Jeanne Jennings on email marketing, the NHL and fish
Jeanne Jennings is an email marketing and website strategy consultant, columnist and author of the new Email Marketing Kit (review) from Sitepoint.
Fresh from penning what she describes as "everything you need to know to get started with email or to take your email program to the next level," Jeanne agreed to talk email marketing with me.
She has a lot of wise things to say about today's and tomorrow's challenges, using benchmarks, the transactional email opportunity, relationship building, the NHL and what we can learn from fishmarkets.
So who should be reading the Email Marketing Kit?
I really wrote it with non-marketers in mind because a lot of people who are doing email marketing or getting into email marketing don't necessarily have a formal marketing background.
But that doesn't mean they can't be successful. So the book is really written for people who...
- own their own small business and are looking to promote it
- are working in larger businesses but are in charge of the email marketing piece of it
- consultants: people who are helping companies with their website or other marketing tasks and who want to add email to their toolkit. So they can say to people, "hey I can build you a website and by the way we should add an email component to it (and I can help you with that too)"
What are the biggest mistakes that newcomers make?
For people who aren't doing it now and who are looking to start, the biggest issues of all surround the address list. So many people call me and say, "I want to start" and then either "I need to buy a list" or "I found this list with a million names for a $100, what do you think? It's only a $100 and it's a million names!"
There's this idea that the best thing you can do is buy an email list. But that's one of the biggest mistakes people make when getting into email marketing. It's really not a good way to get started, for a number of reasons.
The first is that it's a ridiculously low price for a list. That's like saying, "I have a Jaguar, it's brand new with no miles. It's only $100, do you wanna buy it?" You'd be skeptical.
A lot of these lists are junk. They're made up or they're otherwise not good. What that really means is you're going to get spam complaints if you use them...and they're not going to perform well.
The only good lists are rented not sold. But if you constantly rent lists, you've got to pay for that list everytime you want to send an email to it.
The best way to start email marketing is to grow your own list in-house, which also gives you a sustainable resource to use. If you build your own list, you can send to it as much as you want and you don't have to pay a rental fee.
The other thing you're doing with a house list is you are building relationships, and that's something that email is excellent at. You're really helping people to get to know your company...how it thinks and works. And you're building a relationship over time that's going to turn into a sale, a renewal, a cross sell or an upsell.
How about those with some experience under their belt?
A lot of people start with email marketing and they have some success -- which is great -- and then they plateau.
They get to the point where maybe their list just isn't growing anymore. Or maybe their efforts are either bringing in the same amount of money everytime or (more often) diminishing amounts of money.
You get a quick hit at the beginning...people who are quick to buy. But as you keep going to your house list, your revenue and profit goes down, down. What the Kit, for example, really says to folks in that situation is, "let's take a look at what you're doing and figure out how to pump up your efforts."
The great thing about email is not only do we know the results -- how much money we generated from the email or how many leads or whatever we're trying to do -- but we can see how people interact with that email. If you can change how they interact, you can boost your revenue or your leads.
So in the Kit we look at your opens and clicks...what are people clicking on? How can we boost that? If you can get more people to open, more people to click, then very often that is the key to increasing your revenue. So that's one thing we talk about - using those metrics as a way to optimize your efforts.
Is this where benchmarks can play a role?
It's controversial. I really love benchmarks, although it's very important to understand what they can do for you and what they can't. Other people -- some of whom are friends of mine -- refer to benchmarks as "lies, damned lies and statistics" and they really don't like them.
Benchmarks are not a measure of success or failure. Right now, "average" open rate percentages are running in the high 20s, average clickthroughs a little over 7%, although it depends what you're sending and what industry you're in. But let's just throw those out as examples.
You can have open rates of 40% and clickthroughs of 10% -- far above the benchmarks -- and still not be profitable. That's not a successful program.
You can have opens of 15% and clickthroughs of 3.5%, and if you're profitable I would call that a successful campaign.
So the first thing to realize is that metrics are not about success or failure. But they give you an idea of what's going on in the market, in the industry.
If you're sending an email and you've got a 30% open rate, which is right about that industry average, but your clickthrough is at 2%, you want to spend your initial efforts bumping up that clickthrough. Because other people are getting higher numbers.
By the same token, if your clickthroughs are 10% but your open rate is also 10%, then work on your open rate.
I relate it to salaries. If you're looking to hire someone for a job, you're going to want to know what the salary range for that position is...what are other people paying? And if you're interviewing for a job, you need to know what number to ask for. And it's not that you won't get more than the average, but you don't want to get less. And it's just something to shoot for. That's how I see benchmarks.
Also, everybody thinks of benchmarks as industry benchmarks, but the best benchmarks are the internal ones. You get benchmarks related to a certain list or a certain product. Those are much more applicable to your business, though the industry benchmarks are still very helpful.
