False idols: four beliefs that can hurt your email marketing

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?

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• Channel: Email marketing strategy

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