No man is an iland

A dull, grey day here in Vienna, so I thought I’d resurrect and update a less-than-serious and very old post about the future of email marketing.

What will it look like in 20 years time? Inspired by a conversation on Google+ with Remy Bergsma and Kelly Lorenz.

• Email trigger technology is so advanced that the triggered email reaches your inbox before you take the action required to trigger it.

• Email designers complain bitterly about rendering problems with Outlook 2030.

• Online integration now means you get a Tweet about a text message on your smartphone telling you to check email for a note alerting you to a wall post on Facebook informing you of a chat message from a friend who wants to add you to his LinkedIn contacts.

• Experts recommend adding a “view on desktop” link to the preheader to account for the few people who are still using desktop devices.

• Adjustments to US Can-Spam legislation extend the definition of the term “sender” to include birds, reptiles and higher invertebrates. But it still doesn’t require an opt-in.

• Thanks to almost universal image suppression, 3% is now considered a good open rate.

• At least one news headline declares that “email is dead,” while industry commentators complain that email has the highest ROI of all direct response media but still isn’t getting the budget it deserves. Plus ça change.

• Attention spans are so short that Twitter is now preferred for lead nurturing campaigns that require a long copy approach.

• 40% of retailers do not design their emails for blocked holograms. Recipients simply see a spinning red cross accompanied by a security warning.

• Continuing concerns over privacy and permission lead to the introduction of treble opt-in. After clicking a link in a confirmation email, would-be subscribers are asked to solve a Sudoku puzzle in under 60 seconds before their email is added to the list.

• You can still buy 1 million email addresses for $99. It’s still a bad idea.

• Personalization advances mean the offer in an email updates itself based on your browsing behavior after receiving the mail. (Actually, that’s a prediction.)

• The Yahoo Live Gmail New! webmail interface blocks images, blacks out text, hides the sender name, deletes the subject line and issues a strong security warning on all incoming emails that aren’t in a paid certification program…run by Yahoo Live Gmail.

• Web 5.0 focuses on the production of intelligent, thoughtful content by individuals with an objective understanding of the subject matter. It doesn’t catch on.

Your suggestions?

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email humor

A lot of thought goes into working out how to increase email response. One option is to send more email.

Ah, but wait.

We live in fear of the frequency increase. Nobody wants to send the straw that breaks the inbox camel’s back and find themselves labelled a spammer.

So we look for segments and situations that let us increase frequency safely. Like when:

• seasonal demand rises, such as around the Q4 holiday shopping season
• you identify your “best” customers, who respond regularly to your messages
• subscribers opt-in to a special series of emails, like a “12 days of Xmas” promotion
• subscribers take some kind of action that lets you send them a highly-relevant “extra” message: the trigger mail approach

One group of subscribers where frequency increases might also lift response is commonly ignored, because we don’t believe it exists: those individuals who are not suffering from too much email.

Yeah, right…like there’s anybody out there not getting enough email.

The “tranquil inbox” is up there with the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster: more people probably believe in the Tooth Fairy.

The search for the empty inbox

We all “know” that inboxes are groaning under the weight of (commercial) email.

It’s not hard to dig up articles about email overload, email bankruptcy or the astonishing volume of spam.

And who hasn’t bragged about their five-figure inbox, where reaching Gmail’s storage limit is top of the “things to do before I’m 30 40 50″ list?

The People have had enough. The People scan through their inbox like five year-olds with a TV remote. Zap, zap, move on, zap, zap…their fingers permanently poised over the “mark as spam” button.

It’s email hell out there.

And this apparent reality pervades a lot of email marketing advice.

You need to stand out in the inbox. You need to ensure your discount is deep enough and your message loud enough to compete. Don’t lift frequency!

There’s a lot of truth in there, especially since “too many emails” is often cited as a reason for unsubscribing or marking emails as spam. But that whole inbox perception is largely driven by people with cluttered inboxes. People like me and (probably) you. IT professionals, email professionals, tech journalists, marketers, office workers etc…mostly in professions and working environments with a big email burden.

It’s not the same for everyone, though.

You rarely hear about people like my sister, whose Hotmail inbox is indeed an ocean of tranquility. Who wishes her favorite retailer would send more email. Or about the huge number of people who do not use email significantly as part of their job.

How much email do people really get?

Nobody can tell you exactly how many emails are sent or delivered to every inbox around the world. But we can make some educated guesses.

Back in 2010, Hotmail revealed they were delivering a mammoth 2.5 billion emails to customer inboxes each day. The numbers suggest they had around 350 million active accounts at the time.

That works out at 7.14 emails per account per day.

Based on more recent inbox profiles, half of those are deals and newsletters.

So an average Hotmail inbox would get between 3 and 4 marketing emails a day.

