Don’t Forget Email Marketing: Stats, ROI… It “Stacks Up”

Don’t let all the buzz surrounding social media distract you from the power of email marketing. Sure feeds are great and social media participation is a powerful way to demonstrate the value your business offers. But email reading is still the thing most people do most online…

It may be old-fashioned but it’s low cost and it works: email marketing should be an important part of your online marketing mix.

Okay, “old-fashioned” may be overstating things — is online marketing old enough for any tactic to be old-fashioned? But reading as much on online marketing as I do, it’s easy to forget about email, when all the buzz is about blogging and social media.

Bottom line: not everybody online is tweeting, blogging or social networking and RSS feeds, spam free though they may be, aren’t yet a well-subscribed channel. Everyone online uses email from my 73 year old stepfather to my 8 year old second cousin.

Some Email Marketings Stats That Matter:

Why is email marketing front of my mind? Well my RSS feeds [hat tip to irony here] and inbox have been full of good numbers around email marketing in the last day or two.

• According to eMarketer retailers think email is recession ready:
  • Smith Harmon’s “Retail E-Mail Year-End Trends for 2008″ (January 6, 2009) report shows 90% of the top 100 retailers (the ones with the resources to know and implement best practice) sent more email in the Holidays, 15% doubled or more email frequency in December over other months… They didn’t do it for fun they did it because it pays.
  • The U.S. Direct Marketing Association released a study in October showing commercial email returning $43.52 per dollar spent versus $11.74 for direct marketing in general.
• And a little more from eMarketer on“The Powerful Potential of Permission-based E-mail”:
  • An Epsilon and ROI Research October study found 40% of consumers were more likely to purchase more from companies that emailed them after a purchase.
  • And the same report found 49-72% of people willing to “read email from companies they know after days or weeks” or save email for later reference when purchasing.

Be Careful Though: There Are Risks With E-mail

There is a risk in the increasing how frequently you email customers, as the chart shows.

Seven in ten people don’t want more email from your company. And they might just unsubscribe if you flood their inbox with stuff they don’t value.

That’s why I urge clients to make sure they have something worthwhile to offer in any email they send. So it’s important to:

• plan to email people regularly but not at a frequency that leaves you struggling to find something of value to recipients to communicate.
• demonstrate that value early in the email so it is hard to miss in email client preview windows or on a blackberry or phone.

Remember: people will save your email to read later but it needs to pass the initial scan for “what’s in it for me” test first.

If you are finding it hard to prioritise marketing strategies in current hard times, keep the email going out with good strong offers.

And, speaking of current economic woes, how many times have I read that existing customers are your best/first option for improving sales in “get your business through the recession” articles lately. How do you contact them? Well, email isn’t a bad bet…

Bonus link:

Are you a small business owner wondered whether all this corporate email data applies to your business?  “10 Email Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners”, just published by MarketingProfs, offers a useful guide to how email marketing can help your business.

Website Optimisation Wisdom: Continuous is Best

Urgent or easy tasks all too often delay website optimisation to the detriment of small and medium business (SMB) sites.

And not just SMBs either. In years of advising large and small businesses how to optimise their websites, I have often found that initial enthusiasm for changes is lost and changes don’t get made. Competing agendas push things down the priority list. Or the need for change is forgotten as clients struggle to keep on top of site maintenance, fulfilling orders, the day to day stuff.

Checking my YouTube subscriptions I came across some very useful insight into the importance of “continuous incremental improvement” and how to achieve it from three wise men of online marketing.

Shoulder to shoulder, Dr Ralph Wilson, Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg talk through the issues — useful viewing for anyone struggling to find the time to make website changes because other tasks get in the way…

Bottom line: Make little changes to your website experience all the time to keep up with your competitors or fall behind. And find time for them by understanding what is important as opposed to urgent when maintaining your site.

Note: This is an issue I want to explore in depth in a future post because it is an issue that I come across a lot with clients both in terms of the value of my services and getting sites in the shape I recommend.

Think Your Website is Optimised?

Just quickly: If your website satisfies the 400 requirements in “The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period” then you should be patting yourself on the back. Or, maybe, giving yourself a stern talking to for being so complacent.

Put together by Search Engine Guide columnist Stoney deGeyter , the list is a comprehensive reminder that your website is never really optimised. There will always be something you should be doing…

Web Marketing Insight Catchup

Some days my daily search for Web marketing insight is frustrating other days, well, the insight is in full flood.

First thing:
Turn my laptop on return; to the kitchen [sigh] to get the coffee I meant to bring down to the office; log in and wait for my beleaguered pc to sort out itself ["commmmon!"]; and settle in to read email and RSS feeds because that’s one of the things I offer clients: the latest Internet marketing tactics.

