Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

A recent study by ExactTarget and Ball State University showed that consumers 24 years old and younger prefer text messages to email. For consumers 25+, email still reigns supreme. Does that put text/mobile/SMS out of reach for most brands? Not at all. In fact, using mobile to drive email subscriptions is an emerging best practice.

Mobile opt-in is instant, exceptionally easy for the subscriber, and the brand gets both an email address AND a mobile number for use when text messaging is more prevalent in the U.S.

Mobile Opt-in Done Right

I should have joined US Airways’ points program long ago. I fly the airline often, but haven’t signed up for the program because I didn’t want to take the time to fill out a long, online form, etc.

But, on a recent flight I glanced at my cocktail napkin to see this compelling and easy sign-up offer:

Other than the fact that US Airways was practically daring me to violate the in-flight ban on cell phone usage, I was enthralled. One text message with your name and email address, and you’re enrolled. Very slick.

Follow Up Good, but Unfocused

Almost immediately after signing up via text, I received a nifty email confirmation that included a digital membership card, and two offers for bonus mile via credit card offer. While the creative on the offers wasn’t spectacular, the use of transactional email to drive additional action is on the mark.

But then the next day, I received another email that mentioned something called TEXTUS (evidently the system that runs the mobile opt-in program), and asks for me to provide additional info to activate my account. I understand the need/desire for more info from me, but shouldn’t they have asked for that before I got my nifty digital membership card? I wasn’t offended, but I was confused. And that could have been easily avoided. And why was that sent a whole day later?

Then, once I did in fact log-in to provide additional information, I received another confirmation with another digital membership card, and related offers (more this time). Again not bad, but a bit puzzling.

Overall, a great program. Fills a need. Makes it easy. Confirmation and follow up is a little wacky, but extra effort for being an airline (not typically the most nimble marketers) and pulling off a mobile program.

I anticipate mobile opt-in will be big in 2009. The prevalence of SMS capable phones make it a natural for point of sale e-mail subscriptions for newsletters, special offers, and other programs.

Could you use mobile opt-in effectively? What’s your plan?

Welcome. If you like the content here, consider susbscribing to my RSS feed. You can also find me on Twitter @jaybaer

By all accounts, Red Robin is very successful restaurant chain. With hundreds of locations nation-wide and well-deserved plaudits for their Unbridled Acts customer service program, Red Robin has it together. (try the Bonzai Burger, Bruschetta Chicken Burger, and the Tower of Onion Rings).

But the Red Robin customer loyalty messaging program is far less than it should be. In fact, it’s downright weird.

A trip to a Phoenix-area Red Robin recently found all tables covered with these coasters:

I thought “Cool! Red Robin is rolling out a mobile opt-in or SMS promotion program.”  I literally whipped out my iPhone and was ready to go, until I turned over the coaster:

Umm, what? “Red Robin Yummm”? I literally stared at the coaster for a couple minutes before I realized that this was NOT a national SMS program, but rather some sort of conversation piece. I still don’t fully understand it.

A meta joke about text messaging? A subtle suggestion that customers text their friends about Red Robin? The “95 of 237″ indication makes it even more mysterious. Are there 237 of these phony text message coasters? (first one I’ve seen, but I don’t go to Red Robin routinely)

What I completely can’t fathom is that they spent a ton of money on creating fake text messaging coasters. If you’re going to those lengths, why not just put in 1.5% more effort and create an ACTUAL program?

The Robin Has Landed

So when our meal is finished, the bill comes. I open the bill jacket to find that Red Robin has a guest survey (complete with a circle the bird head scale for illiterate patrons). Here’s how it looked in the bill jacket:

  I notice the red part at the bottom because the comment card is slightly too tall to fit in the bill jacket without the bottom folded over. I was thinking “did they not measure the bill jackets when they designed this card? typical agency…” 

But then I unfolded the card:

It turns out, you get a free gift for supplying your email address, and a FREE BURGER on your birthday.

I helped set up Cold Stone Creamery’s massively successful birthday club email program (which now has millions of members). A free anything on your birthday is a big deal. Why would Red Robin create a card that leads with the circle a bird head scale, and hides a very compelling call to action under a fold over that many people will NEVER see? 

