No man is an iland

…and the question is a simple one: is it enough?

One of email marketing’s great strengths is (or was) its robustness. It was relatively easy to get a campaign or newsletter to justify the efforts that went into it.

You could often make “mistakes” and still get a good return on your time and resources.

And that mentality still pervades much of the email marketing world. Never mind that good returns hide the fact that many (most) people don’t actually respond to what we send.

Each year, various people warn against this complacency, suggesting that what was good enough before won’t be good enough for the future. And each year we largely ignore the warnings because the same emails still do the business.

Will this year be different?

Check this graph:

The green line is what most people do in email marketing. Minor improvements over time to the quality of their campaigns and newsletters.

The red line is the failure line, representing a minimum level of quality that still allows success. It’s going up as well, for reasons I’ll come to.

Most of us sit on the left-hand side of the graph. Our green line is higher than the red line. What we do is better than what you can get away with.

But at some point, if you keep doing more or less the same thing, the green line will dip below the red line…panic. This is what those warnings about complacency are about.

Most us haven’t hit that point yet. Which is why we maybe tire of seeing those warnings. But my intuition tells me that we’re all a lot closer to the red line than we think we are.

Why? Why now more than ever before?

Here my reasons…

1. Accelerating diversification of ways to communicate

A few years ago, if you wanted to keep up with new things at a website, you signed up to its email list. It was that or keep popping by every few days to manual check for yourself.

Today you have feeds (blogs), Twitter updates, mobile messaging and other ways of staying in touch. And even more ways of just communicating online. If anything, this diversification of media and channels is accelerating.

Attention is spread thinner, so you have to stand out more if you want your share.

2. Growing email competition

Competition in the inbox is still growing. Possibly faster than ever before.

First, social networks are, ironically, a new and big source of email. Morgan Stewart quotes a Hotmail product manager, who said:

“15-20% of email received at Hotmail is social media notifications”

Second, the economic woes of 2008/2009 led to an upsurge in interest in more cost-efficient, measurable and accountable ways of spending marketing cash. Enter email, waving a very large flag. Pauper to prince in a matter of months.

The result: more organizations sending more email. I see the stats that come out of the UK DMA’s national email benchmarking surveys and the volume of email sent via ESPs is hitting all-time highs again.

Many of those organizations are working hard to improve the quality of their emails. Meaning more competition and better competition than ever before.

3. Changing consumer expectations

With choice comes selectivity. Anybody want to deny that we consumers are more demanding than ever before?

The rise of social media both reflects and drives growing end-user empowerment that conditions us to expect more personal and valuable communication from organizations.

Email is not immune to that trend.

4. More diversity in display environments

Until relatively recently, nearly all email was read on a desktop. Despite the limitations of certain clients, the viewing context for emails was largely a known factor. Not any more.

The last year or two has seen massive growth in alternative viewing environments for email, most notably via smartphones and netbooks. Only yesterday we added another to the list: the iPad.

This isn’t just about design, it’s also about behavior. How does “mobile” functionality impact the way people use and respond to email messages?

5. Recent changes to the deliverability landscape

For the last few weeks and months, various people close to the process of managing and filtering incoming emails have been warning that “legitimate” senders and sources of bulk email are likely to face more rigorous control.

A related development is the intended (and to some extent implemented) move to relying more on how recipients interact with your emails to decide if those emails are worthy of delivery.

The kind of low response that still drives positive ROI may eventually not be enough to convince ISPs of your email’s value, leading to future problems with getting email delivered to the inbox.

In summary: I think the red line, the quality bar, isn’t a bar at all. It’s curving upwards this year. Is it, perhaps, finally time to heed those warnings?

Why wouldn’t you want to get better?

Of course, the convergence of those red and green lines isn’t the real reason to look to improve our emails. As Loren McDonald recently wrote:

“What worked a few years ago might not be irretrievably broken in 2010, but it’s probably not generating the level of returns that it could.”

The argument is a simple one: better emails generate better returns?

How do you improve your emails? The information is out there.

Related post: The slow death of your email (and how to stop it)

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• Channel: Email marketing tactics

My Twitter account had its first anniversary at the weekend, so time for some reflections on what I’ve learned about its value and application for business and marketing purposes.

The bottom line

My original goals focused on providing value and service to those who might find me on Twitter.

Feeling all warm and cuddly about helping folk is rewarding, but does Twitter participation impact business goals? I run a content website, so does Twitter drive traffic to the site?

