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Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously
Stupid Ways Email Marketers
Leave Money on the Table
E
mail pundits are forever talking about highfalutin marketing practices that — let’s face it — most
marketers don’t use.
Who the heck has the time and money to communicate with every subscriber like they’re a best friend?
Someone apparently does, but that someone isn’t you — at least not yet.
However, there are seven practices — not best practices, mind you, just practices — that if not implemented
mean you’re leaving ridiculously stupid money on the table, or in one case, even breaking the law.
You’re leaving ridiculously stupid money
on the table unless you:
1
Design for the small screen. You have one chance to
get someone to respond to an email. As smartphone
usage explodes, it’s imperative to design email messages
so people can interact with them on their mobile devices.
2
Have a welcome program. Failing to welcome
new subscribers is akin to a store clerk ignoring
people when they walk in the door. A welcome message, or ideally a series of welcome messages, will
ease people into the email stream, boost sales and
minimize spam complaints.
3
Exercise list hygiene. ISPs are getting more
and more persnickety about delivering
commercial email. They want to deliver email
people want and filter the stuff they don’t want.
The key to delivery is engagement. The trick is
knowing which email addresses to remove and
which are email addresses held by customers
who want to hear from you but simply don’t
need you right now.
4
Are CAN-SPAM compliant. This is the
least a marketer can do. Know the rules.
They’re pretty simple. And don’t ever say
“but we’re CAN-SPAM compliant” to justify
sloppy email marketing.
5
Know your metrics. Intelligent decision making in email
marketing is impossible without knowing which metrics
are important and what they mean. Many email marketers
mistakenly put too much focus on process metrics such
as open rates when analyzing testing or performance —
potentially leading to dumb and dumber decisions.
6
Have an abandoned-order program. This one’s
a no-brainer. A typical abandoned-order program
will account for fractional percentages of a marketer’s
outbound email volume and double-digit percentages of their email sales. You just have to play nice
with IT.
7
Have a win-back program. Another nobrainer. Lapsed customers are your best
prospects. The key is defining what exactly a
“lapsed customer” is, spotting behavior that
indicates customers are ready to defect, and
testing for the right approach to get them
active again.
In 15 years of reporting on email marketing
— interviewing hundreds of marketers
in the process — these seven practices
have emerged repeatedly as the most
consistent keys to success.
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 1
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
O
1:
Failing to Design
for the Small Screen
ne question: Do you honestly think someone’s going to open your email more than once? Honestly?
Then why aren’t you sending emails that are readable and — more importantly — easy to interact
with on mobile devices?
According to email security and deliverability firm Return Path, email readership on mobile devices is
growing so fast that by the end of 2012 it will be the predominant platform for email consumption.
Among Return Path’s key mobile stats:
• Year-over-year, from March 2011 to March 2012, email opens on mobile devices grew 82.4 percent.
• Apple devices account for 85 percent of all mobile email opens.
• Email readership on the iPad has increased 53.6 percent year-over-year.
Simply put, it’s time to get serious about designing
email messaging for mobile devices:
1
Design for the thumb. Email links need to be easily clickable
for mobile readers. Make the buttons big and make sure
there’s room for error around them. If you’ve got a designer
who loves clean, delicate graphics (and if you’ve got a designer,
you’ve got a designer who loves clean, delicate graphics) please
explain to them, politely at first and then progressively more
forcefully if need be, that this is about functionality, not pretty.
If we can get pretty and functionality to live together, great.
But pretty dies first.
2
Make it one column. For Pete’s sake, don’t
send people through a navigational maze
just to read your content. Let ‘em read it in one
fluid motion from top to bottom. And those
sidebars? Kill them. And keep the offers
simple. Don’t throw 20 at them. Pick one,
maybe two.
3
Think beyond the email. OK, so
you got them to click through
your message on their phone, why
are you sending them to your
homepage? Send them to a page
on which they can close the deal.
And B2B marketers: Why are
you making people fill out 43
different fields of information
to get your white paper? Can’t that wait? Finally, make sure the
landing page is congruent with the message.
4
Focus on the outside and the top. Whenever an email is
opened on a mobile device, the top of the message is all
the recipient will see at first. Make it count. And no, including
unsubscribe copy in the top of the message is not making
it count. The three most important pieces of real estate in a
mobile-ready email are the “From” line, the subject line and
the top few inches of the message. If you’re doing it right,
those three things combined will translate in the recipient’s
mind to: “Hi, it’s me. You love hearing from me,
remember? Here’s what I have for you today.”
If you think about it, designing
for mobile devices is really
just taking us back to the roots
of direct-marketing design. For
too long, too many marketers
have been throwing everything
they could into an email simply
because, well, they could. Designing
for mobile returns our focus to simple,
straightforward and user-friendly creative,
something many marketers have strayed
away from in their email designs.
