Marketing Ideas!

The other day, I received an email from a local restaurant. Their emails are terrible, irrelevant, and useless, but for some reason, I never opted out, I guess because their messages were mostly going to my spam box.

On this day, their email landed in my inbox. I opened it and was immediately turned off. That’s it, I thought — time to opt-out.

When I clicked on the opt-out link, I was presented a page that I thought should pre-load my email address in it. But it didn’t. I guess I’ll have to do this manually … so I tried typing my email address into the Web form. But, the text fields in which I would enter my email address didn’t work.

As if getting the emails wasn’t bad enough, I was now putting way too much effort into trying to unsubscribe. That’s a sure-fire way to lose any last ounce of goodwill they may have had.

A day or so after the above experience, I received two emails from the American Marketing Association (somehow they got both my professional and personal email and I get two of every send). So, I decided enough was enough and tried to unsubscribe my personal email address from their campaigns.

After I clicked the opt-out button, I was presented a list of about 6 or so different campaigns the AMA sends — they asked me to check the campaigns I wanted to opt-out of. None of the items were pre-checked. Thus, I had no idea which campaigns I was already subscribed, nor which ones to remove myself from. So instead of making it easy for me to opt-out, I have to start thinking various strategies to make this work properly.

The moral of this story: if you are putting some effort into email marketing, make sure — make absolutely sure — that your audience can EASILY opt-out of your messages. You may not want to lose them, but you don’t want to annoy them either. If you don’t take care of this, you’re going to be losing a lot more than just an opt-out.

“If I couldn’t interrupt you, how would I reach you?”

This is virtually the first line in the new book by Dave Evans, “Social Media Marketing: an Hour a Day.” It’s in the About the Author section, before the table of contents. Most people won’t read this part of the book. But this is a very powerful question, one that every business — small and large — should be asking.

Here’s why: the traditional marketing and advertising system is broken. The traditional system is about buying advertising and interrupting people with your message. This system worked for a time. Yet, with the proliferation of products and media, we are now constantly bombarded with interruptions. Because there are so many messages, these interruptions have become background noise and is fairly easy to ignore. We now have caller-ID, TIVO, satellite radio, do-not-call lists, and more, all which allow us to choose the messages we want to hear.

And this is why social media, networking, and email marketing are so powerful. These media are based on the concept of permission marketing. When done correctly, you will receive permission to send messages to people who are interested in your ideas.

However, just because you get permission doesn’t mean you have a license to send any message. It must be an appropriate message, ideally something that is of value to your audience and to you. The way to achieve this is to be different. Or, as Seth Godin might say, be remarkable.

Here’s an example of what NOT to do: I receive an email newsletter from an independent restaurant near me that’s actually pretty good. I enjoy their food. But their emails are horrific. The content is obviously syndicated — mass-produced for restaurants — and every time I get one of their emails I cringe. It has (bad) jokes and information that I just don’t find interesting at all. And I’m not the only one who thinks this. It’s a running joke among my friends who are also on their list.

While I originally asked to receive their emails — thus giving them permission to market to me — they didn’t follow through with appropriate messaging. This good restaurant has lost me, a good customer. I haven’t gone there in probably two years. Not because of bad food or bad service, but because they abused their privileged to market to me. It’s left a bad taste in my mouth, literally and figuratively.

Here’s an example of what you SHOULD do: identify what makes your organization unique and then ask, “Who cares?” If  it really matters, tell people. Create your identity around it. Start a blog and write about it. Talk about it when you meet people, work it into your elevator pitch, put it on your business cards, and on your web site. If it really matters, people will notice. It will connect your organization with the people who like what makes you different. It will not be an interruption. It will be interesting. People will see it and they will tell others. Soon, you will have an email list full of people, subscribers to your blog, followers on Twitter — all of them eager to hear your message.

The restaurant I mentioned didn’t do this. Despite their good food, they are no longer different. They are just another restaurant. Actually, they are worse, because not that many restaurants know my email address and interrupt me. The owners of the restaurant probably don’t want to put the time into creating unique content or identifying an idea or differentiator that sufficiently answers the “who cares” question. And it shows.

I’ve recently been reading Email Marketing: An Hour a Day by Jeanniey Mullen & David Daniels and I’ve found the book very helpful. It could use another edit (lots of typos and badly constructed sentences), but the content is still good and has really helped redefined some of my philosophies on email marketing.

If you are interested in honing your email marketing skills, I recommend you pick up the book. And, while you are waiting settle into the book, I want to share with you an interesting segment from the book, which when understood, can go a long way to helping you create a good, solid email marketing strategy.