Twitter’s effect on visitor numbers is hard to measure. For example:

• Over the past year, Twitter.com accounted for 0.88% of total visits.
• But most people don’t use the actual Twitter.com website when using Twitter so the above number underestimates the real traffic implications: Twitter accounts for at least some of the 66,450 visits to the site that had no referrer data.
• Some of that Twitter traffic would have occurred without my active presence on the network.

In summary: I would estimate Twitter participation accounted for some 3-4% additional visits to Email Marketing Reports.

Of course, it’s no good focusing on results without understanding how much it cost to get those results. Nearly all discussions of social media (and email) focus on the former, not the latter.

Social media is different, but the decision to participate still demands the same diligence you’d give any other marketing decision. What does it cost and what do we get back? Not a question that’s always easy to answer, but you should try.

More on those costs later.

Um…you didn’t mention the number of followers?

Just like email list size, the number of followers is a seductive metric to focus on. It’s easy to find and it tends to go up regularly. Perfect!

But as with list size, the number of followers is not an end goal: it’s a means to an end, not the end itself.

What about indirect benefits?

As a social medium, Twitter is about communication and all the benefits associated with that. Communication, done appropriately, strengthens relationships…which strengthen business success.

And there are many other indirect benefits of participation. For me, for example:

• Business tweets are a constant source of useful information and links to interesting resources.
• If you contribute positively, you build goodwill for you and your organization.
• Some people prefer to contact you via Twitter (though I would argue that if they couldn’t do so, they’d just use another channel).
• It’s an excellent testing ground for writing headlines, subject lines and concise copy. I’ve learned much from observing how people pitch my articles to their followers.
• It provides insight into what your audience is looking for. What content gets retweeted the most? What links get the most clicks? There is a lot of market intelligence and audience/customer feedback to glean from the conversations. Someone once pointed out that inane tweets about breakfast are quite interesting if you’re a cereal manufacturer.
• It provides insight into the broader demographics, interests and identities of your audience.

These other benefits alone may be justification to participate in Twitter. But participation also has its downsides…

The time suck

This is the big one. Even if you are very picky about who you follow, the flow of tweets still has a very low signal to noise ratio.

Of course, one person’s noise is another’s signal. This is where you have to be very clear about exactly why you use Twitter and where your priorities lie.

Many “experts” will suggest a single approach based on a particular business objective. But just as with email marketing, we all have unique situations, audiences, goals and resources.

Everyone needs to find the individual approach that works best for them.

For some, participating in a never-ending cascade of conversations is the raison d’être for being on Twitter. It’s fulfillment in itself.

Most business users need to be more circumspect and set policies for active (tweeting) and passive (reading) participation.

I regularly check Twitter for mentions of my account name, so I can comment or react as required. But I do not read every tweet from those I follow, as the benefits do not justify the time commitment.

Nor do I expect the reverse. Your followers are certainly not reading every tweet you put out.

On the active side, I limit my own tweets to article recommendations and responses to tweets directed at me personally. I rarely participate in off-topic conversations.

At this point, all the social media gurus throw their hands up in despair. The conversations are the point! They’re the core of social media success.

If you’re not participating in conversations, you’re not getting it. How can your personality or brand shine? How can you build the relationships that sit at the core of online business success?

This is where we come back to cost: no personal interaction is ever meaningless and there is great value in such interactions.

But they can become meaningless when set against the time required for participation and the other things you could do with that time.

Social media participation has a cost.

As with any resource allocation decision, you have to decide if the rewards justify that cost. A decision we all take for ourselves and our situation.

This isn’t just about a cost-benefit analysis either. It’s also about character.

Social media is perfect for social animals like the great DJ Waldow, a born connector. A man whose optimism and outgoing nature brings people together and leaves you feeling better for the encounter.

Others are less comfortable with that medium. (The telegraph is a good fit for me.) We can all adapt to some extent, but we’re not all cut out to be top conversationalists.

Know your limitations. And make sure the people you employ to drive your social media marketing have (duh!) the right personality fit for the job you want them to do.

The self-promotion trap

Tweets are no different to emails in that you need to deliver value. Constant self-promotion at the expense of value simply teaches people to ignore you.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course.

In my case, people want to know when my latest blog post is available, so I tell them. But I also tell them about other people’s work I think deserves a wider audience.

