Crumbs from the Scone
Ardath Albee often gets questions about appropriate email frequency for B2B nurturing programs. How much is too much? How little is too little? “And, yep, wait for it—the answer is—it depends,” she writes at the Marketing Interactions blog.
So to help a range of B2B marketers find the right frequency for their email programs, Albee offers advice like this:
Accept that the length of the buy cycle is the length of the buy cycle. “If it’s 8 months, trying to increase the frequency to complete the program in 3 months isn’t going to change that,” she argues. “Buyers will move at their own pace.” Attempts to speed things up with additional email messages will likely annoy your leads and cause campaign fatigue.
Plan with a realistic view of your content-producing capabilities. It takes time to research, write, vet, approve and publish high-quality content. “Map your processes to a timeline so that you can meet the frequency schedule you choose to follow,” Albee advises. “Better to space it out and do it well than to rush to publish based on an artificial schedule you cannot maintain over the long haul.”
Coordinate the timing of email campaigns with each of your company’s departments. “Unless you can isolate your targeted lead list,” she says, “you need to look at the entire universe of email that they could be exposed to from your company and plan accordingly.” You might think you’re giving leads plenty of space, but they’ll feel bombarded if they’re also getting product announcements, corporate newsletters and webinar invitations from others in your organization.
Take the time to clearly map things out. There’s no simple formula for correct frequency, and yours depends on a host of variables—internal and external.
Source: Marketing Interactions.
Crumbs from the Scone
In a post at Deliverability.com, Dennis Dayman tells the story of receiving a spam message that pitched—ironically enough—anti-spam products. He decided to investigate, and discovered it had come from a familiar email service provider. “I contacted a friend there and asked them to look into how this company [the author of the email] got my email address since it was not an opt-in email or a company I’d ever done business with,” he recounts.
The answer: At an anti-spam conference in 2008, Dayman had entered a contest by putting his business card in a fishbowl. “Yes,” he notes, “it took them three years to send me the first email.” Even without that strange delay, however, he would have taken issue with being added to the list, he says.
“Not once did I hear: ‘By registering for this free item you will get an email from us,'” he explains. “What I heard was: ‘Drop your business card in here to win an iPod.'”
His wife offered an alternative perspective: “You didn’t think they would ever spam you when you tried to win the Apple product by dropping your business card into the fishbowl?” she asked.
This goes to the heart of the opt-in debate. If you add people to your list without their explicit permission, some—like Dayman’s wife—will see it as a natural outcome and opt out if they don’t want your messages. But others won’t be so generous, and they’re rarely shy about hitting the spam button.
Assume permission with care and caution. “[U]nderstand that when I give you my business card, I am giving it to you so you can individually contact me, not so you can spam me,” Dayman advises.
Source: Deliverability.
Crumbs from the Scone
“If you bought a nice car two decades ago, would you expect it to still run well if you put in minimal maintenance?” asks Josh Nason in an article at MarketingProfs. “What about that house you bought two years ago? Lots of work, right?”
Well, your email marketing program requires upkeep as well, Nason notes: If you don’t take care of it, it won’t take care of you.
According to Nason, a basic maintenance plan must include action steps like these:
Hire an ESP (email service provider). “If you’re still sending emails from Outlook, give up,” says Nason. “That is the equivalent of using dial-up for your Internet connection—and you’ll deal with all manner of deliverability issues, lack of metrics, and blacklisting problems.” In other words, the cost of an ESP is worth it.
Build a custom template. “Generic templates often look like generic templates, so why are you using them?” he asks. “Your business is unique, so why squeeze yourself inside someone else’s creative box?”
Send messages on a regular basis. People don’t want too much email; nor do they want too little. If you go for weeks or months without sending a newsletter or an offer—something, anything—they might forget who you are and flag you as spam, he warns.
Study your reports. Your ESP can provide an extraordinary amount of data. “Open rates, click-through statistics, number of shares—it goes on and on,” Nason says. “But when was the last time you really delved into your reports to see what’s working and what isn’t?” There’s no time like the present.
If your emails are a flop, take a hard look in the mirror. As Nason puts it, “It’s pretty simple: Your email marketing is insufferable because you don’t care about it.”
Source: MarketingProfs.
Crumbs from the Scone
“Today’s online marketing world is full of lovely words like engagement and empowerment, communication and conversation, interaction and integration, friends, fans and followers,” writes Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports. “Many of these keywords go back to the age-old idea of building a strong relationship between your organization and the members of your audience.”
