Can you reach Millennials with email?

Do Millennials engage with email?  Everyone I know is trying to find the best strategy to reach Millennials.  Is the right channel email or social?  Do they need tailored content (e.g., user generated for authenticity or curated content that addresses their particular lifestage) to generate engagement?  What offers would resonate most with them?

The answers to these questions will vary on your industry, your product and your approach.  However, I have found that Millennials are less likely to open or click an email than Gen Xers, Baby Boomers or the Greatest Generation.  However, a recent study by Epsilon found that Millennials were using email more than other age groups to find products and services.  Perhaps Millennials are less likely to respond to “push” marketing and want to determine when and how they interact with marketing.

How to benefit from text analytics

The artist, Anne Truitt, believed that ideas floated in the air, available to anyone for the taking.  I thought of this today when I read a recent Forbes article on text analytics.  It combined ideas from two of my recent posts.  First, in order to at least break even on text analytics, you need a plan.  The author is preaching to the choir.  See my post titled “Plan your dive.  Dive your plan”.

Second, in order to create a plan, you have to consider the benefits that text analytics will provide as well as the costs.  Not all text needs to be analyzed.  However, it can help you spot high-priority issues or customer defection.   In the example of preventing churn, you need to know how much a customer is worth.  As I mentioned in a post on text analytics, overlaying customer data to customer feedback will help you determine what action you take.  For example, you may choose not to retain some customers who threaten to leave because they are unprofitable.

In summary, text analytics can be a powerful tool when used in the right situation.  But first you have to determine if its worth applying text analytics.

The direct marketing channel war revisited

These days the debate over direct mail versus email seems to be over.  The conventional wisdom is that direct mail is too expensive and takes too long.  If a retailer has had bad sales over the weekend, they want to take action now and not wait a month or two to get a direct mail piece delivered to their customers’ mailboxes.

However, this approach could ignore some valuable customers.  What about your customers who are not emailable either because you don’t have their email address or they have opted out of email communications?  Also, sending an email doesn’t mean it will actually be seen by the consumer.  Google’s use of the promotion inbox makes it easier for consumers to ignore marketing communications.  In addition, plenty of people have secondary email addresses that they use just for these types of communications and which they check only rarely.

In addition, there is the question of whether email is always the best channel for the message.  A recent study found that physical ads were better than digital ads in some respects.  See here: http://www.dmnews.com/postal/direct-mail-has-a-greater-effect-on-purchase-than-digital-ads/article/423292/

In the end, it may be a multichannel strategy that works best for you.  Through a test and learn approach you can determine what generates the best return on your marketing investment.

Welcome!

How important is it welcome customers to your brand?  If you are a brand manager with a welcome program for new customers, you may be asking yourself this very question.

Welcome programs run the gamut from a simple email that confirms someone has signed up for an e-newsletter or thanks a customer for making a purchase to  a coordinated series of communications across a range of channels (for example, telephone, direct mail and email).  The best welcome programs are integrated across channels and feature tailored messages based on the customer and the product or service purchased. These communications begin shortly after a customer has made a purchase, registered on a website, etc.  They can span as little time as a week to several months depending on the product.

Welcome programs are important for many reasons.  They enable you to:

  • Thank customers.  Let the customer know that you appreciate their business and it reinforces the good feeling they have about purchasing from you
  • Promote new products.  These communications can be used to make customers aware of additional products and services they may want based on what they have already purchased
  • Educate customers.  It is a way for you to communicate with your customers about product features that some may find confusing.  Proactively sharing with them how to access or use a feature could reduce future calls for technical support, saving your brand money and reducing customer frustration down the road
  • Understand your customers better.  It is an opportunity for you to gather information about the purchase process at a time when customers are most likely to talk to you

I have found that customers are most responsive to communications just after they have purchased a product and just before they are about to purchase again.  Take advantage of this opportunity to begin a dialogue with your customers.

Happy New Year

The new year has begun. Now is the time to measure the success of your holiday campaigns. How did your campaigns perform? This is an opportunity to look at their effectiveness in terms of building awareness, generating revenue, increasing retention and aiding customer acquisition? How do your metrics compare to industry benchmarks as well as internal benchmarks? How much revenue did they generate and were they profitable? In addition, what worked and what didn’t? Now is the time to evaluate any tests that were done – date/time, subject line, creative, etc. Finally, compare the results of this past holiday campaign to the one before and analyze the differences. The insights from the holidays can inform your strategy for 2012.

I am dreaming of a white Christmas

Even though it still feels like summer outside, now is the time to start planning for the holidays.

The first step is to evaluate all of the tests that have been done throughout the year in order to put your best foot forward.  In addition, it involves reviewing the results from the prior holiday season.  That means determining the most effective:

  • communication method (e.g., email, direct mail, multi-channel) by customer segment
  • timing (both day of the week and time of day)
  • creative (hero images, placement of links, etc.)
  • subject lines (when and where to mention free shipping offers, brand or product offers, etc.)
  • offers (discount percentages, dollars off, buy one get one free)

Next step is to evaluate any implementation issues from the prior holiday season.  Before coming up with your holiday strategy it is important to determine any limitations or challenges with respect to execution.  Your strategy cannot be developed in a vacuum.  Thus, I recommend that you review what has worked and what did not work with the entire team.

