In preparation for our upcoming website relaunch, we’ve been updating the content on our site and making some tweaks to our site functionality. As a consequence, you may have noticed our site behaving strangely recently, particularly the Whitepaper Room. Please accept our apologies and know that the Whitepaper Room is now back up and working properly.

Here are some of the improvements that we’ve made ahead of the launch of a totally new site in a few months:

● The eec’s homepage now highlights posts from our two blogs, the Email Experience Blog and RetailEmail.Blogspot.

● Also on the homepage, we’ve added a See past survey results link under the current Two-Click Survey question so you can quickly find out how people voted on past questions.

● The Member Roundtables page has been totally reorganized and updated. You can now find information about the leadership, goals, initiatives and meeting times of all nine of our Roundtables, including our new Measurement Accuracy Roundtable. EEC members can contact Ali if they wish to join a Roundtable.

● In the right-hand column on the Member Roundtables page and throughout the Initiatives & Standards tab, you’ll now find a “New from the Roundtables” list, which includes the latest blog posts, documents and initiatives to come out of the Roundtables. There are several great initiatives that will be released in the weeks ahead.

● The “Resources” tab has been updated so that it now includes links to the eec’s Facebook group, the Email Experience Blog and RetailEmail.Blogspot.

● We’ve reorganized the Useful Tool & Links page, which has been greatly expanded. If you know of other emails marketing tools that should be added, let us know.

● The Email Performance Award page has been redone so that the information is better organized.

● We’ve revised the description on our eec Newsletter Archive page and on the newsletter sign-up form that runs along the top of every page on the eec site now links to the archive page so people can click through to see sample newsletters and more information before signing up.

We’re working on updating a few other pages ahead of the relaunch this summer and, of course, have plans for several new pages of content as well. So stay tuned. And thanks again for your patience and understanding.

—Chad White of the eec

Hola! Bring out the mariachi band and the silver-studded suits—it’s Cinco de Mayo! This year, General Mills celebrates with Cinco-themed Betty Crocker and Dinner Made Easy newsletters. I don’t mention these just because I love a good margarita. (But if you’re ever in Seattle, you must order a Suprema at ¡Cactus! Tell them I sent you.) And while I haven’t been inspired to actually cook anything, the email marketers over at General Mills are doing a lot of things right. Learn from Betty: pick up these cinco tricks to go from email siesta to email fiesta!

(1) Make it easy.
Our subscribers are taking time from their busy lives to read our email messages. If we can find ways to save them time in return, they’ll keep clicking.
(a) Both the Betty and Dinner newsletters embrace this philosophy, down to the nuts and bolts. Both the preheaders and the footers are clear, concise and easy-to-use.
(b) The Dinner newsletter employs graphical icons like arrows, recipe cards and stars to indicate different content types at a glance, eliminating the need to read. Betty frames coupon offers with dotted lines and a pair of scissors.
(c) Copy is customer-centric; even the name Dinner Made Easy carries a benefit. The Betty newsletter takes both hunger and time-starvation into consideration with the headline: “Ready in 30 minutes!”

(2) Ask questions.
As Dale Carnegie says, the most interesting conversationalists are generally those who let you do all the talking. The Dinner Newsletter commences with a conversation starter: “Want to start a taco night tradition?”

(3) Add depth of perspective.
(a) Betty includes customer quotes from both Jessica and Tweety, letting readers—rather than writers—own the content. (Tweety prefers her tacos with lean ground chuck.)
(b) Customer ratings are sprinkled throughout both newsletters. I particularly enjoy the spoon rating system in the Betty vehicle. Beef Tacos: 4.5 spoons! Very cute.
(c) Mexican Hot Chocolate cookies get a halo when cited as a favorite of celebrity blogger and food editor Andi Bidwell. Like LeVar Burton says, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

(4) Make a game of it.
Betty drives clickthroughs and daily website traffic with a Great Grilling Giveaway.

(5) Put it to a vote!
(a) The Dinner newsletter engages readers with a poll—classic or crescent? I say classic! I adore churros; have you ever had them with vanilla ice cream? It’s fantastic.
(b) At the end of the day, your subscribers are the ones who decide whether to open, whether to read...and whether to unsubscribe. How could you not ask them what they think of your newsletter? Both the Betty Crocker and Dinner Made Easy newsletters end with a request for feedback: “Help us improve our newsletter. How would you rate the usefulness of this email?” Overlaying answers with other performance metrics could yield interesting results. Plus, the placement of the request offers some insight into how many folks are actually scrolling down to the bottom of the message.

Speaking of which... How would you rate the usefulness (and/or the entertainment value) of this article? Do you have any favorite newsletters (or taco recipes) to share? Please post your comments below!

--> See the “Betty Crocker” Newsletter
--> See the “Dinner Made Easy” Newsletter

¡Salud!
—General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín
& Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon

-->Read other Make it Pop! posts.

The answer…
18% --> We don’t segment. All our emails are broadcast and/or triggered.
52% --> We do basic segmentation (demographic, geographic, etc.).
30% --> We do advanced segmentation (behavioral, etc.).

