No man is an iland

Administrative messages are the unloved stepchild of email marketing.

The order confirmation, shipping notices, welcome emails etc. are often setup using default designs and text written by a software engineer…and never looked at again.

Which is a lost opportunity when you consider just how much attention these emails get.

We’re all excited about building behavior-based trigger messages, like cart abandonment mails, but forget that traditional confirmation and welcome emails have long followed that model.

After all, if customers make a purchase, they get an order confirmation…if they sign-up to your list, they get a welcome message.

Consider some real-world numbers:

• A study by Experian CheetahMail revealed that welcome messages get four times the opens, five times the CTR and over eight times the revenue per email of typical promotional emails
• Tafford Uniforms discovered post-purchase survey emails got 20% more revenue per email than their standard broadcast messages
• Retailer Isabella found that clicks on product recommendations in order confirmation emails converted at more than double the rate of clicks from standard emails

Three areas that often let senders down with these messages are inbox recognition, clarity of communication and optimization for marketing. Let’s explore each, with the help of an Amazon.co.uk order confirmation email.

Inbox recognition

The typical transactional message already has a crucial head start in the inbox.

People expect to get some kind of confirmation after placing an order or signing up to a list. Indeed, many actively seek out this confirmation (we all want to be sure the order went through OK).

That heightened awareness makes it easier to grab attention.

You simply need to give people what they’re looking for: a sender and subject line that clearly identifies the source and the contents of the mail…there is no pressing need to think up clever, intriguing headers.

Here some examples:

The trap for the unwary is to assume the expectation of an email is all that matters.

You still need recognition cues in the sender and subject line, specifically brand/site names and a reference to the behavior that triggered the administrative email (like “order” or “welcome”).

Here some poor sender names from my “transactional” folder:

The preview pane also plays a role in ensuring recognition. Amazon.co.uk’s order confirmation email, for example, contains a logo at the top left and the words “Thanks for your order, Mark Brownlow”:

Given the sender address features amazon.co.uk and the subject is “Your order with amazon.co.uk”, it would be hard not to recognize this email instantly for what it is.

It doesn’t matter whether I check the sender or subject line or use a vertical or horizontal preview pane…I can immediately see that this is an email about the order I just placed with Amazon’s UK site.

Clarity of communication

When we talk about the marketing value of administrative and transactional email, we forget the top priority is to clearly communicate the transactional information the recipient wants to know.

Consider the Amazon.co.uk confirmation. It tells me…

• My order has been taken
• What was ordered
• Where it will be sent and who gets charged
• How much it cost
• When it’s likely to reach me

A welcome email could, for example:

• Confirm the subscription
• Indicate how subscription preferences can be modified
• Remind the recipient of likely content and frequency
• Provide a feedback option
• Explain how to ensure the emails get delivered to the inbox

…all before we get into any “marketing” text or features.

We might also give some thought to the order of this information…just as we think deeply about the order of text, images and calls to action in promotional emails.

An order confirmation can contain many key information points: shouldn’t we also consider ordering these to reflect recipient and communication priorities?

Two thoughts from the Amazon.co.uk email:

1. They make me scroll down quite a way to find out which items are being confirmed by an order. Yet a key concern for me is whether the right item got ordered. Also, it’s a pain when reviewing order confirmations a little later.

2. It takes seven clicks on the scroll bar (in my preview pane) to find the information that the reply-to address accepts no incoming email. The info is buried below returns policies and contract legalese. (The rights and wrongs of do-not-reply addresses is a topic for another day).

Marketing optimization

Every email you send is an interaction point. And every interaction leaves an impression on the recipient. So every email you send is a marketing email, whether you like it or not.

1. Marketing – the experience

Your image or brand in the eyes of each individual reflects their cumulative experience when interacting with your brand or organization. And that includes each email.

If the message is clear and addresses all my informational needs, then I come away with a positive impression of the sender.

