In his recent Predictions & Unpredictions for 2013 blog post, Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg talked about how brands’ marketing and security functions will need to join forces to fight phishing. One key reason is that phishers and spoofers are continually getting smarter, applying an impressive range of best practices to make their emails ever-more compelling and believable.

• The subject line inspires real concern (especially if you really are a YBS customer!)
• The “Friendly From” is believable (see inset)
• The sender domain is correct (because the real sender is spoofing it!).
• Branding is consistent with the real YBS website.
• The language is professional sounding and there are no spelling mistakes.
• There is a strong, visible call to action – “Click My Account Activity”
• The disclaimer and contact details all appear to be 100% correct.

• It generated a perfectly respectable Spam Assassin score of only 1.5
• It only identified one potential spam trigger word – “Disclaimer”
• It even rendered well on most major mobile devices!

• Nearly 1 in every 20 of these emails successfully bypassing spam filters successfully delivering to recipients’ inboxes.
• Average Read Rate for these emails is 3.66%. This is is particularly startling given that:

1. YBS is a relatively small player in the UK with approximately 1% market share. Assuming that non-YBS customers will almost certainly ignore these emails because they are not relevant, Read Rates for the remainder can be inferred as actually being much higher.
2. In a number of instances the Read Rate is higher than the Not Filtered rate, implying that recipients are recovering these emails from their spam/junk folders and responding to them!

• An authoritative report produced by Cisco Systems shows that on average 99% of phishing emails get filtered, with the remainder generating a 3% open rate. This implies the YBS phishing emails are highly effective, out-performing the Cisco benchmark by a factor of 6.
• Cisco also calculated the commercial impact of a phishing attack at $250 (£155/€190) per compromised recipient. Using the report’s average click-to-open rate of 5%, with 50% of clickers giving up personal data, we can extrapolate the Inbox Insight data to infer an estimated commercial impact in the UK of over £1M pm – for this single scam alone!

• Read our Anti-Phishing Guide which contains actionable advice on how to achieve brand protection and secure your email channel.
• Make use of Return Path’s APS suite of tools and services to:
  • Identify potential brand abuse (Email Brand Monitor).
  • Proactively block phishing and spoofing activity (Domain Protect).
  • Facilitate prosecution or phishing site take-down efforts (Domain Secure).

Day in and day out, DMA’s Government Affairs team is on Capitol Hill advancing and protecting data-driven marketing and fundraising. Since the start of the 113th Congress in January, DMA has been focused on educating policymakers about how you use consumer data responsibly to benefit your customers and the economy as a whole – going on the offensive to stop attacks on the use of consumer data. But attacks on our data-driven way of life are still coming hard and fast:

• Representative Hank Johnson is saying that app stores “threaten the physical and financial safety of consumers” – and introduced the APPS Act to limit the collection and use of data through apps.
• The FTC is taking action against a mobile device maker for failing to follow data governance best practices and putting “sensitive information about millions of consumers at risk” – and will be looking over the company’s shoulder for the next twenty years.
• A movement to strengthen existing European data protection laws is gaining steam, with a key European Parliament Committee joining the growing list of groups to endorse a plan that would give consumers the “right to be forgotten,” allow access and deletion of all consumer information, and require breach notification in 24 hours.
• The States are getting in on the action too by pursuing bills that would set up conflicting standards in Maryland and California for marketing to children, and new regulations limiting online behavioral advertising.
   

DMA is doing everything it can to fight these attacks. Now it’s time for YOU to join the offensive in three easy steps.
 

1. Take DMAAction at DMA in DC 2013 – March 12-13
Every year, the DMA Government Affairs team hosts a “deep dive” on critical issues affecting the data-driven marketing community. We’re extending a special invitation to join us in Washington, DC on March 12-14th for DMA in DC 2013. You can register using the code “INSIDER” to save $200 off the conference price. You won’t find this kind of intimate access to a line-up of industry experts like this at any other event – including a Keynote Address by Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill. The Federal Trade Commission is THE regulator for email marketing.
 