Ridiculous. If you want to build a list, ask people to sign up. In this case it’s as if Red Robin feels they have to launch a birthday club, but are sort of embarrassed about it, so they hide it. Like people that keep their ill-behaved, slobbery dogs in a guest bedroom when they have company over to watch football. 

Red Robin has all the ingredients for a wildly successful, multi-modal messaging program. Brand loyalty. Budget. At least some executive support for a birthday club. But for a restaurant that bills themselves as “Master Mixologists” the combination of elements in this program could use some serious re-working. 

A long-standing “success metric” in email marketing is the unsubscribe ratio. Like telling children that their pet fish is “just sleeping” the “unsubscribe ratio” is a euphemism.

Your unsubscribe ratio is the percentage of people who receive your email that have gotten so tired or frustrated with your program that they simply can’t take it any more. They’re fed up with your lack of relevancy, your frequency or some other shortcoming, and they’ve taken the extraordinary measure of actually clicking links and buttons to make you go away.

Unsubscribe rates have actually declined in many cases, but don’t get all cocky. It’s not because email programs have become more relevant to consumers, they’re just clicking the “spam” button, instead of using the “unsubscribe” link.

When you think about the frustration level required to actually unsubscribe, it’s disheartening that unsubscribe rates of 1 customer in 200 are often considered acceptable. If a similar number of customers walked out of a retail store yelling “I can’t take this anymore. I’ll NEVER come back,” a lot of attention would be paid to it.

Unsubscribes on Line 1

Hiding unsubscribes on a spreadsheet diminishes what it actually means for your brand. A few bright ideas to shine a light on unsubscribes:

1. For e-commerce companies, instead of tracking unsubscribes as a raw number, track the total value of all prior purchases made by unsubscribers, and put that dollar amount on the spreadsheet.

2. Each time a customer unsubscribes, send an email to the the CEO or CMO.

3. In addition to providing a CAN-SPAM mandated unsubscribe link, offer your customers an unsubscribe phone number where they can call or text message, and an unsubscribe Twitter account. Once unsubscribers start creating content instead of just hash marks in Excel, your organization will start paying attention to the cause, not the ratio.

I’m In. Who Else?

Effective immediately, I’m going to pay more attention to unsubscribes myself. At the recent Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, Gary Vaynerchuk said he is investing major resources into having team members telephone unsubscribers. I can’t go that route because I don’t have phone number for my subscribers, but wherever I can I’ll be emailing people that drop me on Twitter or via RSS.

And it’s already proving interesting. I emailed a gentleman from Norfolk who unfollowed me on Twitter (you can get unfollow notifications by using Qwitter). The text of my email is below.

Keith -

Hi there. I received a notification that you’ve unfollowed me on Twitter.

I want to do everything possible to serve my readers and my community. It would be fantastic if you could give me a sense of what you didn’t like about my tweets, or what you would have liked to see more of in them.

Thanks in advance for your feedback. It’s truly appreciated, and I hope to win you back someday.

Very best regards,

(@jaybaer)

JASON BAER
Convince & Convert
Social Media & Email Consulting
——————————————–
Blog: www.convinceandconvert.com
Twitter: @jaybaer
Ear: (602) 616-1895

Within 5 minutes I received his reply:

You were removed during a clean up of folks that did not follow me back. Twitter stills shows that you are not following me.

A perfectly reasonable explanation, and one I preferred to “your content sucks.” And now, we’re both following one another. It’s a success story.

Everyone and Every One counts

As you build your email list and your social media currency, it’s easy to view individual audience members as less than critical, because another subscriber could be just minutes away. Don’t fall for it. You don’t have to be the very best to succeed in a wired world. You just have to care the most. And I’m going to try to out-care my competition. How about you?

What Are You Doing to Out-Care the Competition? Comments, Please

I just finished an invigorating panel discussion at the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer. Moderated by Aaron Kahlow from Online Marketing Summit, the session was titled “What Your Customers Really Think of Your Email Program.” (click here for the presentation at Slideshare)

I was joined on the panel by Katrina Anderson of iPost, and Annie Kinnaird of Emma. Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath was the brains behind the format.