(Know the story of Sisyphus doomed to spend eternity 1. pushing a rock up a hill 2. losing it near the top and 3. repeating 1. and 3.? Well. I relate. But in a good way. The fact that one is never on top of the Internet marketing knowledge hill could be frustrating. Except, constant learning makes life interesting for me.)

Hour later:
Either:

• Hmmmm. Not sure I’ve actually learned much — another five internet marketing information product  pitches, advice I first read in 2001 recycled or repackaged, two more social media sites to consider, etc. That is: a lot of information but no insight.

“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner

Or:

• Lots of fresh insight to note (fresh water to drink from the sea of indigestible salt water that is the daily flow of Web marketing advice) and not enough time to take it in and share it with others.

Fresh or Worthwhile Web Marketing Insight:

• A reminder from Gerry McGovern that your target audience is more and more fickle every day based on a number of things Gerry has come across on his web travels
• (via Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide) a very droll take on the right way to hire an SEO firm from Ian Dury of Conversation Marketing

(Note, especially: the first point about SEOs that can’t write. The technical stuff matters. But the words deliver the traffic and the ROI. I would say that, of course.)

• “Five Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience” from, Clickz columnist, Heidi Cohen actually offers more than five. Her general theme, understanding and catering to chosen customers’ needs in products, service and company style is one I heartily endorse.

Two Email Trails: Careful Where You Send ‘em

I received two email promotions yesterday. Both were good enough to win a click. But one had no chance of converting into a sale. The sender didn’t do enough to help me spend my money. After I clicked I saw no prominent signage to the trail I was interested in following.

I’m time poor. I get a lot of email. And I’m online promotion shy.

I’m pretty normal then for thirty-something professionals with a little cash* to spend who’re online daily for work/communication/play purposes. For me the email/RSS thing is maybe more acute — you try staying on top of developments in ever-evolving world of Internet marketing…

Anyway.

An Email Promotion Good Enough to Win My Click

Both emails where compelling enough for me to lift a weary finger and click through to the site:

• Amazon — targeted as ever — was offering discounts on social media marketing books because (see above re. “ever-evolving world of internet marketing”) I’ve bought the odd online business book now and again.
• Fishpond, New Zealand’s biggest bookstore (think: Amazon circa 1998), was offering $10 credit if I bought any of the items in a Wishlist I haven’t looked at for months. Not a bad idea. I’ve expressed interest in these books maybe a little shove is all I need.

Not sure I would have clicked on either email if I hadn’t been a. cursed to pursue the pot at the end of the internet marketing knowledge rainbow and b. interested in how Fispond is chasing sales because I am cursed… “You get the picture.” But that’s beside the point.

Turning Click into Conversion With A Well Marked Trail

The point? The point is that Amazon delivered on my expectations but Fishpond didn’t:

• Amazon offered a landing page bulging with social media books. (Out of date from the moment the writer and editor agreed they were ready to be published but that, too, is beside the point.) Some I already own, so the targeting was there but the personalisation was a little lacking. If one of the titles had related to a particular challenge I, or one of my clients, was facing I might have even tried to remember my Amazon password.
• Fishpond offered their homepage as the landing page. They were asking me to sign in, remind myself what I had in my wishlist, etc. Well. Immediate access to my Wishlist is probably too much to ask — some serious technical challenges. The homepage has a lot of popular books. The “Sign In” link is prominent on the homepage.  Not bad. But not good enough. I needed something more closely related to the reason I clicked.

Fishpond Lost Me When I Lost the Trail of My Wishlist

The Fishpond email had me thinking “Wishlist”. The trail I was following was marked “Wishlist”. The homepage with its “Wishlist” text link amounted to a trail with insufficient signage. In the few seconds I — like any Web user — allowed the page to hold my attention there wasn’t enough of a trail to follow.

What could Fishpond have done?

Ideally, they would have created a landing page for the promotion mentioning the offer I had responded to and prompting me to signin to my wishlist. They’re not Amazon; their resources are limited. The ideal isn’t always possible in an SME/SMB like Fishpond. I know. I’ve been there.

Sending me to their wishlist page would have helped.  But some changes to that page would have meant the trail I was following was prominent.

1. Heading, “My Wishlist Contains”, becomes “Your Wishlist: Keep Track of Stuff You Want”
2. Copy, “No products are in your Wishlist” becomes “Login or register to view or store stuff you’d like for later” with relevant fields. Indeed, two succinct options would be good. (Note: I am assuming this is the permanent page a landing page would vary in not needing to cater to new visitors by offering calls to action related to registering.)
3. Additional content to be added if at all possible: (not quite a specific landing page) mention of the 24 hour promotion to be added to the page if you can be sure that it will be removed as soon as the promotion is history.
4. Other content, (”Want to know what other shoppers wishing are for? View the top 10 most desired wish list items here.”) would be replaced with the actual list to create another way of grabbing my attention. This new “trail” is a detour but a prompt to “Add to Your Wishlist” could get people back on track.

