As I write today, it's actually sunny here in
California - although clouds are on the horizon. Only our second sunny day
of April; the Giants have had two home games rained out! Two sunny days in
14 - that's a .143 batting average, bad enough to get a pitcher shipped to
the American League! People around here have started muttering about
"global warming."
But this newsletter is about marketing, not politics
- and besides, it would just take too long to explain how global warming
leads to snow on the beach at Capitola. (And there's a chance I might not
fully understand it, myself!)
Clearly, though, the winds have changed - in direct
marketing as well as baseball - so today, let's take a look at how we
should trim our sails to take advantage of these fresh breezes.
Will
Goodmail Affect You?
When AOL and Yahoo! first announced their plans to use Goodmail's
pay-to-play
CertifiedEmail, it raised quite a furor. MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland
said "the proposed charges would roughly double most mailers' send costs";
many others decried the end of email marketing. What's all the fuss about?
Basically, Goodmail allows senders to pay a fee to "certify" that they
aren't email abusers. In return, they get a free pass around the ISPs' spam filters
and straight into their prospects' inbox. Potentially improved returns,
for an increased investment. How will this affect your ROI?
Well, maybe your costs will go up; maybe not. They almost
certainly will not double. But Anne is one of
those people who is, annoyingly, always right (that's my opinion, not
necessarily hers).
So if something she says doesn't sound right, a bit of careful study will
often uncover some useful insights.
First,
Anne made
that statement before full details of the AOL and Yahoo! deals came out.
It turns out Yahoo! will only support Goodmail for transactional messages,
not marketing messages. So unless you're having problems delivering email
receipts to your Yahoo! customers, this won't impact you. (By the way,
"transactional" is a separate Goodmail certification level.)
And although AOL initially announced Goodmail
would replace their Enhanced Whitelist, they now say they'll continue to
support their existing whitelist programs. Goodmail is just an additional option.
AOL's program will deliver Goodmail-certified messages directly to users' in-boxes
(unless user filters send them elsewhere).
Since 48% of Bigfoot's
respondents don't check their spam/junk mail folder, that could help
your ROI. And, Goodmail-certified messages will have images and links enabled. (The AOL
default is disabled, unless the sender is in the user's address book.)
That could impact "open" rates - remember our discussion last issue.
Still, it was hard to figure how a $2.50 - $10.00 CPM surcharge would
double the costs for marketers who are already spending $350-$450 CPM to
rent solid B2B lists. Well, first, Anne was talking specifically about
"send costs". High-volume senders tend to pay their ESP around one cent
(or less) per message. That's $10 CPM or less. Add Goodmail's $10 CPM or
less, and that's "roughly double."
Paul Myers (another guy who seems to always get it right - but at least
he tries to be annoying) shed some light on this. First, the per-message
charge may be 2-4 cents ($20-40 CPM). And, there's an up-front
fee of $10,000. By my math, it looks like hitting a list of 300-350
prospects would "roughly double" costs. Of course, you may only pay the
setup costs once. But if you send to that list ten times this year, that's
still a 10% increase. And that's significant. Hit them every two weeks,
and it's still a 4-5% increase. Is that in your budget?
(Think 350 is a ridiculously small list? Remember the data about list
sizes in our last issue? That's right in the "sweet spot".)
But, this only matters to you if you need to reach a lot of AOL
addresses, and the current AOL whitelists don't work for you. Even then,
unless you work with very small lists, or with a larger (10,000
- 500,000) in-house list, the costs aren't that dramatic.
What's a Marketer To Do?
OK, we've discussed how to decide whether or not you should use Goodmail.
But we all need to deal with the other issues we've raised, so let's talk
about some specific recommendations.
First, list hygiene is more important than ever. Purge bad
addresses; track and suspend bounces; honor unsubscribe requests. And,
consider implementing a re-engagement strategy for high-value
prospects whose open and click-through rates decline. Consider special
offers to new subscribers - response rates drop dramatically after the
first 60
days.
Don't try to cut your list to less than a thousand names - or stop trying
to grow it if it's smaller than that. Of course you still want to build a big
in-house list. But now more than ever you must segment your list.
Find out who's interested in what, and send them separate, targeted emails.
Yes, this means more work for you and your team, or more money spent on
agencies or consultants. But the paybacks are more than worth it. In
MarketingSherpa's study, segmented campaigns generated almost 6.5 times
as many opens as non-segmented - and almost 13 times the click-throughs.
Use your conversion rate and average selling price to see how much this
would be worth to you.
Are you sending your campaigns on the right day? At the right time?
Don't just switch to Fridays (everyone else will, anyway... ) Take a
look at your logs. When do most of your opens occur? Better yet, when
are most of your sales made? Consider sending campaigns on the days
and times when your prospects are most likely to buy. (Be sure to filter out sales from your
existing email campaigns - they're tied to your current sending pattern.)
