VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

We Have Updated our Glossary

Just a quick note to let you know that we've updated our glossary, adding scores of terms and revising others to reflect the latest in the world of direct marketing.  Check out the new and improved version of VR's Direct Marketing Glossary.

Job Market Survey

June is practically upon us which means that freshly minted graduates are flooding the job market in an annual rite of summer.  Every year, new alums (and their parents) nervously evaluate employment prospects, but it's an anxious time for companies as well as they try to re-stock their ranks with the best available talent.  So, is it a buyer's market or a seller's market this year?  Which departments are hiring and which majors put you in the best position to get that plum job?  Take our Job Market Survey and help us get to the bottom of this!

Testing - How To Boost Your Response Rates

Testing can be an important part of your email marketing strategy. A simple tweak in your email campaign could squeeze in some additional clicks, opens or even added revenue!

By starting with simple rules you can be a testing genius.  An old direct marketing rule of thumb is the 40/40/20 rule. Simply put, 40% of your response is driven from your list, 40% from your offer and 20% from your creative.  With email it can be a bit different, since your list and your relationship with your recipients will dictate if they even see your offer due to the potential of them filtering you. For this reason we like to put more emphasis on the list so for email we'll go with the 60/20/20 rule. How do you put this to work? Here are some ideas for each part of this rule which can hopefully help you garner better results.

Develop a “Control” Email

What is a "control"? It's you putting a stake in the ground as far as what you think will work for your audience. You can’t really determine if any changes you make to your campaign in your test are having an effect unless you have a comparison baseline. That’s where the control message comes in; it’s a handy reference point that allows you to evaluate those "tweaks" you made in your campaign.

So take your best stab at developing your creative, copy, offer and messaging and always test against that control email. Once you’ve beaten your control, that is, garnered a better result, then the new email becomes the control.

Test Your List

A good way to test your list is to simply divide your mailing list into different segments, send each group a different email, and determine which one got the better response. This usually works best with larger lists (over 1000); smaller lists may have a sample size too small to be statistically valid. Either way it doesn't hurt to try.

You also might want to try separating your list by "customer" vs. "lead". This way you can try moving the leads along to one day be customers and you can have different offers go to your customers.

Test Different Variables Within Your Email

When you try a new idea, make sure it contrasts sharply with the wording, theme or style of your control – it’s the only way to really determine what works and what doesn’t. With so many different variables you can test, here are just a few:

Offer – Your offer is 20% of your response so let’s get it right. Once you have your list segments in order try some different offers to your list.

• Test a hard sell (Buy now for only $29.95) vs. soft sell (include content around your offer)
• Test pricing – 29.95 vs. 39.95
• Test varying discount levels – 20% vs. 30% off
• Test a free offer - a free product with purchase vs. no free product
• Test free shipping vs. discount

Look and Feel – You’ve built your control based on your brand and what you are trying to accomplish. Now you can learn by testing specific variables within your email as it relates to your general look.

• Colors and Fonts – Try not to stray TOO far from your branded image but if you’re looking to boost response test it out.
• Mail Format and Layout  - Test Text vs. HTML, long vs. short form or columns vs. vertical layout.
• Length of Message – Include the entire message in the email or just a small teaser with a link to the rest of the information.
• Degree of Personalization  - Test no personalization vs. personalized name.

Subject Line – Your subject line IS one of the most important parts of your email, if it doesn’t get opened you don’t get your desired results so go ahead and test within the subject line to get your email opened. If you can get access your list of those who did not open your email, you can send another one with a different subject line.

• Test your offer wording – 20% Discount and Complimentary shipping vs. Complimentary shipping and 20% discount, remember to stay away from excessively using the word “free”.
• Test different article headlines from your newsletter too see what gets opened more.

Test Your Mailing Days

The day of the week and even the time of day when an email is received can have a significant effect on the response. Does your audience consist largely of people with desk jobs who check email throughout the day, or do they check personal accounts in the evening hours?

The impact of timing will vary according to the target market for each company, so there’s no hard-and-fast rule. The only way you can determine what’s best for your audience is to supplement gut feel with trial-and-error.

