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.

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.

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

Changing gears and looking at a smaller (compared to Vegas) casino, I joined the mailing list for Inland Empire based Morongo Casino and Resort. I believe it’s one of the largest in the area and I do see quite a lot of local advertising.

The recent email I received has some clear areas of improvement

1. It’s one big image: We’ve discussed this several times before, but pay attention to your text to image ratio and don’t create a single image for your entire email.

2. I’m not in this segment: Why am I getting a ‘seniors special’ promotion? This is because they are either sending a big shot-gun email and not implementing a rifle or blowdart approach, or they don’t have that data available for me. If we give them the benefit of the doubt and go with the latter, then it can be a good idea to send an email to subscribers that you don’t have a lot of data for and invite them to complete their profile (I’ll do a post soon just on this topic).

3. Design: It’s simply not A-grade work, or even B-grade work for that matter.

4. Navigation: It needs to be at the top. We’ve discussed the benefits of having navigation in your email in previous posts. They did have a navigation bar at the bottom (screen grab below) but that doesn’t do much good for subscribers that don’t scroll below the fold.

This email doesn’t need any more analysis as items mentioned above need to be flushed out first. Casino Morongo, along with many other casinos and card rooms, have a great opportunity to create meaningful segments and leverage the email channel to increase their customer relationship and engagement. I’m on a search now for some casinos that are implement solid email strategies.

Cheers,

Forest

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

One area often overlooked is having a breakdown of your subscriber’s email domains. Knowing this information can be quite helpful when developing your creative. If you find a large portion on one domain, it may justify segmenting them and developing a separate creative optimized specifically for that domain.

Some email platforms will give you a quick graphic breakdown. If not, you can always do a sort in Excel and manually determine your ratios.

Below are breakdowns from 3 different clients I work with

Here we see some differing stats. In the 1st and 3rd example, Yahoo represents 5.6% at max, while the 2nd client has over 25% of subscribers with Yahoo addresses. We can also see that in the 3rd example at least 22% is represented by education or government addresses.

Looking at these three, I was surprised at the low amount of gmail addresses. We see 9.3% in the 2nd example, but none in the 1st and 3rd!

Takeaways

1. Every list will be different and it’s helpful to know how YOUR list breaks down

2. Knowing this breakdown will aid in testing your email creative on different domains. You should be testing on more than your breakdown, but this can provide priority.

3. If you find a large portion on one domain (25%+), it may justify putting resources into segmenting those users and providing creative optimized specifically for that domain. If you’re list is very small, this will be overkill.

4. Also consider segmenting by domain and testing deliverability. (Note – some email platforms will do this automatically).

Cheers,

Forest

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).

Every email marketer you ask will likely balk at the shotgun approach and jump straight to a rifle strategy. While in theory this is ‘optimal’ – it’s not always that black and white. Additionally, many email marketers pick up the rifle, put on their sniper costume, and call it a day. While this of course is a great starting point, there are opportunities to have a greater impact with multiple approaches also utilizing a high powered blow-dart.

Let’s Examine the Shotgun, Rifle and High Powered Blow Dart

1. Shotgun Approach

Basics: Your email communications are broad and promotions are developed for a wide and diverse audience. In other email terms; you are sending one general email to your entire list with no segmentation and little or no personalization.

Why it’s Bad: For starters, you are not leveraging the email channel. With available technology, you have the opportunity to create targeted segments and dynamically insert personalized data. With a ‘batch and blast’ approach like the shotgun, everyone receives the same email and promotion.

However: What if you don’t have any data (outside of email address) to segment? Many companies starting off with email don’t implement all the best practices for list acquisition, not to mention proper tracking of email engagement for segmentation purposes. In this case, you may be limited to a broad email – and this creates an opportunity to quickly get important information about your subscribers for more refined communications in the future.

For starters:

A. Make sure you have navigation in your emails — which will help you segment based on click activity.

B. Conduct A/B subject line testing to better leverage that big send.

C. Create an email preference center to get more data from you subscribers.

D. Implement some email segmentation just from email engagement.

We of course want to strive for targeted, ‘rifle like’ communication with our subscribers – and when possible this should absolutely be implemented. But In the event you are unable to do this from the start, do begin collecting information that will allow you to make better use of the email channel in the future.

2. Rifle Approach

Basics: Your email communications are focused and campaigns are directed to a select target audience/segment. Promotions are extremely relevant and timely, and you strive to create the impression of a 1-1 communication.

Why it’s Good: Instead of sending one message to 100,000 subscribers, we may be sending 20 messages to 5,000 subscribers based on strategically defined criteria. Here we place our subscribers into meaningful segments and serve them relevant content. This may be done through individual messaging or utilizing dynamic content to execute our segmentation and content strategies.

This will have tremendous impact on the success of your email efforts, and should be implemented whenever possible. This is an extremely summarized description, but the basic premise is that we want to provide relevant and extremely targeted communications and promotions to our subscribers.

3. High Powered Blow Dart

Basics: The blow dart picks up where the rifle left off. With the rifle approach, we are creating targeted segments, developing relevant and timely communications, and creating a better experience for our subscribers. This may or may not include advanced personalization within the email, but we like to make sure it goes that extra step and utilize a blow dart, if you will, to truly strive for a 1-1 communication.

Here we make sure we utilize dynamic content when possible, and further personalize the communication by inserting data that is relevant.

Example of dynamic content from American Advantage

Example of simple personalization from Wells Fargo

Summary

1. Create targeted email segments and focus your content and promotions. Become a sniper and provide extremely relevant and timely communications.

2. If for whatever reason you don’t have data to segment, then start on a basic level with email engagement, reviewing your acquisition process, and upgrading to a better email platform if needed. There is no reason you can’t segment based on some criteria (historical opens, click activity, list origination, products purchased etc)

3. Create an even more personalized experience and utilize dynamic content, personalization, and even more specific targeting.

Cheers,

Forest Bronzan

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With an approach that you don’t often see, they have a screen take-over on their home page with an email sign-up form.

A few cool things going on here:

1. It’s a priority: If you have a site with lots of traffic, you especially want to get new email subscribers. Here, they clearly make it a key focus that nobody can miss. I would be very curious to see what their conversion rate is here.

2. Promotion: They provide an incentive to sign-up. Many email marketers can’t understand why someone would not want to sign up for their list. Well, people already get lots of email and that probably wasn’t their goal when coming to your site anyway. Express provides 15% off your next purchase for signing up.

3. Preview: Express gives a little idea of what you are signing up for: fashion exclusives, new arrivals, special offers.

4. Data for Segmentation: They make zip code a required field. Clearly they will be doing geo-segmentation for local in-store promos. They also ask for gender, which is great for providing dynamic content and more refined personalization. Segmentation is key for a successful program.

5. 2nd Chance Sign-Up: Notice in the upper right they have another piece of home page real estate for their email sign-up. In case you don’t complete this first form, you can easily do so later.

Good stuff here. I’ll be very interested to see how well they execute their email campaigns.

- Forest Bronzan

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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