No man is an iland

Most people don’t click on emails. And most marketers don’t care.

You can pull out all the tools in the email marketing shed: copywriting, subject line optimization, calls to action, trigger mails, segmentation…but you still can’t avoid the problem that most people don’t click.

Why? Because right now I’m just not interested in buying a new pair of trainers or reading about changes to tax laws.

But who cares, right?

The click is the first real action on the road to a conversion. Whether that conversion is a sale, download, registration, donation, whatever.

If somebody isn’t going to convert, then why would you worry about getting the click?

Here are four reasons…

1. Email isn’t only about conversions. It’s about getting people to interact positively with your brand or organization. The deeper this interaction, the greater the impacts on the “relationship” between sender and recipient…the more attention and influence you gain.

2. We are creatures of habit: if we found something clickworthy in one email, we are more likely to pay attention to the next one.

[And vice versa, as explained in the recent post on the slow death of your email...]

3. A click takes people to a website, which is a much richer display environment. It gives you more opportunities to engage the reader and drive some kind of positive (inter)action.

4. Positive interaction with your emails sets you apart from “bad” emailers. According to a recent Pivotal Veracity report, webmail services are increasingly taking user-email interaction (including clicks) into account when determining whether a sender’s emails are worthy of delivery.

So clicks are worth having in their own right, but here’s a crass example of the problem. These are the last few emails received from a domain name registrar:

If I’m not interested in actually buying a domain name, I’m not going to click on these emails.

[Incidentally, even if I am, there's no sense of urgency, since clearly I can wait a few days for the next discount to come trundling along.]

So we want a click, but we come back to our original problem that what we feature is simply not relevant to the majority. So what can you do? Here some ideas…

Offbeat items and humor

Newsletter expert Michael Katz writes:

“…I find this consistently across all types of newsletter, my own and those of my clients. No matter how “serious” the subject matter, the highest clicks are always the diversions.”

I can echo that for my own newsletter. Links to such things as Darth Vader’s inbox or a talking email regularly score more clicks than even the most insightful marketing articles.

Of course, humor is tricky. We can’t all be Ricky Gervais. But you can think of these “diversions” in other ways. Amy Hamilton, for example, notes:

“I find that the emails I tend to click on and forward the most are the ones containing the most outrageous products, just for the humor of it.”

…and features some examples from Buckle, Forever 21 and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Ancillary calls to action

Your email usually focuses on getting people to do something very specific (buy the product on offer, read the article, register for the webinar).

Provided they don’t distract from your main content, additional calls to action can pick up clicks where the main focus is not relevant to the recipient.

Navigation bars, for example, are menus of links to one side of the main content:

In his report on the topic, Chad White says navigation bars:

“…give your subscribers a clear and familiar path to engage with you even when they’re not interested in your email’s main message.”

Another example is outlined in this post: adding footer links to content from previous emails lifted the number of clicks per opened email from 0.47 to 0.61.

Video animations and “click to find out…”

I’ve talked a lot recently about video email, and one post cites various examples where video lifts clickthroughs quite significantly.

Is there a broader principle at work?

Anne Holland reported on a website video test and noted:

“…perhaps being forced to interact with the video to hear sound got more prospects into ‘interaction mode’ so they were then more willing to click a ‘join’ button next.”

Perhaps, then, part of the click appeal of the audio-free video .gif approach in email is a simple desire to hear the sound. The click puts the reader in interaction mode and leads them further down the conversion road.

The only Ology I ever studied was biology, but it seems reasonable to suggest that “teaser” video might work just as well to gain clicks as the teaser email summaries used to get people to clickthrough to online articles.

You might make broader use of the teaser concept, for example by featuring mystery offers (“click to reveal the discount offer”) or linking to the coupon code (“click here to get your personal coupon code”).

Teaser summaries for articles enjoy widespread acceptance among recipients, because they understand you can’t fill an email with too much article text and they enjoy the ability to quickly scan and choose what to read.

The same might not apply to those kinds of teasers where there is no clear reason why you can’t just put the content in the email.

So those kinds of teasers need to be used sparingly, otherwise you give the impression that you don’t value the time and attention of your subscribers.

The content approach

I’ve asked before whether email marketers should become content publishers to keep people engaged and solve the “most don’t click” problem.

There are different ways to approach this. For example, you can:

• …go the newsletter route and focus mostly on engaging content, like Backcountry does with its newsletter.
• …tag content onto promotional messages, like Columbia Sportswear does with the video review feature in this email discussed by Dylan Boyd.
• …integrate promotional messages into content, as in this simple self-tanning how-to from Bliss.
• …supplement promotional mails with tidbits of free information, as Linda Bustos explains here.

