idaconcpts » e-mail marketing

5 Steps To Email Marketing via @hawaiibusiness

Damian Davila — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:59:28 +0000

Aloha readers of idaconcpts.com,

My blog is Hawaii based and I am proud to announce that I was interviewed by Hawaii Business Magazine on the topic of email marketing.

You can find an article on 5 Steps to Email Marketing at HawaiiBusiness.com. You can follow them on Twitter at @hawaiibusiness.

Mahalo for reading,

Damian Davila
Founder and CEO, idaconcpts.com

Keeping Up with the Community

Guest Blogger — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:59:15 +0000

[This is a guest post from Amy G. Howard, Founder of Raleigh Special Tonight. Follow her at @amgenove.]

Running a hyper-local website about daily specials can be quite grueling. In order to keep readers, you need to update at least once a day, or people will stop visiting your site. Raleigh Specials Tonight averages about 600-800 hits per week and 50% of that traffic is returning. I have very loyal readers and I am grateful for that, but I know I need to keep coming with the content if I want it to stay that way.

Where do I find daily content for my site every day? When I first started the site about a year ago, it was tough. I had to seek the information myself by going to individual restaurant websites. I still do that occasionally, but here are some tools I use to keep up with my community so I always have fresh content:

Mailing Lists

Many restaurants have mailing lists where they send out information about specials and events. Some lists go out weekly, some monthly, but I always have an inbox full of information for my website. It’s a great way to have the information come to me so I don’t have to search individual restaurant websites.

Facebook

I “friended” or “liked” local restaurants on Facebook. Their events show up in my feed and I RSVP to them so I always have a fresh look at what’s going on. Content for my site is only a click away on my events page! I also take note when they have status updates regarding upcoming events or specials.

My Eyes and Ears

Raleigh Specials Tonight isn’t just my website; it’s my way of life! I don’t just write about my favorite local bars and restaurants, I go to them. Many restaurant managers/owners know about my website will inform me of events and specials themselves. Also, if I spy a flyer about a local event that my readers would want to know about, I snap a picture with my phone so I have all of the information in the palm of my hand.

4 Tips for a Successful Email Newsletter

Damian Davila — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:34:40 +0000

Through LinkedIn (find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ddavila) and Twitter (@idaconcpts), I receive a lot of questions about marketing and web analytics.

By far, most business owners and marketing consultants have questions regarding how to get started with their email newsletter campaigns.

Often I direct them to these 4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing. Once email marketing practitioners have a solid foundation and have mastered the basics, then we can start talking about content creation.

Here are 4 tips on content creation for a succesful email newsletter and how 4 companies (Facebook, Shutterfly, Bing and Evernote) implement these tips.

1. Your e-newsletter can be short and sweet

You don’t have to send a long newsletter. It can be short and focus on one main story.

You should be able to answer in just one sentence: “What’s the purpose of this email newsletter?” Your one sentence answer needs to trackable with one single measure to determine whether the email campaign was successful or not.

Depending on your business needs, you might use an email template or just plain text (for a good discussion on which one is more appropriate see this guest post from Zachary Zawarski).

Facebook Ads creates great short and sweet emails. For a full discussion on how Facebook does email newsletters, read:

How Facebook Does E-mail Newsletters

How Facebook Does E-mail Newsletters II

How Facebook Does E-mail Newsletters III

2. Share important news (and a gift!)

Remind your customers about the benefits of using your products and services.

Are there any new updates about your company, products or services that your customers would find interesting?

Any newsworthy items in your industry?

Make good use of the law of reciprocity and provide something REALLY useful and FREE to your email recipients.

Shutterfly Wink’s is the king of email newsletters that include a freebie (a photostrip credit to send a free photostrip to anywhere in the world.

Here’s how they offer 2 free photostrip credits on their email newsletter:

3. Showcase your customers and successes

Share customer success stories: show how REAL people make ACTUAL use of your product or service

A company that does this very well is Evernote.

Check out the following screenshots from their “How I Use Evernote” Video Project. See how many views each videos has.

This video series is often highlighted on their plain text email newsletters.