2. Get Smart on Data Governance – March 14
You are already leveraging Big Data to reach and engage your customers or donors. But are you really prepared to deal with the increasingly complex regulatory and governance challenges that come with being a Big Data organization? Stick around after DMA in DC as DMA Education presents “Marketing Data Governance: A Strategic Briefing for Senior Executives,” designed to help you think critically about data breaches, marketing data management; and how you can to take action and implement a data governance plan that includes all the key players in your organization. Register together for DMA in DC and the Data Governance briefing and save hundreds!

3. Contact Your Congressional Leaders – Today
Make your voice heard even before you arrive in Washington! Personal letters and emails are one of the most effective ways that organizations can influence law-makers. Before the legislative fights begin, help DMA start things off on the right foot by introducing the data-driven marketing community to Congress and educating legislators about the important benefits that our industry provides to consumers, communities and the American economy. DMA makes it easy for you to say hello and welcome to your Members of Congress. Just click and take DMAAction today.

Rachel Thomas
Vice President, Government Affairs
Direct Marketing Association

Karen Talavera, eec Blog Contributor, is leading a session at the Email Evolution Conference in Miami this February.  Register today to recieve the early bird discount (through January 14th) and to meet Karen and dozens of other industry luminaries. It's the best place this winter to learn how to make email and digital marketing more successful.  Register now.

What exactly makes people respond to your email marketing offers? What is it precisely that makes them engage and buy from you? And how does knowing these things help you drive better email response?

It’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question asked of all advertising and marketing. While the fundamentals of what makes us want to transact with a company or say yes to one offer over another remain relatively the same across channels, how marketers employ specific tactics can vary drastically from channel to channel.

When it comes to email marketing it’s important to know exactly which approaches lead to trust, engagement, purchase and loyalty and how to translate them into successful email messages and  programs.

Let’s start with that first part – the approach – then move into a specific, tactical process for applying it.

The Basic Psychology of Human Decision-Making
We can pride ourselves all we want on our intellectual superiority over the rest of the species on our planet, but a commonly overlooked fact is that we are as much emotional as intellectual beings – maybe even more emotional than intellectual. Our brains are equipped with reasoning and emotional centers, and both factor into decision making.

In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world can be fast, furious, and impersonal.  There is a built-in immediacy in digital communication channels that often undermines the opportunity to slow down the sale and deepen the consideration process that older, offline channels afforded.

Plus, there is both a considerable amount of skepticism and unfortunately, fraud in the digital world. Allowing people to get to know you online with a relationship-building approach goes a long way toward creating the familiarity, comfort confidence consumers and business people alike need before they’re willing to buy.

It Starts with Creating Emotional Resonance
Despite our immense reasoning power, our instinctive “gut” reactions are older and better honed. From the standpoint of human evolution, we had to develop the ability to make split-second unconscious decisions to survive. This ability survives in us today and kicks-in when we’re faced with any decision – even if it’s not life or death – and often happens before our brains have time to intellectually process facts

That’s why research has proven time and again that people buy from emotion and justify with reason. So it’s essential to know how to emotionally connect with people in your marketing, and in email to do so not just authentically but quickly.

Remember, there’s that built-in immediacy factor with email – people don’t spend as much time with it as print or television. That’s right – with email you have less than three seconds to create emotional resonance.

When you resonate with your subscribers you strike an emotional chord with them. You make a visceral feeling connection.  You both tune into the same “vibe”, and it results in comfort and trust, allowing you to sell in a non-salesy environment.

As in music, your aim is to sing to the same tune as your audience, then harmonize with them by recognizing their needs, pain, challenges and desires and meeting them in that space.

So now that you know we must appeal to both the intellectual and emotional sides of people, how do we do it?

The Five P’s of Profitable Email Response
I recoomend what I call the “Five P’s” process because it not only centers on authenticity, personality and transparency over features and facts, but also honors the intellectual reasoning component of how people make decisions.