Graphics improve click-through (people don't click on the graphic -
they click on text links just
below the graphic). Humor works - the old canard that "humor kills
the sale" is obsolete: another thing the Internet has changed. Prospects
expect to be entertained. Tell a story; get the prospect engaged.
Or don't expect more than five seconds of their attention.
Think very, very seriously about multi-channel campaigns. If
traditional direct mail is a big part of your program, this is a
no-brainer. Remember, most of your prospects will read your direct-mail
piece, then go online to find someone to buy from. They've incorporated
online into their buying habits - you should include it in your marketing
efforts!
But this works both ways. In the past few months, Internet-only
marketers have gotten serious about incorporating direct mail, postcards,
and voice-mail messages into their campaigns. There's plenty of data
showing a significant lift in response when multiple media are combined in
a single campaign.
Don't lead with benefit-oriented headlines - or, for email, subject
lines. (Yeah, I did a double-take when I first heard that, too. Then I saw
the results.) Two things are happening. First, that benefit headline
screams "advertisement" to your prospects, and fires their internal "spam
filters".
Second, it makes your message look just like everyone else's - you stay
buried in the clutter.
Instead, try to tie into your prospects' emotional reaction to the
problem. Join them in their concerns, and in their skepticism. Start
building a relationship. It'll buy you enough attention-span to get your
first paragraph read.
Instead of a sales letter, send an "advertorial". Make your offer a
short white paper, or a report. Giving prospects something of
value, then asking for the sale, works better than asking "trust me" first, no matter
how good your guarantee.
It's all about building an on-going relationship with
your prospects. If you don't have one, find someone who does, and
advertise in their newsletter.
And, above all, test, test, and re-test. And change your approach based on
what your tests show you.
All the best in all your marketing efforts,
-
Steve
Resources
Here are the primary sources of
data for this article. Some are free; some not.
ExactTarget Email Marketing 2005 Response Rate Study (free)
Free report with lots of data from their 4000+ customers' 230,000 email
campaigns and 2.7 billion email messages. A few typos, and more data than
analysis, but good stuff. Free, but you must give your contact info...
http://email.exacttarget.com/lp/2006_BestDay_WP.asp
MarketingSherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006
Want to know what's really happening in Email Marketing? For my money,
this report contains better, more actionable data than what some of my
clients get from analysts with $20,000+ retainers. For only $247.
Features 1,927 marketers' real-life results stats from email newsletters,
sales alerts and blasts; plus, usability, design, measurement, and
delivery tips. Also includes:
-
New email Eyetracking laboratory results (aka “heatmaps”)
- Opt-in tactics and list growth trends (including co-registration data)
- Spam filtering, bounce rates and deliverability data
- Which email creative tests give worthwhile results
- RSS, wireless SMS, and desktop applications vs. email
In
total, 310 charts, tables, and eyetracking heatmaps are included. Download
your copy now at:
http://www.sherpastore.com/c/a.pl?9047&p.cfm/1976
(This is an affiliate link.)
MarketingSherpa's Buyer's Guides to Email Service Providers 2006
and Email Delivery Audit Services
When MarketingSherpa finally released
this update to their ESP guide late last year, I breathed a huge sigh of
relief. You see, I have clients who need this information, and had to pay 50-100
times as much for less useful data. But before this update, the data was over a
year old, and I couldn't really recommend it.
Now, the data is up-to-date, and it's still in the most useful, actionable
format I've seen. If you're evaluating (or re-evaluating) your email service
provider, do yourself a favor and get this report!
Designed to help marketing and publishing professionals, you'll save hours of work in selecting the right email service providers (ESP), and judge email deliverability by using a third-party firm:
- Figure out if you should outsource or keep email broadcasting in-house (includes a data chart on what other marketers are doing).
- Create a short-list of the 3-5 vendors best for you ... in a few minutes instead of weeks.
- Make easy apples-to-apples comparisons between vendors; including pricing, staffing, services, deliverability tactics, and named clients.
- Avoid the "dud" vendors who lie about deliverability rates.
Get your Buyer's Guides instantly:
http://www.sherpastore.com/c/a.pl?9047&p.cfm/2003
(This is an affiliate link.)
Paul Myers TalkBiz newsletter (free)
I
get a lot of newsletters. This one, I read. Focus is primarily online
marketing, more B2C than B2B, more small-biz than multi-national. But I
still get tons of good information I can use...
http://www.talkbiznews.com/
Clayton Makepeace "Total Package" Newsletter (free)
The focus is on copywriting - both online and off-line, although there is
more of an off-line focus. Get it at
http://www.makepeacetotalpackage.com/
AOL Whitelist Procedures
Here are the options to get your email delivered to AOL users.
http://postmaster.aol.com/
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