4. Showcase your community spirit

How does your product or service help the community? Highlight how you support the community and invite your customers to join you. Adding a local touch can help make your e-newsletter more interesting and relevant to your customers.

Bing does this well with their current local fundraising initiative.

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

Damian Davila — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:18:28 +0000

Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

On July 2009, eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size. Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.

About Mailchimp

MailChimp in their own words:

We thought, “Sheesh, people are too busy running their businesses to learn how to code HTML emails. Email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it for them.” We put our pragmatic programming skills to work and built a simple tool that included everything our clients needed and nothing they didn’t. We made it so easy, a human could use it. Our clients loved it. So we made it available to the public. The word kinda spread.

One important caveat is that MailChimp, despite its popularity, it is not one of the biggest players in the e-mail marketing industry as a graph of monthly unique visitors from Compete shows below.

According to Compete, on March 2010, MailChimp had 648,259 unique monthly visitors to its website while Constant Contact had 6,332,717; iContact, 1,555,720; Bronto, 1,016,602; and Mailer Mailer, 157,437.

As of March 25, 2010, MailChimp scanned over 570 million emails delivered through their system (where campaign tracking was activated, and where users actually reported their industry) and calculated average unique open rates, average unique click rates, average unique soft bounces, average unique hard bounces, and average unique abuse complaint rate by industry.

Here’s what MailChimp found out.

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

This list of e-mail stats is useful to small business owners who do e-mail marketing themselves because 70% of MailChimp customers are 1-10 employees, and they’re design-it-yourselfers. This provides an “apples to apples” comparison with others in your industry.

Type of Company	Open Rate	Click Rate	Soft Bounce Rate	Hard Bounce Rate	Abuse Complaint Rate	Unsubscribe Rate
Agriculture and Food Services	23.94%	4.85%	0.97%	2.06%	0.10%	0.38%
Arts and Artists	17.53%	3.54%	1.58%	2.54%	0.08%	0.25%
Beauty and Personal Care	14.94%	2.65%	0.71%	1.54%	0.09%	0.28%
Business and Finance	15.47%	2.77%	2.10%	1.57%	0.04%	0.21%
Computers and Electronics	15.51%	2.97%	1.12%	1.71%	0.08%	0.30%
Construction	28.70%	8.01%	4.51%	5.81%	0.11%	0.35%
Consulting	16.32%	3.30%	2.50%	2.39%	0.03%	0.25%
Creative Services/Agency	24.64%	3.08%	1.34%	2.05%	0.06%	0.25%
eCommerce	14.98%	3.36%	0.74%	0.88%	0.08%	0.25%
Education and Training	16.64%	3.41%	1.42%	2.09%	0.06%	0.20%
Entertainment and Events	16.09%	2.98%	0.85%	1.55%	0.08%	0.19%
Government	25.66%	5.37%	0.86%	0.89%	0.04%	0.20%
Health and Fitness	20.96%	5.73%	3.14%	6.30%	0.06%	0.30%
Hobbies	18.45%	4.33%	1.13%	2.08%	0.12%	0.40%
Home and Garden	28.20%	4.38%	2.93%	2.68%	0.02%	0.41%
Insurance	20.91%	3.03%	2.37%	4.15%	0.10%	0.30%
Legal	17.34%	2.49%	0.79%	0.89%	0.02%	0.12%
Marketing and Advertising	18.79%	4.13%	1.39%	2.50%	0.08%	0.23%
Media and Publishing	18.43%	3.39%	0.48%	0.63%	0.03%	0.11%
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare	13.76%	2.59%	2.18%	4.09%	0.06%	0.18%
Music and Musicians	13.95%	2.43%	0.68%	1.07%	0.06%	0.18%
Non-Profit	20.43%	3.54%	1.13%	1.51%	0.05%	0.17%
Other	33.52%	10.90%	0.83%	1.66%	0.09%	0.40%
Photo and Video	28.93%	5.70%	0.99%	1.34%	0.07%	0.26%
Politics	13.72%	2.58%	0.49%	0.78%	0.07%	0.15%
Professional Services	19.77%	3.71%	2.55%	3.57%	0.08%	0.45%
Public Relations	14.81%	1.12%	2.07%	2.28%	0.03%	0.16%
Real Estate	18.48%	3.44%	1.18%	1.67%	0.06%	0.25%
Recruitment and Staffing	15.31%	3.35%	1.37%	1.75%	0.07%	0.31%
Religion	23.04%	3.24%	0.52%	0.68%	0.05%	0.15%
Restaurant	20.07%	2.41%	0.70%	1.11%	0.09%	0.30%
Retail	17.80%	3.54%	0.61%	1.00%	0.08%	0.24%
Social Networks and Online Communities	22.37%	2.85%	6.94%	5.44%	0.11%	0.74%
Software and Web App	15.57%	2.49%	1.88%	3.06%	0.11%	0.39%
Sports	19.54%	4.77%	0.86%	1.53%	0.08%	0.24%
Telecommunications	21.20%	3.22%	1.60%	2.85%	0.10%	0.41%
Travel and Transportation	14.50%	2.71%	0.84%	0.83%	0.05%	0.17%