Are you surprised by the results? Share your comments below.

Also, visit the eec homepage to answer the latest Two-Click Survey question:
What level of permission to you get from most of your email subscribers?

-->See more Two-Click Survey Results

I am no longer satisfied looking at program dashboards that roll up multiple messages and present average/mean performance numbers without a measure of variance. This wasn’t always the case.

When I first cut my teeth as an email marketer in the late 1990s, it had been a while since I’d taken a math class. Having attended a small liberal arts school in the Midwest, I was never asked to crunch a single number, and happily concentrated on the subjects that most interested me at the time—Cultural Anthropology and Sociology. So when I went to report on those first campaigns, I didn’t have a whole lot of tools in my belt to analyze them. I calculated the basic performance metrics—open rate, click through, etc.—and when trends or anomalies presented themselves I took notice.

Since those good old days, I have brushed up considerably on my analytical skills. Now I still rely on many of the same KPIs, and a few more, to judge program performance, but I definitely see the data in different ways.

As mentioned above, now I can’t look at a set of data without calculating their standard deviation. It’s of course useful to know, for example, what the average open rate is for a group of messages, but without a measure of variance, the average doesn’t yield much useful information. For example, I could have two different campaigns of three messages each that both have an average open rate of 30%. If we stop there, we could deduce that both programs are performing similarly with regards to opens—when one program could be comprised of messages with open rates of {29%, 30%, 31%} and the other could be {3%, 19%, 68%}. The standard deviation of the open rates for the first campaign is 1—not much variance—but the standard deviation of the second is 33.87, indicating some substantial fluctuations. Again, both have mean open rates of 30%, but there are probably different things going on in data set #2 that warrant further exploration.

If you don’t currently calculate the standard deviation of your campaign metrics, I suggest you try it. Don’t concern yourself that the standard deviation is the “root mean square deviation of values from their arithmetic mean,” just type =STDEV into excel and select the data. It only takes a second, and I believe you may find the information useful.

—Nicholas Einstein of Datran Media

On the front line of email, sometimes the best intentions go awry.

That recently happened to me so I wanted to share it with all of you. Hopefully you can all use this as a best practices learning, or story to share internally about crossing i’s and dotting t’s, and what to do when something goes wrong.

So in celebration of Earth Day the eec thought it would be nice to give something free to our subscribers (just like we did when we gave away free dice from SubscriberMail during the holidays 2 years ago). We decided to go with one free issue of VIV magazine. We chose this because it both demonstrated how email can extend into the digital world even further and because it is an all “green” publication.

Sadly, when the service message was set to send, notifying people their eec gift was ready for review, a few things went awry:
1. People received two or more emails with this notification
2. The context of the eec Earth Day gift was left off the copy

While no one’s information was rented or sold to any other company, admittedly, the perceived recipient experience looked pretty poor. This is a great learning experience for us all.

While I have received emails both praising our thoughtfulness and attempt to share with the industry, I have also received emails questioning the execution of this campaign.

I would like to invite anyone who has questions, concerns or comments to give me a call at 973-204-0023.

I am posting this not to invite complainers to bash this effort (although I am sure we will have those), but to continue to share. The eec’s mission is to pursue a community-based approach to making email better. If this is something you applaud us trying, thank you, if it’s something you can learn from so the same thing doesn’t happen to you, we are happy with that as well.

—Jeanniey Mullen of the eec

We’ve found that those “pesky” complaints generated when a subscriber clicks the “This is Spam” button are actually a great source of feedback data. Scour them for clues around type of subscriber—demographics, vintage (when they signed up), activity, customer status—as well as source and type of message. Then, adjust your program to correct any practices that drive disproportionate complaints. Do the same analysis on what drives response.

We always find actionable results from even simple analysis. If know that one source of new subscribers is driving a disproportionate number of complaints, you can adjust the permission or data capture process, renegotiate your prices, or even drop the source altogether. If you know that subscribers are more likely to complain about one type of message than another, you can test frequency, cadence and the template.

Sometimes hard business decisions are required. We must balance the two—as yes, sometimes the answer to both the deliverability and response question is the same. Recently, one of our clients found that the promotions that generated the highest revenue also drove the most complaints. So we tested the timing of that promotion, sent it to only those subscribers who were active clickers, and also made the link to the preference center more prominent. We were able to boost response slightly, but more importantly found that complaints dropped below the ISP threshold.

Another client found that complainers were not active at all—in fact, many had not opened or clicked in months. That prompted a win-back campaign earlier in the lifecycle, in order to reduce the number of non-active subscribers and improve brand equity.

There is no great secret to great email marketing. It really is all about the subscriber. When we send relevant, interesting and engaging messages, we reach the inbox and drive more revenue, too. I know it’s hard to think about doing something additional (like data analysis) when so many of us are sprinting each week just to get the messages out the door. Let me assure you, our experience shows that even a little bit of data analysis will be well worth the effort.

Let me know if we can help or if you’d like to brainstorm on where to start.

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path