Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Tracking Can't Live in a Vacuum

A lot of people ask about email tracking results.  We marketers measure success based on open rates & click-through.  Historically we have looked at these metrics over several similar emails to determine if we are getting better.  One of the greatest aspects of email marketing is the ability to accurately measure.

There is nothing wrong with this type of analytics.  The opportunity is to make it better though by combining your email data with other analytics to get a significantly more accurate view of what your subscribers are actually doing.

What's better?

1) An email that has 5 links clicked, or....

2) perhaps fewer click throughs,but the subscriber visits 5 pages in your site...or perhaps even converts!?

Of course the answer is obvious.  We don't send email to drive open rates and clicks, we send email to drive conversions.

David Daniels of Jupiter has a great article in ClickZ today discussing this and the trend of integration between Email and Web Analytics.  Of course ExactTarget integrates with everyone, but specifically we have integrations withWebTrends & on the client side with Coremetrics.

Please read read the article here.....

What does click fraud mean to Email Marketing?

I’ve got an unpopular belief that paid search has peaked.   Increasing competition for keywords is driving conversions down and acquisition costs up.    Add in click fraud and you can almost smell where this is heading.

Keyword buys over the past 4 years had a big role in building ExactTarget into the national leader we are now,   but paid search is now the fastest shrinking marketing budget item in our company.

We are all getting better at natural search, and that’s where people are more inclined to click anyway.

So what’s this mean for email?   Plenty.    Acquisition is the toughest thing in any business.   As bringing new customers in becomes even tougher a more intense light is being focused on the value of customer retention as well as the proper management of those ever-more-precious leads.

This trend continues to reinforce that data-driven email is the single most important tool in a marketers arsenal.

The Science of the “From” Side

Need scientific proof that ‘humanizing’ your email is better than institutionalizing? 

Would you believe that there are actually neurochemical corollaries to these phenomena according to James Bailey, an organizational behavioralist at GW University?

A study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics,  reports that recognition benefits go back to hunter gatherer societies of more than 10,000 years ago.  We are hardwired to pay attention to those that are familiar.   

Humans unconsciously feel that people we see  frequently are our friends (which explains celebrity endorsements).   

Kanazawa says: “It makes us more susceptible to product messages, because we’re designed to trust our friends.” 

Neuroscientists call this the “mere exposure effect” .  The more we see a face, the more we like it.  The more familiar we become with a person, the more we like them.

Does that translate into more successful email, or more importantly relationships?  You know my thoughts. 

Try it.

You can read more about this in an article by Thomas Mucha in this month’s Business 2.0

Lifetime Value Series, Part Five

Retention.  Before we talk about specific retention, we need to consider the goal of retention.   To make more money, to grow the company.

Is 100% desirable?  Probably not.   This is where it is so critical to know your customer margins.   Often it is the least profitable customers that perceive the least value from your offering.   As a result, you invest a disproportionate amount of time in trying to convince them to stay.  This of course increases your costs on these customers and decreases your margins.   Additionally, it’s probably diluting your focus on the most valuable customers.   Company’s often resort to special offers to convince them to stay…which often have to be offered to the good customers as well; adding no value to the relationship but hurting their profitability too.