The Five P’s of creating emotional resonance and response in email are:

1. Positioning
2. Pain
3. Promise
4. Proof
5. Plan (course of action/call to action)

This process can be followed to craft your copy, offers, message design, message sequence, and even overall messaging strategy throughout a quarter or year.  Let’s explore each of these in more detail:

1.   Positioning

Proper positioning acknowledges both who you are and what’s in it for your audience to be in communication with you. Successful positioning boasts excellent clarity – it makes both your identity as the sender of email and your purpose in sending the message immediately apparent. It then goes beyond clarity to create comfort, familiarity and purpose for your audience.

In email there is little time and space for lengthy build-ups and stories – which is why creative/design elements (like graphics, color, and layout) can be more effective than long copy in creating mood, identity and personality.

Consider these tactics for creating solid positioning:

• Present the “big picture” of what’s possible for your subscribers if they respond to your offer. Show and tell – use both images and words or even video so they can experience that future potential as real.
• Include a link called “About us” or “Our Story” in your main navigation bar/ template that connects to more background about your company or organization. Don’t make it boring – tell a human story that creates both credibility and vulnerability.
• Use outcome-driven, enticing language to set the stage for your offer to come.
   

2.   Pain

Yes, evoking negative as well as positive emotions can entice response (the worst reaction is no reaction at all), but your purpose here isn’t to bring your audience into a place of fear or dread. It is instead to identify and acknowledge their problems, challenges or pain – problems, challenges or pain that you intend to alleviate. Spend just enough effort identifying the pain so your audience knows you understand them, then move on.

It’s tempting to avoid this step in the process. However, in glossing over or skipping it you risk leaving out an important part of the emotional journey for your audience; you also miss a chance to create emotional resonance by helping them feel understood.

3.   Promise

Here’s where you spare no expense getting to the juicy goodness of your message and tying back to your positioning. Effectively creating promise means conveying – again through both words and pictures – the transformational outcome your audience will experience if they say yes to your offer.

Will they be happier? Richer? More beautiful? Healthier? Less-stressed? More successful at work? Better organized?

What are the desired emotions they will feel if they say yes to your offer? Love? Joy? Happiness? Satisfaction? Relief? Peace?

Understanding how your core products/services translate into both emotional and transformational benefits is essential to creating marketing messages that emotionally resonate. If you don’t know how your offerings transform and better people’s lives, you need to learn. If you can’t express the transformational outcomes of your offerings in your marketing, it will fail to connect.

4.   Proof

So far in this process we’ve been heavily in emotional territory. In the proof stage, we accelerate the appeal to reason.

Proof can take several forms both within email messages and on web sites/landing pages. These days the most compelling proof is social proof – as humans we crave a sense of belonging and will often follow the crowd. Who else has experienced the transformational outcome of your offerings and what do they have to say about it? Ideally, you can pull this information directly from your social media pages (assuming you have it there) into your email and website.

If not, include proof in the form of testimonials, quotes, links to case studies, and short success stories. Keep it human! Clinical trials and research studies are factually powerful (and often indisputable) but social proof generates greater credibility. We tend to believe our peers more than scientists or research studies because we can identify more with a peer group.

5.     Plan

Finally, don’t leave people hanging – tell them what you want them to do next and how to do it! Show them where and how to get what you promised.

Otherwise known as your call to action, this step MUST be abundantly clear, concise, literal and logical. While positioning, pain, promise and proof all influence engagement, this final step influences action and actual purchases.  It can be as simple as a text link or a sentence next to a button; or it can involve a short list of steps.

Remember that in email true response is a two-step process beginning with a click from within a message and continuing as a completed call to action (sign-up, content view, purchase, etc.) on a web page. Continue the clarity of your call to action all the way through your landing page and conversion process to avoid abandonment.  After coming this far, you don’t want to lose the valuable connection you’ve created with your responders.

