I published a rather lengthy post on my personal blog yesterday that I thought would be appropriate to share here on the Thinking Inbox. The post is titled “Marketing 2.0: The Content Challenge,” and addresses the challenge that many organizations are facing in this shifting media landscape, specifically the need to consistently produce quality content in many different formats.

Much of the post was derived from an evolving presentation that I have been giving all year dubbed “From Inbox to iPod: Meshing Social Media into the Marketing Mix.”

Here is an excerpt from the post:

One of the key points that I make during the presentation is in regards to the concept of “Publishing is Marketing 2.0,” and I carry on the early mantra of “content is king,” no matter how many times we have heard it before, it has never been more relevant in its time than now. And it is this very point that presents one of the larger challenges for organizations to overcome, both now and into the future. That is one of the marketing department’s transformation into becoming a publishing organization.

You can read the full post by clicking here.

All too often, email is an afterthought. For many marketing departments, it is not included as a budgeted item and is frequently overshadowed by Search and Online Advertising. However, if fully integrated in your online marketing plan, email can deliver your highest ROI. Email can drive targeted and purposeful customers to your website, increasing your traffic and sales.

When you incorporate email into your online marketing, you must give it the same attention and respect that you give to the other components of your plan. Email can no longer be looked at as a last minute “blast” to try to increase sales, but as a planned communication that works in conjunction with Search and Online Advertising. When executed properly, email marketing can generate high open rates, strong click-through rates, and ultimately the conversions that you seek. Once you have you your overall marketing goals set, it is time to see where and when email fits into the picture. Then, set your marketing calendar and stick to it.

Your email marketing program may include several types of communications: newsletters, sales, and promotions. The focus of the newsletter is to build a relationship with your customer. It is paramount to remember that the newsletter should be focused on your client. If the content isn’t valuable to them, they will unsubscribe. A short introductory paragraph to each article should be featured with links to the remainder of the article on your website. The frequency of your newsletter will depend on the amount of relevant content that you have to offer your client base. While some companies may have enough content to send a weekly newsletter, many will only be able to send monthly or quarterly. Also, remember to design your newsletter to compliment your other communications and your website. Including navigation to your website from your newsletter will also help increase traffic. Connecting with your customers through a newsletter now will result in sales later.

Sales emails, also referred to as catalog emails, are basically the same as your print brochures or direct mail catalogs. They are used to sell products. It is not necessary to show all of your products in the sales email, but feature a few and include links to the areas of your website where you have items for sales. Be sure to include strong calls to action that will engage your customers and drive them to your site. Be creative. Instead of using a general “click here”, try using verbiage that will make them want to go to your website. For example, “See more colors” or “Want to find similar products?”

Promotional emails are generally used to advertise a special sale, one-time offer, coupon or event. These emails should be short, easy to scan and have one call to action that will take your customer directly to your website. While the purpose of these emails is the sell, it is important not to use them too often. If you send a coupon weekly or offer the same special over and over, your customers will not see any value in the email or the need to act immediately.

You will want to carefully plan the landing pages that your sales and promotional campaigns link to. If you send everyone to your home page and require them to look for the product you featured in your email, you will most likely lose them. The landing page should contain the exact information they were expecting and also have the same look and feel of the email that sent them there. Your customers should be able to take action with as few clicks as possible.

If you carefully add email into your marketing mix, engage your clients through a well-crafted newsletter, and make it easy for them to purchase through your emails, you will begin to reap the benfits of a well-executed email marketing program.

Last week, I blogged about how we set up our new subscription page on www.blueskyfactory.com.  This week, I’d like to go over how we set up our new welcome email.  Everything we did was set up using our Publicaster application, so Publicaster users should have no trouble mimicking what we did.

First, the nitty-gritty about how we set up this form and mailing list.  You’ll notice on our subscription page, we offer four different types of email publications - Factory Direct (our monthly e-newsletter), Blue Sky Factory Webinars, 52 Email Marketing Tips in 52 Weeks, and News & Press Releases.  The Publicaster opt-in form, however, only allows you to select one mailing list to have opt-ins added to.  To work around this, we created a master subscription list in our Publicaster account that this form was tied to.  We then set up each of the four publication types as database fields in our mailing list.  Anyone that checks off to subscribe to a particular publication on the form is given a value of “Yes” for that particular field in the master mailing list.

