VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Day 2 - MarketingSherpa Email Summit - Offers

Richard on his last day at the Email Summit:

I’m just really beginning to notice how crowded it is here at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit here in Miami.  There are hundreds and hundreds of people.  I can only assume that the restaurant / bar hosting tonight’s after-party must be pretty huge.  I hope they have a dance floor large enough to contain both me and all these people together.  A normal dance floor can barely contain me alone.

What these sessions (the first hosted by Liz Bullock of Dell and the other by Tara Zanecki of Workshare, Inc.) conveyed above all else is the massive amount of variables you can tweak when testing.  Note that if you haven’t done any testing in the past, the first thing you’ll want to learn how to do is use our list segmentation tool to do A/B split testing. (Basically it's testing two things and cutting your list in two equal parts to do so.) We’ve done a webinar on list building and segmentation - hosted by myself and Erin Jacobs, our Director of Marketing - and we also have a short tutorial showing how to put the tool to use.  I’d recommend checking both of them out.

To quickly sum up what both hosts discussed:

Liz has very little control over the pages on the Dell website (there are apparently more than 4 million pages on the Dell site, which is beyond ridiculous), and a request to have something changed can take months.  The only thing she can directly change is the landing page she uses for deals offered to current and potential Dell Small Business customers.  As a result she wants to make sure her landing pages are optimized to a point that they perform better than any other page on the Dell site. 

She did a variety of tests which involved splitting her lists between current customers and subscribers who had not yet become customers.  She discovered that the Dell Deals page, which lists several computer deals Dell has going at an given time, did better than the landing page among non-customers and that the "Configurator" page, which allows site visitors to configure the best system for them, did better among current customers.

To improve things she removed clutter on the landing page and reduced the number of options visitors were given to navigate away from the page. She also adjusted the layout of the page and added a quick link to schedule a call with a Dell Sales Rep to answer questions.  The page then did better than both the configurator and Dell Deals pages (this improvement in performance took a lot of changes and testing).  She continues to make changes and test those changes to try and perform even better. 

Tara faced an issue in which a long lived version of Workshare’s software was being phased out and replaced by a new piece of software they’d created.  She needed to convey this information to as many customers as possible (meaning those customers needed to open and read the email they received) to make sure they understood why it was being phased out and how easy it would be to make the change to the new software. 

She tested two versions of the email: one that was fairly short (a bit less than a page), somewhat generically salesy, and to the point, and another that was personalized with an actual employee’s name, was written in a more personal style as if it was coming from that employee, and was quite long (three pages) in order to explain what was happening.

Though general best practices would call for a shorter email to perform better, the longer, heavily personalized email performed significantly better.  Though this performance was almost certainly helped by the personalization, it still shows that a longer email can perform better with the right audience if it’s providing them the value and information they’re looking for.

That does it for day two.  Now I’m off to the networking party!  I’m planning to walk, through Miami’s downtown?       

Day 2 - MarketingSherpa Email Summit - Copywriting

From Richard at the Email Summit: Day 2 here in Miami and I’ve already entered every single possible prize drawing at all the booths.  I’m hoping to win big!  I’ve also discovered that the younger MarketingSherpa employees sometimes call each other "sherpas" as in, “you are such a sherpa!”  I think I’m going to start calling everyone at VerticalResponse “responders” to show I’m just as cool as the sherpa people.

The best presentation I’ve seen today was by Jeff Cram of ISITE design, and it was called the Rise of the Un-Newsletter.  He showed, by talking about his own company’s newsletter, how putting a lot of effort and creativity into a newsletter can have a huge impact on how customers, potential customers, and even your own employees see your company.

Before I talk about his presentation I have to mention that he’s from Boston and put on his first slide that he’s a fanatical Red Sox fan.  Is every former or current resident of Boston legally obligated to say this?  I’ve never seen a presentation held by a Boston resident in which the Red Sox were not mentioned at least once.  I’d love to see someone mix it up by saying they’re a Bruins fanatic or that they can’t get enough of Boston College Lacrosse.

Up until two years ago, ISITE put very little thought into their newsletters.  They tried to send them out once a month, but were closer to every six weeks and were still inconsistent with that.  They sent out a plain letter from their president which, based on Jeff’s short description, I’d call roughly as dry and boring as a Terms of Service agreement.  Their open rates were next to terrible, and Jeff’s own friend told him he could no longer bring himself to read the newsletter.

