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Awesome Dynamic Trigger from Verizon

July 25th, 2010

After switching over to the Droid Incredible with Verizon, I was pleasantly surprised by an email welcoming me to my new device (and new service provider).

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.

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2C, Design, Dynamic Content, Email Marketing Strategy, Personalization | No Comments »

Monitoring the Revenue/Delivered Email Metric

May 20th, 2010

Open rates, CTRs, conversion rates, revenue, and other metrics are important to track, but an important metric that is often forgotten is rev/del (revenue per delivered email). It is very easy to calculate and one that should make your KPI list.

Simple Example

Revenue for Time Period or Message: $189,433

Delivered Emails: 997,015

Rev/Del: $0.19

How it Helps: The revenue per delivered email metric provides a nice constant when comparing various email efforts. Campaign 1 may have a 25% CTR and $38,000 while Campaign 2 has a 28% CTR and $52,000. The latter may appear to have performed better (and in terms of total revenue it obviously did). But in the scenario that Campaign 1 was delivered to 80,000 and Campaign 2 was delivered to 260,000, the former outperforms with a rev/del of $0.47 compared to $0.20.

For far less effort, Campaign 1 in this example produced over 2X revenue for every email delivered. This is very helpful when comparing promotions, weekly/monthly/quarterly reports, and types of email efforts, such as segmented vs. non-segmented campaigns.

Get your data together and start reviewing some email reports!

Posted in B2C, Email Marketing Strategy, Email ROI, Metrics, Retail Email | No Comments »

Quick Tip: Subject Line Length

April 29th, 2010

The subject line has always been a pretty important element to email communications. After all, if your subject is not relevant and does not catch the recipient’s interest, the likelihood of them opening your message decreases. Sender reputation plays a huge part in this, but let’s focus on the subject line.

In most of our studies, we see the open rate increase with shorter subject lines. Across a large sample, our highest open rates were with subjects that had fewer than 39 characters, but there are exceptions to the rule which makes it very important to test. In a post from early 2009, I wrote about A/B Subject Line Testing. While this plays an increasingly important role as your list size grows, it can also help to make big improvement for small senders.

Quick Tips for Subject Lines:

1. Be Cognizant of Inbox Restraints: some email clients will not display your entire subject, so make sure to have your key points at the front.

2. Focus on Targeted Copy: more important than the length is what your subject says. If it is timely and targeted you will see higher engagement rates.

3. Explore Dynamic Subjects: If your email platform supports dynamic content, experiment with using dynamic elements in your subject.

4. Test: The A/B approach helps increase your email funnel for each send and provide good data for future improvements. Take the extra step and test your subject lines.

Posted in B2B, B2C, Email Marketing Strategy, Quick Tips, Subject Lines | No Comments »

Integrating with Google Analytics – The Manual Way

February 1st, 2010

We have discussed the importance of analyzing email metrics in order to make meaningful improvements to your program. Every email platform will give you insights on email-side performance (opens/clicks etc) but it is also key to track your email efforts in your analytics platform. This allows you to have much more drilled-down data on subscribers that click through to your site.

For this post, we’ll focus on Google Analytics. Some email platforms will have turn-key integration which makes things effortless on your end as every URL in every email will automatically be appended with tracking parameters specific to your account and send.

However, many email service providers don’t provide integration with Google Analytics, but you can still get the same tracking with a few extra steps:

1. Visit the Google URL Builder

2. Enter in information that is specific to your email program and campaigns (this can be fairly top-level or get drilled down).

3. Generate the URL and copy the appending variables. Example: ?utm_source=ESP1&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=TextLinkA&utm_content=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Feb15thNewsletter

4. Add your tracking code to the end of all links in your email (starting with the ?utm_source=…)

To make it simple, you can create 1 tracking URL to use on every link in a given email send. For a more detailed approach, you can create a different tracking URL for EACH link you have. While this may take some extra time, it can give you some helpful insights on your email efforts.

The much easier solution, however, is to use an ESP (email service provider) that supports integration with Google Analytics. In future posts we will be discussing various ESPs and suggestions for what to look for.

Cheers,

Forest

Posted in Email Marketing Strategy, Metrics | No Comments »

Blemishes from SkinStore.com

December 17th, 2009

Every now and then an email comes in with some blatant flaws. While not nearly as bad as the royal screw up from UC San Diego last April, SkinStore.com recently made the Red Flag Mistakes section of this blog.

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.

Posted in Analysis of Live Emails, B2C, Dynamic Content, Personalization, Red Flag Mistakes | No Comments »

Awesome Dynamic Trigger from Verizon

Monitoring the Revenue/Delivered Email Metric

Quick Tip: Subject Line Length

Integrating with Google Analytics – The Manual Way

Blemishes from SkinStore.com

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