practical and valuable features of using email to market your business is using email tracking reports to find out what your audience is doing with your emails after you send them.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies Email service providers such as Emailvision, can track your emails and let you view the results in an email tracking report. In the following sections, we tell you how to make sense of the data in an email tracking report as well as other creative ways to track responses not captured in a tracking report.
Gathering basic email tracking data You have to be an advanced HTML and database programmer to track emails on your own, but using Emailvision or a similar service to track your emails makes things simple. Email tracking reports are analytical summaries of the results of a given email campaign that can tell you: ✓ Which emails bounced ✓ Why they bounced ✓ Who opened your emails ✓ What links they clicked ✓ Who unsubscribed from your emails ✓ Who forwarded your emails Emailvision’s Campaign Commander automatically adds special tracking code to the links you include in your emails. The tracking code is unique to each individual on your email list and tied to each email campaign. The program can automatically read the code from other email servers when they return undeliverable email so you don’t have to do the hard work to determine why a particular email wasn’t delivered.
Understanding email tracking data Email tracking data comes to you in terms like bounce and open rate. To make sense of your results, you need to understand the following terms:
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Chapter 2: Building an Effective Retention Email Marketing Strategy
✓ Bounce rate is the number of emails returned as undeliverable expressed as a percentage of total emails sent. • A hard bounce is an email returned because delivering it is impossible. The email account may be closed, but for whatever reason, that email address is permanently out of touch. • A soft bounce happens when delivery is delayed temporarily. Soft bounces happen because of technical conditions such as full mailbox or a server being down temporarily. ✓ Non-bounce total is the number of emails that were not bounced and therefore assumed delivered. ✓ Open rate is the number of email recipients who opened the message expressed as a percentage of total number of email assumed to be delivered. ✓ Click-through rate is the number of unique individuals who click on one or more links in your email expressed as a percentage of total number of messages opened. Because the default setting on an increasing number of email programs is to block images until the user clicks to enable them, some people scan through emails without enabling images at all. In such cases, the true number of emails that your audience views are probably higher than your email tracking report’s open rate indicates.
Reacting to campaign results A good ESP team can help interpret your campaign results and benchmark it, by comparing your campaign results with typical email marketing campaign results derived from a large set of companies. After each campaign walk through the following steps: 1. Measure to see whether you achieved the objectives you established. 2. Compare current results with the results of previous campaigns to check for patterns or trends.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies 3. Clean your list of all hard bounce addresses and maintain a clean list. 4. Make a list of what you learned from the campaign that you can use for your next campaign. If the goal of your email is to generate purchases in a brickand-mortar store, you need to find a way to track the foot traffic that results from your emails and also compare increase in foot traffic against increase in sales. See Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1: Campaign Commander’s one-page snapshot report.
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Chapter 3
Designing and Crafting Your Email In This Chapter ▶ Creating high impact email designs ▶ Developing effective content ▶ Personalizing email to deliver useful content ▶ Taking the guess work out of campaigns with testing
D
eciding how to design and layout your email content is possibly the most important step in executing your email marketing strategy. Designing your email content entails choosing a format that matches your message and placing your content in visually appealing arrangements. If your emails aren’t easy to look at, no one will pay attention long enough to grasp your message or take action. In addition to making your emails easy to scan, good email designs enhance your business image by giving your emails a consistent and professional brand identity. Brand identity makes your emails more inviting and recognizable to your audience and tells your audience that your email comes from a trustworthy and familiar source. Personalization is key to executing highly relevant email marketing campaigns and differentiating your marketing offers from the competition.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
Deciding Theme, Format and Design A theme is not the same as a format. Format refers to the classification and configuration of an email. Format is about the layout of the text and graphical content in the email. The theme is the primary message you want to send with your email.
Choosing a theme Email messages make more sense to your prospects and customers when the content is tied together under familiar themes. A theme is the main idea of your entire email campaign. Most objectives can be grouped into one of four familiar themes, explained in the next sections: ✓ Promotional ✓ Information ✓ Procedural ✓ Relational Email can sometime include content with multiple themes, but it’s usually best to have one main theme and to group related themes together visually under the main theme. Make sure that all sub-themes are relevant to your audience. If not, divide your email list into groups by theme and send targeted messages that interest each group under their own themes.
Promotional themes When you want to persuade your audience to take a specific action or to make a specific purchase decision, be sure that your email includes only content that supports and relates to a promotional theme. For example, if your email’s main objective is to ask your customer to purchase a specific product, including an invitation to a related product seminar would follow your theme. On the other hand, including an invitation to an unrelated event would detract from your theme.