To this we can add whether the email’s design, style or personality reinforces your desired “corporate image” or confuses it.

Does a badly written text-only shipping notice chip away at the modern, dynamic image you built through a powerful HTML template for your promotional emails?

Should a transactional email take a functional style (like Amazon’s) or should you add flair and personality (like CDBaby’s famous shipping confirmation)?

Are your confirmations and welcome messages delivered instantly (exploiting the power of the moment) or do they arrive days later when nobody’s looking for them anymore?

At the very least, don’t rely on the stock wording typically used in default e-commerce and email marketing software installations. Software designers are great at designing software, not so great at copywriting.

2. Opportunity for further interaction

Once I see a confirmation or welcome email, it’s not impossible that I may want to change something about the order or subscription. Equally, it may simply stimulate me to return to the website to search for more information or purchases.

So it makes sense to include links to popular site destinations to smooth the path to further online interaction.

Amazon’s message header includes links to common transaction-related destinations, like the shopping basket, help section or wishlist. The logo is linked to the index page:

Two issues, though. If the header is viewed with images blocked, those menu links don’t show up at all in, for example, Thunderbird:

…nor is there an explicit “home” link to follow as a catch all. Not everyone knows to click on a logo.

3. Upsells, cross-sells, offers

Quite rightly, the bulk of a transactional email deals with the actual transaction. But sidebars provide an opportunity to present offers and other marketing links without distracting from the main purpose of the message.

This is especially important if you want to stay within the boundaries of what the law defines as a transactional email.

Amazon, like the iTunes store (see left) and others, use clever software to populate this space with upsells and cross-sells based on user purchasing patterns.

The rest of us without clever software can still use the space for more generic promotions, advance notice of sales or events…or any other marketing message.

Given the transactional environment, one tactic is to pitch these marketing links as a service, rather than a(nother) promotion. Amazon, for example, talks about “Recommendations for your next visit” and includes the catch-all “See all your recommendations” link in case the showcase products aren’t quite right.

4. Social integration and user-generated content

Again, we’re all excited about adding “share with your network” (SWYN) links to promotions and newsletter content. Why not to transactional emails?

This approach might also work in follow-up emails. We’re already seeing dedicated emails requesting reviews…why not combine that with opportunities to “recommend the purchase to others”.

The ultimate trigger email program might send a dedicated “recommend to your friends” email only if the recipient bought the product and posted a 4 or 5 star review in a follow-up…

Anyone doubting whether product purchases are shareworthy enough to deserve SWYN links should simply search Twitter for the phrase “just bought”.

Bonus – ghosts of the past

The above ideas and concepts are not set in stone, but simply a catalyst to get you thinking more about those “throwaway” admin mails.

In researching the post, I dug out an old Amazon order confirmation email from 2001 which I thought you might enjoy. Fascinating how the priority back then was educating people on what they can do with their account!

Find related articles:

• Channel: Transactional email

Time to “lighten” up a little (see what I did there?) with an update to an ancient post. Get creative and submit your own in the comments!

Nobody ever removes the bulb. Unless it’s been inactive for more than six months.

You can’t change the bulb until you’ve tested different bulb versions to see which performs best for the target room.

None. The light bulb can change itself using a preference center.

None. Nobody uses light bulbs anymore. Social media killed the light bulb.

Two. One to change the bulb, and one to point out the excellent ROI compared to other ways of lighting the room.

Two. One to change it and one to get the appropriate permission to do so.

Two. One to fit the new bulb and one to design it so it works as intended in whatever socket it goes into.

Three: One to change it, one to design it to work in all sockets, and one to complain that the light bulb still doesn’t work in rooms built by Microsoft.

Six. One to change it, two to work out the best day and time of day to make the change, one to ensure the new bulb will meet user expectations, one to monitor how many people subsequently flick the light switch, and one to remind us that flicking the switch is not an accurate measure of whether the user truly engaged with the bulb.