They fixed that problem, and here’s two of the key ways they did it:

They became more consistent with their delivery.  Instead of continuing to shoot for a monthly delivery and failing, they started delivering their newsletter every Full Moon.  As Jeff said, if subscribers “look up in the sky and see the full moon, they know the email is coming.”   This doesn’t mean you need to start delivering your newsletters on the Ides of March or sometime equally as quirky, but setting a standard time to deliver your company newsletters is a good idea.

They put more thought, effort and personality into their newsletter, and took it from a “Letter from the President” format to a true newsletter with lots of information that’s relevant to their subscribers, along with jokes and pop quizzes (which worked for their audience).  As Jeff put it, “Every email is a brand interaction.” When you send an email or newsletter out one of the main goals should be to reinforce and strengthen the image you want your company to project.  Again, this doesn’t mean you have to make your email flashy or funny.  It just means you should steer away from a cookie cutter newsletter.  If your website provides detailed, boring information to your users and they love that, then you should keep providing them what they love.

Off to some more sessions!  My next post will be on some testing and optimization sessions I attended earlier today.

Live Blogging: MarketingSherpa Email Summit - More on List Building

Richard from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit:

In my first post from the Email Summit, I mentioned that Marketing Experiments had said achieving success in getting someone to take action with your marketing (be it at the point of sign-up, clicking a link in an email, or making a purchase on your site) relies on ensuring your relevance, offer and incentives out weigh the friction and anxiety generated by your marketing. But what does that mean exactly? 

Let’s look at how each of these elements applies to a mailing list sign-up form:

Relevance

The relevance of your form relates to how compatible your emails are to what your potential subscribers are looking for.  If you’re sending out emails to farmers with information on tractors, this would not, for a very obvious example, be relevant to a college student looking to buy a pair of shoes.  Know what your audience is looking for and make it clear that what you’re offering in your emails will provide a match (and ensure then that your emails actually match what you’ve then said). 

Offer

The offer of your sign-up is the value you’re providing through the emails you’ll send following that sign-up.  You should very clearly state this offer and, again, try to make sure the message is relevant to what your potential subscribers are looking for. 
For our own mailing list we state “Get tips, tricks, and insider marketing secrets delivered right to your inbox twice per month.”  This gets straight to the point, telling a potential subscriber exactly what they’re getting and how often they’re going to get it.

Incentive

The incentive is an element that’s been added to make a sign-up more appealing.  This can be as simple as offering to enter the potential subscriber into a monthly drawing.  Incentive isn’t really necessary if your offer is strong enough to overcome any friction and anxiety on its own.

Friction

Friction is caused by psychological resistance to some element of your sign-up process.  This can be caused by confusion generated by a difficult to find form or poorly explaining what you’re offering as part of the sign-up.  It can also be caused by forms that are too long, which are somewhat daunting to fill out.  A form should be easy to find, have a good explanation for why someone would want to sign-up and look like it’ll be easy to fill out.  To look at our own sign-up form as an example - we only ask for email address in order for someone to join our mailing list, and we only ask for a few more pieces of information to allow someone to open a free account.

Anxiety

Anxiety is caused by a psychological concern about your sign-up process.  There doesn’t necessarily need to be a truly valid reason for the anxiety to be there - it's all about perception.  A reason someone might have anxiety about your sign-up process is if you ask for information that seems too personal and perhaps unnecessary for an email subscription (like phone number or postal address).  If you need this info, provide a short and honest explanation as to why during the sign-up.

That’s it for day 1 of the conference.  I’m going to go drink some wine and eat alligator fajitas now!

Live Blogging: MarketingSherpa Email Summit - List Building

I've asked Richard, our Manager of Training, to send up some good information from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit so you'll see a bunch of great stuff today and tomorrow.

Richard: Hello from the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami, where it’s humid and sunny.  I personally prefer the fog and 30 mile per hour wind gusts of San Francisco (which is why I live there), but I’m managing to scrape by.

I spent day one of the summit in an eight hour Email Professional Certification course, held by Marketing Experiments.  This course covered best practices for creating sign-up forms, emails and landing pages.  I didn’t agree with absolutely everything that was said - I’ll spare you from my few disagreements - but found the major themes of the course to be very interesting. 

Those themes were:

• To succeed in getting someone to sign-up for your list, open your email, click a link, and take action / make a purchase on your website or email landing page you must ensure that the relevance, offer and incentives of each step outweigh the friction and anxiety generated by each step.  That’s fairly obvious, of course, but I’d never heard the process described in just this way.

• When planning your email marketing efforts, you should work backwards in the design process from the website / landing page where you want to see people take action, to the content of your message, to the sign-up form on your site.  The reason for working backwards is because you want to make sure your emails properly direct subscribers to what you’re offering them on your site, and you want your emails to properly fit what you’ve promised at the point of sign-up.  It’s easier to make sure the beginning of the process properly leads to the end if you know where you want people to end up from the get go.
  