Since all the subscribers are in one master list and are categorized by a field within the mailing list, we’ll need to use a segmentation to launch an email campaign.  If, for example, we want to send an issue of Factory Direct, we’ll set up a segmentation that Includes Subscribers from the master subscription list and has the segmentation condition of “FactoryDirect” “Is Equal To” “Yes”.  This will pull all people from the master subscription list that checked off the box on the opt-in form to subscribe to Factory Direct.

Now, let’s talk about the welcome email.  We set up the opt-in form as a Notified Single Opt-in, which means all subscribers are sent an automatic welcome email.  It is a best practice to acknowledge and welcome your new subscribers within minutes of their subscription.  Your welcome email should be fairly simple.  It should (1) welcome your subscriber to your mailing list, (2) remind them again of the benefits of subscription, (3) outline the type(s) of emails they will receive and the frequency of each, (4) give them the option to change their subscription or opt-out completely, and finally (5) ask them to whitelist your email address to ensure proper delivery.  Check out our new welcome email here.  You’ll notice that all five of these points are covered.

Since we have four publication types, you’ll see that each is listed, along with a description of content and frequency.  Right under the description is a line that tells the recipient if they are currently subscribed to that publication or not.  Since the email types were all set up as database fields in the mailing list, this was really easy to do using a Publicaster snippet code.  As an example, in our Publicaster email, we included a line that read:

Subscribed? [~FactoryDirect~]

If the recipient was subscribed to the Factory Direct email, this would have read:

Subscribed? Yes

So that this line wasn’t left blank, we set up a default value so that it would read “No” if the recipient was not subscribed.  Right under the email descriptions, the recipient is invited to manage their account by visiting the subscriber preferences page.

And there you have it!  Now you have the tools to revamp your subscription process - all the way from your opt-in form and subscription page to the welcome email.  Please feel free to contact us or comment below if you have any feedback or questions.  If you are a current Publicaster user, please feel free to contact your Account Manager directly if you have any questions about setting up your own opt-in form or welcome email. 

Capturing customer intent can prove to be a difficult task if you do not use the right approach. I recently attended a webinar on this topic, hosted by Blue Sky Factory clients, Chris Brogan and John Stone of CrossTech Media and CrossTech Partners. Many of you may know Chris Brogan from his excellent blog, where he shares his insights as a social media expert. Chris joined John and covered how to approach this issue in “Capturing Customer Intent: Digital and Face to Face Channels.”

The purpose of the webinar was to explain how to capture customer intent from a company’s standpoint. These stages are attract, engage, transact, fulfill, support, and retain. All of the stages are equally important and Chris and John stressed the importance of communication in each stage. The key points I took away were:

• Consider content marketing and relationship marketing strategies right away.
• Build an audience intelligence solution.
• Listen across your touch points and across the web.
• Integrate your digital marketing and live event channels.

They also touched on social networking, blogging, and building strong relationships. It’s not easy to find a connected process to deal with all of these stages, but if you can get it right you have the opportunity to improve customer retention, create new opportunities, enhance service, and lower your costs.

 To view the recorded version of this webinar,  click here.

The industry sure has been atwitter lately with talk of the subscriber experience.  I recently blogged about one company that had impressed me with their subscription process.  Today, I’d like to start a two-part blog series about how you can improve your own process.  We’ll start with your opt-in page, and will continue with your welcome email next week.

Not to toot our own horn, but for both subjects, I’m going to refer to Blue Sky Factory’s new process.  We’ve just redesigned our website, and with that came an improved subscription process.  The opt-in form and welcome email were both set up through Publicaster, so Publicaster users will be able to mimic our process very easily.  You can check out our new subscription form here.  Notice that we’ve kept it simple, only requiring First Name, Last Name and Email.  Also, we’ve given four different email types in the subscription offerings, which cover the various content options available to subscribers.

To give your own opt-in page a revamp, you’ll first need to create a new opt-in form.  We’ve created a “how to” document for the Publicaster opt-in form builder.  This feature is found under the Account Manager section in Publicaster and is a simple three-step process.  The “how to” document will lead you through these three steps.  Once complete, Publicaster will give you HTML code for your new opt-in form, which you can simply paste onto your subscription page within your website.  Then, anyone that subscribes to your emails via this form will be automatically added to your specified mailing list within your Publicaster account.  How easy is that?!?  If you need help with the opt-in form builder, email us.