Reader suggestions

From Jay Allen:

Why change it? It doesn’t cost any money to just keep using the bulb forever, whether it responds to the light switch or not.

From Justin Premick:

Two: one to change the bulb and one to suggest repairing the bulb is cheaper than constantly buying new bulbs.

Two: one to change the bulb, and one to suggest that we don’t have to change the bulb – it’ll work fine as long as we’re willing to pay a penny every time someone wants to turn it on.

Thirteen: one to change the bulb, and a dozen to write about how bulbs and sockets are constantly changing, who changes them well and poorly, and what anyone thinking about changing bulbs must know lest s/he get electrocuted.

From Robert:

None. If it’s dark someone must be blocking my light since I’m sure that my IT does all those “techy” things right.

From Anonymous:

550, but that’s only if the socket didn’t actually exist.

View answers on Twitter:

@remybergsma
@theeMailguide

Got any others?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing humor

So we’re happily wondering if that “buy” button should be green or red.

Or say “shop now” instead.

And all the while revenues are melting away silently, like sand in an egg timer.

Why?

Because our basic beliefs about how our emails work aren’t as self-evident as we’d like to believe.

There’s nothing like a bit of pointy-finger self-criticism to brighten up the marketing week. So here are four beliefs that might be holding your emails back…

1. Overestimating the relationship

Email builds relationships. Yes, indeed.

Unfortunately, the word “relationship” conjours up images of long-term loyalty and selflessness. It seduces us into assuming a level of devotion that simply doesn’t exist among email subscribers.

I like getting emails from Amazon. But I won’t be cooking Amazon dinner or taking it down the pub with me.

The reality for most list owners is that a minority have a meaningful emotional connection to the sender: your biggest fans. A majority don’t. Their relationship to you is a selfish transactional one…”what’s in it for me?”.

For those convinced of their list’s undying devotion, calculate what percentage of your subscribers opened or responded to more than half of your last 10 emails.

I’m guessing you’re doing well if that number is in double figures.

Compare that to the near 100% response you’d expect from the last 10 emails you sent to a friend or close family member.

This is not denigrating the role of email as a relationship builder. It’s just putting perspective on it. And this sense of perspective is important because you run into trouble when you start to exploit a relationship that doesn’t exist.

For example, you might be tempted to relax a little and send under-par offers or content that use up some of the relationship credit you’ve built up.

Except you overestimate the relationship credit available to you: my wife forgives me when I cook plain pasta twice in a row. Many of your subscribers won’t.

Or you might put in too much content that’s all about you and not about them…”Check out our new offices”, “look at photos from our Halloween party”, etc.

Such vanity content has a role to play. It adds a human element to a faceless sender and encourages more personal connections. But it needs to be used sparingly and cleverly, because many (most?) people, frankly, don’t care.

[Incidentally, vanity content in sidebars is a good way of identifying your biggest fans: the subscribers who click on the pictures of your new office really are interested in you.]

2. You can’t increase frequency

Here’s a simple graph I drew back in 2009 in an article on email frequency:

We know from consumer studies that sending too much email is a significant reason for regarding a sender’s messages as spam. At point D, any increase in frequency produces enough spam complaints to get you on blocklists and blacklists. Delivery rates crumble…with profits following.

Many of us (and nearly all articles on the topic) assume we must be close to point D.

But many of us are not.

Some of us are likely in a position where sending more email might even be welcomed by subscribers.

The trick of course is knowing where you are on the graph. Because the penalty for under-sending is a few dollars in lost opportunities. The penalty for over-sending can be much higher.

Regardless, optimizing frequency can actually mean increasing frequency, decreasing frequency, leaving it alone or doing one or more of all three.

EH?!

It’s the relationship lesson again. Not every subscriber views your emails the same way. So one challenge is to identify groups of subscribers who would respond better to different amounts of email and act accordingly.

Some might get more. Some might get less. One simple approach here is to ask existing subscribers to opt-in to additional message streams.

