Dispensable, unimportant, unloved.

Such is the opinion held of welcome emails by many marketers. Optimizing the lowly confirmation that “your address has been added to the email list” is rarely a priority email marketing task. Many senders don’t even bother with them.

The shocking news is that welcomes are actually the best performing email many organizations will ever send.

In this whitepaper, we’ll explain why welcome emails play a hugely significant role in email marketing, offer tips on the content that goes into a winning welcome, and outline sample welcome email messages to inspire your own.

Download the whitepaper now!

This trade association got thousands of people to join its Facebook, Twitter and email audiences during a 90-day sweepstakes targeting U.S. moms. You’ll see the campaign’s viral tactics and learn why you should never forget the “sweepers.”

CHALLENGE

The Sugar Association strives to get its message out to consumers. By sharing research, dietary advice, recipes and other information, the organization’s goal is to increase the public’s consumption of sugar.

Social media networks appeared to be a perfect way for the team to raise awareness and foster sugary discussion. But, by early 2011, the association’s profiles on Facebook and Twitter had not received much traction. The marketing team regularly shared content and tried to engage the audience, but its follower counts had not broken 200 on either network.

Read the entire case study at Marketing Sherpa >>

I would be remiss in not calling out the great women who make email marketing better for all of us.  So I’m going out on a limb here with a list of who I think are the “Rockin’ Women of Email Marketing.”  If I miss anyone, and I’m sure I will, please forgive me and add anyone who you think deserves to be on this list in the comments.

So here’s my list in no particular order, names are linked to their Twitter accounts, so follow them… you’ll be smarter for doing so!

The Rockin’ Women of Email Marketing:

Tamara Gielen & Kath Pay – Plan to Engage (The Dynamic Duo)

Anna Yeaman – stylecampaign

Karen Talavera – Synchronicity Marketing

Ali Swerdlow – Email Experience Council

Stephanie Miller – Aprimo

Tami Forman – ReturnPath

Laura Forer – Audible.com (No Twitter account, so I linked to her LinkedIn acct.)

Kara Trivunovic – StrongMail

Michele Souder – Trendline Interactive

Laura Atkins – Word to the Wise

Kristine Dobson – EmailDirect

Justine Jordan – Litmus

Jeanne Jennings – JeanneJennings.com

Jessica Best – emfluence

Janet Roberts – Content by Janet Roberts

Gretchen Scheiman – Ogilvy (Private Twitter acct., so I linked to her LinkedIn acct.)

Erika Roe – NC State University

Elisabeth Szczokot – Alberta Motor Association

Dori Thompson – dorithompson.com

Denise Cox – Newsweaver

Amy Fitzgibbons – Sailthru

Very fun email and it tracked all plays from any device. Go here to learn more about the cool email games that StyleCampaign has done and are working on currently.

Cheers to Anna, Graeme and the StyleCampaign team! Brilliant work!

For this, I salute the email geeks with a glass of Good Cheer! (Actually 12-year old scotch, but who’s really watching.)

One of the best groups for sharing email marketing knowledge is Only Influencers.  A distinguished, funny, albeit motley crew of the best minds and people in email marketing. (Social and Mobile too!)  Only Influencers is the brain-child of long-time email industry smart-@ss Bill McCloskey.  It’s an invitation-only network, and to gain entrance you’ll need an invite from one of the current members.  (If you’d like an invite, please feel free to contact me and I’ll see if I can slide you in.)

But even having an invite doesn’t guarantee access; you still have to go through Bill’s screening process.

Some of the people you’ll find there include such email marketing thought leaders as:

Loren McDonald - SilverPop

Ryan Phelan - BlueHornet/Digital River

Dela Quist - Alchemy Worx

John Caldwell - Red Pill Email

Dennis Dayman - Eloqua

Andrew Kordek - Trendline Interactive

Anna Yeaman - StyleCampaign

Dave Hendricks – Live Intent

Chester Bullock - Merkle, Inc.

Laura Atkins - Word to the Wise

Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports

Justine Jordan - Litmus

Elliot Ross – Email Design Review

Scott Cohen - Inbox Group

Andrew Bonar - EmailVision

Jim Ducharme - GetResponse

Martin Lieberman – Constant Contact

Jordan Cohen - Pontiflex

Like with most lists, this one is just a sampling of the great people you’ll meet and exchange ideas with.  If you were left off the list, my apologies. If I tried to include all 300+ people this post would never end.  Leave a comment with your favorite email marketing people if you’d like.

But you get the idea: smart people, great minds, and a knowledge base second to none.

So as the holidays approach, thanks to all the email geeks, whether you’re on the OI list, just starting in the field, or one of the many unsung heroes working in the email marketing trenches.

A special thanks to Bill McCloskey who created this great resource so we can share, vent, get on our soapbox and make new friends.  A tip of the hat good sir!

Enjoy your holidays and remember – Email is still has the best ROI of any marketing channel.

THRIVE WITH EMAIL IN 2012 AND BEYOND!