Bottomline:
If you are running an email promotion send people to a page on your site that references that promotion or, at least, is directly related to it. A promotion-specific landing page can be tough to arrange. But you need to offer signposts on the trail that leads to your goal action. Don’t make people work any harder than is absolutely necessary to get to the relevant parts of your site.

*“A little cash” and seeming smaller all the time with current interest rates and what the commentators call “economic uncertantity”. All the more reason to make it as easy as you can for me and all the other mortgage slaves out there to spend money at your site.

Flash For Search Engines

It is one of the maxims of search engine optimisation: if you’ve put it in Flash it might look good but you’ve pretty much hidden it from search engines.

But maybe the maxim doesn’t apply any more.

Google, Yahoo! and Adobe have got together to figure out a way to offer the big name search engines access to content in Flash file formats (SWF). According to Ecommerce Times:

“The two search companies will use an optimized version of Adobe’s Flash Player technology to improve their engines’ abilities to index the Flash file format (SWF) and scan information contained within the files.

This, according to Adobe, will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content powered by Adobe Flash Player and which would otherwise remain outside the scope of traditional Web searches.”

There are already some things you can do to get content in Flash indexed. Things like, most basically, “noscript” content and ensuring that SWF file meta data is keyword rich. This, though, is an interesting development.

A kinda “duh” development, though. S’pose Adobe weren’t too concerned that Flash movies couldn’t be found via the way people find things online, search engines. That didn’t stop Flash being popular with advertising creatives, gamers, etc. or widely used. But taking 12 years to take some steps to cater to search engines…

Indeed, its not clear who approached who. Maybe the impetus came for the search engines’ endless quest to deliver good results. That definitely the feeling I’m getting from what Google has said on its Webmaster Central Blog and Googleblog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

Bottomline: I wouldn’t be rushing to redo your navigation in your site in Flash. It will be a long time before “no flash please if you’re looking to get traffic via search engines” drops out of SEO-client conversation. Best bet is still href text links — modify it all you like via css but offer the simple links.

After thought: Will be interesting to see what impact this has. The heavily designed sort of sites that make use of flash aren’t generally put together in a keyword savvy way either. (Think of big brand sites put together by big ad agencies — Adidas isn’t to worried about using running shoes a lot in website content, for instance.)

The question is whether the text content in Flash files will actually help search engines understand what the content is about.

Ecommerce’s Key Challenge? Show Me the Goods and I’ll Buy

Emarketer.com notes a Pew Internet & American Life study conducted last year that shows an inability to see products before buying them as a bigger factor in negative attitudes to online shopping than security and privacy concerns.

But the real story is an increased diversity in online purchases. With a USC study showing clothes (57.4%) beating travel (57.3%) to second place behind books (65.6%) in rankings for product groups Americans bought online in 2007. A confirmation of a trend for people to be comfortable buying beyond the ecommerce staples — books, travel, CDs, DVDs, software/games — which offer an experience independent of the way they look/form they take.

Hmmm… Doesn’t add up. People want to see before they buy. But they’re buying clothes online a lot. You’d think clothes would be most susceptible to the see/try before they buy sale barrier.

One of those dueling studies scenarios that raises questions rather than answering them. Trying offline, then buying online after a price comparison, perhaps?

And interesting in the context of a meeting this morning where we discussed beefing up product information a client was offering with more product images.

Apparently, sites with so-called “supersize images” have experienced up to 24% better conversion.

Bottom line: Whatever you are selling/promoting, scrimping on images is not a good idea.

Give people a picture or five to help them picture themselves on that beach. Give them lots of images to help them imagine themselves riding that bike down their street…

July 2nd - And more: “In context” increases conversion — as much as 147%. Showing items in use is much more effective than simply showing them say Elasticpath via their blog Getelastic.com.

There are probably some instances where this doesn’t apply — no need to show someone reading a book, listening to a CD, etc.

But an image of active wear is much less powerful than an image of an active person wearing the item bounding from rock to rock. Your visitor can them see the item in action and, possibly more important, identify themselves as the sort of person who bounds over rocks and looks good doing it.

An image of a software CD or box is next to useless, in conveying benefits of that software. But an image of the interface suggesting some great functionality…

Getelastic.com offers all sorts of examples of good product images. And its very worth reading “How top Retailers Show product Images”.

Indeed, if you are running an ecommerce store I’d sign up for Getelastic.com’s feed.