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Review of SCORE's Sign-Up Process

April 8th, 2009

Yesterday I was going through a list of newsletters that I am not yet a member of and noticed that the small business resource group SCORE was one of them. After going to their site to opt-in, I noticed several good and bad things going on with their process. Let’s walk through it. (Images below)

Step 1. On their home page, there is a link in the upper left for ‘Get eNewsletters’ – Points for having this above the fold, but negative points for not having the option to fill in my address right there and submit. Every additional page I have to go to is another opportunity for me to leave and not complete the process. Get my most basic info (email address) right away while I’m interested and then ask for more information.

Step 2. After clicking that link I get to a page with a few options. First they give the option to view a sample of their newsletter. Major points here – it’s a good idea to give a preview of what a subscriber is going to receive. Set expectations from the beginning and you’ll start the relationship on a good note. Major points were also deducted on this page, as it asked me again to follow a link to sign up. I already said I wanted to sign up on the home page, why must I go to a 3rd page just to enter my email address? This is a major flaw. If they must go to this 2nd page, put the actual opt-in field here, in addition to the ‘preview’ link.

Step 3. Finally on the 3rd page they ask for my email address.

Step 4. On the 4th page (yes, 4 clicks and counting to sign up for the newsletter) They are asking for a lot more information, but it’s unclear if I have been signed up already. I thought that’s what I did on the previous page. But with no welcome email, I continue on. On this page they ask me to confirm my email, plus make First Name, Last Name, City, State and Zip required fields. Additionally, they have a security check for input of text from an image. For the contact info, that’s great that they are collecting it as it will be useful for segmentation and personalization later, but why make it required? It’s a nice to have, not a must have. For the email confirmation, why not have that on the previous page, or just have a double opt-in (where I must confirm by clicking a link in an email)? They do give me newsletter options, so are on the right track of an email preference center, but are way off on so many other elements.

Step 5. Finally on the 5th page I get a confirmation and the shortly after I receive a welcome email.

This 5 page process could have been reduced to 2 or 3 pages. On the home page they could have had a quick opt-in field and then taken me to a 2nd page to put in more personalization info (after I was already in the system and about to receive a confirmed or double opt-in email).

If they didn’t want to mess with the home page, they could have left the link as it was there, and then on the 2nd page had the opt-in form with a preview image on that page of their newsletter. On a 3rd page they could offer more personalization options.

I’d be very curious what their sign-up conversion rate is, from start to finish. While they are making efforts to implement some sound best practices for list acquisition, SCORE is dropping the ball with some red flag mistakes.

Screen Grabs from the process (click image to enlarge):

Home Page

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2B, Email Marketing Strategy, List Building/Opt-In, Personalization, Red Flag Mistakes, Segmentation | No Comments »

Royal Screw up from UC San Diego

April 1st, 2009

Oops! UCSD Sends Acceptance Email to Wrong List!

Originally Posted: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Youre-Out-Youre-In-No-Youre-Out.html?yhp=1

Article In a Nutshell:

About 17,000 student were offered admission for the fall
29,000 were not accepted
Acceptance email was sent to all 46,377 students who applied for admission — including the 29,000 rejects — welcoming them to the campus.
Almost two hours after the first note went out, a second e-mail was sent, apologizing to 28,889 freshmen applicants for the mistake.

When I see an article on the front page of Yahoo that deals with email marketing, I get excited. This was most notable during the general election with commentary on the effect of President Obama’s email list.

Today’s front page article had an eye catching preview: UC San Diego sends a warm welcome email … to the wrong list of students.

Come on now. We’re not talking about a complex segment here. We have Group A: Accepted Applicants and Group B: Unaccepted Applicants. This task does not need an email marketing expert, but shows how even simple mistakes can happen to large companies.

I’ve seen blunders from top retailers, sending a test message to a live group, leaving personalization tags in a subject line, typos in body copy, and even sending to the wrong list. But the outcome in most of those cases is rather minimal. There may be a few opt-outs or confused customers, but most will forget about it and move on (providing it is not a constant mistake).

In the case of UCSD, the fallout from a simple mistake is more devastating. On one end, you’re dealing with anxious email recipients that are now frustrated, confused, and possibly hurt. I bet the open rate on that email broke records. On another end though, the sloppy mistake gets the school national attention (and likely a lot of angry phone calls).

Fortunately they caught it relatively quickly and issued an apology statement. Think about the outcome if this was not caught for several weeks, students pass on other schools, make plans etc.

Outside of the intensity of this mistake, mistakes do happen. I have not met one email marketer that has never made a blunder. You need to learn from this and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Review your deployment process. Review your segmentation methods. If you have a very sensitive email like this, you must have more than one eye on the campaign before deploying. I would be surprised if an organization like UCSD didn’t have a fairly lengthy approval process for blast emails. But something obviously went wrong.

This definitely makes it into my red flag mistakes category.

- Forest Bronzan

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Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, Red Flag Mistakes, Segmentation, Welcome Emails | No Comments »

Toys R Us – Hit and Miss

March 23rd, 2009

But mostly hits..

In a previous post I discussed how Toys R Us had a segmentation mistake when I was on the list of previous customers of a particular product that was being recalled. The same issue happened again recently, but I want to quickly point out a few of the good elements going on here with the recall email.