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Examples of content you might include in an email with a promotional theme include: ✓ Product images and descriptions ✓ Coupons and rebates ✓ Testimonials from satisfied customers or laudatory reviews of your product or service ✓ An offer deadline – the expiration date so that customers act quickly ✓ Links that call for action or directions on how to take action
Informational themes Sometimes you just want to educate your audience and help them form an opinion. That’s when an informational theme comes in. Informational themes differ from promotional themes in that they rarely include a specific call to action other than reading the message content. For example, a newsletter with an informational theme may have three articles about the benefits of clean air. The following types of content are informational in nature: ✓ News articles, stories and narratives ✓ Opinions and viewpoints ✓ Event calendars ✓ Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Procedural themes A procedural theme is what you use when the main objective of your email is to give official instructions or explain processes. Procedural messages are like informational messages in that they rarely call for specific action outside of reading the content in the email. Content with a procedural theme may include: ✓ Text welcoming a new customer or list subscriber ✓ Notifications, official statements, disclosures and warranties
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Relational themes Use a relational theme to build or deepen personal relationships. Relational themes are typically one-way communications with no call to action. These emails may include: ✓ Greetings and acknowledgments ✓ News or stories about personal experiences ✓ Customer recognition messages
Choosing the right format After you decide on a theme, you can choose an email format that fits it. Email format refers to the layout of the text and graphical content of the email message. Choosing the proper format for your email is important because the format visually communicates the main idea of your email content before your audience even starts to read it. Deciding which format to use entails matching your email content to the format that best suits your audience’s expectations for the content. For example, most consumers expect newsletters to contain informative content and promotional emails to ask them to consider buying something or otherwise make some type of commitment. Matching content to the proper format enables your audience to get the main idea of your message sooner and helps the reader decide how best to interact with the message. For example, someone who receives an email message in a newsletter format might not be inclined to read the entire message immediately, but someone who receives an email message formatted as an announcement might feel a sense of urgency to read the whole message right away. The format of your email should serve to draw attention while keeping your audience focused on your main message. An easy way to utilize various email formats is to use an email template for each format. An email template is an HTML mockup of an email with design elements that you can customize and populate with your own text, images, and links. Unless you’re a terrific HTML programmer, have an HTML designer
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create email templates for you or obtain them through a template-design service. Emailvision’s Campaign Commander provides email templates that you can customize for your purposes, as shown in Figure 3-1. These templates are tested with a variety of users over time and can help deliver the message effectively.
Figure 3-1: You can customize an email template.
Adding visual anchors Visual anchors are design or text elements that draw attention to your content. Visual anchor designs are limited only by your creativity and the layout of your email template. This list explains how common visual anchors draw attention to your content: ✓ Headlines: Headlines draw attention to themselves and to the content immediately below the headline. Attract attention to your headlines by differentiating them from surrounding text by using a different font, color, or style of text. ✓ Images and graphics: Images and graphics create visual interest in the image first, then in adjacent text to the left, right, or below the image.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies ✓ Text links: Embedded in a larger body of text, a link draws attention not only to itself, but to surrounding text as well. A stand-alone link draws attention only to itself. ✓ Lines and borders: Horizontal lines and borders direct a reader’s eye to content above the line or border. Vertical lines and borders pull attention to content on the left or right depending on the strength of the visual anchors on either side of the line or border. Boxes draw attention to the content within the box, starting with the content in the upper left of the box.
Placing your anchors A good way to visualize your content is to mentally divide your email template into quadrants then position your visual anchors and related content according to the order in which consumers tend to focus their attention on each quadrant. Most consumers begin reading in the upper left and then continue either across the page or down, depending on the strength of the visual anchors in those quadrants. Because the upper left tends to get the most attention from consumers, this quadrant can help drive your message if you use the following tips: ✓ Place the strongest visual anchors here. Visual anchors such as icons, bullets, and graphics can reinforce your audience’s perception of your most important content. Strong visual anchors in the upper left help minimize how long your audience spends trying to figure out what content is important enough to read. ✓ Limit the size of images. Images draw attention, but if you include an image in your email that takes up most of the upper-left quadrant, your audience may well miss the text associated with that image. If you decide to use an image in the upper left, use one small enough so that you can include first few words of a text headline. ✓ Show your audience where to look next. If your email includes important content in a different quadrant, use navigation links and directions in the upper left to help your audience navigate the email. For example, you may want to put a table of contents with navigation links there.
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Chapter 3: Designing and Crafting Your Email Examples of what to put in the upper-left quadrant of your message include:
✓ Your name and logo: Your audience is more likely to read your email when they recognize the source. Make sure that your business name, logo, and other brand-identifying design elements appear somewhere in the upper left. ✓ The main headline of your message: A main headline doesn’t have to reside completely within the upper left, but it gets more attention if it begins there. ✓ The email’s main call to action: If your email contains valuable offers, make sure your main offer is contained or at least referenced in the upper left. If your main intent is to get your audience to read a specific section of your email that contains your main call to action along with supporting information, make sure you use the upper left to tell your audience where to look.
Writing Copy that Drives Action When people subscribe to your email list, they share their contact information with the expectation of receiving something valuable. They aren’t likely to value multiple emails that all talk about how great your business is. Getting the same – or really similar – emails over and over bores your subscribers. And boring your audience leads to low open rates, lost clicks, and unsubscribe requests. (See Chapter 2 for definitions of more email marketing terms.)
Investing your email with value Keeping your email content valuable helps ensure that your subscribers stay engaged and keep their subscription active while you try to convince them to buy from you. The two basic types of value when it comes to email content are: ✓ An offer that’s valuable when acted upon – for example, a 40 per cent discount for placing an order this week. ✓ Content of inherent value – that is, content that’s valuable in and of itself. For example, an explanation of different type of life insurance included in the email message.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies Valuable content won’t automatically make your audience rush to your business in order to part with their money. Your email also needs to have a strong call to action to give your content a purpose and prompt your audience to help you meet your objectives.
