Marketing Insights » Preferences Management

Twas the night before Christmas and Marketers were…

Rhonda Wunderlin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:30:28 +0000

Over the last few weeks I have been overwhelmed with email from every vendor whose website I have possibly visited in the last two years. It struck me that this is “end of year” and companies have revenue targets to hit so they are making this last effort in the 11th hour. It just really surprised me however that I haven’t heard from some of these companies in months… MANY months! As I glance at the FROM and SUBJECT line and delete more than I read, I wonder why aren’t they sending me something relevant? Why aren’t they communicating with me more frequently??

Then I ran across a post by Dennis Dayman, Eloqua’s Email Delivery and Privacy Officer. Dennis blogs on Deliverability.com where he recently shared this holiday story that his friend Rick Buck of e-Dialog had sent around. Thanks Rick!! This certainly resonated with me and I wish I could send this message to all those vendors spamming me this month.

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‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the land,
marketers were scheming to hit year-end plans.

Their e-mails were designed in great detail and care,
in hopes that all of their customers soon would be there.

Mail the entire list. Mail them all!
Mail away! Mail away! Mail away all!”

The executives were nestled all snug in their beds,
with visions of Q4 revenue dancing in their heads.

When back in the office arose such a clatter,
that delivery support ran to see what was the matter?

Away to their reporting tools they flew like a flash,
investigating each client’s mailing to look for the trash.

The data before them on the newly sent mail
gave all indications of why they did fail.

When what to their wondering eyes should appear,
but a slew of bounce codes that no one would endear.

Unknown User! Inactive Account! Mailbox Doesn’t Exist!
Blocks from the ISPs were hard to resist.

If only they’d listened and segmented their data.
Their mailing would have been delivered, staying off of the ISP’s radar.

Relevance, hygiene, permission and more,
ultimately gets the campaign safely out the door.

Reach out to your clients now and give them a shout.
Make sure they understand what this is all about.

Eliminate unknown users, non-responders, and hard bounces alike,
and watch delivery and response rates soar and spike.

It is important to take heed of this trustworthy advice,
because the ISPs know if you’re naughty or nice.

During this important mailing season we must get it right.
Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good-night!

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More mistakes that Marketers need to avoid in 2010 can be found at Anything Goes Marketing. One of the five mistakes listed: “If you continue to only send email blasts on a schedule that you dictate to your email subscribers, you risk massive list attrition, damaging your overall email deliverability.”

Happy *successful* email deliverability in 2010!

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What’s the [Email] Frequency Kenneth?

Paul Teshima — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:06:39 +0000

Although I stole this title from a great R.E.M. song that references a confusing incident with Dan Rather, I hope you have come here to read about the “ideal email frequency” – a concept that is also confusing to many marketers.

Email frequency is a relative concept. What might be too many emails for you, may be perfect for me as an interested buyer. That is why it is extremely important to not set a hard rule of “no more than 2 emails per contact per month”. What if that 3rd email was the directions to your Executive breakfast event? I want to walk through how we approach this with customers, and then also discuss where we can go from here.

Divide and Conquer Your List

The highest order of segmentation is whether or not someone is interested or not interested in your message. The concept of measuring the “activeness” of your list, is one that every marketer should do. What you need is a report that allows you to see the frequency of emails sent to contacts over a given time period. Here is a sample report, that showcases different groups of contacts receiving a different numbers of emails.

The Average Group: 29,000 contacts received 5 emails over the last 5 months
The Oh Oh! Group: ~ 1,000 have received more than 6 emails
The Lonely Group: 37,000 contacts received 1 email

The Average Group
At first glance, you may feel that 5 emails is way too much to send in 3 months (you also may not feel that way). But really it gets down to analyzing your response rates? Are they decreasing? increasing? The average Eloqua customer sends 4-6 emails per quarter last time I checked, and really you need to further segment your list to make a call on whether it is too much or too little. But as long as this isn’t 1 or isn’t 15, you are probably good as long as your response rates are not declining.

The Oh Oh! Group
This is the group that people worry about the most. But in reality it often is a very small part of your list. Also, when you look into individual email history, most of the time they are either company employees or partners. What I advise customers to do, is to take one contact and examine the emails that were sent to them, and ask themselves – should they have gotten those campaigns? Out of the 50 or so times I have done this with customers, the answer usually is – yes, they should have gotten all of those communications, some were support, some were reminders for an event, etc.

The Lonely Group
You pay way too much for new leads, why only communicate to leads you already have in your database < 1 time per quarter? This is the group you need to pay special attention to, and here are some steps to take.

What is the lead score of this group? and if you are not lead scoring yet, just open a report of them in excel and scan them to see if there are some quality names in that list
How new are those leads? If they are new – you really need to investigate implementing a “Welcome Program“, which is a lead nurturing program targeted at new leads to your database. If they are not new – are you seeing any response activity that would warrant an increase in communication frequency?

So there you have it – email frequency is not a simple issue to work through, but if you take the right steps, you can debunk the myth that there is a magic number per month to send, and maximize the potential for generating quality leads, from the database you already have.

If Your Marketing Database Could Talk…

Jennifer Horton — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:00:26 +0000

Click to watch!