Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

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

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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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You’ve heard it all before, right? Circa 1998. The Internet, with its 24×7 hours and minuscule overhead is going to put American retailers out of business. It’s just a matter of time before operational efficiencies triumph over brand and physical location, and quaint stores disappear faster than Diamondbacks’ pitching.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The wisdom of online purchase and subsequent shipping of 50-pound bags of dog food doesn’t seem as sage today as it did then. Anyone want to buy a sock puppet for cheap?

But, even though the initial exuberance of the e-commerce revolution didn’t pan out as anticipated, the survivors of the bust and their progeny are powering a second Internet boom – and this time they’re doing it right. According to Business Week, nearly 60% of all public Internet companies posted a profit in the 4th quarter of 2003. Not exactly the sure thing of banking or utilities, but the financial metamorphosis of the still-standing dot coms over the last four years is staggering.

From a consumer e-commerce perspective, many of yesterday’s leaders are today’s leaders, but now come with a cherry on top called profits. Amazon.com, eBay.com, ticketmaster.com, dell.com, and the online arms of brutish retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy are collecting large chunks of the $53 billion Americans consumers spent online in 2003 – roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Peru.

Like evidence against Michael Jackson, the big e-commerce players get stronger every day. Their historic focus on goods that require low touch involvement by purchasers (media, electronics, appliances, tickets) – makes buying their wares online as easy to digest as gringo-ized Mexican food. But at the heart of the new Internet revolution is the next wave of e-commerce players that are shaking down industries previously thought to be impervious to the transformational effects of Web-based purchases.

The ground is vigorously shaking under the feet of businesses that feature significant amounts of consumer research and information exchange. Look at real estate (anyone not research a home purchase online?), travel, mortgages and loans, insurance, and even golf with its proliferation of online tee time reservations. They’re all categories where traditional players are being forced to compete with nimble online insurgents that can provide instant results for consumers while also offering lower costs by slashing commissions.

But perhaps the most amazing aspect of this Internet renaissance is consumers’ willingness – eagerness even – to buy expensive, considered purchases online – a notion deemed as ridiculous as Carrot Top just a scant few years ago.

To steal directly from Chris Rock, it’s a strange time indeed when the best rapper is White, the best golfer is Black, and the biggest seller of automobiles is eBay Motors. That’s right, a Web site that started out as a collection of PEZ dispensers sold $7.5 billion worth of vehicles world-wide in 2003. It wasn’t long ago that a primary debate surrounding the upside of e-commerce was consumers’ fears about providing credit card information online. Now, you can buy (with PayPal natch) a 2004 Bentley Continental GT for just $198,500 on eBay.

The phenomenon doesn’t end at cars. Blue Nile sold $129 million worth of diamonds online last year, and Phoenix-based Equine.com sold $40 million worth of horses. Attention parents: if your child is bugging you for a pony, your excuse is going to look pretty flimsy when the fruit of your loins logs on to equine.com and finds no fewer than 131 Shetlands, starting at under a grand.

This dramatic rise in online luxury purchases is a result of a confluence of factors. First, the Internet is main stream. According to research firm eMarketer, 67% of U.S. adults will be online by 2005 – more than have cable television.

Second, it’s perhaps no coincidence that we’re called Internet “users”. Sites like amazon.com have provided great experiences on relatively low dollar purchases for tens of millions of people, and these smaller buys serve as gateway drugs that result in larger and larger purchases – as long as the customer experience remains positive.

On a related note, the preponderance of major players in the online vehicle, jewelry, and horse businesses have invested significant resources into comforting user interfaces, reliable software systems, bullet-proof Web servers, and unflagging customer service that glues it all together. They may not be the biggest companies in each industry, but their online operations have a pervasive air of legitimacy that coaxes credit cards out of wallets and onto Web sites.

Joe Schubach, owner of Schubach Jewelers in Scottsdale is an example. While Schubach retains a small show room in an upscale office building, the vast majority of his revenue comes from his six well-designed online stores. He’s no Blue Nile, but the schubach.com enterprise oozes professionalism, and that’s what separates the e-commerce winners from crazyhectorsworldofgems.com.

Third, the dramatic rise in broadband connectivity has enabled high dollar online retailers to provide a litany of product data across a variety of media types. Equine.com allows sellers to showcase their stallions with photos, interactive slide shows, video clips, and more. Most eBay Motors listings contain no fewer than 25 photographs of the vehicle from every conceivable angle, including some you’re not likely to see again even if you bought the car. (Checked your glove box hinges for scratches lately?)

This kind of wall-to-wall visual information goes a long way toward blunting the “am I going to get what I paid for” syndrome that can occur with any purchase not made in the flesh. And unless you’d like to go out for a bite to eat during download, viewing those 25 photos on a dialup connection is impractical at best.

It’s a trend that’s not going to abate. Sales of the kind of vaguely nice but palpably cheesy sport coats worn by car and jewelry salesmen will be plummeting soon as more and more Americans get comfortable buying their most treasured possessions in just two dimensions. And as the Internet becomes truly ubiquitous in the coming years and access via every imaginable device becomes commonplace, we will hit our nadir as a society when we can buy a horse from our cars, and a car from upon horseback.

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