Including a call for action An effective call to action acts like a little sign that allows your audience to visualize the steps involved to take advantage of your email’s content. Anyone who reads email is familiar with the stalwart phrase Click Here, but such a generic phrase isn’t necessarily a good model for writing an effective call to action. Words are the building blocks of a strong call to action. The quality and the number of words you choose significantly affects the number of responses your call to action receives. The most effective way to write a call to action is to begin with one or more action words, verbs that propose a specific task such as visit, call, download, read and print. The following steps tell you how to use action words to create a strong call to action. You can see the progression of the call to action as you make it stronger and stronger: 1. Combine your action word with the subject of the action word. Order this item. 2. Include the place where the action happens. Order this item online. 3. Add the urgency of the action. Order this item online before Friday. 4. Finish with an adjective to underscore the value inherent in the action. Order this hilarious item online before Friday.
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The combination of action words along with your supplementary words makes a complete call to action. Writing an effective call to action can be more of an art than a science, but becoming good at it is just a matter of practice. Turning your action words into links is a great way to prompt your audience to click to take action. When using one or more action words as a link, select words that allow your audience to visualize the steps involved in taking your proposed action after they click.
Starting with Headers that Get Noticed One of the best ways to maximize the response to your emails over time is to place familiar and motivating information into every email header, which includes the From line that identifies you as the sender, your email address and the Subject line, that tells your audience what the email is about. Effective From lines and Subject lines are keys to success.
Formulating an identifiable From line The email From line simply identifies the sender of the email message (who the message is from). Altering your From line helps to ensure that most email programs display enough information for your audience to identify and trust you as a safe source. Changing your From line is usually a matter of typing sender information in your email application’s account options. Ask yourself how your audience is most likely to recognize you and then craft your From line to include that information. The following list contains options you may consider in composing a From line that keep your emails familiar to your audience:
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies ✓ Your name. If you’re the only employee for your business or if your audience is most likely to identify with you personally rather than your business name, use your name. ✓ The name of your business. If your audience is likely to recognize the name of your business but won’t necessarily know you by name, use your business name. If your business commonly uses initials instead of spelling out the entire business name, make sure that your audience recognizes the abbreviation. For example, if your business is Acme Balloon Consultants, Inc., don’t place ABCI in your From line unless you are sure your audience can identify you by your initials. ✓ Your name and your business name. If you’re a personal representative of a larger, well-known business or franchise, use your name along with your business name. For example, your first name followed by your business name as in Steve @ Sunset Travel. ✓ Your location. If you’re part of a large franchise or have multiple locations and your audience is likely to recognize the name of the business but not individual names, use geography. The business name followed by the city, as in Sunset Travel, Denver, is one option. ✓ Your website domain. If your website domain name is the most identifiable aspect of your business, use it. If your domain uses an abbreviation, initials, or an alternate spelling of your entire business name, you may want to spell out the business’ full name as well for brand clarity.
Crafting effective Subject lines The Subject line of your email gives your audience a hint at the content in your email. The most effective Subject lines are those that prompt your audience to open your emails to look for specific information. Consistently coming up with good Subject lines is tough because most email programs display only the first 30 to 50 characters, which gives you a limited amount of text to get your point across.
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Use the following guidelines to help create effective Subject lines for your emails: ✓ Create a sense of urgency. Save the information highlighting the benefits of your products or services for the body of your email and use the Subject line to tell your audience why to open your email immediately. ✓ Include value words. Use words your audience associates with information that’s personally relevant to them. Value words tell your audience that your email contains personalized information rather than general information. ✓ Work from a theme. Using a similar theme over the course of many email campaigns can help you to come up with several good Subject lines in a row. For example, a printer might use Colors that sell as a theme and highlight a different color in every Subject line. (See ‘Choosing a theme’ earlier in this chapter.) Test your Subject lines by sending the same email with different Subject lines to a small sample of your list to determine which Subject line results in the most opens. For example, if you have a list of 5,000 subscribers, send your email with one Subject line to 300 list subscribers and the other to a different 300 list subscribers. Wait a day or two and send your email to the remaining with the Subject line that received the highest number of opens. Emailvision’s Campaign Commander offer extensive tools to automatically test various aspects of your campaign (see Figure 3-2).
Figure 3-2: Choose, Test, Read and React.
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Personalizing Your Emails Personalizing your emails can maximize the response to them. Personalization creates a one-to-one communication channel between you and your customer. The personalization tools of Campaign Commander and other email service providers (ESPs) enable you to customize the To, From and Subject lines as well as the body copy and design to build a personalized relationship with your list members. Ways to personalize your emails include the following: ✓ Personalize the receiver. You can personalize your marketing messages with simple data such as the receiver’s first and last name. You can go beyond the basics to customize your content according to demographic and behavioral data such as response from past email campaigns and buying history. You can integrate other personalized account information such as a number of points in a loyalty program, or a personal ID code. ✓ Personalize the sender. The sender name of your email campaigns should reflect a trustworthy and reliable source (you and your brand). You can personalize the From field with the names of your sales manager or company President. (For more tips on crafting a good From line, see “Formulating an identifiable From line” earlier in this chapter.) ✓ Include dynamic content. Dynamic content tools offered by Campaign Commander and other ESPs allow you to build marketing offers or news with variable image and text content. For example, you can change a photograph to a man or a woman according to the sex of each recipient. You can also change content according to the past behavior of your customers. For example, you can add a special re-activation discount offer to customers who have not purchased any products in the last 18 months or add a special loyalty gift offer to your best customers.
