No welcome email = missed opportunity

Welcome to the neighborhoodOne of the many email marketing best practices, is for a company to send some sort of welcome email that includes some of the latest news or an offer. However, lately I think companies have forgotten to set this up. Only thing is, it’s THE BEST opportunity a company has to immediately respond to a request for information from a consumer or prospect. 

Whenever I sign up for something, I immediately go to my inbox to check to see what they sent me. I keep refreshing for about 5 minutes and then finally give up. The most that I seem to get is an email asking me to confirm that it is a valid email address and that I want to opt in. Glad the company confirmed that I want to receive info from them, but I’m looking for the immediate gratification. I want to see what kind of stuff they’re going to send me, and maybe a note of how often I can expect to receive email from the company. But typically, I get nothing. Then one day I think back to the company and wonder if I made it on  their list or if they just don’t do any email marketing.

Suggestions of what to include in the welcome email:

  1. A quick note from your team thanking them for signing up.
  2. Ask the subscriber to include the email address in their whitelist. This is the number one way to make sure emails make it to the inbox.
  3. An offer or reward for signing up such as a coupon or a link to an exclusive whitepaper.
  4. The company contact info in case the subscriber wants to talk right now.
  5. Either include the latest email campaign that has been released or else a link to view the latest version online.
  6. If the company broadcasts on a regular schedule and/or has a calendar of upcoming issues, give the subscriber that information. It’s always helpful to know when you’ll be receiving something next. Giving the subscriber a list of themes/articles in upcoming issues will also help to get them to whitelist your email address if they find the info valuable.
  7. If the sign up form didn’t request much personal information, perhaps ask the subscriber to update their profile so that more tailored content can be delivered to them.

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Monitor and React to Inactive Subscribers More Carefully

I, like many email marketers, sign up for as many emails as I can to see what other people are doing in this space. I like to see what new ideas marketers are using in order to get people to open, click, etc.  I typically won’t give them my real email address because I don’t want to be inundated with tons of email. Instead, I have about 3-4 junk email addresses that I use  to sign up for these emails and occasionally monitor them. And because I’m in email marketing, I know that the only way an email marketing system can track whether or not I’ve opened the email is if I download images or click on a link. Therefore, I typically will select a few campaigns to not take any action on. I want to see how long I’ll stay on their list, or if anything changes if I don’t open or click for a certain amount of time. I’ve been following some campaigns for the last year to see what their strategy is. Here are the common strategies I’ve found:

Situation A: If the company is selling a product, they will typically send campaigns for about 3-4 months to try to get me to engage. If I don’t click on anything within a given amount of time (typically the length of their lead lifecycle), then I get dropped from all emails.

This strategy can be great at the beginning (at least they’re consistently emailing me trying to get me to do something).  But what if I just wasn’t ready to buy yet and still needed some time? Or, what if I was reading the emails, I just wasn’t opening or clicking in them. The company wouldn’t know this, and so would automatically drop me from their list. Lead lost. Out of sight, out of mind, right?! Once I stopped receiving the emails from them, I forgot all about them. Some leads take much longer to convert, and need a reminder dropped in their email box every now and then. Even if they’re not taking an action, the company should continue to send them some sort of email trying to get them interested again, or at least touch base with them with their best stuff once a quarter. One suggestion is to clean the list of all inactive subscribers within a given time (typically 3-6 months). Then send them an email with an engaging subject line like “Is it time to part ways,” “Your subscription is ending,” or even ”Act now to continue receiving our emails.” Tell them why they should take an action. What value will they receive from the company if they open/click on something? Then add a link in there that they must click on in order to continue receiving emails from the company. People react to these types of subject lines, and you’ll likely discover who’s really interested. Those that don’t respond, clean them from the list, and at least a few times a year, send an email to try to get them to re-engage.

Situation B:  I was doing research on a subject, and found an article I wanted to download on a website. I had to give them my info in order to get the article. The form asked me a few questions (name, email, company, website, do you currently have a solution – I answered yes, and when are you looking to purchase – I answered no plans at this time). I really had no interest to buy, or maybe eventually I want to buy, but need them to build a relationship and trust first. I’ve now been receiving 1-2 sentence emails once a week for the last year from them. Each one basically says the same thing, but slightly reworded. They also include a link to download more research they’ve done, however, I see the same link pop up over and over with a few varieties. There’s been no real value in any of the emails I received. Just an automated responder that tries to keep their company in front of me.

This situation has its positives and negatives. It’s great that they continue to email to me, but it’s almost living on an empty hope that I’ll some day convert or take some sort of action if the only type of message they send is the same one over and over. It’s almost a joke to me now to see the email come into my inbox each time. I keep wondering when they’re going to drop me or ask me to do something to say that I’m actually still interested. Now, for me, it’s funny, for the consumer, it’s annoying. I didn’t unsubscribe because I want to see how long they’ll continue this charade for.  What they need to do is try to get me engaged with them. My guess is that they’re not monitoring their list, or they think that the more people they send to, the greater the chance that at least someone will eventually click and convert. Instead, they should follow the process from Situation A, and clean their list once a quarter or so, and see who’s really interested. Move me to a different type of campaign to see if my habits change.