Cheers, Chris

They might not open or click on emails, but those subject lines, from lines and regular brand impressions are still positively influencing their purchase behavior.

So is it still necessary to send dedicated “winback” campaigns to get these people opening and clicking again?

Yes.

After all, that positive influence likely increases if they’re actually engaging with your messages. And the prominence given to your emails in inboxes increasingly depends on how individuals interact with those messages.

Step 1: Define “inactive” thresholds

The first task is to define the point at which you consider a subscriber becomes inactive. This is typically a number of weeks or months since they last opened or clicked on an email.

You might, however, choose alternative definitions, such as time since last website visit, purchase or white paper download.

Base the decision on your email frequency, business model und understanding of customer behavior. A B2B list promoting a service with a long and seasonal sales cycle will define inactives differently to a B2C list where monthly replenishment sales are the norm.

Your definition must also be practical: it should allow you to segment out inactive subscribers from your address database.

Step 2: Develop winback approaches

Since inactive subscribers tend, by definition, to gloss over your messages, you need to do something different to recapture their attention.

Take some time to test out alternative winback email approaches. Such as:

1. A purely incentive-driven email, which simply highlights a particularly strong offer
2. A service-oriented email, which invites the subscriber to submit more informationon their interests so emails become more relevant
3. A mix of the two

Other things to change and test include:

• From lines – try something different, but recognizable…like the account manager’s name
• Subject line – test promotional (“A 40% discount just for you”) versusconversational (“Did we do something wrong?”)
• Design or format – consider a toned-down plain text approach
• Value of any winback incentive used

Step 3: Automate the winback campaign

Set up a trigger campaign that sends out the winback email(s) to any subscriber who approaches the threshold criteria you defined in Step 1.

You might test and implement different campaigns for different types of subscriber, so those who still buy, but don’t click, get different content to those who neither buy or click.

Do you, however, have a plan in place to keep those who respond to your winback efforts active? After all, the best way to tackle inactive subscribers is, well, not to have any!

Step 4: Manage the truly inactive

Finally, you need to decide how to treat the persistent non-responders. Common alternatives are:

1. Carry on as normal, but keep tabs on how this inactive segment performs

Some inactives will return to the fold of their own accord. You’ll also learn how accurate your definition of inactive was.

2. Reduce frequency or cease mailing for a short period

This lowers the chance of truly disengaged subscribers reporting you as spam. Abstinence can also make the subscriber heart grow fonder.

3. Increase frequency

The “kill or cure” approach either gets their attention again or triggers an unsubscribe. Watch, though, for any rise in spam complaints.

4. Delete the subscriber

If you think inactives are hurting deliverability or you’re sure the subscriber has no value to your organization, then consider removing the address.

Before you do, send one last winback email politely alerting recipients to the pending end of their subscription and giving them the chance to stay on the list.

If you receive an email promoting a product you’re interested in buying, you’ll most likely view and probably click through to the site to see more.  Here’s where the real negotiation starts.

In your head you’re already weighing certain pros and cons:  “I really want this… But can I afford it right now?  Is there a better deal out there?  Should I wait till my next paycheck?  But what if the price goes up… or down?”  You may even get to the point of adding the item to the shopping cart, only to abandon the item(s) because at the last minute, you’ve negotiated with yourself to wait.

As the email marketer, here is another opportunity for you to renegotiate with the buyer.  In fact, you are now in direct negotiations with the buyer. They showed interest—enough interest to actually put the item in the basket. So, here comes your decision:

What will you offer them to complete the sale?

If you have a shopping cart abandonment program in place, you may be set up to send the shopper a follow-up email with a targeted offer for a discount on that particular product or a general 10% off deal to help push them over the edge and make the purchase.

At the end of the day, you have some decisions to make. What should your rules be in the abandonment program?:

The decisions you make when setting up a shopping cart abandonment program, in most cases, will need to be tested based on offer type, total dollar amount of the shopping cart, new or existing customer, etc.  Also look at your current abandoned carts and natural returns to purchase.  See what the average time is between abandonment and return to complete the purchase.  That may give you a good idea on your window of opportunity.

Understand this: This is a negotiation. You just have to decide how willing you are to reduce your profit margin to win the deal.  Because tighter profit margins with more sales will still result in an up-tick in revenues.

Start with a conservative approach and test.  Then tweak the offers based on timing, total dollars in cart, existing customer or potential new customer, type of offer, or simply a reminder.

Don’t think you have to offer big discounts and, most importantly, don’t negotiate against yourself.  Test first and find the offer that best returns the most sales for the least amount of discounts.

—

Cheers and I hope your sales are great this holiday season, Chris

We’re pumped about these big changes, and especially excited by what it means for you, our customers. What does it mean?

• Continued best-in-class customer service
• All-in dedication to full-service email marketing (managed) services
• A bigger team of email strategy, creative, and technical professionals
• More opportunities to combine zombies and email

Speaking of zombies…

Having Fun with the Announcement

Anyone who knows Scott Hardigree (founder of Indiemark) knows he’s a big fan of zombies. That’s why we decided to have a bit of fun with announcing the acquisition:

We sent the above zombie doll and postcard to a select group of brands, industry insiders, and current clients. Those who have received it have loved it. We like it, too.