Feedback, surveys, competitions, reviews, polls, loss leader offers

Of course, building interaction into email dates back to the first use of a question mark in the text. So let’s not overlook tried and tested ways to get people to respond without having to follow a “shop now” or “continue reading” or “register today” link.

Some examples:

• Jake Holman describes the great copy used by MarketingProfs to solicit feedback on an online seminar
• Blue Tent Marketing won a MarketingSherpa award for their holiday-themed customer survey email
• …as did Air Canada for their Dream Destination email competition, which carries the tagline “Dream. Click. Win a trip.” (my emphasis!)
• SmartPak send out automatic emails 14 days after a purchase soliciting product reviews. The tactic increased reviews sixfold.
• Poll scripts don’t work in emails, but you can ask a single question and provide a selection of answers in the form of links. People vote by clicking on a link and your tracking data records the winning answer (and who voted for what). David Dennis explains the technique and how you might use it to build out your subscriber profiles.

Note that all these efforts drive engagement, but serve other goals too: data collection, profiling for later segmentation, content generation, etc..

Finally, an earlier post raised the possibility of loss leader emails: ones that feature extravagant offers or incentives that attract plenty of clicks to gain engagement wins at (perhaps) the expense of short-term profits. Amy Hamilton has some examples.

Any other suggestions for encouraging clicks and interaction?

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• Channel: Email marketing tactics

I’ve pointed you to OnlineMarketing.info before, as it’s where I put up a custom search engine that limits Google searches to 360+ hand-picked email marketing resources.

The site now also features news and article headlines on the start page.

These headlines are updated every 1-2 days and link to those new posts and articles from around the Web that I believe are of particular value or importance to email marketers.

I regularly review some 140+ blog and media site feeds and this is where the headlines are drawn from.

The sites covered by the search database are also now listed for all to see.

Thanks go to readers “That Guy Steve” for the “latest headlines” suggestion and David McLaughlin for the “site list” suggestion. Sorry it took me so long to implement them.

As always, any suggestions for sites to add to the search database or new blogs to follow are very welcome.

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• Channel: None (just a friendly update)

Last month I ran three posts on what 187 emails from Amazon can teach us about subject line length, branding and personalization.

In a feedback poll, 84% of you asked for one more on the topic, so here it is…

Use of discounts and prices

As a retailer, Amazon inevitably uses email to offer discounts on individual products or product groups. These discounts vary from 10% to 90%.

Since the pulling power of a discount increases with the size, bigger discounts get more frequent use in their subject lines:

But what about those few times when a 10% discount features in the subject line?

Isn’t 10% too weak for the modern bargain-filled inbox, especially when your other emails are touting 40%, 50%, 70% discounts?

This again illustrates the idea that a subject line is the sum of its parts and context dependent.

The less targeted the email, the more Amazon has to compensate with a bigger discount to encourage attention. So you’ll find the big discounts featured in subject lines with broader product group promotions:

…and the smaller discounts where a targeted recommendation (based on past purchases) means the discount doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting. It’s icing on the cake:

Heavy discounts on a highly targeted email presumably make little sense for Amazon. If you’re recommending a very targeted up- or cross-sell, people will likely buy anyway or only need a small discount to be persuaded. Larger discounts carry a big revenue penalty and the additional lift in response doesn’t compensate.

Where targeting is weaker, however, Amazon uses the bigger discount to provoke interest and encourage people to explore the individual offers or product categories featured in the email’s body.

Since we’re often told that subject lines need to be specific and reflect the email’s content, does putting actual offer prices in the subject line make sense?

Amazon doesn’t seem to think so. Only a handful of those 180+ subject lines feature actual prices. This likely reflects the idea that the subject line is not driving action directly, but starts a sequence of events that will eventually lead to that action.

In other words, the subject line should not get the recipient to decide immediately whether or not to click, buy or make some other desired response.

Instead, it should persuade them to investigate further so you can exploit the richer environment of the email body and landing page to get the desired response.

[Another issue is the role that currency symbols and prices in subject lines might play in content filters.]

If you accept this approach as valid (some retailers do feature prices in subject lines more often), there are still two exceptions used by Amazon.

The first is to use price as an indicator of attractive prices in general for a particular product group. As Amazon does here:

The second is where the actual price really is a deal closer.

Frontloading

We’ve covered some of the main “hotwords” that Amazon uses to grab attention: brand, personalization, discount etc. But what do they put first?

The further back a word appears in the subject line, the less likely it is to get read. If for no other reason, then because email clients and webmail interfaces limit the number of subject line characters on display.