By Karen Talavera
Synchronicity Marketing
Enlightened Email & Digital Marketing Training, Coaching & Consulting
 

DMA Acting CEO Linda Woolley embraces the power of marketing to transform our world. “Marketers have the power to transform politics. Marketers have the power to use big data to get exactly the right items to the right location at the right time,” she said during her recent keynote address at the DMA2012 conference.  One of her oft quoted stories is that Walmart and Kellogg’s use weather forecasts to ensure enough strawberry pop tarts are sent to Florida before a big storm. The data shows that when there is a storm, sales of pop tarts goes up.  This is data driven marketing, just as much as any email campaign.

Marketers have the power to feed the poor, save the environment, change the world, she said at the event. We can predict customer intent by making educated guesses about that is needed when. “Big data is almost an understatement,” she said. Consider that we approach the production of a zetabyte of data is around consumer and marketing transactions, which is a LOT of data. It’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros. Linda said that $168 billion will be spent on products marketed in the US this year – that represents 52.7% of all US expenditures. Marketers and the companies they support account for 9.2 mm jobs in this country.

No kidding, the business of marketing is fueling the economy in new ways. That is a great way to think about how important it is to participate in our industry and do what we love to do.

Linda also showed a new video that the DMA created on how consumers rely on the data embedded into their daily life. They are “Thrilled and delighted to have that data help them connect with products, brands, people, causes and elected officials,” Linda said.

However, Linda warned us that the FTC has started going after data brokers – which is really all of us – anyone who uses data to do marketing to anyone else. The FTC wants to legally require us to allow consumer permission for every transaction. This would be the end of customer centricity. Imagine checking into a hotel that you frequent often, and the registration clerk asks if you have ever stayed before. Unfortunately, privacy zealots have scared Congress with their hyperbole, Linda said. “They’ve frightened people with the idea that if you buy a deep fryer you will be denied health care.”

However, if marketers fight back hard enough, we can show Congress the value of data driven marketing. This is where the DMA comes in.

Linda asked for each of us to join her and the DMA in taking a pledge to support the mission of the DMA to advance and protect responsible data driven marketing. Please do take the pledge today and ask others in your organization to do the same.

Linda herself pledged that the DMA will work tirelessly with every direct and digital marketer to make sure that the future is a world where we can give customer what they want , when they want it. Where marketers can play a significant role in social causes. A world where products and people get where they are supposed to be, on time.

“Together, we can transform how Congress thinks about marketers and data driven marketing,” Linda said. “we will make sure they – and consumers – understand that what we do improves lives, benefits the economy and strengthens our society.”

I hope you will take the pledge with us today – and provide us any feedback on what you need to ensure the DMA serves you the best way we can.

As Linda said last week, “We are DMA. And we’ll be there for you!”

-Stephanie Miller, VP, Member Relations, The DMA

If your direct email marketing program is intended to drive traffic to a landing page or website, chances are you have abandonment issues. Not because you’re doing anything inherently wrong, mind you. It’s just the nature of the online world. Some people will show up at your website and simply not buy. Even the best email marketing will have people abandon their shopping after following through on a call to action. In fact, 88% of online shoppers abandon, according to a 2009 Forrester Research estimate.

It might be the prospect lands at a page then clicks away without buying (called up funnel abandonment) or it might be the prospect goes as far as starting to buy from you--or register with you--then clicks away (called down funnel abandonment).

Either way, they’re clicking away. And every click on the Back button is a lost revenue opportunity for you.

Is that it? Are you done? Must you stand idly by and let them go? Not if you use a strategic email abandonment campaign to re-engage those who clicked away.

At ClickMail Marketing, we’ve been partnering with Smarter Remarketer, helping clients use re-engagement campaigns that kick in when a prospect abandons a landing page or website. During that time, we’ve realized there are two vital reasons for implementing an abandonment campaign: relevance and ROI.