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 2
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
I
2:
Failing to Welcome
New Subscribers
magine a woman walks into a store and says to the clerk, “Hi, I’d like to see what you have for sale,”
and the clerk says, “Today only! Forty percent off!” or “Free shipping on orders over $100!”
Stupid, right? Yet that’s exactly what many marketers do with new subscribers to their email programs.
They don’t acknowledge the new sign-up and say “thank you.” They simply toss them into the regular mail
stream with everyone else and start shouting offers at them. Even worse, some marketers don’t send email to
new subscribers for days or even weeks after the initial sign-up.
Whereas average email open rates are generally in the 20 percent range, welcome email open rates have
been reported to average from 50 percent to 60 percent. Besides being a prime opportunity to make that first
sale, welcome messaging — whether a single email or a series — can help limit spam complaints.
People sign up for things all the time and forget. And the longer an emailer waits to send that first message,
the more likely the recipient will have forgotten signing up and mark the new message as spam.
Too many spam complaints will result in the emailer’s messages being treated as spam by the inbox provider
and either shunted off to the spam folder, or worse, blocked from reaching recipients altogether. So not only
is a welcome message imperative, it’s imperative it goes out right away.
A typical welcome message should include:
1
2
3
4
A link that either allows the new subscriber to confirm their
sign-up, or one that allows them to opt out.
A description of what they can expect as a result of their
subscription, such as how many messages they’ll get in a
typical week.
A request that recipients mark you as a
safe sender.
An introductory offer, such as a percent-off-firstpurchase coupon.
5
6
A “thank you” note for supplying their
email address.
A prompt of some sort to get them interacting with the
brand on social media or the company blog, if one exists.
Your welcome message or series of welcome messages are your
email store clerk greeting customers and prospects as they walk
through the door. But unlike human retail clerks, you can decide
what your email store clerk should say and do and know they’ll
execute your instructions flawlessly every time.
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 3
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
W
3:
Failing to Exercise
List Hygiene
ant to know how good spam filters have become? Consider the following true story: I run a fantasy
football league for email marketing vendors. Every year the champion gets an engraved crystal trophy.
After the first season, I bought the trophy from a mail-order company and it added me to its email file. I didn’t
mind, but I don’t need this company’s services but once a year.
Gmail apparently has figured this out because all the awards company’s email throughout the year was
delivered into my spam folder.
All except one.
As the second Magill Report fantasy football season was about
to wrap up, I received a message — in my inbox this time — with
the subject line, “Time to Re-Order.” The body of the message
included the details of the previous year’s football trophy order.
There’s a big difference between addresses that have
shown purchasing activity and then gone dormant
and those that have never shown any activity after
initial sign-up.
Somehow the spam filters at Gmail were able to spot the one
single email I would want from this company all year long and
deliver it to my inbox.
So here’s one approach you can take:
Astounding.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Track email-address acquisition by source.
Segment your file by source.
And that’s what you’re up against. Email inbox providers have
made clear they want mass emailers to send wanted messages.
In determining whether or not people want the messages an
email marketer sends, the ISPs use engagement metrics, such
as opens and clicks. By sending to inactive addresses, you drive
your engagement metrics down and risk being unable to communicate with even your best customers.
The obvious answer is to clean inactive addresses from the file. But
not so fast. Some addresses that have been inactive for, say, a year,
could be someone like me — someone who wants to hear from you
only once a year.
So how do you tell the inactive addresses that are
held by potential repeat customers from the
truly dead addresses? One way is
segmenting by source.
Identify poor sources of names.
Identify inactive addresses that have never made a
purchase after sign-up.
Eliminate addresses that have never been active.
Consider eliminating poor-performing acquisition
sources.
7
8
Implement a win-back program for the
inactive addresses that have made purchases.
Take measures to try and catch people
before they go inactive. (See tip sheet No. 7.)
Eliminating email addresses from a house file is one
of the most difficult decisions a marketer has to make. But the
addresses that have never been active are not just a waste of
resources, they’re dangerous. As ISPs continually improve their
ability to determine what email people want and what they
don’t, list hygiene will be increasingly critical.
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 4
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
O
4:
Failing to Be CAN-SPAM
Compliant
K, so this isn’t really a ridiculously stupid way marketers leave money on the table, but no discussion of
responsible email marketing is complete without it.
Quick: What’s the dumbest thing a marketer can say when defending sloppy email marketing? “But we’re
CAN-SPAM compliant,” that’s what. Adhering to the rules laid out by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 is the
absolute least an email marketer can do.