(By the way, did you notice we have a new logo? Pretty sweet, huh?)

The postcard front read:

And the back:

We’re excited to welcome Indiemark to the Inbox Group family!

There is an obvious season(s) for work and an obvious season(s) for play—scenarios that don’t just apply to holiday sales for retailers, but marketers in all types of businesses.

I touched on this topic a bit when I wrote about choosing your battleground wisely when it comes to email marketing. I wrote: “Don’t send email when you don’t have. Don’t compete when you know you won’t win.”

These were words that specifically illustrate the need to understand the seasonality behind your product or services. If you know when you compete best, you’ll be in better position to take advantage of your good seasons.

Yet, email still has tremendous value in the “Offseason.” Here are two ways you can extract value from email during the offseason:

1. Branding.

Yes, there’s that word again: branding. It can be somewhat nebulous and difficult to track, but sending email to your clientele in the offseason (within good reason—don’t go overboard) is a good way to maintain awareness and cultivate that “top of mind” idea. Your most loyal customers won’t leave you during this time, but those who are on the fence or are “casual customers” may forget about you if the silence lasts for too long.

2. Knowledge Gathering

You can use this time to gather input from your customers through surveys, polls, or any other intelligence-gathering methods you may have. Catching your customers in the offseason may give them more time to think constructively about their needs are and how you can better meet them through your product(s) or service(s).

Who knows? You might be able to create an offseason demand for your product or an idea for a new product that creates year-round demand. You never know.

That being said… it is still vital to develop your offseason strategy with the knowledge that you may not move the needle at all. It’s about using the time and taking a long-term lifecycle view to your email marketing that will hopefully produce the right results when you need them the most.

• Boss: “We need to be on Facebook. Let’s have a contest and get people to like us and subscribe them to our email.”
• You: “Okay, great. What do we plan to do with them after they’ve signed up?”
• Boss: “I don’t know. But you need to get X-number of Likes and X-number of subscribers.”

I get it. The numbers chase is where the fun is, where bonuses are made, and high-fives (or fist bumps) are exchanged. It’s especially fun when the numbers you’re chasing are part of the new “shiny object.”

But just having an acquisition strategy and nothing else is amazingly short-sighted. After all, you can acquire millions of “Likes” and subscribers if you give something away to everyone who signs up, right? But how do you keep them around post-conversion?

That, my friends, is retention. And if you’re about to pull the trigger on a serious acquisition campaign, you need to have a plan in place for retention now (yesterday, really). Here are three reasons why you need an email marketing retention plan:

1. You can more effectively gauge real interest in your product or service.

• Cartman: “More people will come if they think we have punch and pie.”
• Kyle: “[typing] Punch and pie.”

If you’ve seen the South Park movie from about 12 years ago, you’ll remember this little snippet where the boys are trying to put together “La Resistance.” They get a decent turnout, and without fail, two kids came solely for the “punch and pie.”

Point: Once the incentive is over, you’re going to lose some people. But there are people who are genuinely interested in your product.

Conservative estimates I’ve seen are in the range of a 20-30% attrition rate almost immediately after a contest ends. That means for every 10 people who sign up, you’re guaranteed to essentially “lose” three of them. Obviously, they only showed up for your version of “punch and pie.”

But what about the other 70%? How will you know whether they showed up for the “punch and pie” or whether they’re actually interested if you don’t communicate further with them after the contest?

Treat your contest entrants like you would “normal” subscribers. Have a communications plan for them that gives them relevant, valuable information that could convert them to purchasers.

2. You can turn your winners and entrants into brand advocates.

In some of the contests I’ve seen on Facebook, there are entrants who will comment on every post, post to your wall, and try to engage with you (skeptic: likely thinking they can skew the results of the contest that way).

Why not use that enthusiasm to your advantage during and after the contest to not only retain these individuals on your list, but potentially empower them to become champions of your brand?

Email makes it easy to even go truly one-to-one with these active entrants. You can stay in touch and figure out ways to make them feel special (even those who didn’t win but want to be involved… perhaps for some free stuff). If they feel special and like what you offer, they’re more likely to continue to be active and talk about you.

And we all know word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising.

3. You can actually make money off of your contest in the long run.

Wait, what was that? Making money off of a contest? Yep, I said it.

If you don’t communicate to your entrants-turned-subscribers after the contest ends, you know what you’ve done? You’ve turned that entire list into “Punch-and-pie” people. Your entire list is now comprised of freebie seekers and nothing else.

And you know what doesn’t happen? You don’t make money.

And that’s why you’re ultimately doing the contest, right? To make money?

Going back to my first point, you can’t know what you have until you ask. And by continuing the communication cycle post-contest, you have a better chance of converting some of these entrants into customers than you would if you simply went dark.

So, keep communicating. Keep the enthusiasm alive. And make your contests worthwhile for everyone.