But the real solution to frequency optimization is to see the link between value and frequency.

The more valuable you make emails, the more emails you can send and the more responses you get per email. So you can increase frequency, provided it goes hand-in-hand with audience needs.

See the original post and many comments for detailed insight on this issue.

3. People use email like us

One of the more unfortunate aspects of the “Is email dead?” debate is the number of participants who extrapolate from a sample of 1 to the entire world.

“I use less/same/more email, so email is dead/steady/growing”

As Morgan Stewart put it recently:

“Don’t confuse your personal experience with good strategy”

The email marketing “community” is, in general, a high-tech community with busy email accounts. So it’s easy to imagine our subscribers are the same. But they are not.

Does it matter?

Yes, because this mistaken assumption leads us to focus energies in the wrong places.

Consider, for example, the large amount of industry coverage (including by me) given to the iPad and iPhone. Now check the numbers:

Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones in Q2 2010, bringing the total sold to just over 51 million since its 2007 launch. Total iPad sales are estimated at something over 8 million.

Combined iPhone/iPad sales of around 60 million units sounds like a lot. But humble Hotmail (a product of the 1990s) has over six times as many active email accounts.

Now, the focus on the iPhone and iPad also reflects their future potential, with mobile email set to dominate email sometime in the coming months and years. But still, how much do you read about Hotmail design issues or Hotmail user demographics?

Email user habits also differ from our own.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 94% of adult US internet users send or read email. Some 62% of US Internet users checked their email “yesterday”, suggesting almost a third of US email users are not checking email on a daily basis.

Global figures published by TNS put email use at 4.4 hours a week, with 72% of those online checking email daily.

Let’s look at Hotmail again. The Inside Windows Live blog reported that the service delivers 2.5 billion messages into user inboxes. Which means an average inbox there is getting less than 7 emails a day.

None of those stats gel with the busy marketer’s typical concept of inbox activity.

A better understanding of your audience’s email habits helps with campaign planning. For example, if you’re going to run a 24 hour sale on Thursday, how far in advance to you need to send out the email so people see it in time?

4. We’re the only people who send this kind of offer/content to our subscribers

A good email marketer looks at each email as one of a series.

Not a Part 1, Part 2 kind of series, but seeing each email as part of an ongoing stream of offers, content, “experiences” and “brand impressions”. This recognizes that subscribers perceive each email in the context of what else you sent and are sending.

At a simple level, it’s this thought process that makes us mix up our offers and content through time to avoid repetition. Or if we’re deliberately repeating offers and content, it’s a strategy…not laziness.

However, we forget that other people are also mailing our recipients. Not just mom, Facebook or the boss, but (potentially) other people in the same market as we are.

Which means subscribers also view your offers and content in the context of what your competitors are sending or sent.

That changes things.

Because the stand-out 20% holiday discount is only stand-out when compared to your previous emails. It’s not stand out when everyone else is doing the same.

It’s a self-evident truth that is not so self-evident when we’re buried deep in our own work and messages.

The logical and obvious lesson: the value of what you send depends on the absolute quality of your content/offer AND on its quality relative to what others might be sending.

Advice on the iPhone’s impact on email design is important and valuable, but less so when everyone else is writing about it.

[It's not that simple, either. Some of your audience aren't subscribed to your competitors' emails so they will value offers or content that might seem trivial or mundane to others. Fun, eh?]

So there you have it. Agree? Disagree? Care to suggest any other beliefs that might be hurting email marketing?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing strategy

Talk to any email marketing expert and they’ll tell you your emails need to be more relevant.

No arguments there.

But what does that really mean? And how do you actually do it?

Those two questions are often met with unhelpful answers.

“Relevant! You know…send people stuff that’s relevant to their needs. It’s not rocket science.”

“You just have to segment your customer database based on existing records, prior email interactions and preference center data…then distribute dynamic content and offers…implement trigger emails based on website behavior and product lifecycles…and make sensible use of personalization.”