But here’s the problem with that: Marketers spend too much time talking about the relationship, and too little time having a relationship, Brownlow argues. The result, he notes, is common mistakes like these:
Speaking to your subscribers as if they’re all the same person. “I don’t talk to the postman like I do to my wife,” Brownlow says. “And I don’t talk to the postman now like I talked to him five years ago.” In the same way, you should consider various factors when speaking to a subscriber:
- How long has she been on your list?
- What kinds of purchases does she make?
- What does she open and click on?
- How does she browse at your site?
- How likely is she to share your content with others?
Assuming your subscriber considers your brand a BFF. We tend to think of the email marketing relationship as having a far stronger bond than actually exists, Brownlow says. “[F]or most subscribers it’s an extremely tenuous commitment. Marketers who forget this often assume unconditional love, meaning subscribers will always forgive the occasional (or regular) transgression.” Your most loyal customers might forgive you, but the majority of your list won’t have any trouble hitting the unsubscribe button, he cautions.
Come back down to earth. Don’t let all the nice theory about email relationships prevent you from seeing each one for what it really is—and interacting in a way that creates the most value for your customer.
Source: Email Marketing Reports.
Crumbs from the Scone
A recent edition of “Which Test Won” recounts an A/B test in which DIYthemes, a template system for WordPress, invited visitors to sign up for email newsletters. Version A used the headline “Get Email Updates (it’s free!),” and used social proof messaging to encourage registration: “Join 14,752 others and get free updates.” Below this was a box for an email address and a “join” button. Version B was identical, except that it omitted the line about 14,752 subscribers.
Voters at the site overwhelmingly chose Version A: 82% to 18%. But the majority was—in this case—wrong. “Version B, without the social proof messaging, got a 122% lift in email opt-ins,” Anne Holland notes.
So what happened? “Derek Halpern, Chief Persuasion Officer, DIYthemes, suggested that ‘joining 14,752 others’ just wasn’t compelling enough, or might have distracted visitors from the submit button below,” says Holland. “But we think another factor might be that the messaging didn’t clearly explain what kind of email updates the subscriber would receive—or the benefits of opting in.”
Whatever the case, it sparked a lively discussion in the comment section. Feedback from Holland’s readers included comments like these:
- “Maybe the ‘joining’ messaging misled people into believing they were signing up for a discussion list as opposed to the blog’s own updates?”
- “I think with the phrase ‘joining 14,752 others’ it seems to suggest that the sole reason to join is because 14,752 have joined.”
- “My own testing has shown that you should leave the reasons for joining to the Welcome Email. Every single extra character is one more reason to delay entering your email address and hitting Submit.”
There’s only one way to know for sure. Many experts had an opinion on this test—and most of them got it wrong. Even when the answer seems obvious, test and test and test again.
Source: Which Test Won.
Crumbs from the Scone
“Every industry has its own language,” writes DJ Waldow in an article at MarketingProfs. “The email marketing community, too, has its own jargon that sets it apart. And if you are unfamiliar with it, navigating the world of email marketing can be confusing.” Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been doing email campaigns for a while, it never hurts to have a concise email-marketing glossary on hand.
Waldow put one together for MarketingProfs, and it includes terms like these:
- Blacklist. A blacklist contains a set of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are suspected of sending out unsolicited email (spam). “If your sending IP has a high complaint rate, high hard-bounce rate, or a bunch of spamtrap addresses … you are more likely to be blacklisted,” Waldow notes.
- Hard bounce. A hard bounce is an email that does not reach the intended recipient because of a permanent error. Hard bounces can occur when an alias (username) or domain does not exist.
- Spamtrap/honeypot. These are old/inactive/unused email addresses that are intentionally set up to catch spammers. If you have spamtrap/honeypot email addresses on your list, it may be time to review your process for growing your email list, Waldow advises.
- Whitelist. A whitelist is a list of “approved” IP addresses and senders. If an Internet service provider (ISP) has whitelisted an IP address, it is more likely to accept incoming email from that address.
- CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Signed into law in December 2003 by President Bush, and updated in 2008, CAN-SPAM establishes the standards for sending commercial email in the United States.
Don’t forget the basics. Email marketing rewards those who know what they’re doing, and punishes those who do not. The first step to success is remembering what all the lingo means—and why it matters.
Source: MarketingProfs.
Ardath Albee often gets questions about appropriate email frequency for B2B nurturing programs. How much is too much? How little is too little? “And, yep, wait for it—the answer is—it depends,” she writes at the Marketing Interactions blog.
