Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

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.

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Agency Advantage Tools - #3 In a Series

Since it’s invention by Todd Defren at Shift Communications in 2006, the social media press release has taken root.

Combining short paragraphs and bullet points with Web-friendly links, tags, and multi-media content, the SM release aims to give reporters and bloggers the key ingredients for a story in an immediately scannable and digestible fashion.

The SM release has been successful because it capitalizes on three converging trends:
1. The emerging use of multi-media content due to increasing bandwidth and ease of content creation.

2. The increasing emphasis on search engine optimization of media releases. After all, isn’t Google just the world’s most powerful reporter?

3. Email has created a deluge of pitches and writers can’t read 1,000 narrative pitches per day. The social media release format enables them to skin and assess what’s newsworthy.

Strategically Brilliant, but Tactically Sketchy - Until Now

The hang-up with social media releases has been actually getting them built. Most PR folks are not Web programmers, and the very nature of what makes a social media release useful (tags, links, multi-media) makes it tricky to execute if your definition of high tech is inserting a footer in Microsoft Word.

Historically, the best social media releases have essentially been customized landing pages, like this genius effort for Jim Beam from Jason Fall at Doe Anderson and Jason Swartz at PSB.

So, unless you have a Jim Beam budget and a Web programmer hanging around, making a killer SM release has been tricky, despite efforts from PRXBuilder (Wordpress and Microsoft Word plug-in) to make it easier. (note, I use PRXBuilder’s SimpleSMPR on this blog).

Enter PitchEngine

Newly launched - still in Alpha release - PitchEngine is out to change all that. Their slick, exceptionally easy online social media release creation engine is by far the best I’ve seen. Literally, if I took the time to explain what a “tag” was to my 9 year-old, she could make a release (it would probably be about ice skating or the dresses on The Titanic).

Here’s how easy it is:

- Request an account
- Log-in
- Add your boilerplate info, logo, contact info (don’t forget your Twitter account)!
- Click “create new release” and you get the screen above
- Type headline
- Type short pitch (Twitter pitch)
- Type rest of release
- Upload photos and videos
- Add links back to your Web site
- Add tags

DONE! Click a button and you have a beautifully formatted, all linked up social media release ready for distribution.

Distribution Included

In addition to enabling you to create your social media release, PitchEngine lets you easily distribute it too, by typing in whom you want to send it to (via email, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook). All releases created in the system automatically appear in the PitchFeed, a stream of current pitches that can be accessed by reporters and bloggers on site or via RSS.

All This, And It’s Free

For now, PitchEngine is 100% free, which is of course a ridiculously good deal. I suspect they’ll be going to a Freemium model at some point, with advanced features costing a few dollars here and there.

For all PR firms and client-side PR 2.0 and social media managers, PitchEngine is the new social media release champion, and an indispensable tool in the new media arsenal. Check it out.

More about social media>>

More tools I recommend for agencies>>

How I help ad agencies & PR firms get better at digital marketing>>
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Like Lohan trips to rehab and Cardinals’ “this is our year” chants, most of us have had it up to here with email.  Spam has gone from annoying to ridiculous. I got an insane, indecipherable missive from a German derelict this week. 417 times. It looked like he slapped a sausage on the keyboard to form random word forms, and then fired out the email.

For marketers, it’s been too easy. Email requires little technical or budget pain compared to other marketing channels, and those advantages have resulted in marketers beating the golden goose to death with a huge “Send” button.

Getting great response rates from email is tougher than ever. Email volume is massive and the technical rules of the game have changed dramatically in the past 12 months.

Here’s what you need to know to be a successful email marketer, now that doing so has gotten substantially more difficult.

Mind Your Rep

Whether or not the major ISPs delivered your email to the inboxes of your subscribers was formerly determined by the content of your email. Viagra references were lumped together with more innocuous offenses like exclamation marks, use of “click here” and “free”, and unusual font colors into a naughty list that would get your email filtered.

That’s clearly a pretty blunt instrument with which to decide email validity. Consequently, many ISPs have now switched to delivering email wholly or at least in part based on the reputation of the sender. Mercifully, it has nothing to do with high school and that night on the roof.  Instead, reputation is determined by the percentage of your subscribers that mark your email as spam. You may have heard that people rarely click “unsubscribe.” That’s true. Instead, nearly all consumer ISPs (AOL, Earthlink, Cox, et al) have a “mark as spam” button prominently located. Instead of taking the time to unsubscribe, consumers click the spam button, and like Prom writ wrong, there goes your reputation.

Consequently, it is more critical than ever to not send email to anyone that hasn’t specifically requested it from you, and to only send content of value. Given the importance of reputation to the success of your email campaign, it’s better to have a small, quality list than to have a big list of dubious merit.

Your Trojan Horse Has Shipped

A proven method for increasing the frequency of your email communication without annoying your subscribers and putting your reputation at risk is to engage in transactional email.

Transactional messages are anything that gets sent out based on either a user action or relationship status change. Thank you for subscribing. Your order has shipped. Your order is delayed. Thank you for your bill payment. Your customer service request has been received.

All of these emails can be configured to include valuable promotional and informational content alongside the core transaction messaging. And it works. A study by MarketingSherpa found that consumers read transactional emails from trusted brands frequently or very often 75% of the time, compared to 55% for regular email communication.

