Random thoughts on the MarketingSherpa Email Summit

I. General feeling that this was going to be a good year for email marketers. Based on a survey of marketers email marketing and social networks were the only two marketing programs that are expected to see a net increase this year.


II. MarketingSherpa stressed:

• Take an analytic approach

• Tie in email marketing with optimized landing pages. Big push on optimizing landing pages that included full day of training prior to the start of the show.

• Tie in email marketing with social networks.

III. Social Media:
A. A lot of talk and survey results show big plans from companies on spending more here but the results on this were mixed. One case study of (anonymous company) showed a 62% increase in reach of the email. However, the case study where an emailer (Miles Media) showed results portrayed the reach as being minimal.

• 100K emails sent

• 47 posts

• Ave of 8.4 opens and clicks (she didn’t show these on her slides so I just scribbled down the numbers from her talk but I think I got them right)

B. The big winners from the two case studies for most popular social media sites were:

• Anonymous company in descending order of posts: Twitter, LinkedIn (sign a B2B emailer???), MySpace and Facebook (a distant forth)

• Non-anonymous (Miles Media) in descending order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Digg (distant forth)

IV. The email marketing awards were a joke. only big name companies won. (Big names = Fortune 200 and Global 1000. )

You may be asking yourself right now – why, did their vast array of resources yield superior results? Well, no. Except for a couple of winners from Capital One and a catchy email postcard from Dell, the winners…how should I put this…stunk. They were just a mass of very tiny and often unformatted text. One exec I spoke with said they looked like the type of emails he gets all the time and automatically deletes. Another exec described them as “text dumps.”

Tips on avoiding deliverability disaster

I encourage you to check out a webinar Steve Webster and I did earlier this month.

You can find out about here: http://www.ipost.com/resources/webinars_deliverability.php

Email delivery is yet another thing for you to worry about in 2009. Delivery is always a moving target. ISP practices and customers' attitudes towards your emails change. It is a privilege, after all, to market to someone.

In the webinar we cover:

• How can you determine how your email is performing?
• What's important to get email through delivery obstacles?
• What can you do to improve your email reputation?

While email marketing is very cost effective, the real cost of is losing the right to market to a customer or, at the least, having your email end up in the spam folder and not the inbox.

Email Marketing Grows Up

The carefree days of email marketing’s youth were spent blasting emails to as many people as possible. What a party that was - sort of a combination of pledge week and Spring Break. Email was and is cheap to send. And in the past, email campaigns just seemed to make money, no matter how poor the methodology, and that sure looked good compared to the other marketing channels.

But, just like those fresh off Spring Break kids who must suddenly contemplate life after college, email marketers in 2009 should be considering a more practical and, dare we say it, sound business approach if they want to continue receiving a paycheck. Let’s take a look at why - now, more than ever - you should segment your email list, protect against opt-outs and spam complaints, and which segmentation approach is the most practical.

My February byline in smallbiztechnology.com covers:

• Why should you segment? To avoid disaster
  
• Why should you be especially worried about opt-outs and spam complaints in 2009?
• Segmenting your list will reap rewards
• What segmentation approach is most practical?

One-to-one marketing: Dream or wasted effort?

Better informed marketing campaigns can be watershed events for many businesses, but keep it simple and stick to modest goals if you want to see them through.

Too often email marketers try to go from one end of the segmentation spectrum (blast away) to the other end (micro-segmentation). This extreme swing often bogs them down and, even if they are able to pull it off, often doesn't yield better results than a simple, macro segmentation approach. After all, most marketing teams are stretched thin and stressed out in today's crazy economy.

In my new byline in iMedia Connection, I offer a sane approach to segmentation that revolves around:

• Understanding the true barriers to implementing your marketing strategy and choose the strategies with the best benefit-to-barrier ratios.
  
  
• Pursuing strategies that use objective data for all of your customers rather than subjective (self-reported) or incomplete information.
  
  
• Implementing the strategy in a graduated approach (simple to complex, broader to narrower, general to specific).

Practical Tips for Holiday Success

The best thing you can give yourself and your company for the holidays is the gift of practical segmentation – a gift that keeps on giving, especially when it comes to profits in a tough market.

In the current economic climate, the shrewd email marketer has an opportunity to be the hero who helps the business stay afloat and even thrive. While many email marketers long to be able to segment their lists into thousands of mini-segments to conduct true one-to-one marketing, now is the time to stop dreaming and get practical.

In my iTiki bylines I give advice on such topics as:

• Practical segmentation means a better bottom line for the holidays
• Learn to say "No" - or at least "Wait" - to discounts
• Thriving for the holidays mean putting on hold your dream of true one-to-one marketing
  

How to Use E-Mail in a Down Market

In my Catalog Success byline I give an overview of how this is the time for email marketers to act like a sharp businessperson and consolidate their own standing in the process. I give practical tips on metrics, segmentation and talking the higher level biz talk.

One of email's assets - it is a cheap channel - can also be a trap that blocks email marketers from using real business metrics and employing savvy methodologies such as segmentation.

Now is the perfect time for email marketers to take their game up a few notches. In many companies, the email team is the only one hitting their numbers (or at least not taking as big of a hit as the rest of the channels). Email marketers can easily capitalize on their comparative success and increase the strategic importance of email in their companies. In some cases, where email has been off to the side, this will mean getting to sit at the adult, strategic table with the C-level team.

A Love Affair Gone Way Wrong

Email marketers apparently just love to lower their margins and leave money on the table.

The mania for discounts is driven to a large degree by the standard practice of blasting emails to every possible email address. When presented with a business downturn, the Pavlovian response is to blast out discounts. The more discounts the merrier - too bad, though, about the impact on the bottom-line.

In reality, customers are not the same. Some will buy from you without regular discounts, some will buy from you with minimal discounts and some will require on-going discounts.

The trick is how to figure out who requires what. For decades in the offline world, marketers used Recency, Frequency and Monetary value (RFM) segmentation to resolve this issue. RFM can be used only even more effectively because it can be automated.

One of our customers decreased the amount of discounts they give out by 40% within a few months and was able to delay offering Holiday discounts by 6 weeks. How? Simple, they used RFM to segment the customers and give discounts to sale shoppers but not to their most engaged customers who are more interested in being first in line for the latest trend.

How will this play out for you? Well, you won’t know until the next time you feel the urge to blast and you just say - "No! I'm going to be a smart business person instead."