Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Word of Mouth Marketing & Email

I just thought I would share this presentation I'll be giving June 21st at the Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in San Francisco.

I've only recently become a member over the past 6 months and am really impressed with the quality and the real world tactics.  One nice aspect of membership is that they sent me CD's of every presentation from every conference they have done.   Lots of volume, but absolutely a valuable crash course in specific tactics in the new world of Word of Mouth Marketing.

If you are thinking of registering for the conference you can get a $75.00 discount by using this discount code when you sign up:  weloveexacttarget

You can learn more about the Conference here....

Email Software Firm Scores Back-to-Back Wins

TechPoint Foundation Names ExactTarget Information Technology Company of the Year

Monday May 22, 7:01 am ET

INDIANAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2006--On-demand email software provider ExactTarget was honored with the 2006 Information Technology Company of the Year Award by TechPoint, the leading change agent for Indiana's technology industry. This marks the second consecutive year ExactTarget has captured this honor. Key considerations for the award are profitability, sustainability, impact on the industry and market, and accomplishments as an outstanding corporate citizen. In 2004, ExactTarget received TechPoint's Gazelle Award, which is given to the leading technology company in business less than three years from the initial commercialization of its principal products or services.

ExactTarget has earned the leadership position among other email service providers by delivering the features that marketers find important, such as ease of use, data-driven personalized emails, analytics integration and industry leading deliverability. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide rely on ExactTarget email software to strengthen their customer relationships. In 2005 alone, ExactTarget added more than 1,000 customers, including Delta Faucet, Gannett Company, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, and Icelandair.

"We are honored to be recognized by TechPoint for the third year in a row and thank them for their support of growing technology companies in Indiana," said Scott Dorsey, president of ExactTarget. "ExactTarget has experienced tremendous growth as organizations realize the benefits offered by our software as a service model. I am grateful to our employees who are completely dedicated to helping our customers deliver timely, relevant and personalized emails communications to their constituents."

Email Marketing in Japan

We had a couple of folks in Japan last week doing some implementation;  Asia is a market that really embraces the concepts of "one to one" and really leverages the relationship in their marketing.  I'll let Kelly tell you about the trip:

Bryan Wade and I went onsite to Tokyo April 13^th and 14^th for user training and international sending consultation. About 15 people participated in the day and a half training session. The language barrier was less of an issue than I was expecting and everyone seemed to catch on quickly. We covered basic core training, email encoding and international sending challenges. Everyone created and sent an email by the end of the training.

Special thanks to Marketing for customizing some ExactTarget gifts in Japanese that we gave all of the participants. (Scott – I have a sample for you.) We studied up on Japanese business etiquette but were surprised how Americanized they were. (i.e. we did not get any gifts and nobody bowed).

Joanna Ewer is off to the UK next week to train their EMEA team. And by the way, If you want to put your name in the hat for the next destination, let me know! It was a fabulous time. Enjoy the photos.

Thanks,  Kelly

Can I email to a list of my existing contacts?

As you can imagine, I get a lot of questions about Email Marketing Best Practices.   Although this one was simple, it seemed like a good idea to share the answer to a broader audience:

Hi Chris,

We have been given email addresses by our customers over the years.  Many of them didn’t fill out a written opt in form but just gave us the addresses over the phone.  Is it legal for us to send an email to all of these email addresses inviting them to see our new website?

Thanks,  President of a School Supply Company

Answer:

There is nothing illegal about what you are proposing.   I would test the message very carefully on small segments to get the desired result.   Is getting them to the site one time the ideal goal?  I doubt it.   

What you don’t have permission to do is add these people to a list and start blasting to them.

You can assume permission to ping them once…tell them why you are contacting them and where you got their email address (remind them of the previous relationship).  From there you goal has to be permission for a deeper relationship.   Perhaps a survey to learn more about them.  I’m sure you would market differently to a public school teacher vs. a parochial teacher.   Or a high school teacher to a pre-school teacher.  The goal is to turn this list of marginally valuable email addresses in to a hugely valued corporate asset.

You have one shot to get these people engaged…make the most of it.

ExactTarget Testing Goodmail

Cosmetics and Fragrance Retailer ULTA Teams with ExactTarget to Trial Goodmail's CertifiedEmail to Ensure Safe E-mail Delivery to Customers
Monday May 8, 5:00 am ET

INDIANAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2006--ExactTarget, a leading developer of on-demand email software solutions, announced that its customer, ULTA, will embark on an evaluation of Goodmail System's CertifiedEmail service to provide another layer of email trust and enhance email deliverability to its customers.  (read more)

Enterprise Email & Web 2.0

I'm a big fan of Don Hinchcliffe and the Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog.  One area that seems to be a concern for him is finding successful examples of Web 2.0 applications that are actually being used in the enterprise.

Don states the following as necessary for achieving success in the Enterprise environment:

"...Balancing true ease of use with rich capability does appear to be vital for maximizing and sustaining user adoption and even cutting support costs.  My experience tells me that enterprise software is often optimized for early adopters or getting through the acquisition evaluation process, and frequently focuses too little on the average user or the most common daily uses."

I would place ExactTarget as a solid contender for leadership in that category.   (find a Web 2.0 definition here..) 

Here is a short case/example of a financial institution using the ET's  Web 2.0 enterprise email system.

First Franklin enlisted ExactTarget’s enterprise email solution to enable their account executives at their 35 branches to send out personalized emails that maintain corporate brand integrity and are legally compliant.

With ExactTarget, First Franklin’s marketing department can quickly create email templates and content that are locked and published to the field.  The templates include areas that can be personalized by account executives, including the “from line.”  Before, if account executives wanted their emails personalized, it was very time consuming for the marketing department to modify and save each email as a graphic file. 

In addition, First Franklin is able to centrally track all emails and their performance, something they could not do previously.

Results: Better control and tracking of email messages.

Selecting ExactTarget for enterprise email management has been a winning choice for both First Franklin’s marketing department and its account executives.  Now corporate marketing can control information and track emails, and account executives are more willing to use the emails because they can personalize them.  Nearly all branches use email today.

“With ExactTarget, email has become our number one marketing tool,” says Stephen Corsi of First Franklin.  “We have gone from having no formal processes for compliance and tracking, to very formal.  Our response rates are 20 to 30 percent.  With direct mail, we were lucky to get a 5 percent response rate.”

In addition, Corsi says that some account executives with responsibility for many clients utilize ExactTarget as a means to keep their relationships going.  By easily personalizing emails to customers using dynamic content, account executives can maintain one-to-one relationships with little effort.

The ability for control & compliance from the top while pushing the application into the hands of the actual user is what makes this so cool.  The goal is to empower those closest to the customer to build better relationships while making sure that best practices and standards are adhered to.