Getting the Click: How to Deliver Click-Worthy Content

Getting the Click
Delivering Click-Worthy Content in Email Marketing

Jonathan Gesinger • jonathan@myemma.com • @J_Gesinger
Rachel Farris • rachel@petrelocation.com • @MeanRachel

visit us online: www.myemma.com • @emmaemail • facebook.com/emmaemail •

Friday, October 21, 2011

Hi.

Why Email?
I hear twitter and facebook killed it.


Why email is still relevant.


The topic has moved on from email dying in 2009, because it’s now 2011 and we’re all checking our inboxes still
regularly, to facebook killing twitter, google + killing facebook, and even the babyboomers get their chance to
add to the bloodbath and do some social media slaughtering of their own.


To be an effective marketer, you have to use all of your channels in unison. Email is still part of the mix:

- DMA rates it as the highest ROI performer, with a measurable $43 : $1 spent ROI in it’s 2011 report.

- Email still ranks high in the mix of channel commitment. In a September 2011 survey of marketers done by the
Association of National Advertisers, email falls in line behind search, and before web, social, and mobile.

- Nielsen reports in a 2010 study that as social consumption increases, so does email consumption, to the point
where the highest responders noted an average of 180 min in each channel per day. And as of note, as
consumption in social media goes down or up, email consumption follows.

Design friendly


It is a crowded space, and all of those channels are ﬁghting for your eyeball time.

Let’s set the table for what email *is* great at...


Vs. social or other forms of mass marketing, it’s a 1:1 channel that is still very design and brand friendly. Rich
graphics, detailed branding, and consistency with your other forms of marketing are all easy to implement in
email.

Segmentable



Segment by:
Type of contact: Prospects or Customers
Types of customers (VIP for example...)
Demographics (such as in the example)
Geography
Purchase history
Which of your products are portions of your list interested in, speciﬁcally?

Or drill down even farther and segment by activity with your emails.
Have they opened in the past? clicked? deadbeats you need to re-engage?

Targeted



At it’s highest level you may send a portion of your list a very unique offer only for them based on data you’ve
collected about that speciﬁc audience member.

Or more simply, you may welcome all of your subscribers to your list for the ﬁrst time, and give them insight as to
what they can expect to receive from you. Or maybe a birthday or customer anniversary note in the inbox.

Social
(Really?)



Not just twitter and fb are social. Great example of using email to deliver an audience member to engage
customers with the rest of your brand followers. The email may be a 1:1 engagement in your inbox, but the
outcome of the click can deliver a very social interaction.

Story: Crate & Barrel post-purchase email asking a recent purchaser to visit a review sight and give feedback.
Delivery by click.

Measurable



It’s a marketing channel that you can measure - opens, clicks, and other analytics. So you’ll know what’s working,
what’s not, and what you can change to get the results you want.

And, most of the data is readily available. It’s not something that you need advanced programming or personnel
to decipher. It’s at your ﬁngertips in any reputable ESP.

v


When you pair all of these steps in email marketing together it can create timely offers with a high chance for
response (clicks) from your brand fans.

Threadless email:
Emailing to a speciﬁc group, going after a repeat purchase (targeted).
Sent to customers who previously purchased and it dropped them into a speciﬁc (action hero) category
(segmented).
The design and layout creatively features the products (branded/great design).
Smartly works in a facebook contest or a youtube interview with a cult hero (social).

Getting The Click:
---------
1 - Segmentation


Let’s drill in a little deeper and focus on 5 ways to get to that click.

All of the 5 takeaways are strategies that each of you could start to implement in your own campaigns at some
level.

Segmentation. As marketers we’ve got to get beyond the dreaded “email blast” mentality.

You have different types of customers, who purchase for different reasons and in different patterns. Can’t send
them all the same message and expect a response.


Start at the beginning...

Ask for preferences on a sign up form
Use a survey
Pull data from your CRM and incorporate that information and data into your audience section of your email
account.

