WinM@il-WinBlogger

Best Practices - Inbox Management

My Inbox is my best friend and my worst enemy all in the same.  I click to recieve emails with the anticipation of a child at Christmas, always expecting that new inquiry or happy customer or friendly invitation.  At the same time, it often feels like a spring rain that never stops, like the summer of 1993 in Iowa or the winter of 2008.

What is great is knowing I have a system for managing all of the messages. 

And my system has a lot in common with the manamgent strategy posted at the EEC recently.  For tips on how to better manage large quantities of email in your inbox, visit this list of "Inbox Managment Tips"
http://www.emailexperience.org/resources/inbox-management-tips/

Best Practices - Good Business

I am impressed with the Hilton Corporation.  We are regulars at the Homewood Suites in Chicago and ever since our first stay, I have been an subscriber to the Hilton's email newsletter. What the Hilton does right is customer service, and their style of customer service is no longer surprising - for me it is the standard and the norm.

Of course, if I go online and make a reservation, I get an email receipt.  What's more, if I call in a reservation by phone, I also get an email receipt. 

In the receipt, I find details about the hotel location with a link to a map, as well as the weather and local events.

Their newsletter is published in very digestible size, with manageable frequency.

The hotel industry has other customer service queens - I liked something that the Minneapolis Radisson did for me back in February.  My reservation had been made 6 weeks prior to that visit, and the week before our stay the Radisson emailed me a reminder of my reservation.  That was handy to have, because once again it had the weather report - perfect for our ski trip and no icy roads!

These hotel chains are doing it right with email and customer service.  Take a lesson!

Best Practices - Email Marketing Goals

Email is the perfect way to announce upcoming events and invite our customers to visit and try out our new wines,"- Kristin McClarnon, WinM@il Customer, Summerset Winery

What's the goal of your campaign?  Did you make more money than you invested in your marketing efforts? Did you set and meet your marketing goals? How do you plan to calculate this relationship in 2008?  I am constantly surprised at how often this concept is left in the dust as businesses rush forward with an email, or even an email campaign.

Reports show that email marketing, when done correctly, returns more dollars o n your investment than any other marketing strategy. Results from email marketing are simple to measure.

And remember that the best way to measure results is to track them back to the goals of your email campaign.  What are your marketing goals?  Below are some sample email marketing goals derived from WinM@il customers in 2007:

Goal of Campaign: Raise awareness, develop sense of community, fill and retain properties
Goal of Campaign: Increase web traffic, increase visits to booths at trade shows
Goal of Campaign: Increase registrations of clinics and camps
Goal of Campaign: Increase sales
Goal of Campaign: Increased member retention, increase attendance
Goal of Campaign: Develop loyalty, bring in customers

Best Practices - Worst Practices

Here are ten dead giveaways that tell me a company needs help with their email campaign:

1. I sign up for their newsletter at their web site and nothing happens - ever.
2. I unsubscribe from a regularly scheduled email news publication but I continue to get their news.
3. The email has no automatic unsubscribe option.
4. The same email newsletter arrives to my inbox three or four times.
5. The email "design" consists of nothing but verious fonts in various sizes and colors.
6. The news I receive is redundant, irrelevant, or worse - unsolicited.
7. The most imporant information in the email is at the bottom.
8. The email comes from an unrelated domain.
9. I check the email from my phone and all I see are words like "Mark for Download."
10. The email lacks contact info or physical address.

Any other worst practices?  Sign in and post your's here!

Best Practices - Above the Fold

Recently a customer asked what "above the fold" meant and why it mattered.

Originally the phrase related to newspapers and it meant the printed material on the top of the page before the paper folds in half.

For email marketers, the same phrase means within the first viewable screen of an email, before any scrolling.  It matters because the content in the email "above the fold" is more likely to be viewed than anything below the scroll.  A few points to consider:

1. A good percentage of people view their emails in a "Preview Pane" (the top 1 1/2 inches of the email), so an ideal design would have the most important information right up top.
2. Often readers are not willing to take time to scroll down in an email.  To avoid having the message lost, an effective email design would have the bulk of the entire contents within one screen, above the fold.
3. For more details, encourage readers to click a link to a web site or an online brochure.  This enables tracking of that activity, which develops a better report on the effectiveness of the message.

Best Practices - List Building

Regarding "opt-in" email list purchasing or list rental, I most often advise otherwise.  What I have read is that when you rent a list from a list vendor, they do the delivery themselves, and the only email addresses you receive are those of the recipients who have opened the mail or clicked on your link.  Therefore, often the return is small and not worth the expense.  When you purchase a list, that means you would be sending from your own email domain (@yourcompany.com) and sending to an unknown list always results in high bounce rates - and often results in high complaint or unsubscribe rates, both of which can cause problems for future deliveries from your domain.

What I like is the idea of partnering with organizations which are willing to do cross-marketing.  For example, if there is a local department store near your company's restaurant & bar, and that store already has an email loyalty program, investigate the possiblity of putting a link to your web site in their next email promo – make sure then that the landing page at your web site has an email sign-up area.