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Chapter 4
Marketing through Transactional Email In This Chapter ▶ Defining transactional email ▶ Understanding its power ▶ Inserting marketing messages into transactional email
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ransactional emails and traditional commercial email marketing are very different. Transactional emails aren’t initiated for pure marketing purposes. A transactional email communicates information about a transaction between the customer and the company. Typically sent immediately after an order is placed or with an account statement, a transactional email contains information regarding a transaction or account. But, you can include a little marketing information in transactional emails that you’re going to send anyway to promote and enhance your company brand.
Demonstrating Transactional Email A transactional email isn’t initiated for pure marketing purposes, its main purpose is to convey information to a customer. The following are examples of transactional email messages: ✓ Order confirmation ✓ Notice of shipping
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies ✓ Notification of changes made to account ✓ Monthly account statements ✓ Change in terms and conditions of service ✓ Information on warranty or product recalls For example, if you buy a camera online the company sends you a confirmation message for the camera order. Some transactional websites send a text-only message to confirm an order, such as the email on the left in Figure 4-1. Others use branding images and take the opportunity to include crosssell/up-sell offers related to the product purchased, as shown in the right-hand message in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1: You’re likely to receive a transactional email or two when you order items online.
Appreciating the Benefits of Transactional Email Marketing If used properly, transactional email is the most powerful form of email marketing available today. Transactional messages are not just opened, but also read and saved for future
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reference. This provides the savvy email marketer the opportunity to add marketing content to messages the customer is very likely to open. The power of transactional email comes from the following: ✓ High open rates and reading rates. Transaction emails have very high open rates in comparison with traditional marketing messages. A customer who ordered a new book wants to know when the book will arrive and will open the shipping notification message. ✓ Ability to target recent customer behavior. Transactional email messages by definition are based on a transaction the consumer voluntarily initiated with the company. You get insight into the customer’s behavior and preferences, and can use that information to target the customer with high value and focused marketing content. If a customer purchased a digital camera, a confirmation message that informs them about carrying cases available for the digital camera along with a discount coupon can lead to an additional purchase, known as a cross-sell. ✓ Reinforce and expand company brand. Transactional emails give you the opportunity to put information on your brand in front of the customer numerous times without seeming pushy or annoying. A poorly designed, text-only shipping confirmation email message with basic content provides no value, but a welldesigned HTML-based email confirmation message that combines the shipping information with the company logo, product and service information and well-placed branding elements helps reinforce the company brand with the customer. Surprise your customers with thank-you and customer loyalty messages when they aren’t expecting them, such as a few days after the transaction. This helps promote your company brand. The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email in the United States, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies The regulation also places restrictions on what a company can do with transactional emails. While compliance with the regulations is essential, the act also ensures that transactional messages do not lose focus on the primary intent of the message. As an email marketer, treat the regulations as a bestpractice guide to follow.
Inserting Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Offers in Transactional Email Transactional email provides a great opportunity to drive additional revenue from customers by adding up-sell and cross-sell offers. An up-sell aims to get the customer to spend more money by buying a more expensive model of the same product. A cross-sell aims to get the customer to spend more money by buying more products. Adding marketing content to transactional email also minimizes the number of emails you send, so that your customers don’t feel bombarded. Implementing successful transactional email programs also requires following best practices. The tips in the following sections provide key guidelines for successfully adding up sell and cross sell offers to transactional emails.
Customize and target Customize transactional emails based on the transaction type and customer profile data. Sending a customer who ordered a mobile phone a discount on toys with the order confirmation email won’t be as effective as sending that person a discount for the various accessories that can be used with a mobile phone. Someone who just bought a mobile phone is likely to be looking for accessories for it, so you can benefit from a cross-sell. In emails you send regularly, such as monthly account statements, include two to three targeted promotional offers or informational elements based on the customer profile data.
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Include a quick call for action Don’t make the mistake of sending an email with offers and marketing content but no call for action – a topic we discuss in depth in Chapter 3. To educate customers about your company, product or services entice them to visit the website for additional information. Sharing a small snippet on the latest cool mobile phone along with a link can encourage the customer to click through for more information. A best practice is to have three quick calls for action content of different types included in the transactional email. To drive the customer to respond, include a limited-time offer. If the customer has weeks or months to act, they may file away the email and forget about it or delete it.
Balance marketing offer content Don’t forget that the primary goal of a transactional email is to communicate about a transaction. You need to present the transactional content clearly or risk making the customer frustrated, and a frustrated customer is less likely to buy from you a second time and may not complete the current transaction. The marketing content needs to be balanced with the transactional content and not overwhelm it. Don’t include so many marketing messages and content elements that the customer has to hunt through a lengthy email for the content they want. A best practice is to use 20 per cent of the email space for marketing messages.