Segment your list based on that info, and then send accordingly. Commit to it. Set this up so it’s ongoing and you
can continue to segment in your efforts. (ie set up that survey annually, or that data import regularly)


If this is starting to feel to “big business with big marketing department” consider Mountaineers Books.

Mountaineers Books has an overall list of just under 4,000 and a marketing department of a couple people. But
they’ve committed to email.

12 different groups to segment their audience, with 30 additionally segmented lists by activity or preference
inside of that, plus 127 automated emails that go out based on clicks, new subscribers or other activities.

In the sample above, this particular email went out to about 30 customers that speciﬁcally responded to a
previous offer on urban farming, and they were able to generate a 93% click through rate. Awesome results.


Transition Rachel in for a case study of Pet Relocation’s use of segmenting and automated triggers that brought a
big email success.

In our case, we realized we had a certain segment of potential customers who would balk at the initial idea of hiring a service or paying over a thousand dollars to move
their pets. However oftentimes when the customer would start the process of moving a pet on their own and ﬁnd that it was more difficult than they initially anticipated. We
decided to segment our audience by creating two different levels of service for them - PetRelocation and MyPetRelocation. Whereas PetRelocation.com was our door-to-
door service for moving pets, MyPetRelocation is be a free downloadable ebook for the type of customer who might want to move their pet on their own initially.

Home page showing the slider that allows people to choose their level of service. Those who select “Free” go into
a certain trigger system.


Screen shot of the landing page people who select they want a free service go to.

The challenge when we launched MyPetRelocation became how to engage these potential customers who might start off wanting to move
their pet on their own but eventually would need our help. So we set up separate weekly and monthly email triggers that would be sent
out to anyone who downloaded our ebook.

v

And that’s what brings us to Mr. Brown.

Mr. Brown has two Italian Mastiffs. Those are big dogs.

v

Moving big dogs is never easy and in Mr. Brown’s case, he was moving from Ft. Lauderdale, FL to London, England. So Mr. Brown came
across our MyPetRelocation eBook and downloaded it.

v

He received a series of trigger emails from Emma.

He opened both of the MyPetRelocation emails and then in August he opened our monthly PetRelocation postcard.

He clicked on one of our stories about moving again with pets. He realized this was too much to undertake on his own, going the
MyPetRelocation route and needed help. 125lb Italian Mastiffs need things like custom crates, and other stuff.

He converted himself to a 1:1 conversation with a sales person vs. handing it on his own.

He submitted a lead, which put him in a queue requesting our door-to-door services.

The typical sales cycle for a door-to-door project is 45 days. Lots of info to digest. Lots of conversations and follow up. But Mr. Brown
did all of that in advance on the MyPetRelocation series of nurturing emails. After the initial door-to-door inquiry form was submitted he
closed 8 days later. 37 days faster than a typical lead.

End result: $20,715 contract to move his two dogs, door-to-door.

Getting The Click:
---------
2 - Be Social


Next up is Acting Social in Email. We’ll go two ways with this. First...

v


Provide your content across channels. When you create and send a campaign, make it available on your social
channels.

Post campaigns to twitter and fb by a link. It is *always* ok to repurpose content. We’re not all in every channel,
every day. If it’s great content your audience won’t mind seeing it again and passing over it. May even read it
again for more details.

An ESP did a study of a month’s worth of emails sent and there was a 55% increase in clicks when they were made
available in multiple channels.

v


Next, within emails themselves: a couple often overlooked, simple steps.

- Incorporate the brevity of social media into your campaigns when appropriate. People are getting used to
shorter bursts of info vs. long email newsletters. (again, good spot to segment instead of put it all in one giant
email to everyone)
- Have fun with it (example above)
- Clicks can also be a click on the ‘reply’ button. If you’re sending from an “info@” email address, how often do
you check that inbox? Maybe even go so far as to say “hey, hit reply and email us back if you want” when it’s
appropriate, or send from a personal email address if it’s appropriate.