Do you have any favorite benchmark sources?
Jupiter Research. The other place I like to go is MarketingSherpa. Anne Holland is fabulous and Sherpa does some great work. Their Benchmark Report is a great place to go to get all sorts of industry benchmarks, sliced and diced in a million different ways. As soon as that comes out every year, I buy it. It's a great resource.
Another place to get benchmarks is case studies. Whenever I find someone who's willing to tell me what they're getting in terms of opens, CTR, conversion, whatever, I throw it into a spreadsheet.
But it's important to know that when you're dealing with case studies, you're not dealing with averages...but it's still good to know what people are doing.
What challenges are on the horizon for email marketers?
The newest thing on the horizon for email marketers is what a lot of the new email clients are doing with blocking images and making links not live. I just read an article from an ESP saying that everyone focuses on image rendering but deliverability is still the number 1 issue. I kind of think they're equal now.
It's important to get your email through, but I just did a study of 30 different emails that came into my inbox. With images blocked, most of them were completely unintelligible. And that's a problem.
A lot of these clients are shipping with images blocked by default. When you try to enable images there's this really scary message which says, you know, this could cause your computer to X, Y and Z. For people who aren't in the industry, it's a concern and they look at that and go, "do I really want to risk this?"
That's one thing that people need to think about. Not that we should go back to text email. But just make sure that if images are blocked, people can see who it's from. Hopefully they can see something of the offer. At least enough to entice them to turn images on. Because it's too easy these days to go, "I don't know what that is...delete."
I recently got invited to the annual conference of a very big interactive agency. Which I love...I've been there before. I forwarded an email to a couple of contacts to say "Hey, I just signed up, are you guys going this year?" And one of them wrote back and said, "Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you forwarded this to me."
The "from name" was someone at the agency who none of us recognized. When she'd opened the original email, all she saw was that red X. She said, "I deleted it. I didn't recognize the name of who it was from and I didn't see anything."
Any other pressing issues?
I still think a lot of companies are doing email somewhat organically. Somebody had an idea for a newsletter, somebody there is sending promotions.
Too many companies -- even really big ones -- are not really treating their email marketing like a business asset. Figuring out how to get the most out of that asset. Figuring out how to protect it, so it's not abused. And really figuring out the best way to generate revenue.
Email marketing's not an infant anymore. It's been 10 years. We need to start treating it like the mature marketing channel it is.
The other thing is transactional emails. It's a huge missed opportunity for most companies.
And spam?
Every couple of months an article pops up saying email's dead. First email was dead because of blogs. Blogs were going to kill email. Then email was dead because of RSS. RSS was going to kill email. There's space for all. TV didn't kill radio. I like blogs. I get RSS feeds. But email hasn't gone away.
But people don't take email quite as seriously as some of the other marketing channels. And part of the reason for that is the problem with spam. It's a real issue. There is this (false) idea that if you do email, it's got to be spam. And some companies shy away from it because of that and that's a shame.
Will we lose the spam problem sometime?
It's going to be a technological solution. We've already got much better. One of the big problems with spam was false positives: the idea of legitimate messages being filtered as junk.
Although authentication has not lessened the problem of spam, one thing I've seen it do is decrease false positives. So that's good. In the long run there's going to be a technology solution.
You mentioned transactional emails as a missed opportunity. How do you mean?
Transactional emails are those emails that are sent in conjunction with a purchase or any other kind of customer transaction. So if I order songs from iTunes for my iPod, I'll get a receipt by email telling me what I bought and how much it cost.
In the past, a lot of companies looked at these as a cost center...we have to send an email to let them know it's been shipped. We have to send them an email to give them a receipt.
Since it's a cost center, they were looking to do these emails in the cheapest possible way. So often the copy is written by the IT department. It's plain text. They don't spend a lot of time and thought on subject lines or from lines because it's just this thing they have to do.
What I've found when I've started working with companies and looking more at this is that a lot of companies have a huge volume of transactional email. A much larger volume than they have for marketing email. So there are always emails going out.
And transactional emails have very very high open rates and very high clickthrough rates. Much better than marketing emails. Because it's related to the transaction...if you send me a note about something I ordered, I'm going to open that to make sure that it's on its way and there is not a problem.
What smart marketers are starting to do (and what everyone should think about doing) is leveraging those emails and turning them into a profit center.
You got the reader's attention. Why not give them something in that receipt? Say, 10% off their next purchase? iTunes does a great job of this: this is what you just bought, here's what it cost, oh and by the way here's what other people who bought that also purchased...you might like these. And it gives you three more recommendations.
So the idea is to turn these transactional emails from a cost center into a profit center. There's a tremendous opportunity and a few companies are starting to do it.