• You always want to ensure congruence and continuity in your efforts.  Congruence means that every element of your content should state or support the value of your proposition.  Continuity means that every step of the sales process should state or support the value of your proposition. Basically, keep to your message.
  

This is just the first of several posts from Miami.  I’ll provide more detail on the themes I’ve mentioned above in my next post.

What is an "Anchor Tag" and How Your Email Campaign Can Benefit!

We get this question quite a bit here at VerticalResponse when people are setting up their email marketing campaigns: "What is an anchor tag and how can I use them?" But what worried me is that people might not even know to ask what and anchor tag is. Many businesses can benefit from anchor tags in their email campaigns right now!

Definition of Anchor Tags

Here goes: An anchor tag is simply a link within an email or a web page that directs you to a specific area within that page or email so you don't have to search and scroll, especially if your email has a lot of information.

A great example of anchor tags in use is the Splendora Style Forecast newsletter.  They include a bulleted list of links at the top of their emails entitled "In This Issue" so a recipient can quickly scan this issue to see if there's anything that grabs their attention. Then they can click right to it without scrolling.

You'll see the first item "Quilted Mark Jacobs Bag Sweeps" and if you click on it you'd be directed to the first article. Easy!

How to include an anchor tag using the VerticalResponse Email Canvas tool.

1. List your article headlines or a variation of them at the top of the email just like Splendora does in "In This Issue" in a bulleted or list format.
   
2. For each headline in the body of your email (in this instance "Quilted Marc Jacobs Bag Sweeps" in the dark brown bar) you'd click your cursor right before the first letter of the text.
3. In the toolbar at the top of the Email Canvas you'll see an "anchor" button that looks like. Click on it.
4. A pop up will appear asking you to name the "anchor tag". Name it something relevant. In this case maybe "sweepstakes". Click Insert. An anchor symbol should appear right where your cursor was.
5. Go back to the "In the News" list at the top of the email where you want to have the link and highlight the headline.
6. Click "link" which looks like and a popup will appear. Right below where they ask you to fill in the URL, you'll see "anchors" with a drop down menu. Find what you named your anchor and select it.
7. Voila, you've just created an anchor tag. Now test it by sending an email to yourself.

It's easy to do and it really helps your readers get to the meat of what they want out of your email.

Janine's Quote in eMarketing and Commerce Magazine

This is a great magazine and website to check out run by Melissa Campanelli, ex-DM News. She's been writing some great emarketing and ecommerce articles for years. She asked us to give her an edgy quote about something pertaining to marketing. So I did.

Austin & Denver Email Marketing Workshops - The Basics

Looking to acquire more customers and boost the loyalty of your existing ones? If you're feeling overwhelmed by marketing buzzwords and web 2.0 talk, then we've got a FREE event for you. Join us for a morning workshop (and FREE breakfast!) that peels the onion on the basics of marketing like email, direct mail and online surveys.

These workshops are great for:

• Anyone new to email marketing
• Anyone using another email marketing tool looking to switch
• Anyone looking for new affordable ways to grow their business online & offline

Attendees get the Get Vertical Email Marketing Basics Kit - FREE! Check out the curriculum.

Denver - March 27th, 7:30AM-12 Noon, The Adam's Mark Hotel
Austin - May 22nd, 7:30-12 Noon, The Driskill Hotel

If you are already using VerticalResponse this may be a bit basic for you but perhaps you know someone who needs our help. If you do, refer them to the "Register Now" page.  In the box marked "Referred by" ask them to include your VerticalResponse user name.

For every person you refer who attends our session,
you get 1000 FREE email credits and so do they!

What are you waiting for? Oh right, free email credits...tell a friend!

Remarkable Service - Worth Talking About

We talk about the "extra" things you can do to get people talking about your business or your service. We even put it on our marketing checklist of 2008. Here's a great idea you can take away if you're in the hospitality business or not.

True Story

My husband and I recently took a trip to LA and stayed at The Standard hotel downtown. I asked the concierge if they would get us reservations at the nearby Takami Sushi restaurant. She confirmed so off we went. As soon as we arrived and gave our name to the hostess she said "Ah yes, you're coming from The Standard" and she showed us to our table. Our waitress came to take our order and said, "the hotel would like to buy your appetizer." Nice. Well done to both the restaurant for remembering where they just got two new customers and the hotel for going the extra mile.

