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.

Surprisingly, I see a lot of basic mistakes email marketing being made by very large casinos. With such large marketing budgets, I would expect more sophistication from their email programs.

After making my online reservation, I received the following confirmation email. (click image to enlarge)

It’s great that they are sending me a confirmation with some information in case I have questions, but where is the branding and other relevant content?

Key Items Missing:

1. Branding: All of us here at Email Aptitude are pretty big fans of having a higher text to image ratio, especially for transactional email triggers. But in this case there is zero branding. Mandalay Bay easily could have maintained a high text ratio (and all text for this main body copy) while still having a branded header and footer with additional call-outs.

2. Helpful Recommendations: Why not use this opportunity to let me know about exciting things to do at the hotel? They could have a graphic section showing events occurring during the dates of my visit; information about the the restaurants they have; games they offer; and other amenities I may be interested in. This can all be done in a very tasteful way that does not take away from the simplicity of the email.

3. Cross-Sell/Up-Sell: On my reservation confirmation email it would be a great opportunity to up-sell a different room or cross-sell some services like show tickets or a spa package. This too can be done very tactfully and presented in a way that truly benefits the customer.

With a little effort, Mandalay Bay could be doing much better with email. With some structured planning and testing, they could be crushing it. As of now though, they are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Click to learn more about our strategic email marketing services.

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On the topic of time of day, it can be interesting to take it a step further if you have the data available to you. If your ESP (email service provider) allows you to export and filter through email engagement data, create segments based on time range patterns. In a manual example, this would encompass opening up engagement data in Excel and filtering based on a time range for the given metric.

Side Note: The first instinct would be to filter based on time of open. While you should test this, you may find better results filtering based on time of click or conversion. You want to deploy to your subscribers when they are in a position to act. For more complex products/sales-cycles, this won’t apply as much. But for consumer retail products, it will be good to test.

In this example, you would see how many people (opened or clicked or converted) between 2-4pm, 4-6pm etc. This can get as granular as you have time for. Start slow though and test. Group the larger of the time windows you determine and test sending to them at that time with your next send. Make sure to document and monitor results so you can make informed decisions on testing allocation.

Testing can be fun, but it’s important to consider scale and resource availability. In a post from July 2009, we discussed this testing equilibrium in greater detail.

For time of day (or day of week) segmentation and testing, we ultimately want to provide a better experience to our subscribers. If we can do this, along with provide relevant content, we will increase the longevity of our subscriber relationships and provide stronger results to our email efforts.

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

The focus of this post though is on a pre-trip email from Wynn’s Encore. A friend of mine will be visiting the new resort next week (I’m jealous I couldn’t make this trip!) A week before the arrival date he received an email from the concierge which got us talking about Wynn’s email strategy here.

Subject: During Your Upcoming Stay at Encore at Wynn Las Vegas.

Body of Email (Click to Enlarge)

Landing Page (Click to Enlarge)

Anyone who spots the first problem of why a user has to click through to see any content gets points.

Comments & Suggestions

1. Approach: I love it! For a resort like the Wynn/Encore, there should absolutely be a high level of personalized email communication that is consistent with the level of service they provide. They are on the right track here, but still several steps away from a solid strategy (some steps being beyond the scope of this post).

2. Improved Approach: What I would do here though is have the focuses of this email separated into two campaigns. On one end they are offering a personalized welcome message. This is great and absolutely needed. Make it personal and have it directly from the concierge. On the other end they are offering recommendations and using the email channel as a cross-sell opportunity. This is also fantastic and justified for its own send. Provide some timely recommendations for shows, dinner specials, new casino games etc. (Of course even better if they integrate data from previous customer behavior to make it more of a rifle/blow-dart approach). But at the very least, do let me know about other ways I can enjoy my stay — and provide direct links to make reservations etc.

3. Email Body: Now why would Encore not just have the main content in the body of the email? Here they have an image of an envelope to click through to a landing page with the actual content. Some might argue that since this is going to registered hotel guests, the click-through-rate should be off the charts. Yes – this is very true, however it will not be a 100% CTR. They could be attempting to build excitement and value once you do actually click — but I think much more can be accomplished with a well structured main email.

…This email got me very excited about all the opportunities a resort like the Wynn has with the email channel. They are on the right track with this transactional approach, but still miles away from a top-notch program. I do hope they put in the time to make improvements to their strategy and execution as I know it will pay big dividends.

- Forest Bronzan

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

With that said, they are missing a segmentation opportunity. These inputs are based solely on personal experience, so perhaps there was a simple list mistake, but nonetheless – a mistake and lost opportunity.

Background: I’m an eHarmony.com promoter. My girlfriend and I met through the service about 18 months ago, loved the infrastructure and experience and  have been happily living together for a while. We suggest eHarmony to most of our single friends and have also been in contact with the ‘follow up’ folks there to keep them up to date.

Segmentation Problem: All of the newsletters I receive appear to be structured with a nice dynamic content engine. They also have a basic preference center in place, so I’m able to decide which top-level communications I want. The problem is that the content I’m receiving is not quite relevant.

Most of the articles in my newsletters are for ‘dating tips’ ‘pickup lines’ ‘moving too fast?’ etc. These may be great for someone currently using the service or thinking about using the service. – Someone that is in the dating or pre-dating stage.

eHarmony knows that I’ve closed my account, they know the reason, and they know a general time frame of events. So wouldn’t it be a good idea to provide content more relevant for a serious relationship, and also content to encourage me to promote? (I don’t need it, but it should be there). There are many great life-cycle opportunities here that I feel they are missing. It would be a robust email infrastructure, but nothing too overwhelming for the marketing engine eHarmony has demonstrated throughout the years.

I will give them some credit though; the content appears to be getting slightly more targeted, but still some elements in need of adjustment.

A more extreme case from personal experience were the email blunders from 24h Fitness (who later made progress to redeem themselves in a follow up post).