idaconcpts » e-mail permission marketing campaign

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.

e-Mail Marketing the Right Way: Provide Value

Zachary Zawarski — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:28:07 +0000

[This is a guest contribution by Zachary Zawarski of Zadling]

I don’t subcribe to many e-mail newsletters, but if I do choose to opt into your e-mail list, you better make sure that you’re doing one thing: providing me with value.

We all know that e-mail marketing is a great way to produce sales for your website, but many business owners make the mistake of using mailing lists purely to push their products and services. That is the wrong way to conduct e-mail marketing.

Establish Trust

The best way to gain customers is to establish trust. e-Mail marketing should be about building relationships. Ask the reader to contribute to your blog or follow you on Twitter and make sure that you communicate with them consistently. You’ll also want to make sure that you are providing the readers of your newsletter with tips and resources that help solve their needs. By doing this, you will be viewed as an expert in your field. Once you gain the status of an expert, you have gained your customer’s trust, and then they will be willing to purchase your products and services.

What’s In It For Me?

To encourage your website’s visitors to sign up for your newsletter, you’re going to have to engage in a little bribery. All people really want to know is “what’s in it for me?” Present an offer: “Subscribe to my e-mail newsletter and you’ll receive my free eBook on [insert area of expertise].” Then once you have the customer as a subscriber, don’t forget to keep supplying them with valuable information. Once you have their trust, they will become your customers.

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.

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?

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.

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:

E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals

Damian Davila — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:13:57 +0000

Thank you for the response via e-mail and comment post at idaconcpts.com about last week’s post regarding E-mail Permission Marketing. If you’re still interested on the free copy of the first 4 four chapters of Seth’s Godin Permission Marketing, please e-mail me at damian [at] idaconcpts [dot] com.

So, you’ve created a great product or service and you have users lining up to register online for your product or service so they can use it. You have provided the option to received personal, relevant, and anticipated messages; and guess what? they are choosing to do so by clicking on the checkbox!. Excellent! You cannot believe that people are interested in you and you send out your first e-mail…and…now what?

This week I’m going to discuss, the basics of the “now what”: the E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.

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.
Identify core criteria for e-mail campaigns (what, why, how, when, and so forth).
Create and execute campaigns (mine your e-mail list, scrub it for do not contacts, create the right text or other type of offering, and send it to your e-mail vendor).
Analyze your campaigns.

Email analytics can focus on both ends of this process: defining objectives and criteria as well as campaign analysis.

As you can see, planning is 90% of any e-mail permission marketing campaign. You cannot expect results, if you don’t have an idea of what good results are. The most important part is that you have to figure a return-on-investment (ROI) for obtaining 1 unit of your desired goal (e.g. one download of a software, one download of a flyer on how-to-stop smoking, one call to one 1-800 number, one view of a blog post, etct). That’s the ultimate goal that you want to set up first before anything. How much are you willing to spend in order to get 1 unit of your desired goal? Once you set that goal, write in 60 font size, print it out, and hang it somwhere visible in your working space. This will guide your overall e-mail permission marketing campaign.

However, before getting to the specifics of calculating the ROI, we need to establish the fundamental metrics. Remember, walking before running. In the case of an effective permission e-mail, you can only have up to 2 goals, for example: a) click here to learn more about my great website, b) click here to download my great free mp3, c) click here to make an appointment, etc.

The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:

Actually receive your permission e-mail.
Open your permission e-mail.
Click on the link you want them to click.

In order to track these results, you will need the following metrics. Kaushik suggests that you use an e-mail vendor, however I will assume that your operation is pretty small and does not exceed a couple thousand e-mails. At that level, there are only a couple fundamental metrics that you need to worry about.

Number of e-mails sent
Number of opened e-mails
Number of bounced e-mails
Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

With these metrics you will determine:

Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

That’s it, nothing more, nothing else, to get started. I believe that even with little or no experience, you should be able to calculate everything except the CTR.

I will disccus the specifics of setting up the measurement of CTR with Google Analytics on the next post.

Thank you for your time.