Like email marketing, if you retain the interests of the reader at heart, then you will automatically deliver value. And you will get value in return: attention, word of mouth, viral effects, clickthroughs etc.

“Always on” expectations

Twitter use adds to the “always on” pressure associated with 24/7 online marketing and business.

While you can limit your input to ensure the cost-benefit balance falls in your favor, you have to have a set minimum commitment. Not least to ensure any tweets directed to you are answered promptly.

If you can’t meet a minimum commitment, then don’t commit at all.

Diminishing self-worth

Twitter is and isn’t the real world. It’s the real world, but filtered so that people present the image of themselves they’d like to present.

Depending on who you follow, you can reach the conclusion that other people on Twitter are far more interesting than you are. Based on the profile pictures people use, I’m also in the bottom 5% of global physical attractiveness.

Just remember, few people tweet about things they think will make them look bad.

And you can do wonders with Photoshop.

Apply email discipline to tweeting

I’ve written before on the comparison between email and Twitter. But a lot of the discipline and expertise applied to the former is equally applicable to the latter.

Think of the testing and thought that often goes into identifying the best time of day to send out an email. Twitter is no different. In fact, timing is even more important in Twitter.

It takes hours or days for an email to get buried in a typical inbox. It takes minutes for a tweet to suffer the same fate.

If I tweet about an article in the early morning my time (CET) it bombs. The same tweet put out 8-10 hours later will get 3-4 times the clicks. When is your audience paying attention to their Twitter stream?

A “promotional” tweet shares much in common with an email or a PPC search ad. Much of what we’ve already learned about copywriting and similar can be adapted to Twitter. Again, Twitter is new, but people are still people.

My breakfast

After one year and 959 tweets, I thought it finally appropriate to mention the contents of my breakfast. Allegedly this is all most people use Twitter for. So here goes:

• Organic cornflakes
• Organic muesli
• Organic banana
• Organic skimmed milk
• Orange juice

Before you jump to conclusions, nothing else I eat is even remotely as healthy as my breakfast. The contents of my lunch will be revealed in one year’s time.

Your thoughts?

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• Channel: Email and social media

In the early hours of the morning, malicious persons unknown hacked into the ad serving software at Email Marketing Reports in an attempt to turn the site into a source of spy/malware.

The problem was identified with the fast and efficient help of my host (pair.com) and the ad software disabled. Email Marketing Reports was back to normal very quickly. Needless to say, I’m now looking for new ad serving software.

Some people visiting the main site (but not the blog) during this brief period would have got malware security warnings from their browser and been unable to access the site’s content. My heartfelt apologies for this horrible user experience.

I don’t believe this was a targeted attack, but malicious automated software scouring the web for installed software vulnerabilities. Fortunately, it was only the ad software that was affected.

I’ve built this site word-by-word over a period of nine years. During that time, an overriding goal has been to help marketers send emails using ethical, permission-based practices that result in a win-win for both sender and receiver.

To find the site the subject of an attack attempting to spread software that represents the antithesis of what I preach has left me feeling numb.

Although the incident was not personal and not uncommon online, I feel like I came home to find a drug dealer had broken into the basement.

Once again, sorry for the problems earlier today. It may also take a while for me to regain my sense of humor, perspective and optimism.

Find related articles:

• Channel: None (just a friendly update)

We’re all familiar with the idea of novelty value and how it wears off with time. But it gets scant acknowledgment in email marketing.

We sometimes treat email users like goldfish with their fabled 3-second memory*, where everything they see is always as new and stimulating as the first time they encountered it.

But email users are not fish (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write).

It’s easy to ignore that fact when doing one-off tests on such novelties as video email…to the detriment of our campaigns.

What drives response?

People pay attention and respond to an email for many reasons. A key factor is obviously seeing something worth their attention or a response.

A big part of email copywriting and design (and email marketing as a whole) is to ensure people actually see what you want them to see and also find it worthwhile responding.

So a larger “shop now” button might boost response by attracting more attention to the call to action.

A trigger email might boost response by including a more targeted offer related to the previous purchases of the recipient.

Novel email design elements, like animations and video, can impact response positively by attracting attention. And by providing some kind of value, even if nothing more than to make the recipient smile or engage their curiosity longer.

Novelty impacts and true value

Part of that value is the value of novelty itself: most of us like new things. We’re initially attracted to explore new experiences.