1. Great use of the email channel for reaching out to customers on an important issue

2. Clean design that focuses on the recall information; not trying to sell other products

3. Because of the heavy text-based content, the email displays well with images blocked by default

A big area of improvement though was with their landing page for: ‘Click Here to Receive All Safety Email Notifications.’ On this page (screen grab below), it asked to sign in to my email preference center. Why would Toys R Us not take me right to the preference center? Perhaps I don’t have a preference center as it has an option for me to sign-up, but any legitimate email platform will have a preference center already integrated. I do understand that approach they are taking here, but feel it should be much more seamless for the subscriber.

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2C, Design, Landing Pages, Personalization, Retail Email, Segmentation | No Comments »

Benefits of Navigation in your Emails

March 1st, 2009

One element marketers often leave out of their email template is a simple navigation bar. While we focus so much on our promotions, design, and CTAs (calls to action); we forget that our subscribers may not want we exactly what we are sending them in a particular campaign. Ideally you are practicing sophisticated segmentation and personalization to deliver highly targeted content, but why not also give the subscribers options?

Don’t go overboard here, but some core product categories can have several key benefits. Lets examine:

1. The subscriber will have another entry point away from the email and to your website (thus increasing your click-through-rate). For retail companies in particular this is key.

2. You have the opportunity to follow up with extremely relevant landing pages.

3. You can get a gauge of what your subscribers are interested in. If you have a list of 500,000 you are sending to, and 0.0005% are clicking on the ‘dog shampoo link, you can make some deductions.

4. You can segment down further based on click activity. This is a great use of email technology and something I will be discussing in greater detail in a later post. In a nutshell though, your email platform will keep track of who clicks on the ‘basketball shoes’ link, or the ‘skincare’ link. From here you can send a special related communication to that group at a later time, or set up a more advanced sequential sending program where targeted content is automatically based and click activity. There are many exciting options here.

Below is a screen grab of Sephora’s simple header navigation. Clean, basic options, in a traditional location, — oh and they point out that there is free shipping for orders over $50; a nice bonus.

sephora-navigation

- Forest Bronzan

Posted in B2C, Design, Email Marketing Strategy, Landing Pages, Metrics, Promotions, Retail Email, Segmentation | No Comments »

Where do I Sign Up? – Shane Co. Drops the Ball

February 24th, 2009

In some previous posts I discussed some nice things that Blue Nile is doing with their email program. In particular; I have seen great use of blocked images, and nice design architecture.

To compare a bit with some of their industry competitors, I wanted to add myself to the Shane Co. email list. Living in San Francisco for several years, I heard radio ad after radio ad from. “We’re your friend in the diamond business” — I will never forget the consistency in tone from Tom Shane, and how much frequency they had on the major radio stations.

At any rate… I went to shaneco.com and… no email sign-up. I searched around for several minutes with no luck. An image at the end of this post shows the home page above the fold (where I would want to see a simple: “Sign up for exclusive offers”). I went to several other pages with no luck.

Now in this case, I’m not just an email marketer doing research; I’m a primary persona: mid to late 20s male in a serious relationship and in the early research phases of engagement rings.

With the engagement ring product line in particular, the email channel is a great fit for a jeweler like Shane Co. Let’s examine:

1. It can be a long sales cycle: Customers of course will differ, from the spontaneous to methodical, but with a high ticket (and very personal purchase) like an engagement ring, it’s reasonable to expect a prospective customer taking a longer time to make a decision. Email can help that relationship by providing educational pieces, shopping tips, and other general guidance during the cycle. With email we can create the impression of a one-to-one communication to enhance the subscriber experience.

2. Keeping the brand top of mind: With purchases likes these, it’s natural to ‘shop around’. While a prospective is out at other jewelry stores (and on other sites), it sure would be great to send some reminders of your value, and check-ins so they don’t forget about you. These check-ins can also be good for the customer that is not shopping around much but who is just taking his (or her) sweet little time to decide when and what they want to do. Helping them get into the moment can be quite rewarding for you.

3. You can see how they engage: Utilizing just some of the simple elements of email marketing technology, you can gain valuable information about how your new subscriber engages with your communications. On a basic level we will know if they open and click through. We can also monitor which links they click on and set up corresponding content to be sent based on those links. We can take it a step further and see if the subscriber hits certain goal landing pages after they click through from our email. Now where we just started with a name and email address, we may potentially discover that our subscriber opens 70% of our emails, and spends a lot of time on the site learning about ’round shaped diamonds’ — the retargeting options here are exciting.

Frustrated with my discovery, I decided to ‘chat live’ with a sales representative. The response after asking if they had a newsletter I could sign up for was: “oh, no — we don’t really send email blasts” — I didn’t go any further, but was thinking: “Well it’s good that you’re not sending ‘blasts’ because you should be sending highly targeted and personalized emails — but WHY are you not sending anything?” — if someone from the marketing department at Shane Co. would be so kind to explain their reasoning, I’m all ears.

- Forest Bronzan

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2C, Landing Pages, List Building/Opt-In, Personalization, Red Flag Mistakes, Retail Email, Segmentation | No Comments »

Royal Screw up from UC San Diego

Toys R Us – Hit and Miss

Benefits of Navigation in your Emails

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