Use these stats to evaluate your past, current and future e-mail marketing campaigns.

Thank you for your time!

Good and Bad Birthday Emails

Damian Davila — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:28:02 +0000

Yesterday was my birthday.

Yay!

I received gifts!

Yay!

I received one great birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nom nom nom”.

I received one terrible birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nooo it are my birthday”.

Here’s the story of one company that sucks at doing birthday themed e-mails, and another company that got its stuff together.

The Bad Birthday E-mail

Hey, nice cake picture!

So nice that Macy’s remembered!

FREE SHIPPING! That rocks!

Until you read the fine print:

Due to size and/or weight, certain items bear a shipping surcharge, which will still apply. When shipping to multiple addresses, only shipping to the first address will be free; Standard Shipping will apply to all other addresses. Free Shipping offer cannot be applied to purchases being shipped to Alaska, Hawaii, US Territories or APO/FPO addresses.

Hey Macy’s but I live in Hawaii!

What’s the point of sending me a gift that I cannot use?

You might argue that I could save the free shipping code to use it on a future purchase, however the expiration date is April 30, 2010. Less than 60 days is too short of a time frame for me to make a purchase at Macy’s.

Learn from Macy’s failure: If you segment your mailing list by a specific field (e.g. date of birth) make sure to double check (make that triple check!) that the e-mail is applicable to all members of that segment. This “free shipping” e-mail promo shouldn’t go to registered Macy’s users with mailing addresses in Alaska, Hawaii, US Territories and APO/FPO addresses.

The Good Birthday E-mail

Hey, nice gift picture!

So nice that Nature Made remembered!

FREE POINTS! That rocks!

NO RESTRICTIONS! Woohoo!

IT ONLY TAKES 1 CLICK TO GET MY GIFT! Even better!

Nature Made has a program called Wellness Rewards that lets you earn valuable rewards when you use Nature Made Vitamins and Supplements. You bank the Wellness Rewards code sfound on Nature Made bottles and packages and then you can earn rewards including coupons worth up to $7 off Nature Made products, exercise DVDs, pedometers, etc.

Learn from Nature Made’s success: Birthday e-mail promos don’t have to necessarily be an instant monetary reward, as long as they are highly relevant to the interests of your target audience (I have banked so far 2,735 points at the Wellness Rewards program). Make the gift/offer actionable and automatic after 1 click. No fine print, no restrictions: it’s a birthday gift!

Another company that is doing great e-mail newsletters is Shutterfly with its product, Wink.

How Shutterfly Does Email Newsletters

Damian Davila — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:54:13 +0000

Playing Scrabble online?

There’s an app for that.

Finding great local concerts?

There’s an app for that.

Writing great e-mail newsletters?

Sorry, there’s no app for that.

Actually, if you or your company thinks that there is an automatic way to do e-mail newsletters, there’s none.

That is why we need to learn from the pros and if there is one organization that is doing e-mail marketing right, it is the Shutterfly’s Wink team.

What is Shutterfly’s Wink?

Wink is a great iPhone and web app developed by the guys and gals of Shutterfly. Here’s a full review of the web version and iPhone version of Wink.

