Situational Marketing

Email Marketing Interview With Karen Talavera

The following is an interview with Karen Talavera, an email marketing expert with Synchronocity Marketing.

1) Karen, can you tell me a little bit about your company and what you do? No marketing speak is allowed for this question?

Yes, Synchronicity Marketing can be thought of as a strategic sherpa for marketers transitioning, evolving, and expanding beyond traditional direct marketing channels to new ones.  We help companies integrate new communications channels – like email or mobile messaging – into their traditional ones, and avoid the pitfalls in the process. The goal is to help marketers move away from a channel-siloed way of marketing to thinking holistically, so that the whole (constellation of efforts) produces a far more powerful impact than the individual components could on their own.

2) Integration is a pretty common buzzword in your line of work – what does it actually mean, and can you talk about an example where integration actually led to more revenue?

Integration to me means connecting the tools in the toolbox so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.  It means different marketing channels and tactics work to reinforce and create incremental benefit for one another, rather than each operating in a pigeon-holed fashion.  Consumers are multi-media savvy so marketers need to assume their customers will experience their brand in many environments, including some like social media sites (MySpace, Second Life, You Tube) which can’t be entirely controlled.  Today there are so many channels, formats, and devices let alone points of presence through which a target audience member can be reached and communicated to that if marketing campaigns are not cross-channel integrated, meaning if we are not helping people “connect the dots”, the alternative is our messages will be hopelessly fragmented and therefore, lost or unintelligible.

Integrating Your E-mail Marketing With Blogging

Smart e-mail marketers know that bulky e-mail attachments clog up inboxes and don't get read.  A lightweight HTML newsletter that gives portions of the content but drives readers back to a website is the key to adding traffic and getting read.

It's an old trick, but a good one.  But it usually means you have to create the content for a newsletter and post it in two places - your e-mail marketing piece and your website.  If you're interested in displaying the same amount of information without doing double work, I'd suggest you start using a blog software as a content management system.  Blogposts are published using HTML.  It's very simple to take a blogpost and turn it into an e-mail newsletter.  At the same time, writing and posting just once a week gives you four articles to add to the newsletter.

Some people read content from the newsletter, and some read it online.  If you're looking to save time (and improve your SEO), learn to publish blogs that can be reconstituted as your monthly newsletter.  It's as easy as write, publish, and send.

Valentine's Day Is Coming

Marketing is a holiday-driven function in the retail world.  This is true of car dealers, furniture stores, restaurants, and even grocery stores.

For e-mail marketers, the options go much further, from product based e-commerce stores to accountants promising tax advice on the cheap if done before Valentine's.

The Vertical Response blog lays out a whole series of Valentine-themed e-mail campaigns.

Jewelry - Pictures work! Make sure you put them prominently in your emails to show off your stuff.

Flowers - This is too obvious, but remember to include email marketing campaigns all the way up to and on the day.

Spas & Salons - Start putting your offerings out on your websites and in your salons now. Gift certificates are THE thing you should be pushing for this holiday.

Wineries/Wine Shops - How about putting together gift baskets of your merchandise? We've seen some nice red gift bags that wineries are giving for free with nice card attached.

Can you come up with any more?  And when you're done, it's time to start working on St. Patty's Day.

Help! I'm Getting Too Much E-mail!

An e-marketer report, forwarded to me by the ever-helpful Chris Torbit, references the problem with using e-mail marketing exclusively.  We as consumers have too many addresses, too much e-mail, and we can't opt-in everywhere.

 
Problem 1:  Many of us have multiple accounts.
Problem 2:  Everybody wants a piece of our time
Problem 3:  E-mail still works, at least for the moment.

These are the core problems of e-mail marketing, and yes, we're going to toot our own horn here, but this is what we build Consumer Decoder to solve.

Your opt-in strategy may be a brilliant one, but for most companies, the fatal flaw is in a lack of consumer choice.  The whole point of opt-in is customers get to tell you whether or not you have permission to contact them.  If your only method of communication is e-mail, you're going to lose customers who just can't take any more e-mail messaging.

You can solve that by offering a myriad of choices for customers to be contacted, including Voice, IVR, SMS, and RSS, but you need four vendors to handle that work, and your database integration becomes hopelessly tangled.

Consumer Decoder is built to help your customers self-select their messaging options.  They opt-in, choose how they want to be contacted, and you do nothing but service their needs and focus on your messaging.  Currently, most people prefer e-mail, but the market is changing, and based on your demographic, e-mail may not be the only choice.  What are the stats on usage?  The chart is below the fold.

E-mail Marketing: Spam or Scam

E-mail marketing is easy, or so everyone thinks.  It costs so little, and is so easy to start, that many companies don't take the time to think through what they're sending out.

From gathering the right list of people to send out to writing an e-mail that is clear on what they're selling to providing instructions on what action to take, e-mail marketers often miss the boat in their pitches, and those are the ones who aren't spammers.

Ian  from Conversation Marketing got what he thought was a clear cut piece of spam, until he looked closer. It was an e-mail marketing piece from Clarisonic.  Oops!  Evidently Clarisonic (as seen on Oprah!) is pushing a new brush head product and used a traditional marketing campaign to attract an on-line audience. Unfortunately, the e-mail read a lot like it came from a spammer and could have been misconstrued as an elaborate scam from a competitor.

Ian describes the mistakes made it pretty elaborate detail, and takes this opportunity to educate us on how to improve upon it........

1. Change the tone. The writing style in this reads like it was sent by a spammer. I actually spent an hour trying to figure out if this was an elaborate scam by a competitor. Use a more personable tone.

2. Get rid of the all caps text at the bottom

and one more.