When you can do so, incorporate video in your emails which will deliver audiences to a more social channel.

Study: VOX Marketing recently posted a Forrester research study of over 250 marketers that incorporated video
into their emails and had between a 2 - 3x lift in click through rates on video links over non video links.

Getting The Click:
---------
3 - Automation


Next up is Automating your campaigns.

Most ESPs are able to automate campaigns now (yours should) some of them might call them something different,
like “triggers”.

What you’re after is a way to send a series or a single campaign out based on an activity (click), a date, data info
that you have about your audience members, or as advanced as automating a series of emails as a more complex
sales nurturing email campaign.


Even the most simple automated emails can bring click rates up.

Welcoming someone immediately after they join your list ups your engagement with them. The ﬁrst 60 days after
someone joins your list are most important. Adding great content about what they can expect to receive from you,
or an offer to engage right away, is also strong.


Same thing with ongoing emails that have a personal touch - automated birthday emails (with an offer) or
customer anniversary emails.

Make your audience feel more loyal based on you reaching out to them, unprompted, on a special occasion.


RACHEL : Emma Case Study

Step 1: Insight
Based on historical data, Emma learned that leads are 2x as likely to convert into accounts if they get a personal response
within 15 minutes of their ﬁrst inquiry, and 3x as likely if the connection with a lead is made within 5 minutes of their inquiry.
The only challenge was, Emmaʼs sales staff was not only answering an initial inquiry after a form such as this example was
ﬁlled out online, they were also doing all of the follow up and nurturing calls / emails manually after that initial sales
conversation. Thatʼs a ton of email and phone work and it kept the sales team from hitting that 15 min or less, or 5 min or less,
goal.


Goal
To decrease response time, and by doing that, increase close rate and number of new accounts that converted from leads.

Plan
Lessen the workload on the sales team by implementing 1) a lead nurturing program that sent immediate, automated initial
emails to very low scored leads. 2) use lead nurturing email series after the initial personal touch for leads that did not buy but
went into a decision making process after the initial call or personal email.


Prospects were engaged with an email series that trigged out nurturing emails which would educate them between the
salesperson's initial phone conversation / email, (or for lower scored leads, educate them from the start in an automated way)
to the point where the prospect was ready to purchase.


The nurturing emails introduced things like 5 great reasons to use email with Emma. Gave customer testimonials and
examples. And tips for successful emailing once the prospect came onboard with an account.

Case Study Result: Over the 18 weeks prior to Emmas use of lead nurturing, 36.4% of leads were contacted within 15 minutes
or less.

In the 18 weeks after lead nurturing was implemented Emma contacted 53.2% of leads within 15 minutes or less (increase of
17%) and today that number is over 60% (increase of over 24%)

Emma’s well known for their personal touch, but they didn’t abandon a key tenant of business by using automated email nurturing, just
enhanced it. When a prospect is ready, it’s a personal sale.

Long term sales result: Automated lead nurturing, coupled with Emma’s traditional way of reaching out 1:1 initially with anyone who inquires
about their service, has contributed to an 68.4% increase in the number of accounts closed over the same four-month period from 2010 to 2011. It
didn’t replace the personal aspect of their sales cycle. It just combined personal plus online for better results.

Getting The Click:
---------
4 - Don’t Forget the Basics


Always take a minute to take a step back from all of the cool, more advanced ways to use email and make sure
you’re still hitting the basics.


Personalize. Just like checking for your replies that we touched on earlier, make sure you personalize your emails.
It is an easy step that can have a big impact.

By the way, this screen shot is from an online service called Emailium, it is a warehouse of email campaigns. You
can search by email type, esp, subject lines, and a few other data types to see what other companies are doing
with content, layout and sending. Great service.


Make your subject line sound clickable enough to open.