Test your message template A message template is an HTML mock-up of an email with design elements that you can customize and populate with your own text, images and links (refer to Chapter 3). Some very subtle and small elements have significant impact on how effective your transactional email is, and the message
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies template is one of them. While you may test subject lines, offers, promotions and informational content, message templates are often overlooked. The template is particularly important for transactional email as the transaction content needs to be clearly presented and the marketing content needs to work with this restriction. It is important to test multiple templates to see which works best. The A/B testing capabilities of Emailvision’s Campaign Commander solution make tracking of metrics such as clicks and conversions easy to track and manage.
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Chapter 5
Keeping in Touch throughout the Customer Lifecycle In This Chapter ▶ Understanding the customer lifecycle ▶ Triggering email automatically ▶ Selling to customers who stopped shopping
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he different stages of a company’s relationship with a customer can be viewed as a lifecycle. Effective marketing engages with customers based on the stage of the relationship and recognizes that customer interest, needs and actions vary at each stage. For best results, you use targeted marketing techniques based on the customer behavior at each stage of the lifecycle. According to a study by leading email deliverability services company Return Path, a shockingly large 60 per cent of companies did not send a welcome message to new email registrants. When a catalog firm started sending email messages to shoppers who had abandoned their shopping carts, a massive 25 per cent of those shoppers became actual customers. These statistics show the tremendous opportunities in lifecycle email marketing. Effective planning of a life cycle marketing plan is necessary for successful customer engagement.
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Looking at the Customer Lifecycle Although there are many ways to look at a customer lifecycle, a simple and intuitive approach in which the customer lifecycle is split into four distinct stages is presented in the following list: ✓ Prospect. Potential customers investigating, looking for product or service information, comparing features and engaging lightly with the company in some form, but who have not made a purchase are at the prospect stage. Introduce your company brand, beliefs and culture to this new audience. ✓ Customer. People who have made a purchase move into the customer stage. With the purchase they become aware of the company brand, products and services. Make customers familiar with the product and services and build their confidence in/with the company. ✓ Repeater. In this stage are customers who are actively engaged with the company and have made purchases with the company on more than one occasion. Having customers in this lifecycle is ideal for the company as a core set of repeat purchasers loyal to the company and brand result in a high degree of profitability for your company. Invite them to join elite loyalty clubs and send them exclusive offers. ✓ Disengaged. People at this stage of the lifecycle made a purchase with the company in the past which resulted in awareness of the company brand and products or services, but they are not planning any additional purchases. Develop plans to win them back. The objective of the marketer is to generate prospects, convert them into customers, keep them actively engaged as repeaters and not let them become disengaged. This requires targeting the customer at each stage, at the appropriate time, with targeted and customized marketing content, which, as we talk about in the next section, is best done via email marketing.
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Automating Messages during the Customer Lifecycle A very effective way to engage prospects and customers is by targeting and triggering messages based on their response to emails they’ve previously received from the company. You can generate additional sales and profits by sending highly relevant and personalized offers based on response to email messages (see Figure 5-1): ✓ Send timely messages according to rules. You can schedule automated delivery of email and/or mobile text message campaigns according to rules and triggers you set up. Automatically email a welcome message to firsttime subscribers and trigger birthday cards, subscription renewals and product guarantee extension offers by date. ✓ React to customer responses. Send messages that encourage up-sells to higher quality, more expensive and thus more profitable goods and/or cross-sells to accessories and add-ons to the original purchase. (We talk about both up-selling and cross-selling in Chapter 4). ✓ Combine multiple scenarios and channels. Channels are multiple ways of reaching the same customer. Scenarios are the various methods of engagement. Rapid reaction messages can range from a simple ‘thank you’ to personalized up-sell and cross-sell offers.
Figure 5-1: Send targeted, personalized messages throughout all stages of a customer lifecycle.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies By monitoring and automating your best strategies, tactics and campaigns, you spend less time programming and more time analyzing results and building effective marketing strategies. This makes it possible to generate highly profitable and automated campaigns with minimal effort.
Recapturing Distracted Customers Website analytics solutions track and measure website usage and navigation by customers and prospects. It can help you quickly identify the most profitable paths through your website, determine where visitors are navigating away from the site, and identify critical measurements for success for your online marketing campaigns. Using website data, when a customer navigates away from your website, you can trigger an email that includes information or promotions on product or service information the customer viewed on the site. The customer may have just run out of time and needed to get back to work or gotten distracted by a child’s antics. Sending an email listing the benefits and remarkable features of the product or service they were exploring can encourage them to complete the transaction. Abandoned shopping carts is another challenge website analysis can help you turn into sales. Customers abandon a shopping cart for various reasons ranging from credit card problems to distraction. A simple but effective way to prompt the customer to complete the transaction is to send an email message after an appropriate period of time (typically the next day is a best practice) that contains the list of items in the shopping cart along with a promotion or a limited time discount to complete the purchase. Make sure you don’t offer a discount on low margin items or a low value transaction. Consider offering a discount on a single item to minimize the impact on your profit margin.