Test Your Frequency

The volume of email you send, as well as the frequency with which you mail your list affects the response. Does regular mean twice a week or once every two weeks? It really depends on what you told your recipients when they registered, so if you do test, don’t stray too far from what they expect.

Also be aware of your frequency as it relates to bounces and unsubscribes. If you mail too sporadically, you’re likely to lose your recipient’s interest or they may have changed email addresses in the meantime and forget to inform you.

Got any insights on testing? Tell us!

FTC Nails Kodak and ICE.com for Violation of CAN-SPAM

It was bound to happen. It seems like the FTC has been wanting to nab a few legit email marketers violating the CAN-SPAM law. Last week they did it, they charged Kodak (formerly Ofoto) and ICE.com, two companies that VerticalResponse has approached in the past about retaining us for their email marketing needs.

The story? Kodak Imaging Network sent over 2 million messages and didn't have an unsubscribe mechanism or a postal address included in their emails. The outcome? They had to pony up over $26,000 in penalties. Ouch.

ICE.com's story was different. They sent an email marketing campaign to 6,000 people who had previously unsubscribed. Their penalty was a "cool" $6500.

So there you have it. If you use almost any ESP like VerticalResponse, you're ok, we ensure that you have a postal address and that the unsubscribe mechanism works indefinitely (not just the required 30 days).  We also ensure that you don't email someone who has unsubscribed using our mechanism.

(Oh, and thanks to Christopher for such a nice comment about how I had mistakenly published it was 10 days instead of 30, either way VR has you covered.)

Why "Do Not Email" Registries Can Be Dangerous

Last week in DM News, Ken Magill reported a story that shows the precise reason why email registries don't work: they can be a target.

I'll recap it for you if you don't have time to read the whole story. Here's what the company featured in the story, Blue Security, does:

• People who don't want email subscribe to a "do not intrude registry" from Blue Security.
• Blue Security assesses where spam is coming from from desktop software on a registrant's computer.
• Blue Security finds the opt-out/unsubscribe on the spammer's website and automatically bombards the servers with requests.
• The spammer's servers are bogged down potentially slowing them from spamming.

Here's what happened:

• The spammer got mad!
• Said spammer then compared all of the requests to be removed with their internal list and specifically pulled those addresses out.
• The spammer emailed the list with this excerpt:  "You are receiving this email because you are a member of Blue Security," the message reads, in part. "Due to the tactics used by Blue Security, you will end up receiving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally."
• The attack took Blue Security down for some time.

In this case the spammers were specifically trying to target and attack the registry even if they didn't do it by hacking into the databases. This story illustrates another point for exactly why registries can be dangerous.

Got a comment? Let's hear it!

Re-designing the Website

For years we’ve had people tell us they like our corporate website VerticalResponse. Easy to navigate, lots of info, we showcase our customers and this year we even made the Webby Award Honoree List. That means out of over 5500 sites, ours was in the top 20%. Kudos to our creative team!! Next year we're shooting for a trophy!

On to the new site and a few hurdles we had to overcome.

First Stop? CMS - For starters, we needed a content management system. For those of you who don’t know what a CMS is, it’s an easy way for anyone to update their part of the website, without having to go through a webmaster or engineer. We looked at a ton of open source (no cost) CMS systems on the market and chose one, Drupal.

Reworked URLs for Google – We had to rework our pages because the way we initially named them wasn’t optimized for the search engines. For instance here is a VR URL:

www.verticalresponse.com/pc

It should be:

www.verticalresponse.com/postcard

This brings us higher in the rankings for “postcard”.

Next? Content and Help - So now we’re working on layout (going for the web 2.0 look, can you say trebuchet?), upgrading the copy (which will be a fun read, I promise, Josh, Troy and I wrote it), and the content. We’re severely upgrading our “resources” area so you’ll find all the email marketing information you’ll every want to know quickly and easily.

Give us Your Smile! - We are also on the lookout for more customers to feature so if you don’t mind your beautiful smile on the back of a bus or on our site, email us! Don’t be shy.

So be on the lookout in the coming weeks for a new look of VerticalResponse, it will be very hip and very Web 2.0. Next stop, later this year, the product. Stay tuned!