Sally Lowery over at the Bronto Blog has a great post on Remarketing Campaigns. I can tell you from personal experience that these types of campaigns can be huge revenue generators for any company.
She points to 5 steps to creating a marketing strategy:
Five Steps to Creating a Remarketing Strategy:
Identify your business objectives. Do you want to target online and offline activities, or are you more focused on specific channels such as paid search, online advertising, etc.? The benefit of remarketing is taking the acquisition that you have already paid an acquisition expense to and keeping them engaged to see a healthy ROI. Determine which campaigns you can act on seamlessly.
Start simple. In our excitement to create more sales activity, we often start big. Consider beginning with something small such as a remail to email campaign recipients who didn’t open. By testing a new subject line or from line, you may be able to create a higher response.
Make certain you have the tools. Do you have an analytics solution that can identify your respondent’s behavior and provide you that data real-time? Do you have an email solution that allows you to segment your audience easily by their behavior? The more tools you have at your disposal that can take behavioral data and allow you to make it actionable, the more sophisticated your remarketing strategy can grow to be.
Report and trend. Make certain all the work is worth the effort. As with any campaign, reporting on data is key to successful marketing. Whether you are trending sales, CTR, acquisition cost, or turnover, keeping a close watch on the numbers will guarantee that your remarketing strategy is moving in the right direction.
Don’t over market. Are you sending multiple remail campaigns to non-opens? If so, your respondents may be experiencing email fatigue. Be cautious with your remarketing, ensuring that across all channels you aren’t sending too often. You don’t want to lose that prospect or customer because you are over zealous.
Sounds nuts huh? Who the heck every heard of quadruple opt in? About a month ago I signed up to receive emails from a particular company. I went through the standard double opt in process and all was good. About 10 days ago, I received an email from this company saying that there was a change in their email practices and that they needed to confirm my wish to receive email from them. At this point, I had received maybe 3 or 4 communications from them, so I found this strange. I clicked on their link and again acknowledged that I would like to opt into receiving their email. 2 days ago, I received another communication from them indicating that this was the last communication I would receive from them, unless I click on this other link, did the acknowledgment again and then answered 3 questions. At first, I thought the last communication was an error on their part. I thought certainly that their 3rd opt in attempt went awry, but apparently not, since they asked for more information.
Goofy? Yes. Creepy…..yes. I don’t want to call out this company for good reason as it may damage their already bi-polar email manager, but there is such a thing as either too much protection or just plain ignorance.
A question was asked at LinkedIn that got me thinking about the future of email marketing. I of course offered my opinion and you can read it along with all of the other answers here. I would be curious to know what your thoughts are, but below is my answer to what I think email marketing will look like in 5 years.
“Lowell makes some excellent points and I would like to piggyback on what was said.
1. First and foremost, email is here to stay period.
2. Email that people will receive will be dictated by the receiver. I think the user will have greater control over what they see and what they receive.
3. The behavior will drive the email. In the coming years, no longer will we receive promotional barf blasts with content for the masses. Companies will need to invest in technology which will drive meaningful messages based on the actions of the users. Information will be key.
4. Reputation is everything. Companies will no longer rely on the rich history they have just to send email. Email practices and more importantly, the ability to drive relevant messages based on the actions of the potential recipients will win in the reputation game.
5. New metrics for email marketers will emerge. OR and CTR’s will be like dial-up…..still there but why?
6. Mobile messaging will be key. Companies that can solve the mystery mobile market with degrees of success will prevail.
7. Companies will have to adapt to the fact that email marketing is not free or even all that cheap in 5 years. Email marketing will not be a one off or a 2nd or 3rd job for folks at companies. Organizations will need to hire full time email marketers who know the business and can dedicate the time it takes to ensure that email produces a ROMI.
8. Finally…(a bold prediction) 5 years from today, the entire look of an email will completely different. If the relevancy, reputation factor and user definition of email engagement evolves, so too will the messages evolve. I predict customized flash video engagements and voice activated email engagements that are customized for the recipients.
Email marketing will evolve into email engagement for companies. It will be a collaborative effort across all interactive/digital marketing departments that will engage the user to participate in a 1 to 1 dialogue with the company at the other end.”
Mark has an excellent post today about being stuck in the numbers rut of email marketing. Often people are too obsessive with numbers and don’t really have a good grasp on what really/how to measure the success of their email marketing.
So the next time you go into a meeting with top executives, have this question answered and stick to your guns: How do we as a company measure our emails success, both short and long term?
I have suffered from email bankruptcy before and so I know where some of these guys are coming. Not only does it occur in our inboxes, but it is now becoming even a bigger problem on my RSS feeds and all of things that I like to track.
Anyway..thanks Scott for the great post. Keep’em coming.
Over the next few posts, I am going to dive a little deep into email acquisition because in the times that we are living in, most companies will continue to be aggressive in the areas of email address acquisition. There are some right ways and some wrong ways to go about getting an email address.
However, I thought I would start with a story. (you can decide on if its real or not as the names are made up to protect the guilty and the innocent)
In a far far away land, there was a company called Tarmart. Tarmart was a great company to work for and to shop at. They carried everything from bongos to beach balls. The CMO at Tarmart saw that his competitors were doing alot of business online and recently found out that most of his competition were getting into this new marketing called “sending out email” Suddenly the CMO stated that email was a top priority at Tarmart. Their current data warehouse of customers did have a lot of information in it. but they found out that they had virtually no email address’. This disturbed the CMO and he immediately tasked all his underlings to launch a plan to acquire email address’ of everyone that shopped in their 250 stores. They currently had 1 million email address’ that they sent a bi-weekly product barf (promotional email) too, but this CMO tasked all of marketing and specifically the newly hired email marketing manager to acquire 4 million more. Since they had information on about 10 million folks, the CMO thought that this would be an attainable goal. This new email marketing manager had about 2 years experience in the industry and thought the quickest way to shut up the CMO was to do an eAppend of his current customer data. Certainly he can find 3 million emails or so from the 10 million they had. It would be easy he thought. Then we could just blast the hell out the 4 million and get a ton of revenue and make the CMO and everyone in marketing jealous of what he was able to do. Little did he know……that this strategy was ultimately doomed to fail….