Once all of this information has been gathered, you can develop a holiday strategy.  It should incorporate the lessons from past tests and holiday campaigns as well as encompass:

1.  Start Date. The average holiday campaign begins in October.  Some retailers hold pre-holiday clearance sales and send informational emails to start their holiday campaigns.

2.  Black Friday. For Marketers, the holiday campaigns have been starting earlier and earlier on the calendar.  The same is true for Black Friday.  It is now beginning on Thanksgiving Day for some retailers.  When will yours start?

3.  Cyber Monday. While many digital sales are made on the Monday after Thanksgiving, digital sales are occurring earlier as consumer shop from home.  Will you wait for Cyber Monday or start earlier?

4.  Sequence. If you are using email, you can easily send at least an email a day.  It is important to determine the contact frequency and cadence.  Will all or a segment of your customers receive an email a day, every other day, every third day, etc.?  Will emails be sent only on weekdays or only weekends or a mix?  Will there be a resting period or a maximum number of emails that can be received?

5.  Free Shipping.  Many consumers expect to get free shipping online, especially during the holidays, and will not pay for shipping.

6.  Social Sharing.  Consider how to tie in Facebook, Twitter and other social sites with your campaign.

7.  After Christmas. Lastly, there is also the opportunity for follow on sales after Christmas.  It is the time to promote use of gift cards and purchases of parts or refills.

Trigger emails

One of my clients was asking for my advice about trigger e-mails.  If you haven’t worked with trigger e-mails then you may not be familiar with the ability to set up e-mails that are automatically “triggered” by an event.  There are many behaviors that can trigger an e-mail and below is a selection of the types of trigger campaigns you can develop:

1.  Welcome Campaigns

If a customer makes a purchase or registers on your web site, this is a wonderful opportunity to thank them as well as up-sell existing customers and convert prospects into customers.

2.  Birthday Programs

Why not surprise and delight your customers with a special birthday promotion.  You can send a promotion or special offer in the month of their birthday.  For one of my clients, this program consistently generates among the highest response rates.

3.  Specific Product Promotions

You can leverage past purchase behavior to let customers know about products that might be of particular interest to them.  Amazon is a great example of this.  Based on books I have previously purchased, I receive e-mails about books on topics of interest to me as well as e-mails about new books from authors from who I have bought in the past.

4.  Reactivation Campaigns

If it has been a while since a customer has bought from you, a reactivation e-mail may be in order.  The purpose of a reactivation campaign is to remind customers about your products and services and encourage them to become an active customer again.   This is your chance to win back a lost or inactive customer.

Trigger campaigns are one key element of your communication strategy.  They provide relevant content based on customer behavior and enable you to speak to the particular needs and interests of your customers.

Will Marketers Never Learn?

If you have been reading Limeduck like I have, you might have read about a Rockport print ad showing shoes that are not available for purchase.  As I noted on that website, this has happened before.  In a Marketing class several years ago, my professor showed a television ad featuring a car that could not be purchased.  As you can imagine, consumers saw the car and went to their local dealerships looking for that car only to learn that it wasn’t available.  Given that high profile mistake, I am surprised that Rockport made the same gaffe.

And yet, just today I received an e-mail that I wanted to share.  In an earlier post, I talked about how some e-mail programs do not load images.  This was in the context of measuring the open rate of an e-mail.  However, the fact that some e-mail software turns images off by default also affects the look and feel of an e-mail.  Here’s what the e-mail looked like:

In the image above, pictures have been replaced by boxes featuring red squares, blue triangles and green circles.  All of the time spent crafting a beautifully designed e-mail is lost if recipients cannot quickly read about the offer(s) and easily engage with the e-mail. I certainly did not bother to display the images in this e-mail.

Three reasons that open rates don’t matter

Clients ask me about e-mail open rates and, honestly, they are not what they used to be.  In fact, they no longer matter for many reasons but here are my top three:

1. False negatives.  An e-mail is considered opened when a tracking image is downloaded.   However, major e-mail clients like gmail disable images by default.   If you read the e-mail with the images disabled, it will never be counted as an open.   And what about text e-mails?  They do not include images and thus do not count as opens unless you click on a link (and even that might be e-mail software dependent).

2.  False positives.  Let’s assume that images are enabled.  E-mails displayed in a preview pane are considered opened because the images were downloaded.  But who always reads the e-mails in their preview pane?  I don’t and I bet you don’t either.   So you have undercounting due to the disablement of images and overcounting due to the use of preview panes.

3.  What really matters is the action taken.  To me, the true success of an e-mail marketing campaign is whether you drove the desired action.  Did you sell more widgets as a result of the e-mail campaign?  If not, the open rate is moot.