Claiming CAN-SPAM compliance is simply saying, “But we’re not breaking the law.” Yeah? Well, so what?
Even mediocre email marketing requires much more than simply following the law.
So without further adieu, here’s the skinny on what you
must do to comply with CAN-SPAM:
1
Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your
“From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information — including
the originating domain name and email address — must be accurate
and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2
3
Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must
accurately reflect the content of the message.
Identify the message as an “ad.” The law only requires
this when sending messages to recipients without their
permission (“affirmative consent”) and gives you a lot of leeway in
how to do it. But you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that a
non-permission-based message is an advertisement.
4
Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must
include your valid physical postal address. This can be your
current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the
U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a
commercial mail receiving agency.
6
Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out
mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out
requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You
must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days.
Do it right away, though.
You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any
personally identifying information beyond an email address, or
make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email
or visiting a single page on an Internet website.
Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more
messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email
addresses, except to transfer the addresses to a company you’ve
hired to help you comply with CAN-SPAM.
7
5
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. Even
if you hire another company to handle your email
marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility
to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is
promoted in the message and the company that sends the
message may be held legally responsible.
Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to
allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a
menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but
you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from
you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
The CAN-SPAM Act gives marketers a lot of wiggle room.
But email inbox providers are stricter about what they’ll accept
than CAN-SPAM requires. The ISPs own the pipes through
which email travels, so they have every right to decide what
gets through and what doesn’t. Of course you should comply
with the law, but realize the people who deliver your email
expect you to move well beyond it.
Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future emails. Your
message must include a clear explanation of how the recipient
can opt out of getting email. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for
an ordinary person to recognize, read and understand. Creative use
of type size, color and location can improve clarity.
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 5
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
S
5:
Failing to Know
Their Metrics
omewhere right now some people are sitting in a conference room talking about the performance of
their email program, and someone is touting its open rates. And you know what? Most of the people in
that room have no idea what it means.
An “open” is recorded when the receiving machine calls for graphics from the sender. So a more accurate
term would be “graphics-rendered rate.” With images frequently turned off by default, a lot of email can be
opened without having registered as such.
This isn’t to say open rates are unimportant. They simply need to
be understood as a barometric measure, not an exact one.
A high open rate — 20 percent is about average — indicates high
recipient engagement because they’re turning their graphics on.
Open rates plummeting at a specific ISP are a sign of trouble at
that ISP.
Accurate definitions of email marketing’s top metrics
are imperative for making smart decisions. The
following are definitions of some of email marketing’s
most important metrics:
1
2
3
Email Conversions: The number or percentage of people
who took a direct, desired action as the result of an email
campaign.
Email Revenue: The amount of revenue generated as a
result of a campaign.
Email Gross Profit: The amount of revenue generated as
a result of a campaign, minus direct costs, such as the cost
of deployment, creative development, list rental, unsubscribes
and customer service.
barometric, but the click-to-open metric can give insight into
the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of offers, copy, creative
and links.
7
Email Unsubscribe Requests: The number or percentage
of people who unsubscribed after a particular mailing. If
this number is climbing from campaign to campaign, you’re
doing something wrong.
8
Email Abuse Complaints: The number or percentage of
people who report a sender’s messages as spam. Spam
complaints are one of the top metrics email inbox providers
use to determine if an emailer’s messages are spam. Too
many complaints can result in all the senders’ messages being
shunted off into the spam folder, or even blocked from reaching
recipients altogether. Obviously, keeping this metric as low as
possible is crucial to the health of an email program.
Notice the first three metrics are about conversion and the
money that results. Email marketers can drown themselves in
metrics if they choose to do so. But if only for sanity’s sake, it’s
important to focus first on the ones that truly matter.
4
5
Total Email Click-Throughs: The number or percentage of
links that were clicked on in a campaign. This can include
clicks on multiple links in the same message.
Unique Email Click-Throughs: The number or percentage of unique people who clicked on a link or multiple
links in an email campaign. Clicks on multiple links in the
same email count as one.
6
Click-to-Open Rate: The number of unique
clicks compared to the number of unique
opens expressed as a percentage. Yes, opens are
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 6
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
P
6:
Failing to Have an
Abandoned Order Program
ssst. Want to know a secret? You know all those email pundits who are incessantly urging marketers to
segment their email files and send different stuff to different people?
Well, I’d bet my wife’s share of tonight’s martinis that not a one of them have ever worked in a resourcestarved creative-services department — resource-starved creative-services department being redundant —
and had to manage all the creative their advice would require.
They have never been on the receiving end of, “Just take this and
repurpose it. It’ll take you five minutes.”
Am I recommending against segmentation? No. By all means, if
you’ve got the resources, do it.