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Chapter 6
Making Sure Your Emails Get Delivered In This Chapter ▶ Improving email deliverability ▶ Complying with regulations ▶ Leveraging the deliverability resources of email service providers
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veryone who uses email deals with spam. Consumers receive so much spam they’re hesitant to open emails unless they know and trust the sender, and they are more than willing to report emails as spam to their Internet service provider (ISP) if they don’t appear to be from a trustworthy source. Deliverability refers to all issues that need to be overcome to successfully get your email into the inbox of your intended recipient. Spam filters, incorrect addresses and email server technical issues can all impact successful delivery of email messages. Numerous legal and professional standards apply to commercial email, and every email marketing strategy is subject to the possibility of consumer spam complaints. The three authoritative benchmarks for determining whether your commercial emails are regarded as spam are: ✓ Legal standards, as outlined in the CAN-SPAM Act (see the next section for details). ✓ Professional standards, as outlined by consumer advocates and the email marketing industry.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies ✓ Consumer preferences, as dictated by consumers themselves. Consumers expect marketing emails to come from a trusted source with just the right frequency and amount of content. Adhering to professional email standards keeps your emails legally compliant and improves your relationships with the people who receive and open your emails. In this chapter, we show you how to become a trusted email sender, minimizing consumer spam complaints while maximizing the trust between your business and your existing and future email list subscribers.
Complying with the CAN-SPAM Act Spam is bothersome enough that United States lawmakers enacted the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) to help prosecute spammers. The acronym comes from its official title, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003. Names aside, the law makes certain email marketing practices illegal and provides legal definitions for many best practices. The following sections summarize the basic tenets of CANSPAM. You can read the Act for yourself at www.ftc.gov/ spam. This chapter can broaden your understanding of industry practices, however it should not be used to make decisions regarding your own compliance to the law. Contact your legal counsel for more information.
Determining which emails have to comply CAN-SPAM applies to commercial electronic mail messages, which the law distinguishes from transactional or relationship messages. In general, the CAN-SPAM Act defines the two separate kinds of email messages, as follows:
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✓ A commercial email is an email containing an advertisement, promotion, or content from a business website. ✓ A transactional or relationship email is basically anything other than a commercial email.
Collecting email addresses legally The CAN-SPAM Act makes certain types of email address collection illegal and requires permission from your email list subscribers before you send certain types of content. Here are some best practices for steering clear of potentially permission-less email addresses: ✓ Never purchase an email list from a company that allows you to keep the email addresses as a data file. Email addresses kept in a data file are easily bought and sold, and emails addresses with explicit permission are too valuable to sell. ✓ Never collect email addresses from websites and other online directories. You can’t get explicit permission from the addressees if you collect addresses this way. ✓ Don’t use an email address collection service. Unless the service collects confirmed permission from every subscriber, steer clear. ✓ Don’t rent an email list unless you are certain that the list rental company’s practices are legally compliant. Most rental companies don’t have permission-based lists.
Including required content in your emails The CAN-SPAM Act requires you to include certain content in your emails. To stay compliant: ✓ Provide a way for your subscribers to opt-out of receiving future emails. You’re required to remove anyone who unsubscribes from your email list permanently within ten days of the unsubscribe request, and you can’t add that person back without explicit permission.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies ✓ Make sure that your email includes your physical address. If your business has multiple locations, include your main address or the physical address associated to each email you send. ✓ Make sure that your email header information clearly identifies your business and does not mislead your audience in any way. The email header includes the From line, Subject line, and your email address. ✓ Make sure that your email Subject line isn’t misleading. Don’t use your Subject line to trick your audience into opening your email or to misrepresent the offer contained in your email. ✓ Make sure that your email clearly states that the email is a solicitation. The exception is when you have permission from every individual on your list to send the solicitation.
Becoming a Trusted Sender Getting more email delivered starts with sending your email from a reputable email server. You need to engage a good email service provider (ESP), such as Emailvision, to give your emails a good chance of getting through to your recipients. According to a recent study conducted by Return Path, a leading email deliverability services company, 77 per cent of email delivery issues occur because of the sender’s reputation.
Improving deliverability with Emailvision With all the challenges of today’s email marketing environment, small to medium companies and even large corporations are finding it extremely difficult to commit the necessary in-house resources and expertise to ensure optimum deliverability of their emails. However, most companies find that working with Emailvision improves
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their deliverability significantly due to the following factors: ✓ Expertise: The Emailvision deliverability team maintains good contacts with ISP teams. Emailvision can then manage messages, follow up on blacklisting concerns, encourage whitelisting (expediting delivery of messages from an approved source) and
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resolve ISP complaints – all of which improve deliverability of customers’ emails. ✓ Inbox and message preview: The ultimate proof of deliverability is sending messages to various mailboxes and checking whether they were received and
✓ Spam check: Checking for content that can result in the email being flagged as spam is essential in improving deliverability. With the increasingly sophisticated techniques used by spammers, an ISP needs to use a variety of rules and tests to identify spam. Tools such as SpamAssassin provide flexible and easy-to-use solutions that can identify issues with spam and flag offending words.
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how they looked via the preview screen, shown in the nearby figure. Campaign Commander provides the capability to do just that. You can check a variety of ISPs to determine whether a campaign email made it through to the inbox, ended up in the bulk folder or failed to arrive.