6. Check the code. Right now, the HTML code for this e-mail is a mess of Microsoft-generated gobbledygook. I'm not just being anal-retentive. This code makes most spam filters shriek in alarm. Cleaner, more standards-compliant HTML would create less of a red flag for these filters, and increase the odds that the e-mail actually gets to folks' inboxes.

I have made been the author of some very poor e-mail campaigns myself.  When I first started, I thought that merely sending an e-mail was good enough, because it was me, and I was not a spammer.   Suffice it to say, e-mail marketing is a sensitive topic, and Iearned quickly that if you're not writing to someone  you know, they likely think it's spam.  Check out Ian for some good e-mail marketing tips and suggestions before you push your product or idea to a world of Web 2.0 strangers.

And don't forget the technical side.  Blast Companies helps you manage your e-mail marketing campaign.

PR Spam: The Final Frontier

Blogging Meets E-mail Meets PR firms in the battle of the century.  It seems that bloggers no longer want to be mass e-mailed as a function of the PR Community.

Fishing for Customers writes a post where he says that half of his e-mail is now spam releases, and he really doesn't want them writing.

Within days I was getting regular solicitations, and within a few weeks they made up half of the mail in my "in" box.

I don't mind people submitting story ideas, or opportunities to interview, but I wish they had even a small understanding of the topics I write about.

Chuck also points us to Chris Anderson of the Long Tail, who published a huge list of PR e-mail addresses from people who sent him e-mail that he didn't want.

I've had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it's PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers.

So he published the e-mail addresses.  The comments on the post are varied, instructive, and heated.

This is an issue that strikes home for Blast Companies, because we manage e-mail marketing services and the  biggest problem is learning to recognize when someone wants to be contacted, and when they want to be left alone.  We have software that helps to fix that, but it requires companies interested in generating true opt-in and opt-out lists.

The biggest problem with spam?  It works.  Change a few words, act a little different, and you're able to get your message out and make money.  There is a negative impact, but it's often overshadowed, and even in the case of someone like Chris Anderson, more e-mail addresses are available.

One-to-one contact is expensive, and difficult.  You can spend a lot of time on non-influential people, and as a PR rep, if you make the mistake, you're fired.  If you spam someone, you at least have a numbers on your side to defend your fees.  It doesn't mean it's right, but it's understandable.  Short-term thinking dominates most industries.

When the pain of public embarrassment, given by people like Chris Anderson, is greater than the benefit of mass e-mailing press releases, the practice will change.

Email Matters!

It's a great title.  Denise Cox, who happens to write across the pond, writes a great e-mail marketing blog called Email Matters!  Aside from being catchy, it's a message of hopefulness that businesses and entrepreneurs involved in online marketing need to hear.

E-mail marketing works.  If you do it right.  So the post I wanted to showcase was on reasons to switch over your print newsletter to an e-mail newsletter.  It's a top ten list, but my highlights are:

5. Email newsletters are a top ROI tool for your website. In a previous post I noted Jakob Nielsen’s article saying newsletters offer good Return on investment (ROI) because they “let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site. …. plus, they have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines.” (Email Insider provides lots of stats on email’s ROI.)

3. You’ll be able to easily and quickly test anything in your newsletter. The world of testing is your oyster with email – you can test subject lines, offers, calls to action, time and day of send to see what works best BEFORE you do your full send. (All about testing)

Yes, yes, we all like to complain about our e-mail, but for mostly secure, one-to-one and many-to many communication that includes a "paper trail" and a rolodex in one, email is still the most useful technology around.  It's good for strangers, friends, and colleagues and most of your audience uses it - daily.

Check out Denise's blog for more tips on e-mailing - and if it's spelled different than you might think, remember that they're the ones that officially speak the language.

http://www.newsweaver.co.uk/emailnewsletters/?p=103

E-mail Marketing Growing. Now Can We Make It Profitable?

Silverpop reports on the Direct Marketing Associations new figures out that say open rates for e-mail marketing are on the rise, as are opt-in rates by consumers.  That's great news for e-mail marketers, especially amid claims in 2003-2006 that e-mail was dead as a marketing vehicle.

What is dead is mindless e-mail broadcast to millions of unsuspecting and uninterested viewers.

The opt-in numbers are the most important, and I think they'll continue to grow for some very simple reasons.  People want to be informed, and e-mail is a great way to do so.

In an age where communication is everywhere, our customers need information.   But they want to trust what they read, and this requires an action on their part.  If I sign up for a newsletter, I'm clearly more likely to read it than if it comes to me unsolicited.

So it's the valuable e-mail (to me) that I want. 

Marketers often forget that, and so I was pleased to see Kevin Hillstrom tackle the subject by telling a story about Land's End catalogs and the way they measured value.

"Back in the day", Lands' End measured the profitability of every spread in a catalog. Every major catalog was analyzed by a team of merchandising, creative, inventory and circulation staffers.

If I remember correctly, each spread in the catalog was grouped into one of four categories.

• Spreads that generated 30% or better variable profit (profit before fixed costs) were coded "GOLD".
• Spreads that generated 20% to 30% variable profit were coded "GREEN".
• Spreads that generated 10% to 20% variable profit were coded "BLUE".
• Spreads that generated less than 10% variable profit were coded "RED".

When we measure e-mail responses (or text or phone or social media), the key value for the client is not just the responses, but the number of sales/amount of revenue that comes from the campaign.  A 200-1 return on a marketing campaign would be good if 1% opened up the e-mail or if 50% did.  It's those who buy who matter most.

The rest may make for nice metrics, but ultimately it's the result of the campaign we should be focused on.