Back in 2009, we wrote a post on the email shotgun, rifle, and blow-dart, which focused on the importance of relevant and personalized email content. While this post could benefit from a few updates, much of it holds true and serves as a good example of what Southwest could be doing.

I routinely receive an email very similar to the one below that emphasizes their ‘Click ‘N Save Deals.’ This is a great idea, in concept, but when the resulting content doesn’t provide relevance to the subscriber, it does little good. What I mean is that most of the time the ‘deals’ are never in my primary service area. While I may be interested in a nice deal on a flight to Aspen, if the deal is only for Dallas to Aspen, that does me little good.

The Long-Term Risk of this Lack of Personalization: Subscribers will continue to check if their is a deal that applies to them, but after a while if they consistently see that the promotion is irrelevant, they will be trained not to check. When that perfect deal does come along, it will be too late as they will delete it before checking (or opt-out).

What Southwest.com Could Do:

1. I’m a frequent flyer and have a rewards account with them that is associated with my email address. Why not identify my primary departure airport and have personalized content about my area and corresponding deals. Also include surrounding airports that are within a 60 mile drive.

2. If there is no ‘deal’ for my airport, why not have special alerts for last minute flight availability to prime areas. This of course requires integration with other databases, but it is doable.

3. In addition to my primary airports for departure, identify frequent destinations. This could serve as a reminder of reasons to visit, partner offers (e.g. hotels) and more.

There are also significant improvement opportunities with the overall architecture of these emails, but for the purpose of this post we will stay focused on the context/relevance of the promotion. Southwest has a tremendous opportunity here to provide extremely personalized email content that will improve the customer experience and ultimately increase sales. With a few small adjustment they can have a big impact, and with a larger strategic overhaul, they could really start to better leverage the email channel.

In the first email, Verizon utilizes some great personalization and dynamic content. In the screen grab below, notice the following:

1. Image of My Phone: This is great and helps integrate the content of the message.

2. Useful Tools: To help me get started with my new phone, they offer quick links to move my contacts, set up email, create shortcuts, and more. Very useful.

3. Focused Content: Everything here is focused on helping me better leverage my new purchase and is specific to my actual device.

When we talk about providing targeted, timely, and relevant content to subscribers, this is a great example and a fantastic use of the email channel. This email from Verizon should help to create a lot of ideas of how you can create a better customer experience.

The Problem: They had a technical error in their deployment where the titles of the their dynamic rules displayed in place of the actual content. Starting with the Subject Line: %%CONTENT1%% — which of course should have been calling whatever content they had in ‘content1′

The issue continued to the entire email with pretty much all dynamic sections (images, content etc) displaying the rule code.

On a good note, they had solid intentions of providing some personalized content via a dynamic approach. When executed properly, this can add significant value to your email efforts. Unfortunately there were some technical slip-ups here that resulted in poor presentation. Additionally, no follow up email was sent (at least I didn’t receive one). If the issue was detected, and corrected, re-sending with the functioning version could have helped a great deal.

We all make mistakes and have stories of technical frustrations. This email here may be a good opportunity for Skin Store to review their testing process, email platform, and deployment procedures in order to make improvements to their program.

The next page had a great  preference section that was obviously specific to this particular promotion. I was able to indicate if I wanted reminders for Laptops, Desktops, Monitors, etc. You’ll see in the screen grab below that they have large visuals for each of the options which is a nice touch. Not only is it more usable, but seeing the products makes a user more likely to want to receive updates on them — tech “eye candy” if you will.

They offer an opt-in check box to subscribe to additional offers and also allow you to subscribe to mobile reminders. On the confirmation page though, Dell had a really cool move of providing links to “Shop Now” for the categories I selected to receive updates on. Sounds like common sense, however many retailers take you to a general thank-you page and you have to navigate your way to certain products. Dell does a nice job here of making it easy for the user to get where they likely want to go and retain visitors while they are in the buying mindset.

