the other einstein

Article by Matthew Schwartz from a Recent Interview About Email Marketing

By Matthew Schwartz for The ZoomInfo B2B Sales & Marketing Blog

E-mail, which is well into its teens, is still viewed as a cheap, yet effective marketing channel. But as the medium starts to mature, sales and marketing teams may have to ramp up spending on their e-mail programs in order to separate their brands from the pack, reach new prospects and cultivate existing clients.

However, devoting more of your budget to e-mail campaigns is just half the battle to garnering decent returns. Many companies tend to create one-size-fits-all e-mail programs that get blasted regardless of who the end-user may be (like a howitzer being deployed to shoot an army of gnats).

“You need to segment and target appropriately and often it takes more time and resources to make that happen,” said Nicholas Einstein, director of strategic and analytic services for Datran Media, a marketing services and technology company whose clients include Entrepreneur.com, Lycos and ValueClick. E-mail programs need “to be a) automated, b) segmented and c) perfectly integrated with [your] Web site to ensure you’re getting people right when they’re signing up.”

Overall, 58% of marketers said they planned to increase their e-mail budgets in 2009, according to a survey  released in April by Datran Media. The company took the pulse of more than 3,000 industry executives from Fortune 1,000 companies and interactive agencies.

Einstein, who blogs at “the other einstein” (hats off), said that e-mail programs should feature relevant content, such as white papers, links (and invitations) to Webinars, information about upcoming virtual events “or any drivers of leads.” But smart packaging of content is a nonstarter unless it is properly segmented.

Indeed, segmentation is key. Open rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are as much as 20% higher on average for the first 30 days, according to MarketingSherpa’s “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008.”

Click rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are doubly high for the first 30 days, with a slight increase for 60-90 days, while click rates for segmented versus non-segmented campaigns are five times higher the last 90 days of the year, the study said.

Because they are on the front line, sales execs can be the innovators of new e-mail programs depending on the audiences’ needs. But executing and managing the execution of email campaigns is a job that’s increasingly being left to marketing.

Einstein said he is seeing more and more e-mail campaigns that are centralized. Clients “are taking away some autonomy  sales teams have had in the e-mail space, because, quite honestly, you get into situations about compliance and CAN-SPAM issues, and it can get hairy having sales teams sending out promotional messaging” to people who have potentially unsubscribed to the material.

The happy medium is when IT can integrate sales and marketing and provide a bridge between inbound and outbound efforts. “We have seen a lot of success launching  triggered and serialized messaging programs based on behavioral targeting,” Einstein said. “When prospects are taking action on a Web site, it’s important to leverage this behavior to target relevant messaging that nurture the lead and help foster sales.”

5 Quick Tips for Optimizing Your Email Program

Intensely focus on the new members of your list.Be sure that the messaging you send first properly manages recipient expectations about the email program while accomplishing core business objectives. Response rates will be highest for these messages, so focus on appropriately leveraging this opportunity. I believe the welcome message stream may be the most important tool in an emarketer’s arsenal for driving near-term engagement with a product or service. 

One message is [almost] never enough.
Consider splitting your long winded, scrolling welcome message into a series of messages sent over the first week+ of a new user’s tenure. Try for shorter messages with clear calls to action and relevant content based on lifecycle. 

Take time to identify key performance metrics that appropriately reflect business goals.
KPI’s are different for every business and every campaign, but ensuring that the metrics you select directly correlate to your core business objective is key. Many tests include a conversion or customer lifetime value metric, as well as engagement metrics based on clicks, click stream tracking, or time on site. 

Measure your test against a control group to isolate and quantify learnings.
Good email programs are data driven and test v. control is how to generate actionable data. Whether you’re executing simple A/B tests or more sophisticated multivariate efforts, be sure your control groups are well defined and that your test is constructed in such a way that you’ll easily be able to quantify and compare your success metrics. 

Test, learn, repeat.
Start with the lowest hanging fruit, but then continue to test and optimize. Extend learnings throughout other programs and continue to hone your communications to new members. If you’re not testing an important variable on virtually every message that goes out the door, you may be wasting a valuable opportunity.