While integral, the form itself is just one part of the subscription page.  You’ll also need to include information about your emails and process on this page and throughout your site.  Here’s a list of best practices you should follow when creating your new subscription page:

• Put the form or a link to the form on every page of your website for maximum email capture.  Notice we have a link to our subscription page in the upper right-hand corner of every page throughout our website.

• Keep the form short and sweet.  Only ask for the information that you will really use in your email program.  Think of what information you might use later down the line to segment with.  Some choose to only ask for basics up front (email, first name, last name, zip), and then follow up later with an email asking for more information.  You can test different form lengths, but general opinion is to keep the initial form short and easy so you don’t get drop-offs.

• On the opt-in page, tell the subscriber what they can expect from your emails.  Include a content summary, promises of special offers and the frequency they can expect.  Setting expectations upfront and sticking to those will help keep your subscribers happy.  Also tell them the benefits of signing up for the email program … think “What’s in it for me (the subscriber)?”  You may also want to include a screenshot of a sample email so subscribers will know what to expect.  Check out the “What am I signing up for?” section to the left of our subscription form.  Subscribers can click on any of the four email screenshots to get an overview of the email content and frequency.

• When building the opt-in form in Publicaster, be sure to choose the Email Validation check so that the subscriber must enter an email address in the name@domain.com format.  This will prevent people from making a mistake or entering nonsense just to gain access to a sweepstakes, free whitepaper, etc.

• Set up your opt-in form to be a Notified opt-in form, whereby the subscriber will receive an automatic welcome email.  (This can also be set up through a Publicaster auto-response campaign, which is what we did.  More on this next week.)  This will also help to validate the email address, and will make your subscribers feel “welcomed” by your company.  In the welcome email, give them instructions on whitelisting your email address.  Feel free to link to our how-to whitelist page that we created for our clients to use. 

This should get you started on building your new opt-in form.  As always, feel free to contact us if you need help with anything.  Next week, we’ll go over the welcome email, and I’ll dive into the specifics of how we set ours up.  Check out the image to the right for a preview of our new welcome email.

We have written a lot recently on the importance of giving subscribers the option to update their preferences and settings for emails.  Email users are savvy and they want the ability to control what they receive and when.  Many ESPs give emailers the option to set up a Subscriber Preferences center for their recipients, and that feature should be, and often is, utilized immediately.

So because of this, I’ve been shocked to find that recently my preferences have gone unnoticed by several companies that send me email.  There is a particular retailer who sends emails every day.  While I do enjoy hearing about their sales, the frequency is too high for me.  Rather than unsubscribe, I chose to receive one email per week on their Subscriber Preferences center.  I was thrilled to learn that I could still get their emails, but that they wouldn’t be clogging my inbox all week. 

Unfortunately after making this change, they have continued to send emails to my address almost every day.  In fact, this week I received an email from them 4 out of 5 days.  This obvious oversight is especially troubling since they took the time to ask me what I preferred, but then chose not to use that information.

It sounds like a simple rule but it’s a detail that can easily be overlooked: if you ask subscribers what they want, you must deliver on that promise.  If I weren’t such a sucker for email, I would have opted out from their emails long ago.  Most subscribers will take that route rather than put up with something they don’t want.  If you value your subscribers, take the time to ask, listen, and then make good on your promise. 

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the subscriber experience and what a poor one it is.  A recent study by Return Path showed that 60% of the companies surveyed did not send a welcome email to new subscribers.  While 88% of those that did send a welcome email sent it within 24 hours of the subscription, this still isn’t good enough in these days of instant gratification and messaging.

With all this bad news circulating the industry, I wanted to showcase a company that got it right.  I recently signed up to receive emails from Thrillist, a company that promises daily emails about special events or promotions going on in your city of choice.  The emails are quirky, fun and relevant to me as I learn about city life in my new home. 