Do you have a business that lends itself to co-marketing opportunities with a neighbor?

Clothing Retailers - Give one free dry cleaning around the corner when someone purchases more than $100.
Italian Restaurants - Give one free dry cleaning when a customer spills red wine or pasta sauce on their shirt from the delicious food you serve!
Hotels - Give one day pass to the gym down the street or give a free gelato coupon to the local gelato shop.
Realtors - Give a housecleaning coupon for $50 off the first clean or a local handyman coupon.
Jewelry Shop - Give a coupon for a free basic manicure from a local nail salon if someone purchases from you.
Car Dealer - Give a coupon for a free detailing.
Online Retailers - After someone has purchased offer a discount code to a complementary product. A good example is when wine.com used to offer discount codes for Omaha Steaks after you purchased.

Hopefully your neighbors will give the coupons or gifts to you for free or heavily discounted since you just potentially walked a new customer through their doors. Then it's up to them to do a great job converting them for repeat business. Either way, both of you have the potential of looking great, just like the restaurant and the hotel.

Word of mouth isn't always a campaign you can just start, it's all of the remarkable things you do for your customers. But when they're successful, they can start to get rolling, just like me talking about the restaurant and the hotel.

Do you have any ideas on how to get word-of-mouth rolling? We'd love to hear them!

Increase Response Rates with 4 Easy Best Practices

Our Marketing Director Erin was giving a presentation last week and thought her slide about Back to the Basics would serve a nice purpose for our readers. I did too. We get this question here all the time, how can I increase my response rates? Well there's a ton of moving parts to email marketing, but there are always the "marketing basics" that sometimes we all need to be reminded of. Here are a few:

Repetition is a Good Thing - Give your reader more than one opportunity to respond within the same email. Don't include only one link at the bottom of your email. Your reader may never scroll that far. When you send yourself a test email, make sure you can see links in your preview pane, which is the window in an email client that lets the reader "preview" an email before they open it. If you're a publisher and you charge for advertising in your emails, you'll have a happier advertiser the more the links are placed towards the top.

Focus on What's HOT - The focus of your email should be on the offer or the content you think will be really exciting for your reader. Think to yourself, "What in my content is most compelling to most of the people on my list?" If you've got two distinct audiences that might respond differently to different subject lines segment your list and send them targeted campaigns. Oh and don't confuse the reader with too many messages, unless you've set them up in a newsletter where each topic can be viewed and read concisely on its own.

Call-to-Action - When you plan your campaign or email, ask yourself "what do I want my reader to do? Buy now? Sign up now? Register for an event?" Make that message clear on the layout of the email. Also make sure each call-to-action and each image you use is linked to where you want them to go.

Expirations Work - Create a sense of urgency around your promotion if you have one. If you want your recipients to attend an event ask them to sign up by a specific date to guarantee their spot or get a discount. For a sale, create a discount good only for a certain period of time, then stick to it. You don't want to be known as the softie for letting people continue to get the discount the next time you have a sale. They'll get used to it.

Hope this helps! Any other basics? Bring 'em on.

Local Ad Spending Will Grow Faster in 2008

An interesting eMarketer report recently came out that showed local ad spending to grow more significantly than national advertising from 2007 to 2008. Although the national spend far outweighs local spending, the report shows that year to year businesses will buy more local advertising through search, email, newspapers, print, and classifieds at a rate of twice more than the previous year.

I thought about it a bit and how that relates to our own business. Are we thinking to do more local advertising? You bet!

We already do local advertising here in San Francisco with print events and outdoor (check for buses and billboards!), but we're taking it to a city near you.

Are you doing anything at the local level?

Google Adwords - You can purchase location-based advertising clicks so if you service a certain geography you can target your adwords.

Chamber of Commerce - Many companies aren't members of their local chamber of commerce and hey, you get out of it what you put into it. But your local chamber of commerce might have ad opportunities you can capitalize on just because you're a member. Sometimes they print newsletters, I know VR has hundreds of chambers that send email newsletters, they even have trade shows you can attend for networking opportunities and expanding your business.

Events - You can be a part of an event, or host your own. We're offering up our office to host a local user group for Salesforce.com this week. We'll get to meet some new potential customers that way as well as some current customers.

Print - You may have a local paper, or you might have a city magazine. Where Magazine is great for consumer offers, their circulation is pretty nice and they distribute into many hotels. Online CitySearch is a great tool for you to get your business listed. They also do national ad runs as well.

Hey VR is on a local city tour. Check out our events calendar to see where we'll be next in a city near you.

I think I agree with eMarketer, now get out there and join us!