Great opt-in process from Dell here. They stay consistent with their brand and usability of their site, offer a reason to opt-in to their list, provide user preference options so they can further segment and provide more sophisticated dynamic content, and they integrate the process with other site goals. One quick area of improvement would be on the first page where you click “Need a Reminder…” and then go to the opt-in page. I would recommend having a quick sign-up here (have a field to enter your email address) accompanied by a button reading: “Click to subscribe and select product preferences” — or something to that effect. By doing this they likely increase their opt-in conversion rate by acquiring more sign-ups from the main page and drawing additional attention to the fact that there is an email sign-up option.

The next post will focus on the reminder emails deployed during their campaign.

Cheers,

Forest

Questions or thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

The big win for Southwest is with their focus on email preferences. As we’ve discussed many times before, allowing your subscribers to select from a range of email options will be a win-win for everyone. Bronto had a good rundown of Do’s and Don’ts in this post.

Southwest started getting it right by having a very simple email sign-up and then making additional preference options available later. In the confirmation email they had the following call-out that was right to the point with great architecture and design.

On the landing page they had detailed preference options as follows:

Several nice things going on here:

1. They start off by giving you a great reason to fill out your preferences — so you can help them send you more relevant offers. Relevancy is key and becoming increasingly important.

2. Rapid Rewards: By asking for this, they should have access to detailed data on past purchase behavior which can be gold for segmentation.

3. Trip Related Preferences: They ask for items such as home airport and favorite destination, along with types of trips such as last minute vacations, business travel etc. This will provide Southwest with great information to further segment and provide relevant content.

4. Activity Related Preferences: Finally, they ask about activities you enjoy while traveling. This potentially takes their email program into another category by being able to provide partner offers, destination activity recommendations, and engaging content. I’ve seen Hotels.com and a few other related sites to this pretty well.

This is a great example of a company going the extra step to not only provide an email preference center, but one that is fairly detailed. Keep in mind though that this model would not be realistic for some smaller companies. By collecting these preferences they have the ability to provide some extremely targeted and relevant blow-dart like communications, but it creates the need for a more robust technical infrastructure and time-consuming content development. If done right, it can be gold — but make sure your foundation is ready to execute before implementing a detailed preference center. When in doubt, start smaller and scale up accordingly.

It has been a few weeks and nothing extremely targeted has come my way, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Southwest puts out and am excited to see how well they execute here.

Thoughts or questions? Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email.

Cheers,

Forest

A client I work with manages hundreds of sites that collectively have thousands of service provider listings. Each service provider has a profile and we needed an efficient way to have them update their information, and notify them of their regional representative contact.

For this, we created a clean text-driven email with a bunch of personalization and some dynamic content. This allowed us to reach thousands of providers with the same email, and create an efficient system for getting updated information.

Below is a raw screen grab with filler content.

In the above example, there are several points of personalization and dynamic content:

1. First Name: Simple and easy

2. Organization Name: We of course want to personalize this with the name of their organization

3. Update Date: As a reminder, we included the date that they last updated their profile

4. Profile Link: This takes them to their specific profile

5. Info on Record: We have the Address, Phone and Email that is currently listed on their profile, plus a link to view the profile again to see the rest of the info

6. Edit Profile Link: To make changes, we have a link implemented that takes them directly to a page where they can submit updated information

7. Dynamic Content: We have a section for CSA contact information (their local representative) that we have dynamic rules set up for based on what product they fall under and their county. E.g. IF product=xyz and county=Los Angeles THEN CSA Contact = Jim Smith – jim@email.com

Below is the same screen grab with highlighted personalization elements.

A very simple email here creating a 1-to-1 communication and an efficient system. This email didn’t need flashy design, or excess copy — just personalized content and some top-level organization to make the process seamless. While the nature of this particular email is very specific, the concepts can apply to a broad range of initiatives. It’s very important to create a personalized experience with our subscribers, and with available technology email marketers should look at how they can better leverage their efforts.