Yahoo! recently put up a tool displaying how many emails they’re currently delivering each second.

I’ve been watching it to get some idea of typical email volume. At least during the European working day, it looks like the figure jumps around 60,000 a second.

If we took that number as an average, it would mean an equally mammoth 2,592 billion per day. (If anybody wants to check the tool over 24 hours and give me a more accurate figure, I’d be happy to update the numbers.)

The tool also claims around 302 million unique users, giving us a figure of 8.6 emails per user per day.

A recent end-user survey by the UK’s DMA found half getting less than 20 emails a week from trusted brands or under three a day.

Merkle’s Digital Inbox report suggests the average number of companies in a recipient’s “inner circle” is 11.3.

The Retail Email Blog tracks the emailing frequency of the top retailers. At the moment, we’re looking at around 3.2/week. Putting the two numbers together would give us just over five marketing emails a day for the average recipient.

Now there are lots of flaws and assumptions in all the above calculations, and you can find numbers that suggest busier inboxes. For example…

• Hotmail conducted a survey of 500 Hotmail users which found an average 200 emails per week or about four times the amount the earlier calculation suggests.
• Forrester even predict a typical consumer will get an average 9000 commercial emails per year by 2014, which is around 25 commercial messages a day.
• And in 2009, the Radicati Group put the number of global email users at over 1.4 billion, getting 247 billion messages per day: 176 emails a day.

Consider, also, that people often have multiple email accounts. Nor is email volume a perfect indicator of how full or cluttered an inbox is: low email volume with infrequent checking can mean a full inbox, high volume with frequent email management can mean an empty inbox.

Plus we can assume that people who subscribe to commercial emails are probably heavier email users than average.

Basically we have a mess of conflicting numbers. But that’s kind of the point: your inbox is not my inbox is not your subscriber’s inbox. Common sense alone tells us that there is no single inbox reality. And we are not the only ones mistaking our experience or our working community’s experience for reality.

As Harrison Kratz puts it when talking about social media experts:

“Are we so entrenched in this bubble that we’re forgetting what the “norm” really is?”

There is no single inbox reality

We are quite happy to accept that our lists are made up of individuals and segments that differ in terms of tastes, preferences, demographics, buying propensity, fashion sense, eye color and favorite football team…yet we often act as if their inboxes are all the same: full.

Those numbers may be messy, but some of the averages provide strong evidence that that missing segment does exist: the tranquil inbox.

Its size depends, of course, on your list. If you’re marketing to people like me, then good luck finding it. But if you’re marketing to people like my sister, a stay-at-home mum, then it’s a different scenario.

So how do we exploit this segment?

That’s a real challenge, because you can’t really segment by how full or active a recipient’s inbox is.

Two ideas I’d like to throw out for your consideration.

1. Can you ask subscribers if they’d like more emails?

Our (often justified) concern about sending too much means we commonly talk about “opting down”: giving people the chance to get less email, rather than unsubscribe.

What about opting-up? Is that an option to put in a preference center or as a secondary call to action in emails?

“Like our deals? Get even more.”

2. Is it worth testing increases in email frequency to see if that tranquil segment is larger than you think?

Remember, there are plenty of senders keeping subscribers happy with daily emails, and they’re not all daily deals either. Not that I’m suggesting you go daily: when people say they get too much email they really mean they get too much useless email: frequency thresholds are as much about the value you deliver as anything else.

If every email you send me makes me $1000, you can send as many as you like. If they’re a waste of my time, then once a month is too many.

What do you think?

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• Channel: More posts on timing and frequency

You can change your religion and nationality.

You can change your mind, hair and underwear.

You can even change your gender.

But you cannot (CANNOT!) change your from name.

At least you’d think so based on how most people react when you make the suggestion.

They’re not wrong, but they’re not completely right either: I changed my newsletter’s from line and improved results, as I’ll show below.

What are we changing?

First we need to clarify what exactly we’re changing.

Every email carries with it various bits of information to say where it came from. This includes such things as the sender’s name and email address.

Most email software and webmail services display the “friendly” version of the sender’s identity in the inbox, i.e. the sender’s name:

So viewing, for example, my newsletter in a typical inbox would show a sender name of:

“Email Marketing Reports”

In this post, I’m only talking about changing this friendly from/sender name, not your sender email address: that’s a topic for another day.

Why you should not change your from line

The main issue with the from line is recognition…existing subscribers have got used to associating a certain from line with your emails.

Most people argue that changing the from line breaks this recognition: emails may then be ignored or even marked as spam (eek!), if the recipient decides some unknown sender has sent them unsolicited commercial email.

This argument is perfectly logical. (But see the P.S. at the end of the post for a surprise!)

However, the problem is not changing your from line per se, but how you change it.

