Non-Line Blogging

We're gripped with election fever in the UK right now.  We're being told to vote with our hearts by some parties, and tactically with our heads by others.  One thing we do know is that this election has been dominated by the old medium of TV and not silly old new media.

However,  to show just what is possible, here is a great viral campaign from the Obama camp a couple of years ago.  Pretend that you're called David Hughes (it's easy for me) and you've just been sent an email from a friend worried that non-voting will ruin Obama's chance of victory.  Click on this link and enjoy great personalisation, fantastic re-statement of the issue and some really nice calls to action to spread the word.

http://bit.ly/9KQGkb

A good point well made, I think

Happy voting

With Christmas nearly upon us I was wondering what presents digital marketers would like to find in their stockings.  A perennial favourite toy across the world is Lego and, whilst we’re probably a bit too old/busy/grown up to get any this year, the joy and wonder of the little bricks is brought to life with these fantastic advertisements from 2006.  

Then I began thinking that, just like some children these days, digital marketers have too many toys to play with.  We should play more often with the fantastic tools we have or we should be using our imagination to make the most of them. 

Display Advertising - Just add imagination

What do you see when you look at a 728 x 90 Leaderboard display ad - just some pixels (a digital Lego Brick?) or a wonderfully flexible and creative marketing format?  

Here are some games you can play long into the New Year with your digital ad inventory:

• Frequency capping – it’s amazing how many campaigns still get deployed in a wasteful, sub-optimal way...work out how many times people need to see an add before it wears out, and make sure your ad budget goes further by serving it to somebody else
• Format testing – so they didn’t click on a leaderboard, so re-assemble the pixels into a sky or an MPU and measure the impact of format on response (interactions or clicks...you choose).
• Contextual targeting – find out from publishers how they can deliver ads based on page content and do some playing (testing).  The click-through rate uplift should pay for the incremental costs and your conversion rates should grow too.  
• Behavioural targeting – make 2010 the year that you unwrap individually targeted ad deployment.  It will mean that you can alter your creative to suit people who are in different stages of the consideration and purchase funnel, based on what they have been viewing and clicking recently.

Email recipients are like snowflakes - every one is different

What do you see when you look at an email address?  Just another name to blast a standard message to?  The wide-eyed marketing child will see some wonderfully exciting opportunities to create imaginative messages that make email more interesting for the customers and more successful for you. 

Here are a few traditional email marketing games to get you started...fun for all the marketing family:

• Acquisition tools – if you’re renting data, ask the list owner what variables they hold and then deliver different versions of the same message.  For BtoB that should be different subject lines, opening paragraphs and calls to action based on “job function” or “industry sector”.  For consumers you may know their lifestyle and affluence from geo-demographic variables that list owners like Acxiom hold...have different propositions for less affluent and older prospects or use a different creative for young professionals.  Let you imagination run free!
• Conversion - as digital marketers we sit on the most valuable real-time prospect data so let’s get it out of the toybox and play with it.  Who clicked on an email link but did not complete a successful outcome?  Who looked at deep product pages on your site but did not buy?  These re-marketing campaigns should deliver 4-16 better conversion rates than one-size-fits-all messages so start building them.
• Retention – send different message programmes to your newer customers, or have a different tone of voice for purchasers of specific products.  Build “personas” (imaginary friends?!) to help with your tone of voice, imagery and calls to action.
• Re-activation – how do you know when you’ve lost a customer?  Probably when they’ve not bought for a specific time period.  So develop a “win back” programme with the first message triggered by a “date of last purchase is more than 60 days".  And be relevant...”we’ve noticed that you have not bought from us for a little while....” is a good start.

Fuel your imagination – get reading!

It’s good to know that even digital marketing kids can find pleasure in moveable type. When I was growing up the “must have” book was the BBC’s “Blue Peter” annual.    This year you ought to be asking Santa to bring you the wonderfully comprehensive “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avinash Kaushik.  Weighing in at more than your festive turkey, with 450 pages that gives you just over a page a day for all of 2010! 

But aside from being a real “value for money” present, this book encourages us to explore our world of data.  It’s partly a “how do they do that” book (go on, admit you’re not really sure how “multi-tabbed time on site is calculated, are you?), but it’s also an activity book along the lines of “what shall we do today to make sense of our marketing”.  With information covering pure web analytics, analytics for search, email and social media and links to further reading it is as near to a “Boys Own Annual” that digital marketers can get.

