As email has become more competitive and customers have taken to a variety of communication paths, most notably social in 2011, sends have become much more individualized with companies in the same category and channel sending very different offer types and frequencies.

Looking at the overall trend, it appears volume is up, likely as companies continue to strengthen their digital competency as well as the size of their offers.

The Volume Counts:

• Brookstone – 114
• Restoration Hardware – 55
• Bath & Body Works – 54
• Macys – 42 [includes sub brands, i.e. rewards]
• Harry & David – 41
• Victoria’s Secret – 42
• Zales – 42
• Ice.com – 39
• CircuitCity.com – 38
• Eddie Bauer – 37
• NewEgg – 34
• Pottery Barn – 32
• NFL Shop – 31
• Sports Chalet – 28
• Best Buy – 29
• Costco – 27
• Target.com – 24
• Bed, Bath & Beyond – 23
• HP – 22
• BananaRepublic – 21
• Dockers – 21
• The North Face – 18
• Zappos – 15
• See’s Candy – 15
• SiriusXM Radio – 12
• StarbucksStore.com – 11
• Quicksilver – 7
• The Art of Shaving – 7
• Mophie – 6

The misses & future opportunities:

1. Many companies repeated messages, offers and creative. While emails do go missed, trends become notable and as shoppers key in, response is reduced. By diversifying messaging points, even with the same baseline offer, activity increases to see what “different”.

Restoration Hardware is just one example having sent 4 identical titled emails in 1 day.

2. Significant oversending continues to be a wide-spread problem with Brookstone setting the bar at 114 emails in around 90 days. While more volume can drive short term sales, finding a balance helps insure list quality and continued usage throughout the season and minimum opt-out requests.

3. Only a few companies addressed mobile viewing. With the huge spike in mobile this year, the implications of being accessible are significant — increased awareness and offer usage for retail and being a direct alternative for etailers.

Harry & David and Best Buy offered a mobile links on messages improving their shot at converting shoppers on the go.

4. Almost no companies leveraged social to validate messages. By including user generated content such as user reviews, comments from other shoppers, or more abstract programs like gift tips, social can help email become more authentic and lessen the spammy nature of offer only messages.

Samsung keyed in to both reviews and Facebook chatter in one of their email sends.

Note about the data: I track emails starting in September that mention holidays through to new years. Messages are sent to a dedicated account and regularly opened to fire tracking tags but are not acted on [no purchases] to avoid segmentation changes and of course some messages do get lost in the mix, this is not scientific.

First I found out that it’s time for me to propose thanks To Robbins Brothers.

Then I found out this special someone works in an office thanks to ProFlowers.

This was news to me but all seemed slightly ok until Victoria’s Secret told me there was a new way for me to love my own body in time for Valentine’s Day, with a bra. I guess only women end up on their mailing list.

Tiffany’s also shot over a confusing one when they offered to help me get a gift for “him” although they were ambiguous about who exactly “he” was.

And of course we can’t forget the anniversary gifts, computer parts and other suggestions sent out by all my other favorite retailers, most of which had much less impactful insights into my world.

Now I’m not suggesting any of these companies should have held back on their campaigns, in fact I’d like to I commend them on trying a diverse set of campaign messages and using some great creative to drive the sale. And these campaigns aren’t much different from what we see on TV, hear about in radio spots and are bombarded with in every other channel possible. What’s different is the opportunity of the internet – with a little interaction, some micro-profiling or even just a fun email offer Robbins Brothers could know my relationship status, Pro Flowers could be sure the name they keep suggesting a gift for is still a part of my life and Victoria’s Secret could become aware of my gender.

Personalization isn’t only about stopping awkward emails; it’s also a conversion steroid. Just think about it – if 1-800-Flowers knew who my mom was (they’ve shipped to her), what the status of my current relationship is, and that I’m more of the random flowers type than the once a year guy they could have slaughtered all their competition with some targeted and really useful gift suggestions instead of 23 different offers over 14 days. Getting accurate consumer data is of course a fine line as you don’t want to scare people off but as the world becomes increasingly digital the opportunity for a little profiling exists, it just needs to be used.