Open Sesame

When it comes to measuring the success of your outstanding new transactional email program, give pause when using open rate as a metric. If you have Outlook (or Yahoo! mail and others) you may have noticed that images in emails don’t load unless you click “load images” in the message. Email open rates are tied directly to images. If an image (like your logo) loads in the recipient’s email program, the email has been “opened” and will be counted as such. This is true even if the email is only seen in the preview pane.

With images turned off on many browsers, however, open rates have plummeted. We have seen a decline of approximately 50% for every client over the past year.

Consider using click-through rate or total clicks as your main barometer for email success. Both are reliable and not influenced by technology or email software variations.

Also, because so many images are not loading, it is absolutely imperative that any graphics in your email are solely illustrative. You should never put an offer, headline, phone number, or any sort of important information in a graphic unless that same information is also prominently included in text.

The Name Is the Game

Everything you’ve just read is of course invalid unless you can convince people to subscribe to your email program.

As much as half of your Web site traffic may enter your site on a page other than the home page. Thus, you should include your email sign up on every page of the site. Incidentally, this is true for other key promotional elements on your site. Remember than any and every page of your site could be a visitor’s entry point and that page needs to be clear and persuasive.

While you’re at it, include the actual sign-up form on every page. Don’t make people click to another page to sign-up, we have found it to reduce response rates.

Lastly, make sure people know what they’re going to get from you. Again, it’s like high school. Set clear expectations at the beginning, and nobody will be disappointed. Add a link to a sample email newsletter above your sign-up form. Your response rate will increase, your spam complaints will decrease, or both.

Is email the bright and shiny new toy it once was? Sadly, no. But by following the evolving rules for email success, you can continue to outflank your competition and create valuable online relationships with your customers.

What does the Internet have to do with your print, TV, radio, direct mail and other traditional tactics? Plenty.

Along with the oft-cited belief that half of all marketing dollars are wasted lies a corollary, which is that the traditional components of most marketing plans are evaluated using less than scientific means. In many cases, the perceived success or failure of a traditional marketing tactic such as a magazine ad is based on the random, coffee-breathed feedback offered by Lance, the knit-tie wearing sales associate that stops by your cubicle each morning to give you a blow by blow of each customer interaction. The one big sale Lance was able to make last month was to a woman who mentioned seeing your magazine ad. Thus, Lance advocates an eight-page full-color insert in the next issue since it’s obviously the best possible advertising vehicle.

In addition to Lance’s unimpeachable research, you may ask your customers via some sort of survey where they first heard about you. Numerous studies have shown these queries to be unreliable, as people either check the first box on the list, or whichever media they tend to consume most frequently.

So, what we advocate is the use of Web analytics to determine effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics.

With Internet access surpassing cable television in terms of consumer penetration rates, increasingly prospective customers consume traditional marketing messages first, and then evaluate your company via your Web site before determining whether to progress along the purchase cycle.

Consequently, as long as your traditional marketing consistently references your Web site, your online presence is a reliable surrogate and aggregator for your complete marketing program.

Here’s how to use it to figure out what works.

Public Relations

PR results have always been tough to measure. Historically, column inches of press coverage are multiplied by advertising costs for the same amount of space to derive a value. But that has no bearing on actual effectiveness of PR in driving awareness or sales. We log all media placements our PR division makes for clients by the date the articles ran and by publication. We also create a list of search terms that relate to each article.

Then, we look at the client’s Web site analytics to see traffic patterns after the articles ran, and measure visits from corresponding search terms.

For a recent client for whom we placed an article in the Wall Street Journal, we saw a 1000%+ increase in Web traffic, including many visits directly from wsj.com, and a spike in visitors using search terms mentioned in the article.

Marketing Mix

Similarly, to determine the relative impact of different pieces of the marketing plan, we create spreadsheets that plot when all traditional marketing activities occur such as TV and radio buys, billboards, direct mail drops, newspaper and magazine ads, etc. Then, we add a line graph that show Web site traffic, leads, and sales (if applicable) along the same timeline.

Anytime we see a spike in Web site results, we see what marketing tactics were ongoing at that time, and use that data to help determine which activities are most successful at driving results.

Message Impact

I’m not anti-focus group, but relying solely on research that asks people what they would do in theory puts a lot of artificial conditions on their buying behavior. After you’ve had a couple beers and if the light is just right, even the Pontiac Aztek looks pretty good.

We prefer when possible to mix focus group type theoretical research with measuring what people actually do in a low cost environment that gets results fast. We create a series of online banner ads that contain a distinct potential marketing message for the product or service, and then launch a quick online media buy that puts those ads in front of likely customers. Within just a few days patterns emerge that tell us which messages are salient. The trick to this approach is making sure that the ad creative is extremely similar except for the message itself. You don’t want to interpret a message as powerful, when it’s actually the photograph of the cigar smoking beagle in the one ad that is getting the attention.

While online marketing’s share of the overall marketing mix will continue to expand for the foreseeable future, it’s important to think of the Internet as more than an advertising vehicle. Those online ad dollars can be used to inform and improve the results of your traditional programs as well.