An ESP did a recent research project of over 40,000,000 emails sent and landed on 2 outcomes:
- the best subject lines typically are not overly salesy and rarely pushy.
- the best subject lines are not too bland: stay away from “October Email Newsletter”

Land in the middle somewhere, and most importantly... describe the contents of the email. Not rocket science
there but its a good reminder that getting too cute can actually backﬁre, and being too bland usually always does.


And of course always, always, always use good permission based rules. Don’t buy lists. Don’t play in the gray area
and harvest names either... (if you’re a member of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, you may not download the
membership list and assume they are your peeps. they aren’t. And don’t “borrow” someone else’s contacts to
“cross promote”)

Last year respected marketing publication iMedia caused a bit of a ﬁrestorm with a blog post and tweet. The
question should have been answered pretty easily: Don’t Buy Lists. But instead they actually created a blog post
suggesting best practices for list purchasing.

John Caldwell (owner of the email consultation RedPill) along with quite a few others took them to task over it.

v


They got the hint. Here’s the dead end to that blog post now. Spam is not the road to successful emailing and
hopefully this helped to reinforce that.

A big (purchased) list of people not paying attention to you is no where near as valuable as a smaller list with
dedicated readers/followers. Build it on your own.

Getting The Click:
---------
5 - Test.
(Then Test More)


Last but not least, email best practices are *your* best practices. What may work for some companies may not
work at all for you.

Mention: Marketing profs email conference study, where a brand did a year long case study to increase sending
rates from monthly, to daily. Lost a big percentage of their list. But they kept testing along the way and did it
slowly, making tweaks throughout. The end result was an increase in sales. Their list was full of non openers and
non clickers, and the loyal followers clicked more when they were presented more opportunities to click.

This will not work for everyone! Test...

v


Things you can test:

Subject lines.
Content Length.
Sent from address.
Personalization.
Time/Day of send.

Great resource just for fun, but also for ideas. WhichTestWon.com

Anyone want to guess which version won? (audience vote)

v


Yikes? Back to earlier point on testing to ﬁnd what *your best practices are*

They ran this same test 3 more times, because the marketing team at Tumbleweed felt it was an anomaly. All caps
version seemed really spammy.

Same result over the additional tests. With an average result of 21% more opens and 30% more clicks on the
additional tests.

v

v

v


Test content...

length
images
headlines
offers
Mint.com has done some award winning work in email and this case study was no exception. The first test offered the opportunity to win
a “Minty Green” iPod Nano once three of their friends became Mint.com users. The second offered exclusive access to the Mint.com Beta Testing
Program, also in return for three new users signing up. The third test served as a control group offering no reward, but still asking recipients to
send an invitation to their friends.

The winning “backstage exclusive access” email was opened by 48% of those mailed. Of those, over 10% became “Influencers” for the Mint.com
brand by sharing the invitation with, on average, 5 friends each, significantly expanding its reach. Their test proved their customers are more
interested in more features than they are an Ipod Nano, and they’ll use that for future offers.

v


Whatever you test, the most important thing is *to* test.

It’s easy to create an A/B test by splitting up your list. Some ESPs will assist with that and automate it for you,
such as the screen shot above where you can even test 10% and 10% and 10% and send the other 70% the winner
for better results.

You will ﬁnd outcomes unique to your brand and your audience, so remember: even hearing what’s worked for
others needs to be tested on your own list to see how it impacts the clicks.

Ready to Get Clicking?
Questions?


That wraps up our 5th point. Questions?

Thanks for participating!
Jonathan Gesinger • jonathan@myemma.com • @J_Gesinger

Rachel Farris • rachel@petrelocation.com • @MeanRachel

visit us online:
www.myemma.com • @emmaemail • facebook.com/emmaemail
www.petrelocation.com • @petrelocation • facebook.com/petrelocation


Thank you!

Getting the Click: How to Deliver Click-Worthy Content

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