1. Relevance: Emails that follow up on a specific prospect action, such as clicking through to a landing page or adding an item to a shopping cart, are by default highly relevant to that prospect. We can’t know the reason for not following through and purchasing. For all we know, the cart was abandoned because company showed up unexpectedly or the boss called the prospect into her office. It might not be a decision not to buy. It might be real life got in the way. So imagine the relevancy of an email sent to a prospect who was that close to purchasing? The email could remind them of the selected items or even offer a discount if purchase is made within a certain time.
2. Return on Investment: The same logic we apply to factoring the real cost of email deliverability issues applies when computing the real cost of losing a customer because they’ve abandoned your website. Simply look at your abandonment rate and multiply that by your average sales amount to get an idea of the money you’ve left on the table. Chances are, you’ll see a potential ROI that makes the time and cost of implementing an abandonment campaign make both dollars and sense.

In addition to the immediate benefits of higher ROI, consider the longer term benefits of brand and customer relations, plus having a bona fide reason to send that prospect an email. And not just any email, but a very targeted and relevant email, one very likely to get opened, which in turn will help your email deliverability by showing the ISP a high level of engagement.

Getting started
Due to the importance of adding a re-engagement element to your email marketing program, you want to be sure you’re using the best email service provider you can, one that maximizes deliverability and helps automate or simplify abandonment and other triggered emails. Make sure your current vendor (or any ESP you are considering) has a proven record of actual, real life successes too. Ask about measuring and tracking results, and how the vendor will be held accountable for helping you to implement such a campaign. You can learn more about abandonment emails and get advice on choosing a vendor here.

There’s more to reaching out to abandoners than a simple, “Hey, what happened?” email. Adding an abandonment and reengagement email program into your mix makes sense, not only because abandonment emails are perfectly relevant, but because they make an essential tool for ROI, thanks to their ability to reclaim what would have been a lost sale.

Marco Marini, CEO
ClickMail Marketing

• 92% plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2012
• 60% plan to increase email marketing budget; 54% social media; 37% mobile/search (tied)
• 45% cite data integration as primary email marketing challenge in 2012; 43% lack of resources/staff; 40% content management
• 48% cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2012 email marketing initiative; 44% improving segmentation/targeting; 32% growing opt-in email list
• 68% plan to integrate email marketing with social media; 45% with mobile; 17% with search

We exist in a best-practices driven industry. Email marketing has many variables and it's a constantly changing landscape with ISPs and regulations changing rules on us on a consistent basis. We crave the tried-and-true rule, the best practice known to deliver the best result, the sure thing.

We have plenty to learn and use, to be sure! Search for "email marketing best practices" in Google, and you’ll find far more than you could ever digest among the search results.

Best practices for using social tools in email, however, are yet to be clearly defined. In fact, given the pace of change in social media, with constant Facebook updates and new technologies like Google+, these so-called best practices might forever elude us.

Those proven techniques we can turn to with confidence, however, are common sense and come from the email marketing world. Today I offer you four common-sense tips for using social tools that will help you maximize your results: 1) Offer great content. 2) Be very, very clear. 3) Test everything. 4) Go both ways.

Offer Great Content

No matter how much the email marketing industry changes, this common-sense tip will always be. And when you're seeking sharing to social, your content has to be so great that people want to and willingly share it. That idea isn't new. We've strived for "share worthy" content in the past. We had another name for it was all, because what we want back then was a forward. Now we want a share. Great content leads to greater use of your social media links by your subscribers who want to tell their network about your email.

Be Very, Very Clear

When you include social media buttons, be sure to ask for the action you want and let the person know why they should click. A plain, standalone Facebook button will garner only so many clicks compared to a Facebook button with words that ask for action and offer a benefit: "Like us on Facebook for fabulous fan pricing." Everybody knows what a Facebook button is, but not why they should click on it. Ditto for Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social media buttons.

In addition, words help you to be clear on the purpose of a button. A button for sharing is not the same as a button for liking, after all.  

Also be sure to put the buttons where they make the most sense...for your subscribers. Figure out when/where in your email your subscribers are ready to take action. This you might only be able to determine by testing, which takes us to...