How Shutterfly Does Email Newsletters

Before jumping into e-mail (and social media, for that matter) campaigns, you’ve got to have a clear idea of what objectives you want out of it. A clear one sentence objective that has a clear call to action, and can be tracked with one measure.

From the February 4th, 2010 e-mail sent out by the Wink team, it is clear that they have a very clear of what they are their objectives and how they are going to measure them:

The e-mail newsletter clearly states 2 objectives.

First:

Objective: Inform users of Wink that the service has been updated.

Call to action: The first 400 people who act after they read this e-mail get a free photostrip credit.

Measure: How many users try the new version because of this e-mail.

Second:

Objective: Ask users for feedback.

Call to action: Send the team your feedback and they’ll send you a free photostrip credit.

Measure: How many user feedback messages the team receives.

Conclusion: Shutterfly’s Wink Avoids the Brochure Mentality

The brochure mentality is the mindset that tells us that as long people get our brochure, open it and browse it for a while; somehow they will get “aware of our brand” or that they will “eventually act on it”. Notice that how exactly the readers of a brochure become aware of the brand or act on it is not really defined, it is just left to, yes you got that right, pure chance.

This e-mail avoids the brochure mentality and clearly states what are the objectives of the e-mail, how to act on them, and provides an incentive to act on them.

How Facebook Does E-mail Newsletters II

Damian Davila — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:55:23 +0000

Does Facebook roll you the welcome mat?

In October 2009, we analyzed an e-mail newsletter from Facebook titled Ads Manager Announcement that was directed to the Facebook Ads users. This newsletter is a great example of how to implement permission marketing, how to avoid the brochure mentality, and how to do seamless product placement.

Below is a snapshot of another newsletter release for Facebook Ads users on January 19, 2010:

The newsletter design is good: short and informative.

However, there is one big problem with this newsletter: the no-reply e-mail address from Facebook.

The Problem with a No-reply E-mail

Conversations matter.

Yes, they really do. Think about this.

Would you want to talk with somebody who introduces himself as “Hi, I’m not interested in what you think, but let me tell you about this!”?

Probably not.

Scratch that. Absolutely not!

Facebook Ads is doing exactly that by using a no-reply e-mail:

The problem with no-repply e-mails was first pointed out by Seth Godin in his book, Permission Marketing, back in the 1990s, and yet still, 20 years later, there are still a lot of organizations (e.g. Facebook) using this conversation-killer e-mail address.

What about the Help Center mention?

The newsletter’s link takes you to the Facebook Help Center with a list of FAQs about Facebook Ads:

Still Facebook does not want to hear from you.

Don’t think so?

The contact form is buried on the website.

Here’s how it looks like:

If there is a way to reach Facebook directly with your question, why don’t make it simple for users to do so. Facebook wouldn’t like that they needed to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to e-mail each one of its members, right?

Conclusion: when doing e-mail newsletters make sure to make it as easy as possible for your e-mail recipients to contact you.

More info about Facebook and E-mail Marketing:

About the author: Since 2007 Damian Davila Rojas lives at Honolulu, Hawaii doing marketing, public relations, and web analytics. His research interests are viral marketing and how to use web metrics to make better strategic business decisions. Follow Damian on Twitter at @idaconcpts.

4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing

Damian Davila — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:22:37 +0000

On early December 2009, a marketing intern at a Fortune 500 contacted me via LinkedIn and asked me how to get started on e-mail marketing. While responding to his message, I realized that it would be a good idea to share it with the readers of idaconcpts.

The first step is to get acquainted with the tenets of permission marketing and how to apply them to create permission-based e-mail marketing campaigns.

The second step is to learn to establish clear objectives and understand some basic metrics to evaluate e-mail marketing campaigns. At the same time, newbies to e-mail marketing need to get acquainted with web analytics tools such as Google Analytics.

The third step is to understand proper evaluation and benchmarking of e-mail marketing campaigns:.

The fourth step is to learn current practices of successful writers of e-mail newsletters.

How Facebook Does Email Newsletters?

If you have any questions feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or at @idaconcpts on Twitter.