So marketers tend to put their “hotwords” as near the front as they can. Here are the first and second most popular subject line beginnings at the three different Amazons I looked at:

Amazon.com
1. Brand name, e.g. “Amazon.com: Bestsellers in Biographies and…”
2. Discount, e.g. “Save 32% at Amazon.com on…”

Amazon.co.uk
1. Discount, e.g. “Huge savings on…”, “Up to 70% off…”, “Save 26% on…”
2. Brand name, e.g. “Amazon.co.uk: Find great offers”

[Incidentally, since the analysis was done, I'm getting more emails from Amazon.co.uk that lead with my name: "Mark Brownlow: Save up to 70% on..."]

Amazon.de
1. “Jetzt neu: …” (translation: New release or New in stock)
2. Various…

While some differences likely stem from my different purchase patterns at each Amazon, it’s a reminder that different audiences have different hotspots.

Perhaps the Amazon.com brand has a particularly powerful pull in the USA, UK shoppers are after bargains and Germans like to have the newest thing?

The point is simply that there is no universal “winning” subject line approach. The words you use should adapt to different audiences. Just as you might write different ad or landing page copy depending on who you’re targeting.

When experts talk of email segmentation they usually refer to sending different content/offers to different groups of subscribers. But you might apply the concept equally to the presentation of that content or offer.

So the same offer or content goes out to the list, but different segments get different subject lines. You might lead with the discount for the “bargain hunter” segment, the newness for the “want to be first” segment or your brand for those who see you as their trusted adviser.

OK that brings to an end my interpretation of what the marketing brains at Amazon are trying to do with their subject lines…do you agree? Why do you think they do what they do?

More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines

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• Channel: Subject lines

Time for a 2009 update to my annual guide to the top people and places to go to for email marketing information.

There are now hundreds of great sites, blogs, newsletters and writers in the email marketing world. So these are just my personal “favorites”…confined to info available in English and admittedly US-centric.

Please do list your own favorites in the comments.

So, in no particular order…

Media sites

ClickZ was one of the first marketing media websites to publish an email marketing column. They now have five, featuring many long-time industry stalwarts.

All are good value, but my particular favorites are the optimization (Derek Harding, Ed Heinrich) and delivery (Stefan Pollard) columns.

MediaPost’s Email Insider hosts various excellent columns, written by experts with strong backgrounds in the subject area.

If I was forced to name favorites, I’d go for Loren McDonald’s column, which probably comes closest to the way I think about and use marketing email, and the design inspiration provided by Lisa Harmon and colleagues.

Check the iMedia Connection site for regular articles from another slew of email experts like Wendy Roth, Spencer Kollas and others.

MarketingProfs offers many great resources, but the email newsletter “Get to the Point: email marketing” is perhaps best. You get summaries of email marketing articles at the main site, plus highlights of useful posts from other sources.

For a more UK-oriented view, check out Econsultancy’s email marketing articles.

And, finally, I know marketers who read Ken Magill’s columns just to make sure they’re not in them. He is just about the only one out there willing to burst the cozy mutual backslapping bubble that all industries wrap around themselves.

Stats and reference works

MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide has achieved iconic status in the industry. The main Sherpa site is also a good source of case studies and other reports.

The EmailStatCenter.com website is the place to start looking for public stats. It’s the brainchild of Simms Jenkins, who passes on his broader email marketing experience through an iMedia Connection column and The Truth About Email Marketing book.

Other recent books on email marketing include Successful email marketing strategies and Email marketing: an hour a day.

ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart is one of the few experts out there with an understanding of email, wider marketing channels and statistical analysis. I value his blog posts very highly.

Twitter accounts

I have dozens of email marketing Twitter accounts listed here. And many of the highlighted names in this post are, of course, worth following at Twitter, too.

A special shout out, though, to Fred Tabsharani, Captain Inbox and John Caldwell who do a great job of passing on useful links to their followers.

Blogs and newsletters

You can get an OPML file of all the 140+ blogs I subscribe to here, but some highlights:

• Chad White operates the Retail Email blog which is a super public source of insight into what the big retailers are doing with their emails. Also see his column at MediaPost.
• The MailChimp blog often comes up with great insights and stats, such as numbers on the effectiveness of different subject lines and advice on what kinds of address lists can be used for email marketing.
• eROI has several blogs which are always great and regular sources of practical tidbits, event reports and musings from the front line of email marketing. My faves: Return on Subscriber by Alex Williams and The Email Wars by Dylan Boyd.
• The Bronto bloggers have impressed of late with their concerted effort to bring useful hype-free info to the community.
• The Blue Sky Factory blog stands out because the people there are also very clued in to social media and the implications for email. And because it features the irreverent DJ Waldow.
• Finally, try the Alchemy Worx newsletter. It takes common topics and offers a new perspective or advice that challenges what we all thought was true. CEO Dela Quist is also the only reader who doesn’t leave comments on my blog, but actually rings me up to debate a point.