So there you have it.  Some ideas for kindling your imagination in 2010.  And we’ve not even touched on multi-variate landing page testing, search marketing or social media experimentation...better leave some of those for your birthday!

Here's wishing you a peaceful Christmas and an imaginative New Year. 

Argos.co.uk I think I love you.

For several years marketers have been talking themselves out of using "FREE" or even "Free" in email subject lines.  "We'll end up with a bad reputation and blocked by ISP's for ever", they cried.  More and more marketers joined the chorus until even their colleagues in Finance would stop them in a corridor and say

"I was playing golf with my accountant friend Jack and he said we should never use "Free" in our subject lines".  

So, Mr Finance Director, just suppose you compete with Argos in the UK e-commerce market and into your inbox come the following email...

The Argos e-commerce team seem to know more than others about email delivery and, since "Free" is one of the most powerful motivators in our language I hope they are reaping handsome rewards for their know-how.  So, how are they doing it?

In short, the deliverability war has moved on from simplistic "content filtering" and is now based more on "consent" and "reputation".  I won't go into a big lecture on all that right now, but here is what you really ought to know.

1.  Consent - Get people to add you to their address book will ensure that emails you send (from the same address) will by-pass local Spam filters on clients like Outlook and web-based systems like Yahoo and Windows Live Mail.

2.  Reputation.  Do the right things - don't re-mail un-subscribes, or blast out lists with a high bounce rate, or send dull messages that nobody will respond to.  They will tarnish your reputation and organisations like SenderScore will share that bad reputation with ISP's and business mail hosting service providers.

For reference, Spamassassin does indeed have a "naughty boy" point for using the word FREE in the Subject line, but it is only a single point and is only 1 of several hundred rules that are run against all your emails.  However, there are worse tests to fail but thankfully people in Finance don't know about them.  Wouldn't it be a great day if somebody came up to you and said:

"I was playing golf with my accountant friend Jack and he said we should check our messages for X-IP Headers as they attract almost 3 times more points than using the word "Free".

Here are some of the Spamassassin checks you may want to get excited about, but you will never know what score triggers filtering, or what % of a total process is made up of the Spamassassin elements so it really is a blunt tool for precise filtering from the marketers' perspective.  (you can find them all here but it still won't give you any clues as to how many points your message needs to get delivered - it will vary every day and for every in-bound filtering system); first up is everybody's favourite with the word FREE, then I have shown one of many tests done on the "header" of your message, and finally one to show that even filtering tools now factor in some kind of reputation checks...you can start off with MINUS 100 points if you have all the Authentication tools in place.

So, how do you know if its safe to use FREE?

Well, the first thing we can do is know our Reputation as others will see it.  Head over to Senderscore and read all the lovely stuff they have written about reputation-based filtering.  Then find out your own reputation score by doing the following...here'e the results for Argos.

First, find out your sender IP address - its somewhere in the message headers.  This is where it is in Outlook 2007

Then copy the IP address and pop it into the FREE (!) Senderscore Reputation checker (you will need to register to see more detailed information).  This will give you your reputation as others see you:

So, with a 70 out of 100 overall reputation score, a 100% delivery rate and a "Low" risk it is quite likely that most ISP's will allow most Argos messages through without getting excited about the words and pictures they use.  And with powerful motivators like "free" in there, I hope they are enjoying wonderfully high click and conversion rates.

Just to validate my thinking here is one from deep in my Gmail Spam folder...with a 5 out of 100 its got little chance of getting into my primary inbox regardless of the words

And finally, just like a personal credit record in the financial services world, sometimes having no reputation is as bad as having a poor reputation.  Here is a lovely email that made its way into my Junk Mail folder

...and here is the reputation report from Senderscore, showing that little or no activity gives them too little information upon which to base their opinions:

So, to summarise, don't hang on to outdated, over-simplistic email filtering rules.  Get good at managing your reputation and take a few "risks" once you know that your message has a good chance of being delivered.  Keep testing campaigns to check delivery into Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail and if all seems good, keep filling up those subject lines with presuasive words!  Way to go, Argos!!