The idea was to wade through the ton of email data being published seemingly every day, and focus on the really juicy stuff - subscriber studies - that’s impacting how the email marketing industry is evolving.

Which of These Email Marketing Stats Scare You Most?

1. 21% of email recipients report email as Spam, even if they know it isn’t

2. 43% of email recipients click the Spam button based on the email “from” name or email address

3. 69% of email recipients report email as Spam based solely on the subject line

4. 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone

5. IP addresses appearing on just one of the 12 major blacklists had email deliverability 25 points below those not listed on any blacklists

6. Email lists with 10% or more unknown users get only 44% of their email delivered by ISPs

7. 17% of Americans create a new email address every 6 months

8. 30% of subscribers change email addresses annually

9. If marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, ROI would increase 9+%

10. 84% of people 18-34 use an email preview pane

11. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers

12. 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email

13. Subscribers below age 25 prefer SMS to email

14. 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device

15. 80% of social network members have received unsolicited email or invites 

What Do You Think? Is the Future of Email 1:1 Communication? Leave a Comment

More illuminating posts about email marketing>> 

Thanks to Jason Falls for the inspiration (okay, it’s a straight rip-off) for this post. Jason pointed out five lesser-known bloggers that he reads regularly (including Convince & Convert). His post seems to have triggered an a-ha moment, as several other excellent social media bloggers including Mack Collier and Amber Naslund have posted similar lists of people to read. 

This is truly the genius of the World Wide Web. A hyper-linked community that enables users to find interesting and useful content based on the recommendations of real people, enabled (but not driven by) technology. 

Here’s my Fab Five bloggers. People I read that may be less well-known by Convince & Convert readers. Also, because I work in email marketing and digital marketing in addition to social media, my list is not purely social media focused, as are those cited above. 

Tamara Gielen

Tamara’s blog BeRelevant is dedicated to B2B email marketing best practices. Tamara doesn’t post a ton of her own content, but her ability to cull down the huge output of blog content about the email industry, and include only what’s legitimate and groundbreaking on her own site is a godsend. 

Tamara is also the founder of the Email Marketers Club, a social network for professional emailers with more than 1,700 members. By day, Tamara is the Director of Email and Digital Dialogue for OgilvyOne. She lives in Belgium, and can be found on Twitter @tamaragielen 

Bryan Eisenberg

One of the few folks out there who have been in digital marketing as long as me, Eisenberg is a conference staple (especially search conferences). His insights into customer experience, usability, information architecture, and conversion rate optimization are simply unparalleled. If you need to get more results from your Web site, he’s a guy to follow.

His blog Grokdotcom is more of a company-wide production now, but still brimming with insights. Watch for his regular series of books too. His new one, “Call to Action” is outstanding, and “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark” is required reading for all Web designers, project managers, and information architects I hire. 

He’s on Twitter @theGrok

Dan Zarrella

A great blogger with no shortage of opinions about social media, search, and cross-linking. Not afraid to rock the boat, Dan Zarrella brings serious science to the discussion of social media and viral marketing. He believes that “going viral” is no accident, and I believe he’s the number one guy to watch in terms of the emerging confluence between blogging, other forms of social media, and SEO.

He’s got some very useful tools for maximizing the search and viral friendliness of your blog. Check them out in his Tools section. 

Dan is on Twitter @danzarrella

Michael Gass

I do a lot of work for ad agencies and PR firms, and Michael Gass’ blog Fuel Lines is redefining how agencies think about business development. A great example of a blogger picking a distinct topic and absolutely owning it, Michael eats his own dog food (and the food of other dogs as well). You see, his consulting business is based on helping agencies use smart blogging, SEO, and social media to generate inbound leads - rather than shooting in the dark making cold calls.

In addition to regular, insightful posts about the future of ad agencies, Michael has added a ton of value to his blog with a sweeping survey of the agency biz dev landscape, and a “best agency blog” competition.

Michael has been a huge help and a great friend to Convince & Convert. If you’re at an agency (and even if you’re not), read his stuff. He’s on Twitter @michaelgass

Jason Falls

Yeah, he put me in his five. But, I would have had him in here regardless. With the tsunami of blog posts, opinions, pass-alongs, retweets, and me-toos out there, Jason Falls maintains an exceptionally high quality level. If he says something on his blog - Social Media Explorer, it’s worth reading. If he sends a tweet, the link is worth clicking.