Or create a mail postcard campaign to a certain geography which includes a pitch for recipients to go online and sign up for your news, perhaps in exchange for an immediate special offer.  For example, a postcard that says – visit YourCompany.com today to receive a 2-for-1 dinner coupon…

Integrate the list-building process into all marketing and sales functions.  This is the best way to grow an inhouse email list.

Best Practices - Permission & Perserverence

Communication professionals using emial to build and retain customer relationships are challenged to gain permission in order to email. 

But the challenge doesn't stop once permission is obtained.  A relationship is built on meaningful two-way messaging, perserverance, and promises kept.

So many times I have signed up for email at a web site and not received any confirmation and not received any emails.  In this case, if I do some day receive an email from  one of these resources, I will have forgotten I signed up for the email, and I'll probably delete it thinking it was unwanted/unsolicited spam.

The point is, as useful as email is at building relationships, it is a competitive and fragile relationship that can crumble without attention, persistance, and the fulfillment of promises. 

If you are collecting addresses at your web site, be sure not to let that relationship die on the line. 

Plan ahead, get permission and then pursue a closer connection. 

Best Practices - Practice v Profit

There is an email marketing debate out there today, and the question seems to be based in the argument of best practice vs. most profit.  (See http://www.clickz.com/3626503 and then read http://blog.emailexperience.org/)

Email marketing has a growing list of industry leaders who participate in the ongoing discussion and promotion of best practices in email marketing.  This seems to be in response to two things:

1. The need for standards and a more common set of measurements to determine value and ROI
2. The need to stop abuse of email

Meanwhile, email marketing also has an eager group of leaders who focus on improving profits by integrating this strategy into their marketing mix.  This seems to be in response to two things:

1. The need to increase profits and grow business
2. The need to report positive ROI and meet departmental goals

These two groups are not mutually exclusive.  What's important is knowing how to maintain a positive position in business, both in terms of adhering to and benefiting from industry standards and in terms of turning a profit.

Email marketing pioneer Al DiGuido says that best practices in email marketing do matter (Clickz article Putting the Service in E-mail Service Provider):

"Don't expect an ESP to divulge proprietary information about an individual company's performance or strategy, but do expect the aggregate lessons from assembling best-practice information."

Here, DiGuido points out that marketing professionals who hire an Email Service Provider need to pursue aggressive Q&A.  Adoption of an ESP should depend on how well it can help your business meet financial goals.  The vendor must display a combination of knowledge of best practices and superior functionality of the technology they are selling.

The importance of best practices in email marketing brings us to another point.  In today's email news from eROI, read about a study that points out the descrepency between professionals who preach "best practices" and those who just preach them. 

"Email deliverability and rendering has been a hot topic for a long time, but how important is it to marketers? There is a vast difference between what they say and what they do." 

The eROI study indicates that the two most important elements of an email campaign's success are 1) content and 2) deliverability.  When success in terms of dollars is based on ideas like content and deliverability, it is no wonder they are hot topics often discussed at roundtables and seminars. 

What is interesting is that almost half of the marketers surveyed are not adjusting their email design to the diverse demands of various email applications like the new Outlook 2007.  If deliverability is key, and success is measured on real results from opened and viewed emails, then it would be worth while to pay attention to best practices in HTML rendering.

It's all connected.  Email best practices and increasing ROI on email campaigns are not mutually exclusive. 

What's more, best practices today are different than they were even a year ago, so one global online discussion in the summer of 2007 is not enough.  It is too much to assume that what works today will work tomorrow.  The discussion needs to continue, needs foundation in statistics, and needs proponents.  Organizations like the DMA's eec are filling that bill.

Best Practices - Benchmarks for Success

Measuring Success by "Emails Opened"

1. "Opened" only happens when an email application displays the pictures within an email. When a subscriber reads your email with the images "blocked, or "images off," this is not recorded as "opened."  *blocked images: when an email application is set to disallow automatic appearance of all images within the emails received.
2. 59% of online customers routinely block images. – MarketingSherpa (2007) 
3. This means that whatever number of emails are showing up as "opened," there may be half as many more than that who have read the message.
4. Try measuring "emails opened" over time, set a goal to increase the average number.

Expectations for an email campaign should be related to business goals. Just like the sales rep, these goals should be tangible. For example, do a short survey to collect feedback on how well customers like your newsletters. Query conference attendees to learn how many are there as a result of the email announcement. Check sales data to determine the relationship between actual sales and your email campaign. Ask the receptionist how many calls came in the afternoon of an email delivery.

Email Best Practices - Formal vs Informal

On a formality continuum, I believe email falls into place in the middle.  This is where it truly has longevity:

Informal........... Formal..........Most Formal
     |                        |                        |
texting                email                snail mail
cell phone           Internet            postal service

In business, email has a long life ahead as a tool for customer service, customer/member retention, and targeted, anticipated sales.  Effective business email is branded, represents high standards, and targets quality over quantity.  Engage, request and fulfill.