Test Everything

Is there a magic spot for your "like" button that will generate the highest number of new Facebook fans? Probably. Can I tell you where that is within your email? No. As far as best practices on technical details when using social media tools, these can only be determined by you. If I could sit here and tell you placing the Facebook icon in the lower right corner will drive the most "likes" on your Facebook wall, I would. But I can't. It all depends. Testing is the only way to optimize placement of social media tools like a Facebook button for your particular business and audience. In fact, testing is the only way to optimize every aspect of your social media tools, from where you put the links to which links you offer. So test. Everything.

Go Both Ways

Yes, using email to drive subscribers to your social media sites or to share is smart marketing. Also be sure your email to social works as your social to email, as well. Your social sites can promote your email subscriptions and offer email signup forms.

And One Last Note...

Even when integrated as part of your marketing matrix and going both ways, email and social differ. And taking a customer relationship into the social realm can certainly alter customer expectations. Once you’ve crossed the social media line, you might need to revisit the tone and personality of your email communications. You've taken the relationship to a new level of intimacy via social channels, and using a corporate or more formal tone in your email marketing might run counter to the warm fuzzies a subscriber now feels for you.

Following these four tips should help you determine your own best practices for using social tools in email...meaning those practices which work best for you and your goals.


- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

Email marketing and blogging share one core feature that neither can exist without: content.

Creating content takes time and effort. For email, you have offers to formulate, copywriters to hire, drafts to review, words to tweak, calls to action to polish. For blogs, you have keywords to use, writers to manage, and frequency to maintain.

You can save yourself time and effort by repurposing content between your email marketing program and your blog program. 

When you create something once and use multiple times, you’re getting more bang for your buck. You can also get more out of user-generated content, and other types of content like video and photos this way.  Since blogs require a lot of content to be effective, you want to tap into every source possible, including your promotional emails and your informative, newsletter-style ones.

At ClickMail, we archive every email newsletter on our website, write a follow up blog summarizing the article and provide a link on our blog to the archived issue. We’ve served our list by providing valuable content with the newsletter, we get the SEO benefits of the additional content by posting the newsletter on our website, and we get the blog content, additional SEO benefits, and a link back by posting a blog. We’ve accomplished all this by simply repurposing one newsletter article.

You can also save money while generating blogs and emails by tapping into your customers for free content. For this user-generated content—which tends to be more relevant to your audience, as well as objective—solicit feedback post-purchase using email. Use any testimonials in your blog, email newsletters, and promotional emails; or let customers contribute to your blog and draw from that content to repurpose it for email content, too.

To save even more time and money by repurposing content, think beyond posts and articles to announcements, webinars, podcasts, video, photos, press releases, customer testimonials and reviews. Consider all content potentially email and blog-worthy with edits to make it appropriate to the channel. If it works in your blog, it can probably be repurposed in your email. If it works in your email, it can probably be repurposed for your blog.

Also remember that your blog works as an SEO tool, helping people who don’t know about you to find you. This may lead them to sign up for your emails when they see your blog on the search results page, click through to it and then your website, and like what they see. So repurposing email content in your blog might just help you grow your in-house email list, too.
 

- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing


 

When do fewer emails mean higher ROI? When your emails are hyper-targeted and truly one-to-one. That doesn’t mean you need a huge team of people contacting customers one at a time, like the telemarketers of old.  It only requires you to tap into existing technology and know-how to make it happen.

I like to say “happy birthdays mean happy profits” because birthday emails are a perfect example of this concept. When someone subscribes to get your emails, you get their birth date along with the other data you gathered about them upon signup. That date goes into your system and on or near the customer’s birthday, depending on how you have it configured; an email is automatically triggered offering a birthday bonus of some kind, like a free ice cream cone if you work for a chain of sweet shops, or a free movie rental if you’re marketing your video stores.

These emails get a remarkably high response rate because they are so targeted…and therefore, welcome.