Small business

Most of the resources mentioned in this post are for people dealing regularly with email marketing. Here I’d like to point out some resources that address small business and those dealing intermittently with email marketing…

• If you write an email newsletter and haven’t read the articles by Michael Katz, you should.
• Janine Popick’s blog posts at Vertical Response take a small business focus and go beyond the mechanics of email marketing to cover other business aspects relevant to the “small” emailer.
• The folk at AWeber are very good at highlighting key stuff for small business and those with smaller lists and autoresponders. Look out particularly for Justin Premick’s posts.
• The StreamSend blog is a constant source of quick tips for email marketers.
• Constant Contact has a huge small business user base: see their Learning Center for blog posts, articles, webinars etc.
• Campaigner’s blog is a regular series of quick tips on email marketing and small business (in particular).
• Tom O’Leary writes the Messaging Times blog for Infacta.

Asking a question

The Email Roundtable is a marketer-dominated discussion group with some of the brightest folk in email marketing on board. The discussions deal with the day-to-day strategic and tactical issues faced by email marketers and are characterized by their pragmatism, experienced insight and friendliness.

The Email Marketer’s Club is probably the biggest networking site out there for email marketers and includes a forum and many other useful resources. It was founded by Tamara Gielen, who also runs the BeRelevant blog which regularly aggregates links to the more useful email marketing content out there.

Bonus: Deliverability

Return Path are never shy about commenting on issues that coincide with their interests. But they offer a different vendor perspective on their blog as they’re not a traditional email service provider. In particular, Stephanie Miller gets through my trust barrier and you’ll find her articles at places like ClickZ and MarketingProfs.

As well as the occasional appearance on his employer’s blog, Al Iverson pops up in various places to display his in-depth knowledge of spam, deliverability and blacklisting issues.

Laura Atkins is an independent consultant who isn’t carrying around any particular vendor bias when it comes to delivery issues. Get her advice and links from her blog.

Led by Dennis Dayman, the Deliverability.com blog pulls in contributions from a veritable who’s who of the email (delivery) world. A special mention for two of those names…

• Matt Vernhout also runs the Email Karma blog with deliverability news.
• I don’t always agree with Andrew Kordek but he’s an important voice because he provides the crucial perspective of the frontline marketer with real-world pressures. A pragmatic counterweight to “best practice” advice from those who don’t send email themselves (many vendors) or who operate in a non-retail environment (like me).

Traditionally, Pivotal Veracity have kept themselves to themselves, but you’ll find Deirdre Baird and colleagues quoted in media articles: they have a very profound understanding of deliverability issues, so pay attention to them.

Bonus: Design

There are so many great HTML email design resources (e.g. Email Standards Project, Style Campaign, Smith-Harmon blog) that there is another post dedicated to that topic alone.

OK, over to you to list your favorites.

More email marketing resources | Tags: email marketing, online marketing

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• Channel: Basics of email advertising

We’d all like to be running one of those email marketing programs that deliver the Hollywood results you read about in case studies.

Most of us, though, are trundling along with unspectacular programs delivering solid results. And have been for a while. Emails work, even if you’re not a database marketing hero.

But your program might be dying a slow death, thanks to the way subscribers behave and the new email landscape we now live in.

Here’s how open rates have changed over the last 2 years on a small B2B newsletter I run:

It doesn’t take a statistician to reveal that open rates are in decline.

Some of that is down to the growth of image blocking (though that excuse is getting a little old). Some of it might be delivery issues. Some might be a decline in the quality of the emails (hope not).

Slow death factors

But there are two factors ensuring that declining responses will likely affect every email program that keeps doing more or less the same thing as before. Like mine.

First, there is ever-increasing competition for subscriber attention. Both from other emails and all the other ways people now have to get information and promotions (most notably social media).

Second, the longer someone is on your list, the less engaged they are (on average). Here’s the chart to prove it, which looks at open rate by year of sign-up for the most recent newsletter:

This slow decline in response rates due to such factors as aging and competition doesn’t get much attention, because list growth usually compensates.

So while the percent of people responding drops, the absolute number of responders stays steady or even rises. Example:

The August 27th, 2007 issue of the above newsletter got an open rate of 47% and a click-to-open rate of 30%, which meant 160 clicks.

