Marketing Technology Blog

Each day, The Marketing Technology Blog sends out an email via MailChimp that automatically converts the blog’s feed to nicely formatted HTML email. There’s only a couple hundred folks that take advantage of it – a fraction of the readership of this blog on a daily basis. That’s okay… it’s a niche and feeds those who want it. I don’t try to artificially grow the list, it’s got great retention and does the trick for those who want my blog in their inbox.

Email is a push marketing channel. I’m a huge advocate of permission-based email marketing but I believe the majority of companies utilize email ineffectively.

• Email marketers don’t measure their email list retention, they only pay attention to how many are on the list at any one time. Your list acquisition may be outpacing your retention. If you’re getting a lot of unsubscribes, you need to fix something sooner rather than later.
• Email marketers believe that incredibly low open and conversion rates are good when they’re above industry averages. Folks, a 4% click-through rate off of an email is a 96% failure rate and not something to celebrate.
• Email marketers often have a calendar that requires them to publish, regardless of whether or not the content is crap or not. I get emails in my inbox every week and I seriously wonder how the company possibly thought there was something intriguing enough to send it.
• Email marketers believe in email math: If 10 people purchased from my list of 1,000 on my weekly email, I can double sales with 2 emails per week. It’s like printing money. No… it’s not. More lackluster emails may initially provide an increase in sales, but ultimately you’re going to lose valuable subscribers.

Although the cost of email marketing is plummeting, it still costs companies a lot of time and some money to send email. I haven’t tried to push my email or dress it up because I’m not sure it will do well with readers. Perhaps if I can have dedicated content in the email down the road – but I’m not going to send out crappy emails for the sake of trying to get a few more eyeballs.

The best thing you can do for a company who sends a crappy email is to unsubscribe. Don’t wait for the email to get better – send them a message today. Clean up your inbox.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HTML email campaigns – is sending them a waste of your time? (inklingmarkets.com)
• How to get the attention of inactive subscribers (b2bemailmarketing.com)

I recently took my 9 year old daughter to Justice, a children’s apparel retailer. From the onset the manager bombarded me, at 5 minute intervals, with product recommendations and promotions. This continued for 30 minutes until I was forced to school her on customer insight and preferences.

A bad email program is much like an ineffective sales person. Instead of having to read the disinterest on the faces of your customers, feel the negative impact on sales, or in my case, hear the harshness of their words; email marketing can tell you almost everything you need to know about your customers and help you to sell more.

Going Beyond “Hi FNAME”

The insight required to make your email program more profitable is already at your finger tips and it’s inexpensive. It comes to you in the form of data. I don’t mean open and click data, although that will tell you a lot, I’m talking about data that will allow you to personalize the experience for each of your customers.

Sure, personalized greetings are often well-received but as I mentioned in a recent Chief Marketer article, this year’s standout Valentine’s Day campaigns were those that used deeper data, such as purchase history and customer profiles, to make their offers more personal and therefore more relevant. In the article, I was speaking largely about retailers but service companies too have a slew of easily accessible data to track (or even predict) the purchase intent of their customers as well as identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

What Do You Have to Work With?

The sources of actionable data are seemingly endless, but here are few categories and specific examples:

Profile: Imagine you run a travel agency and I’m your 65 y/o prospect, do you think I’d respond better to an offer that reflected the most popular senior destinations? Now imagine that the images in the offer were those of the silver-haired persuasion. Or perhaps I’m on west coast time and your webinar is schedule for 1pm eastern, would I be more likely to reserve my seat if the email read 11am pacific?

Purchase History: If I bought gifts in or around today’s date, two years in a row, might I want to buy another again this year? What if the new gift recommendations were in line with my previous purchases of those of other gift buyers? Conversely, what if I’ve already purchased your primary product, do you think that I want to hear about how much money I could have saved, if only I’d waited? Instead, wouldn’t I rather know about your secondary offerings?

Activity: Maybe I’ve downloaded three sequential white papers in 30 days, but I’ve yet to make a purchase, would it be a good idea to invite me into a discussion about my specific needs? Or maybe I haven’t responded to your offers in some time, am I perfect for a reactivation offer or satisfaction survey?

Preferences: Imagine that you have 10 different products but I’m a reseller that’s only interested on products 1-5. Shouldn’t I be put into a segment with other resellers? What if I’m a direct user but I only want to receive educational information, as opposed to promotional, I’m more likely to remain an enthusiast and share your information if I only get what I really want?

It’s Easy and Inexpensive To Execute

I’m always surprised when SMB marketers say that using data at this level is only for the big boys. That may have been true in the years past, but today any ESP that’s worth their salt integrates easily with your CRM or E-commerce solutions and web analytics. All you have to do is integrate it and most importantly test it.

