Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Thinking Outside the In-Box

Thank you Karen Klein for the great article in Business Week today.

Nice to have a national pub really try and understand our industry and work to educate their readers on the reality of good email marketing and focus on best practices.  Check it out.

Thanks again to Morgan Stewart for another great & insightful study.

Video of me talking about Blogging

I'm doing some experimenting with video.   Here is a test.  Don't flame me on the quality, just the content please:

Thought's on Marketing Math From Offermatica

The following comment was posted on Stephen Bakers blog:

....More feedback from the math cover. One provocative point is that companies can buy the most sophisticated analytics systems on earth. But they're worth little if their workers can't understand them. This from Matthew Roche, CEO of Offermatica, a company that tests companies' online efforts.

One of the best comments I heard recently about Math in Marketing is from another client who said that he knew he needed to use advanced statistics, but victory was not just making advanced statistics and optimization possible for a quant, but to make it accessible to the type of person he can afford to hire.

Wall Street can afford one or two quants (who are, as you know, impossible to find). Marketing lives on the back of 26 year olds making much, much less.

Of course, this means there's a giant market opportunity for companies who build sophisticated math tools for unschooled users. That's what Google has accomplished in a big way.

Chris' comment:  The same is true for ExactTarget and lot's of other Marketing Software tools.  The more that we can put quant analysis along with easy to execute tools...the more we can flatten the world of great marketing.   

Seth's take on too much noise

Seth had a post today about too much noise in blogs & RSS fatigue.   He's right.   Talk less, make your words mean something.   People talk about one medium vs. another in terms of effectiveness when the truth is they are all abused.

It's like we see an opening and we rush to the gap before it closes.  The result is chaos and everyone winds up trampled.

Bigger isn't always better in e-mail marketing

Hats Off to Morgan Stewart for his latest study.  Morgan continues to knock the cover off the ball when it comes to fully understanding what really drives success in email marketing.

The focus here is something that should seem so obvious...but is practiced so little:  The better your targeting, the better your email preforms.....

...The bigger the e-mail list, the lower the open and click-through rates, says a new study from e-mail service provider ExactTarget.

The 2005 study of more than 4,000 organizations? 230,000 e-mail campaigns and 2.7 billion e-mail messages reports that lists with 100,000 or more names experienced an average open rate of 18.2% and click-though of 3.6%, while those of 101-1000 names had an open rate of 42.1% and click-through rate of 6.8%. For lists of 1,001 to 10,000, the rates were 33.2% and 5.1%; for 10,001 to 100,000, the rates were 25.8% and 4.5%.

"This phenomenon is one of the strongest cases for audience segmentation," says Morgan Stewart, director of strategic services at ExactTarget and author of the study. "The smaller the targeted audience, the better organizations can aim their message directly to their subscribers in their e-mail communications."

The ExactTarget 2005 Response Rate Study summarizes overall open, click-through and unsubscribe rates and provides additional analyses based on day of week for sending email while examining list size and target audience.  The study will be available by going here...

Math, Marketing and “Very Old Thinking”

"Al DiGuido, president of e-mail service provider Epsilon Interactive said Baggot's idea was an example of "very old thinking" and that software can't replace expertise when it comes to interpreting raw data...."

Uhh…ever hear of Google?

The quote he was responding to came from Magilla Marketing:  "Marketing is becoming so much more of an analytical game as opposed to an intuitive game;  said Baggott." “The arithmetic is going to tell me what to do. “

Now perhaps I could have said that arithmetic is going to help me determine what to do, but the point is the same.  What software does best is help me determine strategy by interpreting data.   

So what got me hot on this today was a trip to my local barber shop.  (My barber runs a two chair operation and segments his customer database into 9 different categories for his email marketing efforts:  New customers, customers who have not been in 30 days, different emails on the second and third visit (he knows that by the third visit he’s got them)….customers who are breaking appointments or skipping them, confirmations, etc…..)

Anyway like all small town barbers he has a ton of old magazines.   Imagine my joy when I pick up the Business Week from January 23rd, 2006.   Cover Story?   

More Math Geeks are calling the shots in your business.   Why Math Will Rock Your World.

Excellent article by  Stephen Baker

You have to be a subscriber, but here are a few quotes:

“The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math.   (That’s software to you and me)

…..look at where the mathematicians are now. They're helping to map out  advertising camp aigns, they're changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they're enabling marketers to forge new one-on-one relationships with customers. The clearest example of math's disruptive power is in advertising. There Google and other search companies built on math are turning an industry that grew on ideas, hunches, and personal relationships into a series of calculations. They can pull it off because, quite simply, they know where their prospective customers are browsing, what they click on, and often, what they buy. Internet companies use this data not only to profile customers but also to pitch for more contracts. Some 18 months ago, 30 blue-chip companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Walt Disney Co. (DIS ), underwent a series of tests promoted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group. These studies crunched consumer data to measure the effectiveness of advertising in a host of media. The results came back in hard numbers. They indicated, for example, that Ford Motor Co. could have sold an additional $625 million worth of trucks if it had lifted its online ad budget from 2.5% to 6% of the total. Ford responded vigorously: Last August it announced plans to move up to 30% of its $1 billion ad budget into media targeted to individual customers, half of it through online advertising. Such moves are sure to generate even more data, giving greater clout to the numbers people.

Ok, I better not clip too much more…don’t want to violate copyright.   I did subscribe to Business Week today simply based on this thinking. 

My final point is this.   Intuition cannot be turned into software.  Data & Mathematics can be turned into software.  And because that software gets less expensive when delivered as a service (SaaS) and easier to use, all those great metrics and interpretations are now in the hands of a lot more marketers to use their own intuition ….and that’s the threat to the old line marketing services companies….Marketing Democracy.

Seth's talk at Google

I realize I'm probably a week late in posting this video, but if you have not seen Seth speak live, this is about as close as you can come. Key points that get me thinking: Being remarkable, and more importantly using your fanbase to spread the word about your company.

My favorite Seth-ism is the TV industrial complex :-)