Two years later and the open rate drops by over a third to 30% for the August 24th, 2009 newsletter. Click-to-open rate is still 30%, but the list is now three times the size it was.

List growth more than compensates for the drop in open rates: the number of clicks is 332.

Actual responses have doubled, even though relative attention has fallen.

So why worry? Surely it’s the end result that matters?

Think beyond list growth

There are two big issues on the horizon here.

First, using list growth to compensate for declining response rates is not a long-term strategy.

The older and bigger your list, the more new addresses you have to find to compensate for list aging. And the low-hanging fruit is likely already gone: your frequent visitors or customers are already on the list.

You have to work harder and harder on list acquisition, investing more and more resources. At some point, it won’t be enough.

You may also end up seduced into questionable list acquisition practices that see subscriber quality drop and lead to permission and spam problems.

Engagement is also a deliverability issue

The second issue is deliverability.

A while back, people in the industry were predicting that those organizations managing incoming email (particularly the big ISPs) would broaden the list of criteria used to define spam (unwanted) email to include how people interact with a sender’s messages.

If recipients aren’t interacting positively with an email, this indicates he message is unwanted and the reputation of that email’s sender suffers.

This is no longer speculation or theory.

Consider this quote from a recent report on a meeting with Yahoo’s anti-spam czar:

“Yahoo stressed that the key to inbox delivery was to work towards positive engagement.”

Among the signs of “positive engagement” cited: “Members are opening messages…members are clicking on the links in the message.”

In other words, a decline in such numbers as open and click rates not only hurts responses, but might now lead to a poor sender reputation, in turn leading to deliverability problems.

Compounding the issue is the prospect that future inboxes will also include more tools allowing users to quickly identify or filter out those messages that are not spam but are also not that important (i.e. not open or clickworthy).

Ouch.

[You'll find more commentary on these sea changes in the delivery landscape from, for example, Stefan Pollard, Jeff Rohrs and George Bilbery.]

The obvious solutions aren’t enough

So what can you do?

If you keep doing the same thing, your response rates will fall, you’ll be under a lot of pressure to grow your list and you may run into new deliverability problems.

The obvious and glib answer is to certify your emails and get into all those advanced tactics that we keep putting off because things are still pretty rosy. Now is the time to start investing time and resources in things like segmentation, testing, trigger emails etc.

But there’s more to the challenge than just improving targeting (which is what nearly every advanced tactic is about at its heart).

Consider why older addresses tend to disengage from your emails.

Some reasons are inevitable: people change interests, move jobs, etc. But there’s also a parallel to population ecology. Um…what?

A population of animals can survive the occasional dip in numbers, provided the number of surviving animals never drops below a certain extinction threshold. If it does, the population is doomed.

I like to think of subscriber interest the same way. Your “relationship” with the subscriber can survive the occasional dip in interest, provided this interest doesn’t drop below the extinction threshold.

In other words, you can send the occasional irrelevant email and people will forgive you. They’ll still look out for your next email.

But if enough emails in a row are irrelevant, then the loss of interest dips below an extinction threshold. The recipient switches off and future emails can get ignored, even those emails that are valuable and relevant.

And the longer someone is on your list, the more chance there is that they’ll encounter one of those catastrophic interest drops.

The key point here is that I don’t believe that advanced targeting techniques are a complete answer to that disengagement problem.

A retailer who sends out offers cannot expect people to keep opening and clicking on promotional emails, however good and targeted those offers might be. I’m not going to buy a new digital camera (or camera accessory) every week or even every year.

See engagement as its own objective

If engagement becomes critical to delivery, then you must be less tolerant of letting people go inactive, even though many of these inactives may still be “unemotionally subscribed” and likely to buy/respond at some later date.

So how do we keep them engaged?

First, we can start to think of responses not just as sales, downloads, registrations etc., but also in terms of engagement. So what we used to think of as purely process metrics (opens, clicks etc.) might now become valid goals in themselves.

This encourages us to invest in email content that drives interaction: feedback surveys, teasers, etc. It also suggests those selling via email should also focus on engaging content as much as targeted offers.

For more on that concept, read Should all email marketers become content publishers?

And I wonder if we might reach the stage where the occasional email is used as a loss leader…where the offer is so good that it may even have a net financial cost to the sender to make it.

But the loss leader email boosts response. It keeps people away from the “extinction threshold” and keeps those engagement metrics up so that future emails have a better chance of being delivered and responded to.

What do you think?

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• Channel: Email marketing tactics