But there’s another way to treat different customers differently
that is far more practical: Triggered emails. And there is one type
of triggered email you should put resources against immediately:
abandoned-site/order emails.
In all my years of email reporting, I have yet to hear of a single
marketer who hasn’t achieved gangbuster results with them. They
take some upfront resources and tweaking, but then they generally run on automatic.
Case in point: an abandoned-shopping-cart email program
implemented by library supplies merchant and Silverpop
client DEMCO.
The program entails three messages sent one, three and five days
after the cart is abandoned. The first message serves as a simple
reminder. The second is a little more urgent and the third offers a
free tote bag as an incentive to purchase.
According to DEMCO, the messages convert at 22 percent,
15 percent and 24 percent, respectively. DEMCO’s abandonedcart emails drive 97 times the revenue of its broadcast messages.
Also, while abandoned-cart emails account for 0.3 percent of
DEMCO’s outbound messages, they account for 18 percent of
the company’s email sales. And DEMCO’s results are reportedly
pretty typical.
So here’s what you do:
1
2
3
Politely approach IT and get them on board by explaining
how much new money abandoned cart emails can bring in.
Implement more than one abandoned-cart message;
I’ve heard three is generally about right.
Test timing. One marketer has likened abandoned-cart
emails to the crab pots on cable TV’s Deadliest Catch:
Leave them in too long, you get fewer crabs. Take them out too
quickly, you get fewer crabs. Likewise, send abandoned-cart
emails too soon and you may get fewer orders. Send them out
too late and you may get fewer orders.
4
5
6
Test offers. Should you offer a premium? In the first
message, probably not. But only you can decide what’s
right for your business.
Measure results, once the program seems to be humming, of course.
Pick your jaw up off the floor, take the results to management and politely ask for more resources to begin
implementing more triggered-email messaging.
Whenever I’m asked the one thing email marketers should do to get
immediate results, I recommend abandoned-order messaging. Not
only are they one of the most efficient ways to increase revenue
from the email program, their almost-guaranteed success can open
the door to new resources for the department.
silverpop.com © 2012 Copyright Silverpop. All rights reserved. The Silverpop logo is a registered trademark of Silverpop Systems Inc.
PAGE 7
Ken Magill’s 7 Ridiculously Stupid Ways Email Marketers Leave Money on the Table
No.
Y
7:
Failing to Implement
a Win-Back Program
ou know those new resources you were able to get as a result of your bang-up success with an
abandoned-order program?
Well, one place to invest some of those new resources is in a win-back program, or series of win-back programs.
Studies have shown that most marketing managers vastly underestimate the percentage of customers
they lose each year.
And inside your list of lapsed customers probably lies a vast untapped opportunity. Consider them your
best prospects.
What to do:
1
Define “lapsed customer.” The definition of “lapsed
customer” will vary from company to company and possibly
from customer segment to customer segment. Someone who
purchases a seasonal item once a year who hasn’t bought in 11
months clearly can’t be defined as having lapsed.
2
Look for patterns indicating possible defection. Look
at your data for signs that customers’ buying patterns are
shifting. You may be able to spot customers ripe for defection to
a competitor.
3
Study recency, frequency and monetary value metrics.
Are customers buying less often than in the past? Are their
order sizes dropping? It may be time to show them how much
you value their business with a sweet deal of some sort.
4
Look for patterns you can take advantage of. Customers
who buy once a year and who have different billing and
ship-to addresses are probably gift buyers. Hit them with a
reminder or two the week before they typically buy. If it’s a
guy buying for his wife, he just may appreciate the birthday or
anniversary reminder.
5
Test, test, test. A/B split tests are crucial to a successful
win-back program. Test offers. What does it take to get
them back? A 15 percent discount? Ten percent? Free shipping?
A tote bag?
6
7
Get the timing right. Is six months after the last
purchase the right timing for a reactivation email?
Twelve months? A year and a half? Maybe it’s all three.
Consider picking up the phone. Yes, if all else
fails, pick up the phone. You have addresses for
customers. You probably have their phone numbers. If
not, they’re easy enough to get. Have a customer service
rep call them. Ask them why they left. You might learn
something that will help you keep other customers from
leaving. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. They’ll be
astounded. And best of all, they’ll tell their friends.
8
Know when to say goodbye. Some email addresses
are just dead, dead, dead. And truly dead addresses
are dangerous. As painful as it is, remove them.
A good win-back program may just be the most
educational experience you can give yourself about your
customers’ lifecycles and the way you conduct business.
As you begin to spot patterns indicating customers are
about to defect, you’ll no doubt uncover areas of your
business you need to fix.
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PAGE 8