Unlike many (most?) social media consultants, Jason is actually a practitioner of the art. His work for Jim Beam via his agency Doe Anderson is one of the legendary examples of social media press releases and integrated microsites. His blog isn’t about what social media will become, it’s about what social media is now, and how to do it right. 

Jason is a straight shooter that’s not caught up in his own emerging Web fame, and among the top tier of social media and PR 2.0 “names” I find him to be the most dedicated to sharing and extremely giving with his time. He was an early champion of Convince & Convert, and I’ll never forget that. (Chris Brogan is another one that’s amazingly cool to lesser known folks, despite his insane schedule and content generation volume). 

Jason is a must-follow on Twitter @jasonfalls

Who Are Your Fab Five? Leave Them in the Comments, Or Write Your Own Post

Subscribers to your email list are most likely to open, click, forward to a friend, and buy in the first 30-60 days after joining the list.

This is the Honeymoon and you need to use it to boost your email results - especially in the 4th quarter holiday shopping season.

This chart from Marketing Sherpa shows the impact of recency on email results. This is a somewhat dated B2B chart, although I have no doubt whatsoever that the trend holds. If you have more recent data, please leave a comment below.

Creating a Honeymoon Segment

During the Honeymoon, subscribers are flush with excitement about your email program. Possibilities are boundless, as your whole messaging relationship lies in front of them, and surely that relationship will be filled with timely offers and insightful information.

While palms are sweaty, and giddiness abounds, you should create a specific and separate Honeymoon Segment for your email program. The Honeymoon segment is anyone who has joined your list in the past 30-60 days. Use 30 days if you plan to mail recipients 3+ times per month, and 60 days for 1-2 sends per month.

Treat Honeymooners entirely differently than you do your other subscribers. Mail more frequently, ask them to forward to a friend, use aggressive offers. Essentially, your objective is to maximize the value of the Honeymoon by capitalizing on the short-term excitement that new subscribers have about your program.

Because the Honeymoon will end. The excitement will fade in a flurry of email offers, and you’ll begin to quarrel about things that used to seem so trivial - like message frequency, bed making, and spending too much time on your fantasy football team.

Note that you can help stave off the end of the Honeymoon by moving as quickly as possible toward truly relevant, hyper-targeted messaging. This is the future of email, but it requires a real commitment to use segmentation to deliver timely and useful messages at all time.

Do This First

Two components of the Honeymoon strategy you absolutely must employ are thank you messages and testing. Send an immediate thank you message to all new subscribers. That thank you should include a meaningful offer (preferably with a time limit) and a request to forward to a friend. Your chances of generating revenue and viral behaviors from your subscribers diminishes with each email received, so try to make it happen in the first 5 minutes a subscriber joins your list.

Second, use rigorous testing to maximize the impact of the Honeymoon. The same way you’re engaged in constant testing of your main email program, you need to be testing your Honeymoon segment. From lines. Subject lines. Day of week. Time of day. Layouts. Offers.

Note that because your Honeymoon segment will of course be much smaller than your main program, it may take longer than usual to test. Watch your statistical validity, too.

Have you used the Honeymoon Segment? Do you think you can adopt it in time for the holidays?

Leave a comment with your ideas.

From Dot Bomb to Dot Boom

Let’s face it. The economy is taking on the distinctive, sickly pallor of a post Mardi Gras Keith Richards.

Generally, recessions hit the advertising business with the ferocity of a rabid wolverine, and the last one trimmed overall ad spending by 9% according to market researchers Veronis Suhler Stevenson. The wolverine in question mauled and devoured online advertising, which plummeted 27% over two years during the last recession.

This time it will be different. Not only will online marketing survive, it may actually thrive during the lean times, continuing its inexorable theft of ad spend from traditional media tactics. Online is far more mature and proven now, and there are five specific reasons why it will be the go-to tactic among increasingly budget-conscious marketers.

Money Talks

First, online is typically less expensive than many other marketing tactics, and a sizable and impactful online effort can be undertaken more quickly and cost-effectively than can an offline campaign.

