Email Marketing : It’s Like You Never Left

What’s next after email marketing? Isn’t RSS going to free us from all those problems with email like deliverability issues, and steadily dropping open rates?

Not so fast says Barry Stamos, Senior Director of Strategy at Responsys. Email is still one of the best tools available for making and maintaining a connection to your customers. “Email [today] is sort of like website development was 4 to 5 years ago” says Stamos. “Each one is a chance to make or break your relationship”. Stamos recently came to Responsys via the acquisition of INBOX Marketing where they guaranteed an increase in email marketing sucess rates by 50%. “We never had to refund any client campaign”.

In this morning’s session “Email Marketing : The Cinderella Story” Stamos and clients Dre Madden of online ticket marketplace StubHub, and Karolyn Stayer of cosmetics brand Philosophy describe how they boosted conversions from their email marketing by up to an astounding 1200%.

If you were looking for a session with some advice you can use right when you get back, this was it. Madden and Stayer each described how they had used limited resources to make relatively simple changes to their email programs to generate fantastic improvements in results.

When the CEO of StubHub first charged Madden with re-vamping their email marketing program she thought “isn’t our program pretty good already?”. But, after digging into StubHub’s email communications, it turns out there was plenty of room for improvement. She started with the welcome message. It was their first opportunity to sell the benefits and features of StubHub, but was only a very basic welcome to StubHub message. After their changes, they saw a 43% increase in open rates, a 130% increase in clicks, and an 1196% increase in conversions.

At Philosophy, Stayer wanted to grow the size of their opt-in email database and improve revenues produced from their in-house list marketing. With the help of Responsys, they implemented a customer acquisition, conversion, retention and segmentation program. Their program now boasts a cost-per-acquisition rate of just $0.47, and a 2006 purchase conversion rate of 16%.

So, what were some of the tips that helped Stayer and Madden achieve such great results? Here are a few of their suggestions:

• Use a short subject line, with a strong offer.
• Test whether using your company name as the first item in the subject. It can boost rates significantly, but Stamos warned this may not always be the case
• Your average user will only spend 5-7 seconds looking at your message, so have a clear, engaging, offer in a prominent headline
• Use a subhead that refers to your headline offer
• Make sure you have a hero shot as a clear visual starting point.
• Put a caption on your hero shot. People are trained to look for and read captions to images
• Use text links and buttons as return points to your site. Some will respond to one, but not the other.
• Be sure you have a strong landing page. There is a symbiotic relationship between the email and the landing page

When asked by an audience member what they should do if they are just starting an email program, Stamos responded with these suggestions:

• If you are a commerce site, you absolutely should implement an email cart rescue message.  “This is the single best thing you can do to improve conversion rates--it can save 20-30% of lost carts”.
• Create an email preferences center. Rather than just unsubscribing users who are unhappy, give them options like a lower message frequency. This will help reduce unsubscribe rates.
• Pick a good email delivery partner, and use an email delivery audit service like Pivitol Veracity to boost delivery rates.
• Add a quick sign-up form on every campaign landing page--this alone can improve your conversion rates by 30%

One final tip: “Treat every customer like they are a princess.” Every message is your opportunity to improve your relationship with your customer.

I’m sure just about any site owner can see something in this list they could improve.

Here are a few links to documents referred to during the session:

- Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide (requires purchase)

- The JupiterResearch study The ROI of E-Mail Relevance available with registration at Responsys.

- Barry Stamos’ article on iMedia Connection: 10 Quick Wins for Email Marketing