See your ESP or software provider for details.

Now all that is true. These tactics can deliver great results.

Trouble is a lot of us are just grateful to get that monthly newsletter written or a quick sales promo finished up. We may not have the time, tools or resources to take the technology route to relevancy.

So what can you do?

Here a few ideas to think about…please do suggest your own in the comments.

1. Don’t get hung up on the word relevancy

The term “relevancy” has been reduced to the idea of matching offers to what people want to buy and content topics to what people are likely interested in.

Which sounds good, but brings two problems.

First, it only addresses a few of those “people needs”. Our lives (thank goodness) are not dedicated solely to the acquisition of goods and factual information.

Second, relevancy is not really the goal. It’s not enough, since it says nothing about whether the message has any worth beyond being “on-topic”. You actually want to send emails that offer people some kind of value…that resonate…that drive a response. That’s not the same as being relevant.

So think in terms of sending email that people want to get. The value you offer is the foundation on which everything else is built. And even the prettiest house collapses if the foundations aren’t solid.

As Simms Jenkins notes:

“Compelling content that provides value to your subscribers is the best way to ensure they stay engaged with your e-mail program”

Part of sending “wanted email” is indeed sending “relevant” offers and/or content. But the concept also frees you to think more creatively about what people might enjoy receiving.

The classic example is the idea of emotional value covered in detail in a recent post. Personality, humor, fun, quirkiness, uniqueness, creative design, creative writing, etc. are all ways to actually make your message more relevant/valuable, even if the main offer or content isn’t.

Learn by doing and asking

As we wring our hands and bemoan the missing preference center or database integration capacity (or just a missing database), we forget that subscribers already have a good way to tell us what they want and don’t want.

It’s called a click.

Standard email campaign reports will show you what offers or topics get the most response. For example, I assign the articles featured in my newsletter to a particular topic category and then review the responses each content category gets across past issues.

A word of warning though.

When comparing responses across a set of emails, it’s not just the offer or content topic that might explain different response rates. You need to take a host of other factors into account too, as this article explains.

And you can always ask subscribers what they want to hear/learn about: send them a survey and use the results to guide future content or offer development.

Try the content approach

I used to get emails from a golf ball supplier. Just a long stream of offers on golf balls. Which is fine. Every now and then I’ll want to buy some balls and they give themselves a chance that I’ll buy from them.

These kinds of email programs are solid, but uninspiring…and typical of senders with a limited range of products or services to push. In such circumstances, it’s hard to build email value through offer variety, so why not boost that value with content?

Suppose some of those emails showed me how to choose the right ball for my kind of golf? Or explained the differences between ball types? Or offered tips on ball care?

And since they know a potential golf ball purchaser is probably a golfer, that opens up a whole slew of possibilities for valuable content.

Now the emails have a better chance of getting my attention and the sender has a better chance of getting the sale.

Chocolatier Nicole Leffer sends prospects and customers candy-molding lessons by email. The result?

“The open rates have been very good…and the course has definitely led to new sales (from new customers), as well as improved our relationship with our customers.” (See the case study)

The main constraint to using content to boost email value is the cost (in time or money) of producing that content. But it need not be high.

This article gives the case for marketing through content and outlines six ways to produce this content at little cost. Those stuck for ideas can also draw inspiration here.

Promote through service: transactional and trigger messages

The content approach to lift relevancy reflects the idea of marketing through service.

Helpful content drives responses indirectly by increasing loyalty, awareness etc. And directly, when related promotions are placed within or near that valuable content.

We’ve been trained to think of marketing emails, despite the opt-in, as somehow intrusive…imposing. It’s a direct marketing mindset that partly explains the narrow view of emails as a vehicle to push promotion after promotion after promotion.

Even ignoring the fact that people volunteer to join a list because they want those promotions or content, it can help to switch mindset and see emails as a service, not an imposition or intrusion.