First of all, let me praise their subscription process.  Right in the middle of their homepage, they have a “Join Up” form, which asks only for your email address.  This form is repeated across several other pages in their site.  Once you’ve entered your email address, you’re taken to another page where you can enter additional information.  All this information is optional, and this is clearly stated.  I love that you are given the option to choose your “Email Type” (either HTML or Text).  Also on this page you can choose which other city edition(s), if any, you’d like to subscribe to.

What they could have done better:  I would have liked to see a sample of their emails, so I would know what to look out for in my Inbox.  In addition, they could have taken this opportunity to tell me what email address I should whitelist to ensure delivery.  Also, I will point out now that some of their email content is a little racy.  While this seems to work for their target audience, a warning may have been nice.  Before going this route for your own emails, make sure it works for your own target audience.

I signed up to receive the daily emails on a Sunday night.  Within minutes, I had a welcome email in my Inbox.  The email was casual and fun, thus setting the mood for future emails.  The email told me what kind of emails to expect and how often.  It also gave me lots of good information, like the email address to add to my Safe Sender List and several links, including those to their Privacy Policy, Subscriber Preferences and Opt-out pages.  The image-to-text ratio was good, including only a simple logo at the top of the email.  This ensured that the email was branded appropriately but also that the message got across to readers without relying on images.

Starting the next day, I fell right into rotation, receiving a funny and informative email every day.  Then, after about 10 days of receiving emails, came something surprising … a subscriber survey!  These people are on the ball!  Again, the email was fun, simple and intriguing.  Sending it to me so early in the game ensured that I was still engaged in their email campaigns and willing to comment.  The witty copy and funny images made me want to click through to the survey.  And in case I needed an extra push, an alcohol-related contest was introduced for those that completed the survey.  Again, this works for their target audience, but double check your readership before using this in your own emails.

What they could have done better:  The survey itself was way too long.  Four pages!  When surveying subscribers, remember to keep it short and sweet, and only ask for the information you really need.

As the title states, I’m absolutely “thrilled” by Thrillist, both from an email marketer and a consumer perspective.  In a short amount of time, they’ve managed to capture my interest to the point where I’m looking forward to their email every day.  How many emails can you say that about?

Have you ever wondered why people are opting out of your emails? Don’t be afraid to ask! You could learn some very valuable information from sending a simple survey to your unsubscribers.

This information could help you improve your email program and retain more subscribers in the future. To learn how to stop beating yourself up about your opt-out rate and use the unsubscribers as a learning tool, read our latest article from our monthly newsletter, Factory Direct.

Segmentation and personalization have become a way of life for the savvy email marketer.  Many of us personalize emails with names, addresses, and customer IDs.  We often segment based on geographic location, email type preference, and even open/click rates.  But there is one type of segmentation that has been seriously under-utilized: segmentations based on website click traffic.

Campaigns that target based on website user click-stream data generate conversion rates that outperform untargeted broadcast campaigns by nearly 4 to 1, according to Jupiter Research.  Most (if not all) Internet retailers track click data on their websites, however despite having this extremely valuable data in-hand, many retailers still do not use email segmentations to target website visitors. 

I am on the email list for a particular online retailer and I happened to be browsing their site the other day.  The very next day I received an email with the subject line “Where did you go? Come on back!”  The content of the email said that they noticed that I had visited their site but left before making a purchase, so as an incentive to do so they offered me free shipping.  Simple, personal, and enticing.  Check out part of the email in the image on the right.

With all of this data at our fingertips, it is truly a waste to not take advantage.   If you know your subscribers are browsing your site, reach out to them with email.  If possible, offer them an incentive to return.  It can really mean the difference between casual browsing and conversions!

Proceed with caution. Having worked with databases since 1990, I know the risks and the rewards associated with using an append file. Should you want to institute this approach to increase your email list, make sure to follow some simple but extremely valuable guidelines.

Keep the append list separate from your house list until it is thoroughly cleansed and tested. Research the vendor you will use to do the append for you to find out how do they obtain their data, how do they perform a match, how often they update their files, and how do they handle bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints. Also, make sure you only send active customers to the vendor for append purposes.

Spencer Kollas has written a very extensive and informative article on this subject, Use Caution When Adding to Your List. In addition to list appends he also details the risks and rewards of email list rental.

Keep in mind the quality of your list is very important to your brand. In trying to increase the quantity of your list you can lose quality if you are not careful.