Every criticism of a from line change I have read refers to a case where the from line has changed to something largely unrecognizable to most recipients. Like if email from “Email Marketing Reports” suddenly came from “David Macmillan”.

Nobody knows who David Macmillan is.

But it’s not the same as saying you cannot change your from line at all. Who says the new sender name has to be an unrecognizable one?

Why you should change your from line

The from line plays a major role in getting people to give your message attention. Assuming you send emails worth that attention, then you want people to recognize those emails…which starts with a recognizable sender name.

Equally the value of that recognition increases, the closer the relationship between recipient and sender (again, always assuming the recipient sees value in the messages).

For most businesses, there is no personal relationship between sender and recipient. So most marketing emails therefore come from a company or brand name to exploit the recognition factor (see the earlier image for examples).

So why would you ever want to change this from line?

Of course there are times when a brand, company or newsletter name changes…but these forced changes to something potentially unrecognizable are not what I’m talking about and need their own special approach.

My question is this: when would you voluntarily change your from line?

In an ideal world, we’d have optimized our from line on Day 1. Call me a pessimist, but this isn’t an ideal world.

Like me, you may have come up with a from name at the beginning of an email program and then bowed to the Goddess of No Change and left it untouched, even though in retrospect it was not the best choice of sender name. Like some of these ones from my Gmail inbox:

You might want to move from a generic sender name (like “marketing”) to a recognizable one.

Or you might want to use a person’s or personality’s name to try and get a bigger connection to the reader. This could work well in B2B where the sender might be the recipient’s account manager.

The first case seems logical. The second is a little more complicated: in the best case scenario, everyone recognizes the new “human” sender and you get a results boost. In the worst case, the person’s name is meaningless and results tumble (but see later).

So how about we test? We just need to make sure that:

1. The new from line is as recognizable as possible

2. Other recognition elements are built into the email

Let’s see how that looks in practice.

A real-world example and test results

As I stated, my newsletter comes with a sender name of “Email Marketing Reports”.

Now every issue starts with an editorial signed by “Mark” (me) and every landing page features an article written by “Mark Brownlow”. And I try and keep the tone of the emails and the articles fairly conversational.

Could I get a response boost by using my name as the from line, rather than the rather unexciting website name?

Good question.

“Email Marketing Reports” is hardly a household name in its own right, but it’s surely more recognizable than “Mark Brownlow”: plenty of readers won’t have any kind of relationship with me. Will my name simply bemuse people?

Or will the value of a more human from line outweigh recognition problems? Are there perhaps enough people on the list who do know my name?

The only way to know the overall impact of such a change is to test.

But…instead of testing “Mark Brownlow”, I tested “Mark at Email Marketing Reports”.

A name is in there AND Email Marketing Reports, hopefully addressing recognition issues, but also adding that human touch.

I also ensured the rest of the email was helping recognition: the subject line also has “Email Marketing Reports” in it, and there’s a branded logo and text in the area typically revealed in email preview panes.

So…the results:

Oh!

(Unique CTR was up 19% with the new from line, too, but not enough to be considered statistically significant.)

Now this is a very specific example, so you certainly could not say it was a general lesson on what from lines are best. My circumstances (not a household brand name, some name recognition among recipients) are probably different to yours.

Equally, I’m not convinced those improvements will hold in the long-term: there may be curiosity and novelty factors at play.

Also, if the emails don’t carry enough of a personal touch from me, then the new from line may actually start to hurt results by raising expectations that are then not met.

But the results do tell us that voluntary, unannounced from line changes do not automatically mean campaign disasters: they are another potential tactic to use as you look to boost your email results.

Summary

1. Consider a voluntary from line change only when you have good reason to believe it might lift results

2. Avoid changing to something that is unrecognizable

3. Ensure other elements of the email are optimized to keep recognition high – preheader, logos, preview pane, subject line etc.

4. Test

P.S.

Here’s a little spanner to throw into our theory.

If you made the sender the name of a random person, you’d expect results to tank and spam reports to rocket.

A few years ago, a reader noted that their experience suggested the opposite was true: a name (even a fake one) boosted opens and clicks…also over a longer period.

See the original blog post and (particularly) comments for details.

This raises questions like:

Just how quickly do people mark email as spam (people, not email marketers who are more finely tuned to the whole issue)?

Do they really do so without even glancing at the subject line or content, before making their decision? If no, is there less risk than we always imagine with from line changes?

How do from line changes work in the long run?

How often could/should you change a good from line (if at all)? Is there potential to use variations on a *recognizable* theme to keep people on their inbox toes?

What about when people have set up filters based on the sender name: how do they react when these filters break? How many people actually use such filters?

Can from line changes help when people are tired of your emails or have gone inactive (see this post for details)?

I’ll leave those for you to ponder!

What’s your view/experience on voluntary from line changes?

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• Channel: Email copywriting