I’ve been involved in email marketing for over 12 years now, as a client, for a technology vendor, as a trainer and as a consultant.  It’s been really exciting helping to shape a channel that continues to deliver the highest ROI of any direct marketing channel ever ever ever.  I have a particular (un-healthy?) fascination with the way that marketers have adapted to the changing legislative environment, specifically in the emotionally charged area of un-subscribing.

In the bad old days of email, we made the un-subscribe process the very opposite of usability best practice: 

• The opt-out link was hard to find - not quite ”white text on a white background”, but not far off!
• The landing page demanded a 20 character alpha-numeric password that had cunningly been asked for at sign-up.
• The un-subscribe would take 10 days to come into effect, during which time the recipient would be spammed to within an inch of their life. 

Then in 2003 it all changed (for the better, I may add).  In Europe the “Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations” ensured that every marketing message carried a “free and simple mechanism” by which people could un-subscribe, and in the USA the “Can Spam” act did pretty much the same thing.  The bar was raised a few inches and the less reputable email marketers who had been blasting away at their base had nowhere to hide.

Fast forward to 2009 and we are seeing some really creative, and wholly appropriate, approaches to un-subscribe management.  The first thing to stress is that we have moved on from a binary world of “opt in or out for everything” to a place where people can “tune” their relationship with an organisation.  If you’re not doing this through “permission centres” then you’re missing a trick to engage at an appropriate level with potential and existing customers.  But of more interest is “what happens when they smack the un-subscribe link”?

Legally, under a 2009 amendment to the “Can Spam” laws in the USA, you must not force people to log into a system in order to un-subscribe:  The link should take them to a landing page where they should be able to opt-out of the email programme.  Nothing wrong with that, you may say.  Indeed Seth Godin in Permission Marketing written 10 years ago suggested that you should let people unsubscribe easily...I would add the phrase “with grace and dignity”.  But how far can we raise the emotional temperature?  What can we say to people to make them change their mind?  And how do we get our great ideas past the stuffy old legal team covered with dust in the basement?!

Un-subscribing is a critical moment in a long-term relationship.  Left in the hands of the legal team it will end up as a dull, rude, clinical process with only one outcome – they’ll un-subscribe.  But legally, the game is not lost.  We can take them to a landing page that simply asks them “are you sure?”.  We want to remind them of how it all began, the good times we’ve had together and the wonderful future we can enjoy together if only they don’t click that “confirm” button...”

So, here’s a little exercise for you...

Firstly, do you know the value of an email address for your organisation?  If not, add up the money you generate from campaigns, look at the cost savings of not having to mail/phone people, and calculate the incremental revenue you can get from all email campaigns over a 2 year period.  If you’re an e-commerce company, the figure may well be near 200 (Dollars, Pounds, Euros...they’re all worth the same these days anyway!)

Secondly, look at the current un-subscribe rate from click to “gone”.  What if you could halve that un-heathily high conversion rate?  How much revenue would that save/make over 2 years?

Thirdly, think about how you could make people change their mind.  Do you re-sell the benefits of a hard-won email relationship?  Can you bribe them, or can you make them feel guilty?. 

Here are 2 landing pages that I’m sure will reduce the number of “un-successful outcomes” (un-subscribes).  The first is a lovely BtoC example in keeping with the brand personality of a photo-sharing site that makes you think “how could I be so mean?”.  The second is  a BtoB example where you’re being “bribed” to stay registered in exchange for an “exponential gift” that needs me to use a racy Password (ICY-HOT, if you please) to get $97 worth of value.  Saddest of all things is...I fell for it!

Easy to set up.  Easy to test.  Easy to deliver some really big wins in your email strategy.  This is one of the few times in digital marketing where we can judge success by the number of people who DON’T do something!  

 Here is a great "are you sure" landing page in keeping with a digital photography client.  Maybe it could build on the "think of all the wonderful stuff you're missing" but as an emotional response, we don't weant to upset the baby! (Many thanks to Avinash Kaushik for spotting that one)

This is a really in-your-face challenge to un-subscribing.  It may sound a bit cheezy and even desperate, but I fell for it!  You'll need tune the tone of voice to suit your own organisation, but keep the passion for maintaining an email dialogue.