Obama and Subject Line Testing

Testing up to 18 copy / subject line variants at a time, the Obama team discovered that the subject line 'Hey' was the one that drove the most donations. It literally brought in millions of dollars!





Original article can be found here

It's All About the Call To Action

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If you have ever read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell you will recall that talks about Thinking without Thinking and that most of the decisions we make are actually made in a matter of seconds.

This of course applies to how consumers react to emails. Their decision to move onto the next stage is made within 2 or 3 seconds, so we need to make sure that we do everything we can to ensure that we inspire action.

Litmus have produced this great infographic to give us the inspiration to do this better

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?

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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

How to Start an Email Conversation

A few months ago I wrote a post on how to start a conversation the right (It's all about the conversation...or is it?: How to start off an email conversation...the right way) . And with this post I gave some tips on sign up

I was sent this fantastic piece of work that shows the benefits of asking people to confirm their email address in the subject line of the confirmation email. ( see it here )

Definitely worth an A/B Test don't you think ?

An A to Z of eCRM - R

R is for ROI 

At the end of the day engagement and conversation are important, but essentially it does boil down to it all being about the conversion so measurement and evaluation are key.

Return on Investment is a key cornerstone of direct, digital and data.

But what should we measure? Many marketers stop after the first few steps. Opens, clicks, shares, reviews, recommendations are key metrics but we must not stop there. But what we need to understand is how these initial consumer indicators ultimately translate  into Return

Testing Testing 1 2 3

I came across this piece on the 'Three Vital Elements of Email to Test' this morning.

A tidy little piece which again highlights the importance of audience selection in any for of direct marketing, or indeed marketing in general.

The audience is primary when considering any form of testing as it more often than not actually provides you with the biggest uplift in response.

My 1,2,3 revolve around these areas

1 : Keep it simple or lose the ability to see the wood for the trees
2 : Counting to 10 before changing anything
3 : Lest we forget what we learnt last time

These are expanded upon in an article I wrote a while back on cuzziol.com

Email Marketing - What's your ROI?

I came across an amazing statistic this morning about the ROI organisations are getting from their email marketing.

Although a year old now, the Adestra Email Marketing Census highlighted how few organisations actually know what their ROI is.According to this census,the majority of respondents being in the UK, a staggering 42% of organisations have no idea what their ROI is!!

And yet, 78% of these organisations believed that as a channel , email was 'excellent' or 'good' for ROI, and yet Direct Marketing was only regarded 'excellent' or 'good' by 6%. I find this confusing as I always thought email was a direct channel ?

I know that often email marketing is seen as being a pretty cheap channel, but that doesn't excuse organisations doing the fundamentals of getting a grip its effectiveness. I was once given these wise words: 'If emails cost as much as direct mail, a lot more thought would be put into how many are sent out'

This is very true in particular when you begin to look at the negative impact too many emails can have on open rates, and even on getting them into the recipients inbox now that the like of Hotmail monitor email open activity as part of their junk email filtering

I can only hope that the 1 in 3 organisations in the survey that say that Measurement & Evaluation is a focus are all in that group that say they have no idea what their ROI is!