A service mentality opens up new avenues to relevancy.

Transactional emails (like order confirmations) are by definition relevant, since they’re a vital part of a process the recipient is going through.

Trigger emails are also intrinsically relevant as they go out as a direct result of a specified action, like an email reminder if a shopping cart is abandoned.

This built-in relevancy is why many experts see these kinds of messages as a cornerstone of email marketing’s future.

Loren McDonald, for example, has an excellent overview of the potential here. And a recent study found that offers placed within shipping confirmations produced over three times the revenue per email garnered by standard promotional mailings.

Many senders ignore these “service-oriented” messages, because we assume they require sophisticated databases and integration with web analytics to achieve their potential.

Not necessarily.

For example, when people talk about piggy-backing marketing messages in transactional emails, they usually refer to related offers inserted automatically based on the products or services purchased. You bought this…you might like this. Like Amazon and iTunes do.

But you can start simply. You can, for example:

• Turn standardized system messages put together by software engineers into well-written, clear communications.
• Insert a generic offer, promotion, sales message, event announcement, or informational note into the footer or sidebar of each outgoing order confirmation. One you can swap out easily as necessary.
• Get your system to send follow-up emails asking for feedback, a product review or similar.

Sophisticated trigger emails are just the grown up version of the age-old autoresponder. Consider, for example, the lowly welcome message.

That’s a trigger email that all software and ESPs should offer and you should make use of. Consider the numbers for my own newsletter:

• Open rate on welcome messages: over double the rate for a typical newsletter issue
• Click rate on welcome messages: over three times the rate for a typical newsletter issue

For tips on making more of welcome messages, see here.

Piggy-back on the wider world

Relevancy/value is raised where you can draw a meaningful connection to what’s going on elsewhere and right now.

We acknowledge this implicitly with end-of-year holiday emails: a banal offer in February gains meaning when it becomes “a gift for dad” in a message featuring appropriate seasonal imagery.

The concept is easily extended to:

• Other holidays
• Seasons (summer)
• Weather
• Major events (elections, sporting events, TV events, etc.)

It’s not just about finding a promotion that fits, like pushing umbrellas when the country is covered by cloud and rain. It can be as little as drawing a logical connection between the message and the wider world:

• “Stuck indoors with all this rain? Here are some new books to read…”
• “Tired of all those political ads? Bury yourself in a new novel…”
• “Didn’t get the right books under the Christmas tree? Try these recommendations…”

The trick is not to make the connection so contrived that it’s painful: some products really don’t make ideal holiday gifts.

Use secondary calls to action

A big problem with relevancy is that you often only have one shot at it in an email. If you’re sending out a single offer or article, you have to hope it hits the mark. And it usually doesn’t.

Some senders hedge their relevancy bets by cramming the email full of different offers or topics…a shotgun approach that hopes that something somewhere will match the subscriber’s needs or interests.

The danger is that too much information, choice or clutter simply dilutes the message and causes recipients to switch off entirely. Equally, not everyone has a swathe of offers or content to draw on.

A useful compromise is to have an email feature one or two key offers or articles, but include secondary calls to action that might pick up clicks when the main focus is not relevant. Examples include:

• Sidebar/footer links to other promotions or content
• Website links (often in a navigation bar) leading to popular areas of your website
• A link to your website search form

I got a sustainable lift in clicks just by adding links to the  previous issue’s content at the bottom of each new newsletter issue.

Don’t assume you can’t be sophisticated

The introduction to this post featured the kind of targeting tools available to those with deeper pockets than most.

But that’s not entirely fair.

If you assume that your value-priced ESP or off-the-shelf software doesn’t support advanced segmentation and such like, then take another look just to be sure.

Go on…take a fresh look at the manual or help files. You might be surprised at just how easy they make it to send “more relevant emails” with the press of a few buttons.

So, just a few ideas for you…any other suggestions for the time and resource-poor marketer to try?

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• Channel: Email marketing tactics