7 Essential Truths of Email Marketing

The “truths” below are from the book, but I’ve also added my own interpretation and insight to them as well.

Truth 1: Email has evolved into a cornerstone of our lives

According to Omniture, more than 21 million emails were sent in 2007 — and that’s just in the United States. Of course not all of those were marketing emails. But that’s the point. Email is not exclusively about reading marketing messages. There’s a myth that we receive too many emails. In truth, we receive too many unimportant emails. According to a Jupiter Research/Ipsos Insight Individual User Survey (July 2006), 87% of consumers in the United States cites email as the number one reason for logging on to the Internet. In other words, we are looking for emails, we want emails, we carry our CrackBerries with us to get emails, it’s just that we’re frequently disappointed in the ones we get. If you can figure out a way to send important emails, even if they don’t have an overt marketing message, your recipients will be more than willing to read them.

Truth 2: Email marketing best practices change all the time

At the recent Email Evolution Conference (which I was unfortunately unable to attend), Jeanniey Mullen — one of the authors of the book and speaker at the conference — stated that about 70% of best practiced from 2006 are now wrong.

Truth 3: Any type of messaging done electronically is email marketing

E-mail is short for electronic mail. It doesn’t necessarily have to be received in an email client. It could be a text message sent via SMS or RSS. It can be defined as a message that is sent to a specific individual (as opposed to a web page or a blog, in which it is consumed by more than one person at a time). But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep these different channels separate, because they are frequently drivers to each other. In the not-to-distant future, it is likely we’ll be relying on “pesonal messaging” on device and technology agnostic platforms.

Truth 4: Email addresses mean money: Don’t ignore your non-responders

You spend time and money trying to increase the delivery rate of your emails. You spend time and money trying to acquire new contacts for your lists. But do you spend time and money on trying to engage the inactives on your list? Most organizations don’t. On most lists, only 50% will ever respond to emails, but that doesn’t mean the other 50% is worthless. According to research in the book, even non-responsive email addresses are 150% more likely to purchase than those who opt out of your list.

Truth 5: This is not “the Farmer in the Dell”

As Jeanniey and David remind us from the book, the old children’s song “the Farmer in the Dell” ends with the line: “the cheese stands alone.” For many organizations, email marketing is a stand-alone channel. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Web forms, online and offline touch points, searches, trade shows, conferences, banner ads, etc. are all points that an email can be obtained and an engagement begun. Successful email marketing is an entry and exit point for virtually all channels of marketing and can affect (and is affected) by those channels it connects to.

Truth 6: Technology partners often act like military members

It’s been my experience (and Jeannie and David write of this too), that service providers — whether it’s an email marketing service provider or some other service — tend to slip into a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mind set. These service providers will wait for you to ask for a service, feature, or support effort before offering it to you. So don’t wait. If you need something, ask. Push for service and support. You deserve it.

Truth 7: Ignore the rules (follow the law)

“I have not failed once. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”
– Thomas Edison

Paraphrasing Thomas Edison, it is only by making mistakes that we can really learn and do better things. That’s why we look for people with experience to run important things. It’s not necessarily because they know what to do, but they have probably already discovered what doen’t work. This is the same with email marketing. Be willing to experiment, try new things, and accept that not all of your ideas are going to work. As long as you stay within the law, get out there and shake things up!

Many small business owners make decisions based on one question: can I afford to do this?

Despite a very low price tag in general, email marketing is no different. Most small businesses are unaware of the specifics of email marketing, and a proliferation of email marketing service providers complicates the decision making process.

Ultimately, it’s easier to compare what you know and what you can measure: the price. But this process is inherently flawed, as shopping for the lowest price rarely delivers the best value.

So how does a small business choose the right email marketing service provider? To begin to answer this question, it’s important to look at three key aspects that help differentiate most email marketing services. While any service will likely deliver a good ROI (email marketing is so inexpensive that it’s hard not to receive some ROI from your efforts), by evaluating your short list of email marketing service providers on these three areas, you’ll be better able to determine the right service provider for your company.

How to Evaluate Email Marketing Service Providers

For the sake of full disclosure, this blog is written by the owner of Aperio Marketing, an email marketing service provider. I hope you will check us out, yet I also know we are not the right solution for everyone. So I hope you can use this information to form an objective opinion of your options and find the right fit and the right solution for your needs.