Cheers,

Forest

Nice usability, focused communications, integrated landing pages, some ‘small-touch’ best practices and more. There are many things going well here for RedBox.

Let’s look at a few elements from the email screen grab  below:

1. Pre-Header: You should always link to a web version, but offering a ‘mobile device’ option is a nice addition.

2. Navigation: In a previous post I commented on the benefits of navigation in your email. Here, they provide 4 primary nav links that are consistent with their site. How Redbox Works, Find A Movie, Find A Redbox, Reserve Online. Simple, to the point, and relevant. 

3. Design: Clean, consistent with their brand, and welcoming.

4. Focus: They have a clear focus here; to highlight the new release. (in this particular email it was the movie “New in Town.” They provide an image, movie description, and clear call to action to reserve it online…

5. Landing Page: You can have a great email, but if your landing pages are not integrated then you are not getting maximum benefit (and hurting your email efforts). Here, they take you to a page specifically about the movie with the option to search for availability at your local RedBox location (and of course then reserve it online). Not every company executes this well. In a previous post, I pointed out some landing page mistakes by William Sonoma.

6. Forward to a Friend: Nice option in the upper right. I may not be interested in this particular movie, but my friends may be.

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Upper fold of RedBox New Release Email (Click Image to Enlarge)

Landing Page for ‘Reserve Online’ and Movie Image (Click Image to Enlarge)

Wells Fargo’s business banking has done a nice job with email personalization. Many email marketers simply insert a subscriber’s name and think they have accomplished personalization greatness. While this can of course be of benefit, there are additional pieces of data we can use to create a better experience for our valued subscribers. Remember though, it depends on your business, customers, and must make sense for your products and email strategy.

Looking at the email below from Wells Fargo, we see 4 points of personalization:

1. Total Points: Here they are dynamically inserting the reward points that this subscriber has earned. What a nice reminder!

2. Account Number: They also have the last 4 digits of the account number in reference.

3. Name: Being a b2b email, they opted to insert the business name in the Dear, field. This makes sense in this context.

4.Dynamic Rewards Suggestions: The last orange box in the main copy reads: “At ____ points you can select from…” Here, Wells Fargo is inserting a ‘next level’ point value, and using dynamic content to provide recommendations for rewards. Depending on the ‘point level’ a subscriber is at, different images and reward copy will be populated here.

A very simple design with effective email personalization. Sometimes it doesn’t take much at all to transform a generic blast email to a highly personalized communication.

- Forest Bronzan

3 Good Elements from the Screen Grab Above

1. Pre-Header Options: They have two links for ‘view mobile version’ and ‘view as a web page’ . A common used practice is: “Click here if you have having trouble viewing this email” — or something similar. Here they do provide the web version but also mobile — very nice.

2. Ensure Delivery: In the upper right you will see a text link titled, “Ensure delivery” — I don’t see this too often, at least not in this form. Email marketers most often have a line of copy reading: “To ensure delivery of future emails, please add newsletter@xyzcorp.com to your address book.” Here, they provide a link to a landing page with actual instructions for different email providers (pasted below). I don’t know how effective this is, but it’s a nice addition to cover their bases.

3. Personalization: While there are more direct ways to make an email personal and targeted, they do a nice job here of providing options that are useful to me. A link to log in to my account, view my favorite restaurants, or access my account center. These dynamic URLs help integrate my user experience and make the process one step easier.

Landing page from the ‘Ensure Delivery’ link in the email

- Forest Bronzan

In this email they had a 9 restaurant locations in my area that awarded travel points. AA is clearly doing some nice geo-segmentation based on zip code and then setting up their email template to serve dynamic content based on a set of rules. This is a great way to send highly personalized and relevant emails to a large list while maintaining efficient work flow for deployment.

Screen grab below (click to enlarge)

- Forest Bronzan