Subject Lines on Steroids!

A well crafted subject line can entice me to open an email. 

Or you could just throw the kitchen sink at me! Check out my Gilt emails over the last week or so

They are actually longer when you open the email..

Maybe the guy in charge of segmentation and targeting went on holiday?

It's Not Rocket Science - 4

Making it easy for me to do what I want to is good eCRM. Turning Product Registration into a Market Research Exercise is not.

As an avid gardener (not), I decided on a new hedge trimmer ( watch out for my next post from A&E).

Having seen the opportunity to win £10,000 by registering the product..I thought why not?

Now having seen the generic landing page I kind of thought Bosch could have made my life easier with a link to the actual registration page, or at least when I got to www.boschgarden.co.uk , it would be easy to find the registration page

Think again...

But in for a penny, in for £10,000 I carry on.

So I'm thinking next stage you will ask a little about me, and I'm right. But do you really need my date of birth?

And check out the clause to get me entered into the prize draw..it involves me opting into 3rd party marketing!

But from here on in it gets worse!!

Followed by

and just when you thought it couldn't get any worse!!!

I wanted to register a hedge trimmer not give you my life history!

As a consumer I have no idea why you want all this stuff ( as a marketer I do). Please think of me first and your segmentation/profiling/targeting second

It's Not Rocket Science!

Keeping the Flame Alive

So how do we keep email subscribers engaged?

My view is that we can't really focus on the business as usual aspects of our email programmes, but look at the whole subscriber experience.

So we are talking about

Lighting that Flame
Keeping the Flame Alive
Last Minute Relighting

Lighting the Flame - The Sign Up

It always pays to start as you mean to go on. The sign up provides the launch pad for the rest of the programmes. It's important to manage customers expectations from here on on.

Key tips include
 1.Make It Easy to find and do 

2.Provide one newsletter subscription page including information about all  newsletters

3.Clearly state when users have navigated to the newsletter sign-up process

4.Don’t pre-select any newsletters for users

5.In multi-step processes, let users know how many steps remain

6.Explain the ‘value proposition’ – what’s in it for me?

7.Manage expectations – what will I get when and how often?

8.Have a clear privacy policy

9.Use incentives - but  be transparent

10.Send a confirmation email, or maybe even the last newsletter

I think this is also a real opportunity to get some information from subscribers as to what other channels they might like to receive information through. And don't just stop at Social channels. I've been working recently with clients where mobile and direct mail are still playing a strong part in the mix for certain segments


Keeping the Flame Alive - Relevance

When we talk about 'inactives'. We need to be careful as to what the definition is we are using. This definition will vary from Client to ESP to ISP. Reminding me of the old adage

''there are lies, damned lies , and email metrics''

Some of the key take outs included

 - They were never ever going to be active. Beware email addresses that were acquired as a result of a competition or a prize draw.

 -  They never got your emails in the first place. Data hygiene is an issue. Use of double entry of email addresses and some data tidying behind the scenes can pay high dividends. As can looking at Inbox Delivery. Return Path believe that only 81% of permissionable actually hit the inbox.

- Nothing lasts forever. There will always be subscribers who out grow what you have to offer. People move on and in true old school marketing speak you will need to pour more subscribers in the top end to cope with the leaky bucket. Of course you can minimize those losses by keeping relevance up by understanding the value of delivering

a - the right content
b - at the right time
c - optimised messages for the relevant device
d - context specific messages


 Last Minute Re-lighting - The Unsubscribe

The time to say goodbye will come - but that doesn't mean giving up without something up your sleeve

Some tips include

1.Provide a way to unsubscribe directly via the website

2.On the un-subscribe page, list the user’s email address and current newsletters, 

3.And a simple way to unsubscribe from any or all newsletters.

4.Provide a separate process for unsubscribing.

5.Offer users an option to change frequency as an alternative to unsubscribing

6.Provide a confirmation screen verifying unsubscription

7.On the confirmation page, list other ways to receive updates eg: through social or a blog

8.Ask for feedback about why they are unsubscribing

9.Send only one email confirmation to users after they unsubscribe

10.Unsubscribe users immediately.

But a good point to bear in mind is that if deliverability isn't an issue with you and neither is CPM - do you really need to take these subscribers off the list?

-----

In the words of someone famous

“  we didn’t improve one thing by one hundred percent 

we improved one hundred things by one per cent.”

There is no magic bullet. As with most eCRM, it's all about improving step by step.

Content is a summary of my presentation at the DMA Email Event on Winback in November 2011

Personalisation for the Connected Consumer

Today’s world is increasingly being inhabited with Connected Consumers. These consumers use multiple channels, touch-points and devices to communicate with brands and with each other at warp speed, 24/7. The number of marketing messages that consumers see is often quoted in the thousands. Whatever the number, it’s a lot!

For brands, providing communications that quickly create engagement with these consumers requires that message to resonate and so personalisation is a key plank of any organisation’s eCRM Strategy.

I often have a quote in my presentations about lazy marketers creating email newsletters. Now of course, having offended a large proportion of the audience, I explain later on by actually talking about lazy marketers creating one size fits all email newsletters. This is based on the principle that if I put enough ‘stuff’ in front of you, something will take your fancy. Today’s consumer doesn’t have the time or patience to trawl through a mass of content to find something they need

Now of course we mustn’t mistake personalisation for salutation. ‘Dear Gianfranco’ doesn’t really cut the mustard in terms of personalisation these days. Even Cicero, the Roman philosopher, a few thousand years ago talked about remembering and using someone’s name to have a successful conversation with them. We need more than that if we are to persuade our audience to takes us along with them on their journey

My old Greek friend Aristotle ( don’t worry, there are no more philosophers in this piece) talks about Pathos, Ethos and Logos in the art of persuasion. In plain English that roughly equates to Emotion, Credibility and Logic.

The emotion (Pathos) of a brand can open up an email inbox for example but only positive and relevant experiences will keep it open. And I believe that Credibility and Logic have the use of data at the heart.

In today’s data rich marketing world, logic in the form of personalisation in eCRM can be based on 3 key information areas

Profile – What I’ve told a brand about myself in terms of age, sex and interests

Behaviour – What a brand can infer are my likes, interests from my interaction with them

Transactional – What do my purchases both on and offline tell you about my current and future needs?

Used correctly, combining these starts to create relevance and context to our messages in particular if we can overlay location as part of all this as well an understanding of what device and or app they are reading the message on. As a result, the messages and the brand gain credibility

But of course this new eCRM only works when the context and relevance that you are engaging with me with has my Permission. But it also stops working if you abuse my Privacy by ignoring the Permission I have given you. That permission is about engaging me on particular topics, at certain times using my preferred media.  Nothing more.

Of course before you can convince an audience, using Aristotle’s Ethos, they have to accept you as being credible. And credibility also has Trust as a cornerstone.

As a consumer I want the recommendations and relevancy that personalisation brings, but don’t want you to abuse that trust.

And if you do, as a connected consumer in today’s world using connected networks, your lack of ethos will be quickly shared.

An A to Z of eCRM - T

T is for Targeting and Segmentation

Segmentation + Targeting = Relevance

And remember that Targeting and Segmentation is multi-dimensional. From a consumer’s perspective it’s all 

about understanding

Who I am

What I am

Where I am

When I am

Ultimately, this keeps the consumer happy and makes your own marketing more efficient.

(Chart taken from somewhere..but I cant remember where..sorry)