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Problem Solver: "How can I integrate social media with my email marketing program?"

The rise of social media is creating an exciting inbound marketing channel that serves as an excellent compliment to outbound email marketing efforts.  Marketers who allocate the time and resources to integrate programs can realize synergies - driving incremental revenue while creating positive customer experiences. 

Below are five tips to help you integrate programs and ensure you’re getting the most from each.

1. Ensure you have clearly defined social media and email marketing strategies.  This may sound obvious, but many marketers skip step one and move right on to the tactics.  I usually work with clients to create distinct strategy statements for email and social programs and refer back to them often.  If your email or social strategies aren’t clearly articulated, make the time to think them through and write them up - I have found it to be a worthwhile exercise.
2. Listen to your community.  Use learnings in email.  If you do nothing else, you can still make meaningful improvements to your email program by just listening to how people are engaging with your brand through social media.  Whether it’s a google alert, twitter search or a relationship with one of the myriad of social media monitoring companies out there, listening to how consumers are discussing your brand, and in what context, is key.  I believe that “listening” through social media can be as useful [if not more useful] than conducting focus groups.  Insights gleaned from social media can inform email messaging and be tested optimized to quantify lift.  
3. Use email to monetize social efforts.  In the social space it is often not appropriate for brands to engage in too many overtly promotional acts.  Social media is a great place to steward your brand and engage with your community, but email is often a better place to test, optimize, and deploy promotional offers.  One tactic to try is including links to your emails (web versions), in your social media messaging, (ie: tweet links to the hosted version of your newsletter).  An offer that may not sit well on twitter itself, may perform well to your “followers” when in the context of your newsletter.       
4. Implement “Share to Social” in your emails.  Even if your ESP doesn’t have this functionality built into their toolset, you can use a variety of free, third party, non-javascript services to implement “share-to-social” and empower your email subscribers to syndicate your content throughout their social networks.  The viral nature of social media can spread a message far and wide, but only if the content you send is worthy of sharing.
5. Leverage email to build your community (and vice versa).  When you are ready to launch a component of your social media strategy - a Facebook group or a new Twitter account, for example - there is often no better way to build the community than through outbound email marketing.  Invitations to join are places to start, but be sure that consumers are given the opportunity to join from across all customer touch points.  Try including links to your social initiatives in transactional message streams - this can be an especially effective tactic. 

I don’t know an email marketer who isn’t excited by the developing social landscape.  By integrating with social media we can better serve our customers and develop more responsive programs, and, to me, that is exciting stuff. 

Build yourself an award winning welcome program.

Last week I was delighted to learn that one of my clients, Sony, won the gold award at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami for best automated series.  The winning campaign was a serialized message stream developed to welcome, educate, and engage individuals who had just joined the Sony Rewards loyalty program.  We executed the new strategy though a simple test plan to quantify the impact of the new messaging, and were quite pleased by the results.

The new messages, a series of three, sent over the course of seven days, enjoyed significant increases in click-through rates over the control group, and drove an exponential lift in site visits and online engagement.  Sony has taken the learnings from this test and extended them through similar serialized message streams targeting other segments.

If you’re not currently leveraging a multi-message or serialized welcome strategy, I strongly suggest you develop a plan to test one.  The bottom line is that new members of your list have unique needs and are likely to be up to five times more responsive to the messages they receive during their first few weeks as subscribers.  It simply makes good business sense to address these needs and ensure that messaging critical to your core business objectives makes its way to the inbox during this time when recipients are most likely to respond to it.

Where do I start?
We process of developing our new welcome program by reviewing the EEC Welcome Message Checklist, a terrific resource that I highly suggest you download.  It covers virtually all of the key issues and exposes best practices that we followed when developing our award winning campaign.

Once you’ve devised a new welcome strategy, test it appropriately - hold out control groups to receive existing messaging [or none at all], and identify specific success metrics that tie directly to core business objectives.

After analyzing test results and optimizing existing messaging appropriately, explore extending the program with additional messages sent during various stages of your customer [or prospect’s] life cycle.

If you have any welcome message success stories, please share here, look me up on twitter [@neinstein] or email neinstein(at)datranmedia(dot)com.