This value declines with repetition. A “click here” link no longer inspires wide-eyed wonder and fascination.

Then there’s what you might call the true, inherent value of the new thing compared to the alternative. Value that lasts. That value might be fun, entertainment, a richer experience, a better understanding, etc.

Let’s assume a fashion email contains an animated image which cycles through the different styles the displayed garment comes in.

There’s still a novelty factor in animated images in emails (“wooo! bits of this email move!”) and we hope there’s true value, too.

Perhaps the recipient gets a better understanding of the choices available and is more likely to find one they like.

When we test the animated image against a static one we might get a response boost. So we ensure similar emails in the future now feature animated images.

The danger here is that long-term we might get the opposite results.

As the novelty value wears off, so its contribution to improved responses declines. Maybe (in our hypothetical example) it turns out that the animation distracted people from the copy and fewer end up buying.

The novelty value more than compensated for that problem in our initial tests, leading to better results for the animated image.

But the same test repeated once animation is a standard feature would show that it now actually hurts response.

Clear lessons for your emails

Some obvious lessons leap out here.

1. If you try something different (a quirky subject line, a video email, an animation) and it has a positive impact, be sure to see if this impact drops off with time…by watching the numbers or repeating comparative tests at regular intervals.

2. Novelty value is real while it lasts. The earlier you use a novel design element, the higher that novelty value. I’m pretty sure the first clickable link in an email got a 100% CTR.

Animation, video, personalized images, personalized videos and horizontal scrolling are a few examples of novel techniques that are still rare enough in email to excite curiosity and attention in their own right, regardless of what they offer long-term in terms of attention and value.

3. The value of novelty for its own sake wears off quickly. So look for novel ideas that also offer true value to the recipient to get longer-lasting response boosts.

A video .gif that gives viewers a better understanding of how and where a product might be used is likely to perform better than one that just cycles through animations of your logo.

4. There are good and bad ways of implementing animations, videos etc. And right and wrong times for using them. These links will help ensure the response changes are positive and durable:

• Animated GIFs in email: advice and links
• Top 14 Animated Emails of 09
• Video email: 8 recommended practices
• Video email: when to use it

5. Novelty works better where it’s understood. Confusing people with something completely different is not a great idea unless it’s all part of some avant garde brand message/image.

On the other hand, people are familiar with the concept of online video. So a video in an email might be new, but it’s not confusing or scary.

6. If some tactic lives entirely from its novelty factor, then use it irregularly so habituation doesn’t set in.

A subtle animation that brings a wry smile and little else works wonderfully the first time. After that its impact largely disappears. So use it sparingly or find an alternative subtle animation for next time.

Getting inspiration

If a novel approach is an obvious win, it would already be a best practice. So you’ll need to dig deeper to find good ideas.

Check the “design inspiration” section of this post for a host of blogs and other resources that specialize in highlighting interesting and innovative email approaches.

Any other thoughts on the role of novelty in emails?

*it’s a myth: the goldfish’s memory is actually much longer.

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• Channel: Email design

I write articles outside of this blog and regularly update older posts with new data. So in case you missed them:

Email marketing successes and failures: past and future

Pivotal Veracity turned the tables and interviewed me for their blog…

Part 1 talks about changes in email marketing over the past decade and my pick of the top game-changing moments.

Part 2 outlines the industry’s successes and failures, with an emphasis on the latter (we learn more from our mistakes).

Part 3 makes some predictions for the next ten years and reveals my true career goal (unfortunately never to be attained).

Does segmentation work?

This article points to stats and references confirming that a little bit of segmentation can make a big difference to results. Recently updated with a couple of new case studies.

Why do email marketing?

Updated for 2010: a review of all the statistics and surveys indicating the value and health of email marketing. Great for showing the person controlling your budget.

Holiday email marketing

It’s a little early to start planning for 2010. Even Santa’s probably taking a couple of weeks off. But here you’ll find all the advice offered for the 2009 holiday season, including several campaign highlights and post-holiday reviews.

Might be worth looking through in the light of your own results to draw out pointers for this year…before the memories fade.

And a little bonus

An article that has nothing to do with me, but…

One of the big challenges in 2010 and beyond is properly exploring the true impacts of your emails. Only then can you make proper judgments on where to invest your time, energy and cash.

This post by Kevin Hillstrom is an eye-opener in that context.

Find related articles:

• Channel: None (just a friendly update)