✓ Deliverability data reporting: Understanding the positives as well as the negatives (both of which we discuss in Chapter 2) is essential to ensuring that your system is capable of successful delivery over the long term. Campaign Commander provides comprehensive deliverability reports.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies Because your own email server isn’t likely to have a reputation, delivering your mail using an ESP, such as Emailvision which has a respectable and well-known reputation, is one of the most important steps you can take to maximize your email deliverability. Make sure that any ESP you use takes the following actions: ✓ Authenticates your email. Authentication allows email servers to identify the sender of an email. ✓ Eliminates customers with high spam complaints. An ESP sends emails from its own servers on behalf of their customers (even though the emails appear to come from the customer). Too many spam complaints can cause the ESP’s servers to be blacklisted and prevent successful delivery of email to the inbox. So that this doesn’t happen, a reputable ESP like Emailvision takes action when one of its customers receives too many spam complaints. Emailvision keeps their overall complaint rates low and your sender reputation as clean as possible. ✓ Affirms the quality of their customer’s email lists. Although Emailvision can’t guarantee or predetermine the quality of their customers’ email lists, Emailvision requires customers to adhere to strict permission policies to prevent them from using email addresses that could generate a high number of complaints. ✓ Confirms permission from their customer’s list subscribers when necessary: Some businesses, such as those in the financial industry, inherently receive a lot of spam complaints because their legitimate email content looks similar to a lot of spam emails. Emailvision recommends such businesses to a service that specializes in working with such senders. ✓ Keeps customers from sending repeated emails to unknown or nonexistent addresses: Spammers send billions of emails to every possible email address hoping to uncover real addresses. Because popular ISPs (such as AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail) spend a lot of money bouncing emails sent by spammers, they don’t appreciate emails sent to nonexistent addresses. If an ESP’s email server is labeled as a nuisance by these ISPs, the deliverability rate of the ESP suffers.
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Instituting Best Practices for Deliverability The ESP is one side of ensuring good deliverability; the other end is you, the email marketer. The practices in the following list can help you achieve superior deliverability: ✓ Build lists through clear and targeted opt-in choices. Many companies, in a desire to increase the size of their mailing list with minimal effort, provide a small check box on a long form that the recipient has to click on to opt-out of subscribing to a mailing list. If the person doesn’t check the opt-out box, they’re automatically added to a subscriber list. Following this practice results in large numbers of people on your list who don’t want to be there. The best practice is to opt-out a subscriber by default and make them take action to opt-in. Some companies send a variety of messages not targeted to the user’s interests, all from a single opt-in subscription. This results in poor response to marketing campaigns and complaints of spam, which then results in poor deliverability. The best practice is to provide targeted multiple opt-in selections so that the user can subscribe only to the lists they’re interested in. ✓ Maintain regular list hygiene. An unmaintained list can cause complaints from the end users resulting in ISP blacklisting. It is essential that you routinely clean your lists to ensure high levels of deliverability. Make cleaning email lists at least once a quarter part of the routine: • Scan and remove duplicates every quarter. • Clean up misspelled domains. Look for bounces from recent campaigns. Simple mistakes such as entering alo.com for aol.com and gmal.com for gmail.com can be easily corrected. • Clean ‘spammy’ email addresses. Services are using email addresses with the word spam (spammessage @hotmail.com, 123spam@aol.com, and so on) to
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies catch spammers. Clean all email addresses that have the word spam weekly. Sending to a spam address can very quickly result in blacklisting. ✓ Honor unsubscribe requests promptly. Taking names off your list quickly is an important aspect of building a good reputation. The best practice in this area is to provide multiple methods to unsubscribe and promptly unsubscribe any requests. Provide a clearly marked link in the email to unsubscribe and also provide an email address where unsubscribe requests can be sent. Ensure all requests are acted upon within a day. Email service provider platforms today have tools that make unsubscribe requests easy to manage. ✓ Send useful, targeted content. Look at email marketing not just from your company’s point of view, but from the subscriber’s point of view. Companies often send generic content to a wide array of subscribers. If the content isn’t useful to the recipients, they can and do make complaints to their ISPs. Segmentation and targeting tools (we talk about these in Chapter 2) help you provide useful content. Targeting is of particular importance in business-to-business (B2B) email marketing, where subscribers can quickly lose interest if the messages they get aren’t relevant to their business area. Sending irrelevant content is a very quick way of landing in and ISP’s complaint list. ✓ Tune message frequency: Email marketers often send too many messages or too few messages to be effective. Getting the right frequency of relevant touches is important. When sending out email from various groups – newsletters, press releases, special offers, and so on – you may not realize the amount of overlap among the different segments and don’t recognize that you’re sending a large number of emails to certain individual recipients. Getting too much email can make the recipient upset and flag the messages as spam, thus impacting deliverability. With Campaign Commander you can set limits on the amount of messages a individual can receive in a given period of time. Make sure you set reasonable limits on the number of messages based on your subscriber base.