You’re not limited to birthday emails, however, nor are triggered emails only appropriate for B2C marketing. Triggered emails come in three types—recurring, transactional and threshold—and can be used in a variety of circumstances:

• A recurring email can be a birthday email like we’ve described above, or could happen a certain period after a purchase, to remind a customer that it’s time to renew
  
• A transactional email can be one email, like a follow up to a purchase or download, soliciting feedback, or even a drip campaign following a purchase, giving tips on how to use the product (and also up-selling)
  
• As a threshold email can occur when a customer’s behavior has gotten to a certain point, say if they’ve purchased three songs from one album, you offer a discount on the album

In the past, marketers resisted moving from batch-and-blast to this kind of targeted, triggered approach because the cost seemed prohibitive. Between building the API and the software to handle the emails the technological cost made any chance of an ROI a slim one. Today, however, all top-tier ESPs and many secondary ones offer triggered messaging capabilities. That means you can make your email marketing program even more relevant without increasing your staff or IT costs.

Before we dive into the benefits and how-to’s of triggered emails, let’s review the terminology:

• Triggered means triggered by an event: A trigger based message is one sent out in response to a certain action within an email or on a website
  
• Targeted means segmented, with dynamic content, so different recipients get different email content and even colors and graphics
• Drip marketing is a series of messages triggered by an event, such as a purchase or whitepaper download (also known as lifecycle messaging)

You’ll also need to define the event or events that trigger the website. The event might be a click on a website, time spent on a page with no shopping cart activity, a coupon download, or a link clicked in an email. Or, to return to our earlier example, it might be date driven like a birthday or anniversary.

One-to-one triggered emails have a much higher ROI so even though you’re sending out fewer emails, you’re making more money off the targeted ones. But what do you need to do to be set up for that kind of triggered email?

1.    An ESP or in-house solution that enables triggered messaging

2.    An API to automate the flow of data from your CRM or in-house database to your ESP or internal ESP

3.    A content library, so your system can take from it to place the appropriate message in each email

Also consider that these types of emails typically use a transactional delivery engine vs. a marketing delivery engine, i.e. point-to-point transmission vs. one-to-many broadcast.

The one caveat happens when you start to collect the data upon which to define your rules. Do not ask for too much. You can ask for up to four pieces of information upon sign up, but any more than that, and your abandonment rate will soar. Instead, be very clear what information you want to start out with and only ask for that (based on what you can really use). Then over time you can ask for more information, and append that information to that subscriber later.

The idea of this kind of targeted email marketing might be daunting, but it’s really not difficult given today’s technology and pre-existing services. As a result, your triggered email messaging can be as sophisticated as you want to make it, to get the most ROI from your highest value customers. For example, your system can score a customer based on behavior, such as purchasing a higher-priced item, and offer an exclusive and limited price on another item as a reward.

Marketers have to start automating their email campaigns based on customer behaviors, such as shopping cart abandonment. Companies who’ve done this have experienced higher click through rates and conversion rates, without increasing staff costs. Alternatively, automating email programs around customer behaviors with hyper-targeted messages will result in a higher email marketing ROI.

And it leads to a higher engagement index, which means more of your subscribers are engaging with your email, which in turn will give you a better standing in the eyes of the ISPs…which in turn will improve your email deliverability and get you into more inboxes…and so on and so on and so on.

Sounds pretty happy to me!


- Marco Marini
CEO
ClickMail Marketing

• product review requests.
• “getting started” guides or how-to tips for using the product purchased.
• product care messages (tips to maintain or clean the product).
• coupon for next purchase.
• product refill requests (after estimated use time as passed).
• non-purchaser series – sending “We miss you” emails with increasingly valuable offers to push folks back into purchasing after a certain amount of time has passed.
• non-purchaser series for those who have NEVER purchased (i.e. the last purchase date field is empty).

1. The ability for all marketers to benchmark their results against the metrics from any delivery platform
2. The ability for the industry to aggregate results knowing that all source data was acquired using the same definitions
3. The ability to compare data across multiple systems and databases
4. The ability to better integrate metrics with other platforms, such as CRM system