- Scott Hardigree | Indiemark

Related Articles from this Author:

• 8 Guiding Principles to Hiring an Email Marketing Expert (marketingtechblog.com)
• You Might Need an Email Marketing Expert If… (marketingtechblog.com)

Most modern websites utilize a CMS (Content Management System) to allow the website administrators to make changes, post content, and manage the website. This is in contrast the old days of calling your design agency to get changes made, which could get very expensive and caused delays in updates. While website management was previously the realm only of highly skilled individuals (sometimes called “webmasters”), a CMS opens up control to non-technical members of an organization, such as the marketing director, administrative assistant, or even the CEO.

At SpinWeb, we create sites on the Accrisoft Freedom platform. Freedom is a CMS that is a bit unique and has some very nice benefits over some of the other players. Indianapolis seems to be a Wordpress town and I see a lot of companies using it as a website platform. There is nothing wrong with Wordpress and in fact my own personal blog and speaking site is built on Wordpress. However, Freedom has some distinct advantages when it comes to usability, depth of features, and support. I enjoy the fact that we are unique and utilize Freedom as our platform of choice, especially for larger organizations that demand more than the open-source platforms can typically provide.

A Content Management System with Support

One nice thing about Freedom is that it is fully supported and maintained by Accrisoft. There is a dedicated development team that is getting paid to create new features, extend existing modules. and turn customer feedback into a platform that empowers organizations to communicate online. Accrisoft is a great company and I have had many great conversations with CEO Jeff Kline about the future of the platform and about online business in general.

Freedom’s codebase is pushed out from a central server that ensures that every install is consistent. With many open source platforms, the typical model is to set up 50+ different websites that are all using different plug-ins, versions, and hacks which then becomes a nightmare to maintain as an agency. Freedom allows SpinWeb to support and maintain an indefinite number of websites without worrying about inconsistencies between them. Because all the software is hosted in the cloud, our clients have no need to worry about installing software on their computers. They can simply log in and go to work. Additionally, we can upgrade our clients’ websites in a matter of minutes when new versions of Freedom are released.

Outstanding User Interface

Freedom also has an excellent user interface. While some of the open source platforms can be confusing to end users, Freedom presents a clean, simple interface that makes it very easy for non-technical people to manage their websites.

Extensible Modules for Email, Forms, E-commerce and More

Freedom provides a number of powerful modules that integrate seamlessly into other parts of the website. For example, Freedom includes a built-in Email Marketing module, which gives website owners a complete private Email Marketing solution built right into the website. It includes templates, scheduling, subscriber management, and delivery statistics built right in. It also pulls data from other modules so that marketers can send campaigns to lists generated from other parts of the site, such as event registrations.

The Forms module in Freedom is extremely powerful and rivals many of the standalone form builders available today. With Freedom, non-technical website administrators can build complex (or simple) forms for applications, event registrations, donations, and lead capture all with a few clicks. That form data can then be processed and exported in a variety of ways or even integrated into the shopping cart for advanced e-commerce applications.

The built in shopping cart in Freedom also allows businesses to deploy an integrated e-commerce solution on their websites and sell products with minimal effort. This can also extend to event registrations, allowing organizations to sell registrations to events and accept credit card or e-check payments online.

Freedom has built-in modules for Blogs, Event Calendars, Press Releases, Podcasts, Forums, Directories, RSS, Affiliate Programs, Billing, and Polls, to name just a few of the other options in the system. Additionally, most modules can integrate with the leading social networks, which means that website updates can automatically get pushed directly to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Freedom is a very secure system. Not only is it a well-tested and hardened application, but it also has an excellent multi-user management feature, which allows multiple website managers to have different roles and levels of access. It also has a Workflow module, which allows editors to approve or reject changes before they go live.

Membership Organization Sites

I would be remiss if I did not also highlight Freedom’s excellent solution for member-based organizations, such as associations. Freedom’s Membership module allows member-based groups to manage a complete database of members and allow those members to maintain their accounts and make updates via the web. The module also allows member billing, CRM, marketing, and communication. Businesses can also use it as a customer database and in fact SpinWeb’s entire client database and billing system is managed via Freedom, complete with email invoicing, recurring billing, and online payments.

As you can see, one huge advantage to using Freedom is that everything is in one place. Before working with us, many of our clients were using different tools for email marketing, e-commerce, blogging, event registration, web content, and membership management. After switching to Freedom, they love the ease of use and efficiency (not to mention the cost savings) of having everything in one place.

Search Engine Optimized Content Management System

Freedom is also very search engine friendly. Freedom-based websites use “HURLs” (Human-readable URLs) which means that content can be indexed by search engines much more easily. HURLs help boost a website’s rankings in search engines and also look much better to humans than the typical database-driven URLs in many other systems. The HURLs in Freedom are completely customizable.