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✓ Optimize layout and content: A clean layout and design improves deliverability. Spam filters scan through messages and mark messages with poor code negatively. If your format is off, you increase the chances of it being marked as spam. Spammers and phishers are making their messages look increasingly legitimate, so a message that does not render properly will be flagged as spam by the recipient.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
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Chapter 7
The Top Ten Email Marketing Blunders In This Chapter ▶ Common mistakes in email marketing ▶ Avoiding email marketing blunders
W
ith email, you can deliver lots of different kinds of content, but just because you can send something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Make sure your emails avoid the following content blunders that make your emails intrusive, unreadable, or difficult to take action on.
EX¢E$$IVE PUNCTU@TION**!!! Your audience may misinterpret the emotion behind your text if you overemphasize headlines, subject lines, and other text elements in your emails. Emails with excessive punctuation are also more likely to be marked as spam because spammers often use more ‘cutesy’ punctuation in their emails. Be sure to avoid, minimize, or replace the following punctuation with more tactful font and style alterations: ✓ All capital letters ✓ Repetitive symbols, such as strings of dollar signs ✓ Strings of asterisks before and after headlines ✓ Multiple exclamation points or question marks
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
Long Articles that Seem to Never End and Keep On Going While Saying Basically the Same Thing Over and Over Again Your audience is more likely to immediately open and read a short and concise email because it takes less time to decide whether to delete, save, or respond to the email. The longer your email, the more likely the recipient will decide to read it later, and no one wants emails hanging around in their inbox the same way magazines and newspapers hang around next to the bed or on the coffee table. When your audience puts your email on hold, your message is at risk of being discarded before being read because it is perceived as old information after a few days. Instead of including all your content in the body of an email, use short, summary paragraphs of text to highlight the benefits of accessing your content on your website. That way, your audience won’t mind taking a few moments to read your email immediately to get the gist of your message.
Unfamiliar From Address Most consumers look at the From line to decide whether to open email. If your From line or email address is unfamiliar, your email is more likely to go unopened or to be reported as spam. You can make your emails more familiar by ✓ Clearly identifying yourself and your business in your From line in a way that’s familiar to your audience ✓ Sending your emails from an email address that your audience recognizes
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‘Click Here’ Links Links draw attention while your audience scans your email, so make sure that they help get your message across in case your audience reads only the headlines and links. Instead of naming every link Click Here, craft your links into phrases and headlines that call for action. For example, a dog trainer might write a link that reads View 3 Additional DogTraining Tips.
Distracting Images Some people look only at the images in your email, so make sure that your images help tell the story of your email and don’t distract your audience from your main message. Images can enhance your email’s message when you: ✓ Avoid busy background images that make your text hard to read. ✓ Use small images and link them to larger versions on your website so interested people can view your images in more detail. ✓ Avoid clip art that distracts people from your email’s main theme. ✓ Make sure your images support the text in your email instead of including generic images. ✓ Limit your image use to one image per article or offer. If you need additional images, link readers to your website to view more images.
Boring Subject Lines Subject lines should prompt your audience to open your email, not simply provide a name for the email. For example, an email with a Subject line that reads, ‘June Newsletter’ isn’t likely to generate too much excitement. Try the following ideas to keep you subject lines from boring your audience:
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies ✓ Include the immediate benefits of opening your email in the Subject line. ✓ Use your Subject line to highlight one of the articles in your email. ✓ Repeat your email’s main call to action in your Subject line. ✓ Repeat one of your email’s main headlines in your Subject line. Keeping your Subject line interesting helps to improve your open rates over time, but remember to be honest and truthful in your Subject lines because consumers won’t appreciate being tricked into opening your emails.
Links that Surprise the Reader Your links should give your audience exactly what they expect. For example, if your email includes a link that reads “More Information” but actually downloads a video with sound, make sure you include those details in the link’s text or add supporting text before or after the link that tells your audience exactly what is going to happen when they click. You can include text such as the following: ‘This video link offers more information: Watch Our Informative Video (.mpg 4 minutes).’
Unfamiliar Advertising If your emails mention sponsors or advertise other companies, keep the following best practices in mind: ✓ Make sure that your sponsorships are related to your audience and your business. ✓ Keep your advertising space to a maximum of 20 per cent of your overall content. ✓ Make sure the ads aren’t too large or positioned in a way that makes them seem like they are the main focus of your email.
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Repetitive Messages Repetition helps your audience to remember your emails, but consumers stop opening emails that repeatedly convey the same basic facts about your business such as your location and contact information. If your audience won’t take action unless they see the same information over and over again, include new and interesting content along with your repeat messages so your emails remain valuable and relevant to your audience over time.
Cluttered Layout Your email’s layout helps to break up your content so that your email is easy for your audience to scan. When you put together your email, do the following: ✓ Organize your content into symmetrical groups. For example, display two articles either side-by-side or one after another down the page in the same column. ✓ Use white space and images. These design elements can break up multiple articles or offers. ✓ Use columns to group related content together. Separate less important content from your main message. Emailvision’s Campaign Commander has a number of templates to guide your layout, and we talk about email design in Chapter 3.
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Retention Email Marketing For Dummies
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Stephanie Kidder Avid / Pinnacle Director, WW E-commerce Sales and Marketing,
Email Marketing Pioneer
“
At Avid/Pinnacle, we rely on Emailvision technology to automate and deliver our global email marketing campaigns
�
To download a free information pack on email marketing, go to www. emailvision.com/infopack
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