Wiggle Room

Like an Elizabeth Taylor marriage, online doesn’t require much long-term commitment. PPC ads can go up and down on a day-to-day basis. Email can be sent (or not sent) based on financial considerations. Even banner ads can usually be negotiated with an advantageous cancellation clause of 72 hours or so. Try that with your local TV station or newspaper. Other than keeping your Web site up to date, the only core online tactics that require substantial ongoing effort are organic search optimization, and Web site analytics and testing.

More Juice for the Squeeze

With diminished outbound marketing budgets, companies will shift focus toward increasing revenue from current customers, either through more frequent purchases, or larger ones. Email marketing is the perfect vehicle for communicating with customers and incentivizing additional purchases. Customer lifecycle marketing (persuasively combining email with direct mail, voice mail and text messaging) will gain favor as companies strive to close a higher percentage of a reduced flow of leads.

Waste Not

There is meaningful financial waste associated with advertising to people who have no interest in your product or service. The superior targeting ability of online marketing will enable companies to focus their reduced marketing dollars solely on likely prospects. This will accelerate the trend toward use of behavioral targeting and retargeting in online ad placement.

Behavioral targeting mines a person’s Web page visits and search terms to serve relevant ads. If a prospect reads several pages on Yahoo! about Nissan Altimas and does a search on Yahoo! using a related term, an ad for Valley Nissan dealers can be served up just in time.

Retargeting (a nascent industry led by local company Fetchback) takes the concept one step further, enabling companies to advertise only to people who have visited their Web site previously without making a purchase. With average conversion rates hovering around 2%, this is an ideal way to reach the other 98% that have taken the time to visit your site but haven’t yet converted.

Additionally, search marketing will continue to expand since it is the only tactic (other than Yellow Pages) that puts the marketer in the middle of the consumer’s purchase psychology funnel. I expect heavier bidding on specific, “long tail” search terms that often correlate with greater intent to purchase.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Online marketing of all types offers superior measurability and trackability in comparison to traditional tactics. This is of course due to the Orwellian nature of the Web, where every mouse click is tracked, usually anonymously. While the availability of this data may give you the same creepy feeling you get when gazing upon Joan Rivers, it makes for effective marketing.

When implemented correctly, banner ads, organic search, paid search, blogs and social media, email, lifecycle marketing and all other online marketing tactics provide a user by user scoreboard that can be utilized to ascertain precise return on investment metrics for each campaign.

In this way, online marketing provides companies the ability to test a wide array of tactics, evaluate which generates the best response, and then adjust the marketing program accordingly.

The old saying is “I know half my marketing dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which half.” This problem is even more acute and painful in a down economy when advertising dollars are curtailed. The inherent cost, targeting, and tracking advantages of online marketing make it more likely to succeed (or at least able to minimize losses from a failed campaign). And when a wolverine is at your door, that’s the type of assurance you want from your marketing strategy.

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The demise of email has been greatly exaggerated.

While Jupiter says that overall email volume has dropped from 41 messages per day per U.S. user to 24, the email marketing universe is very much alive and well. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) projects that $600 million will be spent on email in 2008, driving an astonishing $27 billion in sales. That’s $45.65 in revenue for every dollar spent on email marketing, an ROI figure that’s nearly impossible to match outside of the bottled water and pharmaceutical industries.

But, the increasingly vigorous expectations and demands of email recipients are changing the game. An electrifying survey by Marketing Sherpa in August, 2008 showed that 41% of subscribers believe an email to be spam if it is not of interest - even if it’s email they requested. There’s a Saturday Night Live skit in there somewhere. You meet someone at a party and they end up being boring and irrelevant, so you can click a spam button and they disappear forever.

Targeted = Relevant = Wanted = Successful

Consumer demand for email that meets their specific needs mirrors the surging desire for authentic, 1:1 conversations with brands via social media outlets. Regardless of medium, today’s consumers want to be talked with, not talked at.

This is troublesome for many email marketers who continue to adhere to the longstanding practices of sending an email “blast” or “campaign” to a “list” and hoping that 5% of the recipients take action. This is the definition of surgery with a dull knife, and the patients are starting to revolt.