As an authorized Accrisoft Solution Provider, SpinWeb is able to deploy websites extremely quickly and with consistent quality every time due to our standardization on Freedom. Our clients love the ease of use, powerful integration, and level of control that they now have when managing their websites.

If you haven’t seen Freedom in action before, let me know and I would be happy to provide you with a demo.

In the event you never learned what the term “Jump the Shark” means… it means that it’s the beginning of the end. The term refers to Happy Days when the Fonz jumped a shark on water skis, throwing the show into a death spin it never recovered from.

If you’re an email service provider, don’t scream at me yet.

Email used to be a very difficult job and only the greatest senders had the talent, hardware, and applications to send high volumes of email to Internet Service Providers for companies with huge subscriber lists. The talent has begun to move around in the industry, the hardware has become plentiful (especially with the cloud) and applications are popping up left and right to send email.

The Email Industry Has Changed… it’s Cheaper and Easier Now

What’s happening in the industry is a proliferation of small email service providers popping up. They’re fantastic – have great applications, send very complex dynamic messaging, track perfectly, handle bounces, deliverability issues, comply with SPAM regulations, and have very robust integration methodologies that are typically free. And they’re doing it at a fraction of the cost of the big boys.

Here’s an example: Newsberry just became a sponsor of The Marketing Technology Blog (that’s my disclosure). When I was checking out their site before approving the advertisement, I checked out their pricing page and was amazed at the prices:

I can have a subscriber list of up to 100,000 and send unlimited emails to them for $530 per month? That’s a little over $6,000 a year. I remember when I worked at an email service provider that our annual fees for a small business were about that… plus messaging fees… plus API access… plus, plus, plus…

These incredibly robust email providers are going to continue to shoot it out and businesses sending emails are going to be the ultimate winners. The losers are the very large email service providers who have been around a while – something needs to change.

Large Email Service Providers Overstate their Clout on Deliverability

Many of the large email service providers will tell you that the volumes of email they’re sending provide them with clout in the industry and they have better deliverability rates and relationships with the Internet Service Providers.

It’s not true. Small Email Service Providers can do just as great a job.

My good friend Greg Kraios manages some of those relationships between email service providers and internet service providers with his company, Den of Deliverability. He even helps companies who manage their own email get through to the ISPs! It doesn’t take a large company – it takes a great deliverability expert with good relationships – and Greg has them.

What Email Customers Need

Email service providers should be seamlessly (and I mean seamlessly) integrated with content management systems, customer relationship management systems, landing page optimization tools, and analytics applications. Marketing automation vendors like Aprimo and Eloqua are already stepping out in the lead on these. It’s not enough to send and measure email anymore… companies need more!

Even small, moderately priced email automation solutions are popping up, too! Infusionsoft is a solution with email and customer relationship management solutions fully integrated.

Customers need to easily repurpose content from throughout mediums, dynamically optimize content on the fly, measure the results – and even be provided with feedback on what won and lost. We don’t have time to jump from vendor solution to vendor solution during the day… and try to tie all the analytics querystrings together… and analyze for opportunities. Email service providers need to evolve to our needs.

It’s time for email service providers to take the leap, or they’re going to get blown by. Mailchimp announced 250,000 accounts added in 7 months to their solution. I utilize Mailchimp’s automated RSS to email function to send out emails every day to our subscribers – without ever opening an application!

Do-It-Yourself Email Service Provider

Email has had a long, lucrative run – but it’s almost over. It doesn’t take much effort to build and maintain your own email service these days. Friend Adam Small was so fed up with the pricing and lack of automation methods, that he recently built his own for Digital Home Info… now he’s got mobile, content management, Facebook, Twitter and email fully integrated for his real estate clients. He’s even able to monitor deliverability, track opens and clicks and manage bounces!

If you’re not talented like Adam, you can go buy a box from folks like Strongmail, plug it in, turn it on, and have your own email service up and running. They’ll even help you get started.

Do-It-For-You Email Service Providers

Many email service providers and agencies are actually adding the service to the package as well. They recognize that building beautiful, compelling emails takes both time and expertise – and has a great return on investment, so they develop programs for their clients that are affordable and take all the effort off of the clients’ hands. A couple that I know of are Indiemark and Tomatofish.

How Email Service Providers Will Survive

My advice to the large email service providers out there is to find a content management system, and buy it. Find a customer relationship management provider you integrate closely with… and merge with them. Get an analytics provider, and seamlessly integrate. And do it with robust targeting, segmentation and testing solutions. If you don’t, someone will soon!