Email Marketing Summit: top insights

An overview of the top tips and insights I picked up from MarketingSherpa's European Email Summit earlier this week.

The event featured lots of great speakers who spoke in some detail about their winning email marketing programs.

If you can get there next year, go...it's well worth the trip.

Cited speakers:

ST = Stefan Tornquist of MarketingSherpa
TS = Dr. Torsten Schwarz of Absolit
EL = Edoard Leeuwenberg of Telegraaf Media Groep
TG = Tamara Gielen, consultant
SK = Stefanie Kidder of Avid
GB = Gurmej Bahia of Expedia
S = Saskia Blume and Isabell Geib of Steganos
KR = Kai Radanitsch of eBusinessLab
LS = Larry Swing of MrSwing.com
R = Nik von Graeve and Uwe-Michael Sinn of rabbit eMarketing
SW = Stefan Wornle of Wunderman

Top ideas

1. Go book a flight or trip at Expedia (claim it as a marketing expense). Their post-purchase email stream is very, very impressive.

2. Try testing checkmarks for bullets and make them green. (KR)

3. In your headlines, use a reference to current news to catch attention e.g. "Recession-proof tactics for online marketers." (KR)

4. Make the first word of each bullet point in your copy different. (KR)

5. Use arrows before or after the call-to-action to encourage...action. For example:

>> Click for more info

6. Personalize your welcome emails with targeted offers or content. This way you establish the value of your program within seconds of someone signing up. (R)

7. Look at putting your transactional email to work as a marketing vehicle, too. Apart from the obvious benefits, transactional email is a rock solid channel that's relatively immune to the impact of changes in communication technologies and habits. (ST)

8. Consider matching emails to the weather to make them more relevant or personable. Sports shops send out ski promotions when the first snow falls. Weekend emails might start off with "another rainy Sunday?" (TS)

Email landing pages and copywriting

1. Five key areas to focus on in landing page copy are the headline, lead text, product photo or hero shot, bullet points and the call to action. (KR)

2. The lead text under a headline is often neglected. It needs to establish facts about the offer, make the benefits clear...and relate both of these to the reader. (KR)

3. Product images or hero shots used in the email should appear again on the landing page. If you use images of people, the eyes should always be looking at the product or important text. (KR)

4. If faced by two different calls-to-action, people will choose the one requiring the least commitment. (KR)

Social media and email marketing

1. It's a question of finding the right channel for the right end-user need. (ST)

"I don't want bank statements via Twitter"

2. Consider social marketing not as advertising, but as a listening and learning process where you can help support customer communities.

Microsoft do this by monitoring blogs etc., supporting the work of those who manage independent (i.e. not MS-run) communities and giving special attention to around 4000 non-MS folk identified as Most Valuable Professionals (influencers and opinion leaders).

They do not try to exert undue influence over MVPs, but simply ensure they have special access to information, behind-the-scenes trips etc.

3. Use email to drive social network content. (SW and TS)

[Me: This isn't just about adding "share on Facebook" links. You can also draw on social media to produce content for the email...blog posts, lists of forum discussions, etc....which in turn sends people to those networks to produce more content in a feedback process.]

Segmentation and trigger campaigns

1. Simple, but effective, segmentation is to match your emails to the lifecycle status of the recipient. Software company Steganos split their list into: (S)

• Prospects (get informational emails)
• New customers (get tutorials, tips & tricks, cross-sells and upsells)
• Regular customers (focus on relevant content)
• Lost customers (get reactivation emails)

2. The conversion rate for promotions that segment by past purchase can be up to 30 times higher than conversion rates from generic offers to the whole list. (S)

2. Take common ideas for trigger campaigns (like birthday emails) and vary them.

For example, try a pre-birthday email that offers to get a treat wrapped and sent off in time for the party. The value of standard triggers like a $5-off coupon on your birthday is likely to diminish with time so you need to innovate. (R)

International email programs

You need to master seven main challenges when running multi-country email marketing initiatives (TG):

1. Legal (complying with individual country laws)

[One pragmatic approach suggested by SK is simply to take the strictest law applied in any country you mail to and use that throughout your operations.]

2. Segmentation (regional lists may be too small to easily segment)

3. Design and content (templates get thrown out of kilt when a 3-word English headline becomes 10 words in Finnish)

[Me: SK suggested using a mix of cross-border and local content to save on production costs but keep the local flavor.]

4. Translation and localization

SK said don't ignore the potential value of translating into a local language, even in markets where English is widespread. A test in Scandinavia (where "everyone" speaks excellent English) showed you could double opens and clicks if you translate into Swedish, Norwegian etc. But there's a cost issue, too...

5. Deliverability (there can be 10-15 relevant ISPs per country, plus local blacklists operating in the local language)

6. Operational challenges (coordination and costs)

• Many marketing agencies claim the ability to work internationally, but few actually can. So choose wisely (SK)
• It's not exciting, but spend time setting up clear and robust business processes. Only then can you avoid all the problems of coordinating emails across countries. (GB)
• Ensure common performance measures are used in each region. That way you can identify winning tactics easily and spread them around. (GB)

7. Data (can you segment by region or language?)

Testing

1. Don't extrapolate A/B test results from one region or language to another. Test results change with geography and culture. (SK)

2. Test every assumption: the best results are often surprising and inexplicable. (LS)

3. If you have no time, find a service that uses on-the-fly multivariate analysis to optimize emails during the actual send process based on early results. (LS)

Trends

1. The recession encourages longer sales cycles for B2B and expensive B2C items. (ST)

[Me: this suggests a growing role for emails that nurture long-term customer relationships through valuable content.]

2. For all the talk of cutting edge technologies, email and search still form the mainstays of online marketing. An informal (i.e. don't quote this) survey of German ecommerce sites revealed email driving about 20-30% of revenues. (TS)

Email marketing and your organization

1. Start treating email subscribers like a special customer group and offer them appropriate privileges (special pricing, sneak previews etc.). Too many marketers react to a sign-up like this:

"Thanks for giving us your email...sucker!" (ST)

2. In a survey of marketers, those who are seeing or predicting increases in the value and efficiency of email marketing as a channel are also those who are prepared to invest in the associated skills and technologies. Coincidence? (ST)

Consumer habits

1. People are happy to deal with more communications and more communication channels. But they're not happy to deal with irrelevant communications. When people abandon a sender of email, they tend do so as a direct response to that sender's content/offers/frequency and not because of a broader issue with overload. (ST)

[Me: Stop worrying about the wider problem of information overload and focus on your program: recipients will distinguish between your positive efforts and the rubbish sent by others.]

2. Internet use is changing. People are increasing their Internet use in the evenings, instead of (or at the same time as) watching TV. This may have implications for the best time of day to send your emails and also makes combined TV/online campaigns interesting. (TS)

Deliverability

1. Many German ISPs see any bulk email as spam, which is why certification holds promise for ensuring deliverability at participating ISPs with stringent anti-spam approaches. (TS)

2. Local language emails can get through where foreign language emails might get junked, if the ISP has a strong local orientation (like AOL Germany). (SK)

3. If mailing to Europe, use an ESP that has as many local (i.e. country-based) deliverability support teams as possible. (SK)

4. Don't forget that B2C lists in Europe may still be dominated by US ISPs (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) (SK)

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