Why isn't this happening more quickly?
People weren't looking at transactional emails as a marketing opportunity, they were looking at them as a service. Typically they were handled outside the marketing department.
I'm even finding examples where the marketing department says, "we really want to turn these into a profit center, but there's resistance." There are turf battles. IT says, "this has always been ours. Why do you want to mess with my confirmation mails?"
But smart companies are looking to do it because it's money they're leaving on the table.
The other thing is it takes a little bit of a investment because a lot of transactional emails are sent out from the company's own servers. There's no tracking or reporting. Often there's not even any HTML capability, so it involves moving to an ESP or upgrading your internal system.
You talked earlier of email as a relationship builder. Any good examples?
The NHL. For instance, it's been hard sometimes to find away games on TV (I go to all the home games.) The NHL has got very good about sending out emails every week saying, "here are the games that are going to be on TV. Here's the station and when and who's playing." They have to try harder and they're doing that.
One of my favorite emails of all time came from the Washington Capitals, which is my home town team. They used to send out this email that was a couple of pages that basically gave you the lowdown on that night's home game.
They would tell you who the key players were and what you should be watching for, the strengths of each team and how they were going to match up. It was really informative and one of those thing's I would read right away and print out. It made you enjoy the game more.
I thought that was a fabulous use of email because it increased the value of that game to me. Which is part of the reason I got hooked.
The other thing it did is this: I have a godson who goes to hockey games with us. He's ten now but back then he was much littler. It let me teach him about hockey. Which I wouldn't have been able to do because I didn't have the time to do all that research on the other team. So it let me teach him about hockey.
He's a huge fan now, and now he teaches me. So it was tremendous value. It was interesting as there was no online call to action at all. But that newsletter accomplished its goals. It built fans. People who were already fans became bigger fans. And people who weren't fans began to understand the game.
And the personal stuff
Best piece of business advice you ever got: Years before I had the nerve to actually become a consultant, I had lunch with one of my former bosses. I asked him about consulting and if he thought I had what it took. Did I have the expertise? Did I have the temperament?
He said, "look, the best consultants go into a situation with clients where they get asked questions. And for them it's like the client saying, 'what color is the sky?' and you look up and say, 'well, it's blue.' And they go, 'what are those white things?' And you go, 'well, they're clouds'."
He said if that's how you are, if you know your topic well enough that when you're asked questions, it's like you're telling them the sky is blue and those white thing are clouds, then you're going to be a great consultant. Because you know your topic well enough. You know it cold and you won't have any problems.
If that's not the case, then you're not ready. I thought that was great advice: make sure it's something you know that well. And if you know it that well, then you're going to be fine. I didn't end up going into consulting at that time: he actually hired me again and I went to work for him a second time. Years later I ended up taking the plunge.
Best business book you ever read: My favorite business book, partly because I came upon it at a time of my life when I really needed it, is Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson.
I was working in a company where things were changing very rapidly and it even looked like our jobs were probably in jeopardy. I read that book and the whole idea is to embrace change...don't worry about things you can't control. And I read it and recommended it to everyone in our office. With the exception of one person, everyone loved it and it put us all in a better place.
I'll never forget this one person came into my office, put the book down on my desk and I said, "what did you think?" And he goes, "I really didn't like it, it really doesn't apply to us. It's not like we don't know who moved our cheese. We know who moved our cheese. Management moved our cheese. I want my cheese back."
The whole idea of the book was you can't control it, you can't get it back. That has a special place in my heart because it really helped me through that tough time when we did eventually all get laid off...they closed our office.
The other book I love is called FISH by Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen, which is about one of my favorite places in the world: the Seattle Pike Place Fishmarket.
It's wild because it's an outdoor market and they throw the fish around - it's a show. You can't help but be there and get involved. One of the first times I went I bought an entire salmon. If you know that I don't cook much it was a ridiculous thing to buy and pay to have shipped.
But the idea of the book is about your attitude in the workplace and how you can affect your workplace. I also got a lot out about treating customers. If you're dealing with people and they just want to get involved in what you're doing, that's a great way to get customers.
It's what happened to me at the fish market. I just couldn't not buy a fish. That gave a me a lot of lessons in getting new clients and injecting my own attitude in dealing with work issues. You can't always control what's going on around you, but you can control yourself.
Best way to celebrate a particularly successful bit of business: I'm such a geeky workaholic. Whenever you have success, you pat yourself on the back and say, "way to go Jeanne," and then you figure out how you can do better next time.
That's good, that's great, let's jump around the room and high five. Then let's look at it and see how we can pump it up and do even better next time. Because you're always trying to improve. You're never done with email marketing. I wish I could say something like I open a bottle of bubbly, but it wouldn't be true.