If you think about it, email is essentially Earth Day Friendly. Why you ask?
1. It does not take a bunch of paper to print on and mail out to your mail box, only for you to throw it away and have someone else recycle it.
2. It does not emit any harmful gases to pollute the earth
3. It’s not going to change the climate
4. Its not made of plastic
5. It does not contribute to global warming
6-1000 It in no way affects the environment that I can think of.
All kidding aside on this Earth Day, I encourage you to do something that improves your environmental citizenship. In fact, go beyond Earth Day and make one change in how you will leave your mark on this world.
I found this great little 9:00 min video on YouTube which talks about the basics of successful email marketing. While the concepts are nothing new to me, its worth a look for those of you wanting to learn more about this exciting medium. For us veterans, this is something we should already know, but if you don’t mind taking a refresher course, its worth a look. Enjoy
Joe over at the Joeism blog aka the Bronto Blog has a great post on how Email Marketing is one of the best marketing programs for retailers.
While I certainly would agree with his post and the findings from Shop.org, I would also like to point out that sending relevant based email is key. You can have 400 million email address’, but if you dont take care of them by giving them what they want, it will ultimately fail.
Customers are in control these days in what they want to see.
Do you have a long term email strategy? Is it written down?
I have found that most companies are in the here and now and really have not given much thought to what their email strategy 12 months from now. Most companies want the quick hit and give no thought as to how they are going to nurture their database to provide the customer with relevant content on an ongoing basis. If you have a long term strategy let me know as I would love to hear from you.
Bonnie Malone Fry over at the email marketing water cooler has a great post on trigger campaigns. Those of us that are actively involved in trigger campaigns appreciate the refresh.
She give 3 great tips to keep in mind
1. Be thorough in writing business rules to guide the program.
I was asked today if I have ever given any thought to the “value of an email address”. I thought about it long and hard and I am still thinking about it. However, one thing that I can say about this is that the value of the email address is only as good as how you take care of it.
You can have 100 million email address and not have a formal email strategy and blow it. Consequently, you can have 1000 and they would outperform the 100 million in terms of ROEI (return on email investment) because you send them relevant content at the right time.
I think the value of an email address depends on the organization and what you do with. However, whether you sell software, lawn tractors or shoes, you need to ensure that you captivate your audience by giving them a choice of what they want to see. Remember…..you are not in control with what you should send them…the email address should be able to tell you….and you better damm well listen.
I had the great pleasure yesterday of speaking with Simms Jenkins of Brightwave Marketing. Not only have I read a lot about him in the recent years but I have read a lot of his postings and articles on email marketing.
I mentioned to him how valuable the emailstatcenter.com has been to my career and I encourage you to go and check it out and check it out if you have not already done so. I literally go there almost daily to validate some numbers and learn as much as I can. As a professional email marketer for over 7 years, I learn something new every day in this crazy world of email marketing. Simms is a great guy and I hope to one day meet him in person and perhaps become a business partner.
Looks like AOL has decided to disable links by default in their new WeSuite release. Ho Hum…..if you are a legitimate email marketer it looks like we have another thing to deal with when sending to AOL.
Next thing you know, all ISP’s will require the sender to have a retina scan prior to deployment.
Spring is upon us in Chicago and I tend to do a lot of walking these days. As I walk by peoples houses I notice one common theme: they are packed full with crap. They are so full of stuff that they cannot be used for what they are intended for in parking your second largest investment. Some garages are dirty and filled with unwanted stuff almost to the ceiling that its hard to even clear a path, let alone park a car.
The same sometimes holds true for your house email lists. It’s filled with unwanted, dried up useless address’ that cost your company money. Not having a plan to cleanse and ensure that your lists are in tip top shape can hurt you in the long run. We all know that having a well performing list is always a challenge and often takes discipline. (sorta like cleaning out your garage once a year) However its an essential piece to a successful email strategy.
Do yourself and your company a favor and clean out the junk. Ensure that the list you email too has no dust or clutter on it and that you can park the relevancy train in it. Its actually fun to park your investment so as to protect it from elements.
Clean your lists and your garage often and soon; your company and your investment will thank you in the long run.
I was surfing last night and came across something that might be of interest. Its called The Big Book of Email Marketing and its published in pdf format for those that register. It is published by a company called IPT. If you have read it, let me know if its worth the read. If not, wait till I read it and I will let you know.
The Marketing Blog has a post about a recent survey done by Daran Media indicating that companies plan to increase the use of email. It found that 70.5% reported plans to increase spending on e-mail acquisition and 63% to increase spending on retention campaigns. In addition, 83% of respondents expect e-mail ROI to increase during the New Year. E-mail optimization techniques, including landing pages, subject line testing and triggered messaging, were unanimously ranked as “very important.”
I receive between 250-300 emails a day at work. About 40% of them are mailing lists that I subscribe too. As a rule, I block out all of the images from the emails just to see how email marketers structure their emails. (I even block my own orgs email images for testing) and I am amazed at how many (in fact alot) of people do not use ALT Tags with their images.
I get the standard “right click here to download pictures…..” which blows because if they use ALT Tags, I would be able to at least see teaser copy since my images dont render……oh well…one can only hope people will correct it.