Further, in many circumstances email may not even be the optimal message delivery mechanism. Text messages, voice mails, good old direct mail, Twitter, and other outlets can be more appropriate and more engaging for consumers at times.

The promise of a hyper-targeted and relevant message, delivered at the right time, to the right person, using the right medium is holy grail marketing, and its the new focus of ExactTarget, the leading email service provider that’s morphed into a robust, centralized messaging system.

(disclosure: I’m an ExactTarget customer and was a speaker at their Connections user conference this week in Indianapolis)

ExactTarget is trumpeting this new era of multi-modal, targeted messaging under the mantra “Subscribers Rule.” Essentially, it’s an umbrella position for “give people what they want, even if it’s a text message in Portuguese at 3 a.m. featuring coupon codes for mittens.”

This notion of 1:1 marketing has of course been the rallying cry for digital marketing since its inception. Historically, the problem has been gathering enough information and insight about your customer base to be able to fashion customized, truly relevant messaging. In the past, you’d have to mine e-commerce data or implement a sweeping audience segmentation study to do it right, and then you’d build an e-mail campaign around it.

Now however, ExactTarget and its burgeoning network of partners are enabling email itself to be used as a segmentation tool. Advanced link tracking, integrations with Web analytics software like Omniture, and a new user-controlled engagement score feature (whereby you assign a numerical weight to subscriber activities like email opens, clicks, purchases) allow the sophisticated marketer to learn a tremendous amount about their audience based on their email-driven behavior, and then use that feedback loop to create and send ever more relevant and timely messages.

Additionally, a thorough program of triggered messages (sent individually based on Web site behavior) can provide tremendous information about a subscriber while simultaneously delivering hyper-relevant and timely information.

I Get Sign Ups With a Little Help From My Friends

A second very interesting opportunity presented by the centralized messaging platform concept is the cross pollination of message delivery vehicles. The most buzz-worthy example is “email opt-in via text” whereby consumers can use short code text messaging to sign up for highly targeted offers and other communication from a brand at point of sale. This could render the physical email opt-in form moot at retailers and restaurants, and would make opt-in immediate (enabling instant couponing, etc.).

Imagine you’re in a check out line at Petsmart and you see a prominent sign that says “for $5 off Iams dog food, text “Iamsdog” to 23907. For $5 off Iams cat food, text “Iamscat” to 23907.” Instantly, the brand knows whether you have a dog, cat or both, has added you to its database, and you get a valuable and relevant coupon immediately. Slick - and not terribly difficult to execute.

Lions vs. Lambs

As this multi-modal, 1:1 marketing gets more prevalent, the software needed to run it and the expertise needed to strategize and manage it are becoming commensurately larger and more complex. Interesting then that ExactTarget is rolling out a formalized partner program (similar to Microsoft, Oracle and other enterprise software companies) that will features specific partner tiers, certifications and other “badges” to distinguish among specific expertise. This should assist clients in selecting the most appropriate agency partner for their 1:1 marketing efforts, and agencies will have a codified program for reselling the software and providing services to augment it.

I’m on Twitter @jaybaer
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I’m happy to announce that I’ve been elected to co-chair the Consumer Education Roundtable for the Email Experience Council. 

The EEC is the global professional association for email marketers, striving to enhance the image of email as a tactic while advocating its importance for business.

In partnership with the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), EEC also puts on an excellent (dare I say definitive) conference for email marketers called Email Evolution. The next edition is February 9 - 11 in Scottsdale, AZ. (Information here)
 

Help Me Help You

My EEC Consumer Education Roundtable is charged with building the definitive Web site or online application to help marketers understand email best practices, design, statistics, regulations, etc.

Currently, there are a lot of resources online about good email marketing, but they are spread all over the place and its hard to determine to whom to listen. This new EEC initiative will help solve that problem by aggregating “approved” email marketing information.

Even the EEC itself is perpetuating the current problem, as the online resources section links to a variety of white papers, blogs, stats, columns and other flotsam and jetsam. (I’ve been waiting for the day when I could use flotsam and jetsam in a blog post)
 

I Need Your Comments Please

Please help me get the new roundtable off to a rousing start. Please leave a comment (or hit me on Twitter @jaybaer) and tell me what you really want to know about email marketing.