These are three important features you need to look at:

• Tracking capabilities (e.g., can you identify how someone found you?)
• Don’t look at the price so much as the pricing model.
• Make sure their customer service fits your needs

Tracking capabilities

You frequently hear how important it is to send targeted messages. What’s not frequently discussed is how to do this. That’s a topic too big for this post, but we can start that conversation now.

A great place to start is by knowing who’s on your list.  While it may be hard to discover their likes and dislikes, or other demographic information, it should be fairly easy to track where the contact found you. This one fact could tell you a lot about your contacts’ likes, and preferences, among other things.

In face-to-face networking events, meetings, or other interpersonal scenarios, this is fairly easy. When you meet someone and receive their business card (and permission to contact them), you can create a group or list just for the event, then put the contacts into that group. Now you can send them messages that revolve around that common experience, a technique that can be very powerful.

It’s a little different for those who find you online. To solve this problem, search for an email marketing service provider that provides unlimited signup screens (for free — some charge for additional signup screens). You can use signup screens to tie-in with specific lists or groups on the back end, thus giving you good data on which pages are converting the most traffics into contacts. This strategy becomes really powerful if you are able to trigger auto-responders based on the signup screen used.

Pricing Structure

I’ll admit this one falls into a subjective category, but it’s a topic on which I have strong feelings. There are three main pricing models for email marketing service providers: database size, pay-as-you-go, and volume of emails sent. For the most part, the difference in price is nominal. If you are simply pinching pennies, then there may be no other solution than the lowest possible price. But, again, if you’re looking for the right fit for your organization, then you should strongly consider what your firm believes in and how your vendor’s pricing model matches up.

Database size

For many, this is the most economical choice, because you can send as many emails as you want without incurring additional fees. Your cost is based only on the size of your database. From my perspective, this is the worst model for small business and here’s why:

• Small businesses needs to be able to grow their list of contacts without penalty. This model unfairly penalizes list owners for growing a database, even if it isn’t used for email marketing. I think this is backwards of how it should work. Especially in a small business environment where resources are scarce, you should be able to grow your list of contacts as large as you need it to be without penalty. Storing emails and not using them has little intrinsic value.

• The model is inherently unethical. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this model is unethical. Under this model, you can send as many emails as you want, whenever you want. Thus the sender is in a position to essentially spam contacts in the database at no penalty. The small business owner may suffer because of the ill-will that may be generated, but the real victims in this scenario are the recipients. Let’s face it: email marketing doesn’t have a good reputation, and it’s pricing models like this that contribute to this perception.

Pay-as-you-go

A slightly better option is the pay-as-you-go model, which is a little like a cell phone plan. You buy a certain amount of email credits that you can send, and you keep the volume of emails within that set amount. This option is better than the database size model in that the small business owner is not penalized for growing the list size, and there are some controls in place for not sending an unlimited amount of emails.

The biggest problem with this model is again an ethical one. Many of these plans “expire” the email credits bought. When the expiration date is coming up, you have to “use ‘em or lose ‘em,” which can encourage sending unwanted emails.

Volume of emails sent

Perhaps the best model of the three is a volume-based model. Under this model, you are not penalized for growing your list and you only pay when you send emails. In other words, you are only paying when there’s opportunity for ROI, which is a good, and fair, practice (and similar to the pay-as-you-go model).

The biggest upside here is that there are no expiring email credits, and in some plans, if you don’t send any emails, you don’t have to pay anything. So if you only send out a quarterly email newsletter, you are only invoiced four times a year.

Customer service

Perhaps the area that should be scrutinized the most is customer service. Many of the service providers that a small business will consider are based on a “self-service” model, meaning the small business is responsible for all aspects of creating, sending, and measuring campaigns. Because of this, and the lack of experience many small business have with email marketing, the “batch and blast” emails typify the approach most organizations use.

But if you really wanted to incorporate email marketing into your marketing plan as a substantial tool, to build relationships, and boost revenue, you will want to learn how to use the tools properly. During your evaluation period, find out what sort of education programs and staffing the service providers offer to help you through the learning curve.

The last, and most important area to consider is your relationship with the vendor. Because of these low price points, most email service providers are looking to gain customers on a national or global stage. In stark contrast, many small businesses are local and use local resources. Local businesses understand the value of using other local services. Local businesses can usually support your quicker, better, and more efficiently than a global company can, plus you are supporting your local economy, which is no small thing. So consider a local email marketing service provider as one of your vendors. If you are using a local company, they may have local training capabilties, and may even be able to come to your location to educate you on their system.