Lessons to be learned…

  1. Clean your list on a consistent basis to move inactive subscribers into different types of campaigns (quarterly emails, re-engagement campaigns, or last chance to continue). Not only does this help the consumer, but you’ll also see more accurate open/click rate with your reporting. When you have deadwood in your list that you continue to email to, you don’t have a real idea of how many people are consistently opening/clicking on your emails and staying engaged.
  2. Email is all about timing. You never know when is the best time for them to view your email. So if you haven’t seen an action from a subscriber within 3 months of mailing to them, chances are they might not be interested anymore (depending on your typical lead lifecycle timeline). 
  3. Not every subscriber is in it for the same thing. Because of this, it’s important to ask them what they want and try different types of campaigns to see what gets them to take an action.
  4. If not already doing so, try to only give a teaser paragraph along with a link to view the rest of the story in order to get subscribers to actually click through. If they have all the content they need on a “front page”, they won’t read through for more.

Why are these lessons important to an email marketer? Well, it could be annoying a potential customer if no one is paying attention to their behavior. The company could be spending extra money sending to an email address that will never open anything. I’m pretty sure that no one wants to annoy potential customers or lose money. Kind of a given. I realize it takes time to go through some of these steps, but companies are likely to earn more business and keep subscribers/consumers happy if the effort is made.

Yahoo! turns on images for Return Path Certified members!

Return Path Certified members received an email today announcing that Yahoo! and Hotmail will have automatic image and link enabling for Certified members.

Specific requirements must be met by the email marketing provider in order to get the images enabled, but if you’re working with a provider that is whitelisted with Return Path and a Certified member, then chances are you’ll soon see an increase in your open rates on Yahoo! and Hotmail. This is a huge accomplishment for Return Path and its Certified members! Learn more…

Target Email by What Subscribers Say and Do

Segmentation Techniques that SMB Marketers Worldwide Plan to Use in Upcoming E-Mail Marketing Campaigns, February 2010 (% of respondents)A lot of research studies have been going on lately about what marketers plan to do in the next year with their email marketing in order to get more relevant. 

Of course segmenting and finding the right interest groups can be time-consuming for a marketer, so it’s understandable that many companies haven’t been able to adapt to this type of change yet. However, email marketing system are coming a long way and some are now able to intuitively segment lists for the marketer based on what subscribers say or do.

For instance, ask the subscriber to give you some information about themselves when they sign up. Get the basics and then ask them what they’re interested in. Re-use the content that you’ve already created for previous marketing material to send in your email marketing campaigns. Once you’ve started sending to your subscribers, profile them by what they click on. Some email marketing systems will allow you to create targeted lists from the email marketing broadcast report based on opens, clicks, etc. TailoredMail has created Automated Theme Segmentation, which is a break-through feature allowing marketers to learn and respond to users by placing “theme trackers” on links. Reporting automatically rolls up all links within each theme type and displays click through data, as well as the ability to easily add those subscribers to targeted email lists, and automatically add the theme(s) to the subscriber profile.

Now that you have what people say they want, and information stored on them based on what they did in an email campaign, you can easily send them relevant content based on what they want, not just what you think they want. Doing this eliminates the time to have to analyze all the data to determine how to send more relevant content when a system does it for you. Now it’s just up to you to come up with the content.

Connecting Email to Social

Email marketing is the epicenter of digital communication and continues to grow and create connections with other communication tools. Check out “How to bring together social media and e-mail marketing.” http://tinyurl.com/pxcqs2

Email and Social Networks Connect

4CKSDW98NJY7 Businesses are quickly catching on to the need for creating social network pages for their business in order to keep connected and in front of the consumers mind. Once they have created their social network page, the next struggle  they tend to encounter is creating content to be used for each network. The content for each social network (like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) isn’t usually the same since it’s targeting different groups of people.

Rather than having to take the time to post to each social network site, use the content you’re storing in your email marketing library, and post it to your social network sites from the email marketing system. Most email marketing systems are now adapting to this, and it’s trackable. You can also start to see who your social network influencers are (the people who spread your information virally), and perhaps even start to send them some of your better content through email since they do such a great job at promoting you. This saves time and money, and you don’t have to rewrite or copy and paste content in order to post to each of the networks.  You can also use email marketing systems to host your landing pages so that you can continue to track what they’re doing.

Email marketing is definitely not dead. It’s just had a rebirth and will continue to grow with the digital world. It all really does start with email…

Email >> RSS
Email >> Social
Email >> SMS
Email >> Blog