How Facebook does E-mail Newsletters

Damian Davila — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:38:16 +0000

On 10/23/2009 Facebook sent out an e-mail newsletter titled “Ads Manager Announcement” to its Facebook Advertising users.

This newsletter is a great example of how to implement permission marketing, how to avoid the brochure mentality, and how to do seamless product placement.

How to Implement Permission Marketing

Click here for a full explanation of e-mail permission marketing.

Facebook provides its users with a check-box so they can decide whether or not to give you permission to contact them.

Here is a list of the Facebook ads e-mail notifications:

Facebook is asking its users: “Do you want to hear from us?” This little question is very powerful because Facebook is already engaging in a conversation with its users. Facebook is letting them know that it wants to keep in touch with them and likewise it is asking them, if they are ok with it.

How to Avoid the Brochure Mentality

Click here for a full explanation of the brochure mentality.

Facebook did not mess around with the objective of this e-mail.

The business objective is clearly defined (go to the Ads Manager right now!) and how this e-mail fits into it.

There are 5 mentions of the Ads Manager tool and they all are clearly defined as hyperlinks to the Ads Manager tool.

Facebook sent you this e-mail because it wants you to use its Ads Manager tool right now. Facebook will measure the success of this e-mail campaign not by the CTR on those links, but by how many dollars are generated from the use of the Ads Manager in a certain period of time.

The brochure mentality is avoided by putting the brochure as a simple link on a side bar (if you want the brochure, here it is), rather than presenting the brochure first and then putting a link to the Ads Manager at the end.

How to Do Seamless Product Placement

Everybody wants to do a little bit of money with its e-mail communications right? Facebook appears to want to do that as well.

Facebook may or may not had planned to sponsor the services of Box.net, but it surely ends up just being that!

The message is clear: Facebook uses Box.net for sharing files via e-mail.

Conclusion

Great e-mails don’t happy by accident! Take some cues from Facebook and improve your e-mail marketing campaigns today.

Are you deceived by your email campaigns?

Damian Davila — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:03:59 +0000

Measuring the success of your permission e-mail campaigns is often oversimplified. Marketing managers are often happy to see rising open rates and click-through rates. (If you have no idea on how to measure the click-through rates of your e-mail campaigns, here’s an easy tutorial using Google Analytics). The problem of being content with just measuring open rates and click-through rates from our e-mail campaigns is that we are victims of the brochure mentality.

What’s the problem with the brochure mentality?

I am sure that newsletter services and talented newsletter writers will challenge the above statement. But think about it for just a second. When discussing with a graphic designer or an e-mail newsletter, how often do you discuss about the actual objective of your e-mail campaign defined in one sentence and whose success can be tracked with one simple measure?

I am not talking about how many people click on your “read more” link or how many people open your “Labor Day Blowout Sale!” e-mail. I am talking about how many people actually end handing you cash in exchange for the product or service that you offer.

Let’s take a look at what Avinash Kaushik has to say on this (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, p. 220):

Before you start your analytics, it is important to understand, at least at a high level, that there several important steps to the process of executing e-mail campaigns:

Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.

I just quoted the first step out of 4 to emphasize the importance of this concept. If you’re a frozen yogurt shop, are you in the business of selling frozen yogurt or are you in the business of making people open e-mails? If you’re a humane society that protects animal rights, are you working hard towards increasing the number of people adopting stray dogs or are you working hard that people click on a YouTube video of a sad dog looking for a home?

Before jumping into e-mail (and social media, for that matter) campaigns, you’ve got to have a clear idea of what objectives you want out of it. A clear one sentence objective that can be tracked with one measure.

Here are some great real life examples that I have encountered during my online marketing practice:

Bake shop: Sell my daily excess inventory of red velvet cupcakes, about 14, before they spoil.
Online coupon service: Generate 5 paying customers during a week.

Not so fast, monkey!

There are several e-mail newsletter services that work great (e.g. MailChimp), but before you sign up for any of them, do your homework. Even though some offer free trials, hold off signing up for them until you have figured out your one sentence objective whose success can be tracked with one measure.

Helpful Links: