B2B » Email Marketing Strategies

Archive for the ‘B2B’ Category

Advanced Preferences from Southwest

November 9th, 2009

Being a frequent flier on Southwest Airlines, I naturally wanted to re-join their email list. I was a subscriber in the past but with new addresses I fell off the list at some point.

The big win for Southwest is with their focus on email preferences. As we’ve discussed many times before, allowing your subscribers to select from a range of email options will be a win-win for everyone. Bronto had a good rundown of Do’s and Don’ts in this post.

Southwest started getting it right by having a very simple email sign-up and then making additional preference options available later. In the confirmation email they had the following call-out that was right to the point with great architecture and design.

On the landing page they had detailed preference options as follows:

Several nice things going on here:

1. They start off by giving you a great reason to fill out your preferences — so you can help them send you more relevant offers. Relevancy is key and becoming increasingly important.

2. Rapid Rewards: By asking for this, they should have access to detailed data on past purchase behavior which can be gold for segmentation.

3. Trip Related Preferences: They ask for items such as home airport and favorite destination, along with types of trips such as last minute vacations, business travel etc. This will provide Southwest with great information to further segment and provide relevant content.

4. Activity Related Preferences: Finally, they ask about activities you enjoy while traveling. This potentially takes their email program into another category by being able to provide partner offers, destination activity recommendations, and engaging content. I’ve seen Hotels.com and a few other related sites to this pretty well.

This is a great example of a company going the extra step to not only provide an email preference center, but one that is fairly detailed. Keep in mind though that this model would not be realistic for some smaller companies. By collecting these preferences they have the ability to provide some extremely targeted and relevant blow-dart like communications, but it creates the need for a more robust technical infrastructure and time-consuming content development. If done right, it can be gold — but make sure your foundation is ready to execute before implementing a detailed preference center. When in doubt, start smaller and scale up accordingly.

It has been a few weeks and nothing extremely targeted has come my way, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Southwest puts out and am excited to see how well they execute here.

Thoughts or questions? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

Cheers,

Forest

2 Comments »

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2B, B2C, Dynamic Content, Personalization, Segmentation

Personalization + Dynamic Content = Efficiency

October 8th, 2009

Note that the content of this post is working its way into a new case study, but here is an overview.

A client I work with manages hundreds of sites that collectively have thousands of service provider listings. Each service provider has a profile and we needed an efficient way to have them update their information, and notify them of their regional representative contact.

For this, we created a clean text-driven email with a bunch of personalization and some dynamic content. This allowed us to reach thousands of providers with the same email, and create an efficient system for getting updated information.

Below is a raw screen grab with filler content.

In the above example, there are several points of personalization and dynamic content:

1. First Name: Simple and easy

2. Organization Name: We of course want to personalize this with the name of their organization

3. Update Date: As a reminder, we included the date that they last updated their profile

4. Profile Link: This takes them to their specific profile

5. Info on Record: We have the Address, Phone and Email that is currently listed on their profile, plus a link to view the profile again to see the rest of the info

6. Edit Profile Link: To make changes, we have a link implemented that takes them directly to a page where they can submit updated information

7. Dynamic Content: We have a section for CSA contact information (their local representative) that we have dynamic rules set up for based on what product they fall under and their county. E.g. IF product=xyz and county=Los Angeles THEN CSA Contact = Jim Smith – jim@email.com

Below is the same screen grab with highlighted personalization elements.

A very simple email here creating a 1-to-1 communication and an efficient system. This email didn’t need flashy design, or excess copy — just personalized content and some top-level organization to make the process seamless. While the nature of this particular email is very specific, the concepts can apply to a broad range of initiatives. It’s very important to create a personalized experience with our subscribers, and with available technology email marketers should look at how they can better leverage their efforts.

Cheers,

Forest

Leave your comment »

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2B, Dynamic Content, Email Marketing Strategy, Personalization

Do You Know Your Domain Breakdown?

August 6th, 2009

We talk a lot about knowing our customers; developing targeted content; and implementing a rifle or blow dart approach with our email communications. These items and more are all key for an optimal program.

One area often overlooked is having a breakdown of your subscriber’s email domains. Knowing this information can be quite helpful when developing your creative. If you find a large portion on one domain, it may justify segmenting them and developing a separate creative optimized specifically for that domain.

Some email platforms will give you a quick graphic breakdown. If not, you can always do a sort in Excel and manually determine your ratios.

Below are breakdowns from 3 different clients I work with

Here we see some differing stats. In the 1st and 3rd example, Yahoo represents 5.6% at max, while the 2nd client has over 25% of subscribers with Yahoo addresses. We can also see that in the 3rd example at least 22% is represented by education or government addresses.

Looking at these three, I was surprised at the low amount of gmail addresses. We see 9.3% in the 2nd example, but none in the 1st and 3rd!

Takeaways

1. Every list will be different and it’s helpful to know how YOUR list breaks down

2. Knowing this breakdown will aid in testing your email creative on different domains. You should be testing on more than your breakdown, but this can provide priority.

3. If you find a large portion on one domain (25%+), it may justify putting resources into segmenting those users and providing creative optimized specifically for that domain. If you’re list is very small, this will be overkill.

4. Also consider segmenting by domain and testing deliverability. (Note – some email platforms will do this automatically).

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or inputs? Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Leave your comment »

Posted in B2B, B2C, Design, Email Marketing Strategy, Metrics, Segmentation

Email Testing Equilibrium

July 7th, 2009

We talk a lot about the great benefits of implementing testing strategies with our email efforts. I’ve made multiple references in various posts, and so far have had two dedicated posts on the topic: A/B Subject Line Testing and Email Marketing Testing . Marketers (not just email) LOVE testing. Combine with some juicy analytics and we’re entertained for a long time.

Nothing has changed with the fact that testing should be implemented and will inevitably improve your email marketing efforts. I do feel, however, that there can be a risk of over-testing, or ‘testing burnout,’ if you will. This mostly comes down to available resources a company has and the expected return on marginal testing programs. If we put 10X more resources into testing and only realize an x% increase in sales, our testing program could be producing negative returns.

This has a more costly effect on smaller companies, as the scale of return is much smaller. [The marginal return from an x% increase in open or click rate is much larger for a big company with a list size of 5,000,000 vs. a small company with a list size of 5,000.]

For that small company, testing is indeed important. They need to make improvements to their email marketing efforts and increase sales just like every other company. But at some point a negative return is realized.

Example

Let’s say a small e-commerce site selling backpacks has a list size of 15,000. Their monthly promotional email brings in $1,350 on average. [25% open, 12% click, 5% conversion, $60 average order]
This company creates a testing plan that will require an additional 3 hours per month of company resources.
After the test, they increase their metrics to: [28% open, 15% click, 5% conversion, $60 average order]. In this case we see a $540 increase in revenue. Perhaps a decent result for the small e-tailer. Their gross testing return was $180/hour.
Now let’s say they create a testing plan that is more robust and requires an additional 30 hours of company resources each month. (compared to no testing)
After the new testing program, they increase their metrics to: [30% open, 19% click, 6% conversion, $62 average order]. In this case we see an $1,830 increase in revenue. Their gross testing return was $61/hour. Depending on their margins and several other unknown factors, this may or may not be a profitable scenario

These same metrics with a big competitor would have a much different result. e.g. If another company had a list size of 750,000, their marginal return on the last scenario would be $91,530 with a $3,051/hour testing return. Probably quite favorable.

So where do you find that testing equilibrium? It comes down to the unique situation of each business. Regardless of size, start small with your testing program and work up from there. Pay close attention not only to the increased results of your tests, but the amount of resources that go into your various testing programs. Time for different content, designers, approval, segmentation, deployment, review & analysis etc, can add up when you are introducing complex testing strategies.

In the end, you should test to see what testing portfolio is optimal for your email efforts.

Cheers,

Forest Bronzan

Questions or thoughts? Leave a comment or feel free to shoot me an email

Leave your comment »

Posted in B2B, B2C, Email Marketing Strategy, Email ROI, Metrics

Page 1 of 712 3 4 5 »...Last »