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Email is the most popular (and by many counts, the most successful) of all online marketing channels, but it’s role and best practices are changing dramatically and rapidly.

The excellent David Daniels, analyst for JupiterMedia (recently purchased by Forrester) wrote a report in July on “The Social and Portable Inbox” that underscores how the game has changed. Increasingly, consumers are using text messaging, online messaging via social networks, and instant messaging for communication.

In fact, according to Jupiter, the average number of emails received per day is 24, down from 41 in 2006. Nobody I know gets 24 emails a day or fewer, but that’s what the research says. Personally, if I could get as few as 24 emails per day, it would leave me time for that Emu farm I’ve been pondering.

And even though people are getting less email, they’re checking it more frequently. According to a new report by AOL, 51% of users (and this is AOL, not the most tech-savvy audience) check their email 4 or more times per day. There are very few other things I do 4+ times per day.

Because people are using other tools to communicate, Email is becoming the new direct mail. A series of come-ons, one time onlys, you could be a winner, and so forth. Granted, according to Jupiter 44% of email recipients (which is nearly every non-incarcerated human) made at least one online purchase in the past year as a result of promotional email. (interesting side note: 41% made at least one OFFLINE purchase due to an email promo). However, those buying rates are down a bit from 2007, and I fear they will continue to slide. Why? Because companies (and especially their agencies) don’t understand the changing nature of email communication.

4 Rules to Make Your Email Campaign Work

Here are 4 rules to follow to make sure your email isn’t immediately deleted.

1. One size doesn’t fit all. The worst emails (and in my experience, the least successful) are those that assume all customers have the same needs and circumstances. If you’re sending the same email to your entire list, your email program is severely challenged. Segment your list in as many ways as possible (gender, when they joined the list, how they joined the list, purchase history, propensity to click through) and then develop specific, highly relevant messages for each audience. Is it more work? Absolutely. But, it will almost assuredly pay off for an e-commerce or promotional email campaign.

2. Get right to the point. Most email is scanned in the preview pane, and not “read” in the classic sense at all. Far too many emails - especially those built by professional designers - have substantial amounts of photos, icons, intro copy etc. with the actual offer and call to action toward the middle or bottom of the email. Big mistake. State your offer immediately, and then restate it at the middle and end of your email.

3. It’s not a Web site. If somebody cares enough about you to be on your email list, they’ve already been to your Web site. You don’t need to include multiple links back to your site in the header of your email. It just gets in the way of the content. Plus, when read on a mobile device (16% of the population does so according to AOL, and the numbers are soaring), when an HTML email renders, it stacks all navigation labels first, and then shows the body of the email. This pushes your offer WAY far down on the Blackberry, and nobody is going to scroll page after page on a Blackberry to see your offer. Making sure you have a solid, tested text-only email version is critical as well.

4. Ditch the pictures. Increasingly, email software turns images off as a default, including these popular programs: AOL 9, Gmail, Hotmail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Outlook Express 6, Windows Live Mail. Consequently, many recipients of your email may not see your snappy custom graphics at all, they’ll just see a blank box.

Agencies are especially guilty of creating emails in Photoshop or Illustrator and coding them as a single image. This is absolutely the kiss of death for modern email. Don’t do this. Instead, create an email without images first. This makes you emphasize convincing copy. Then, add selected images and code them as individual graphics. All text should be HTML, not graphics. Make sure you have descriptive alt text for each image that will display when images are turned off.

Lastly, a fantastic idea for both images off and mobile device scenarios is to describe your email and your offer in small HTML text above your logo. We tested this approach for a client at Mighty Interactive, and increased sales by 65% from only this one tweak.

The email below from Levenger is rock solid.
- It uses the above the logo call to action.
- It states the offer at the top (twice). It also states the offer at the very bottom of the email (not shown)
- It doesn’t use needless Web site navigation.
- Images are coded separately, and have alt tags.

The biggest fallacy in email marketing is that emails have to be “beautiful” to be effective. That thinking creates emails that look and act like a poster, and given the trends, that’s the exact opposite of what agencies should be doing for their clients.

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