20 of the emails I got from 1800Flowers in just 2 weeks. The shocker: This isn't everything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to update my family on some recent insights.

2 – Open rates measure everyone who has read my message.
If you use Outlook 2003 or 2007, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail or just about any other new email program or service you’ve probably loaded messages to see a prompt saying that images have been disabled for your safety and you have to download them by clicking. Open rates are measured by the loading of images (or when someone clicks through your message for some providers) so if a user browses your message but never chooses to download it they wouldn’t count as an open. Furthermore some email clients don’t even display the possibility of images and the user just sees text (this is especially true for smartphone email clients) which means there’s absolutely no chance of registering an “open” until a click is made.

3 – Using fewer images will make my open rates more accurate.
As I mentioned before, an open is only counted when someone loads images. If all you have is a small logo or a couple of aesthetic images in a mostly text message there’s very little reason for anyone to download the images associated with the email and thus become an open. So while you want your messages to be legible and clear without images being loaded, you also want images to be important enough to the message that people have a reason to download them and trigger your tracking in the process. Your images need to add to the message to be used… having too many will make the message bulky and impossible to read without images being loaded but having too few will give the user no reason to load them at all.

4 – Images are a thing of the past. Everyone is going to text.
For a while the marketing buzz out there almost got me to believe we were going to see the end of images and HTML in email but so far that has not been the case and in fact, I’d argue that email is going more image heavy these days thanks to improved bandwidth and big brands doing more email. The truth is most consumers are going to shop using visual cues and while text may get delivered better it doesn’t show the product, the story or the experience nearly as well as images. Thus image emails are almost demanded (I’ve had customers ask me why we sent them a text campaign before) and despite the extra step many consumers are more than willing to open up images to get a better sense of the message. A picture is worth 1000 words even in email.
Of course don’t mistake this as an absolute. Some niches have seen much better responses from text only campaigns like those targeting blackberry users (b2b).

5 – Its either text or images, there’s no other option.
Emails don’t have to be sent in just one format and most email service providers have started forcing emails to be sent with text and html/ rich versions if a rich version is being used. By creating what’s known as a multi-part message your emails can be all done up for users with rich viewing clients yet also have a simple and completely separate text version for those using more restrictive systems or older mobile devices. Multi-part messages aren’t perfect as SPAM filters still see the HTML for their equations but it’s a great option for your users and something every email message should have setup.

6- Every email can be tracked to sale.
While email is one of the more contained means of online marketing where you really can tag every link don’t make the mistake of believing that everyone who sees your email uses those links to convert or at all. While many people do click, there have been a few studies showing that many people will simply surf to a site directly after seeing an email blast (and not always immediately) or just go to a store. And of course if you have other conversion options like a phone number there may be no reason for a click at all.

So there you have it, 6 myths you hopefully didn’t fall into but now know the truth about. Have more questions on email marketing analytics? Leave me a comment.

The benefit from personalization and segmentation in general comes from matching a customer or user with something that’s relevant to them which causes them to find the right match and buy more. While it may seam harmless to match things incorrectly from time to time, it’s anything but. Case in point, in a 2007 survey by ChoiceStream, nearly 40 percent of respondents indicated that they were “less willing to return to sites with poor recommendations.” (ChoiceStream PDF)

But even strong numbers haven’t kept some companies from making bad decisions about how to personalize their marketing messages. A few days ago I recieved what amounts to perfect a example of a personalization mistake…

The problem…

As you can see the above email is from Harry & David and is about Valentine’s Day (subject line reads: Ladies: Here’s the Way to Your Man’s Heart! FREE delivery on select gifts for Valentine’s Day!). Now I’m a huge fan of the brand myself and would buy into their product gladly. Problem is “Ted” isn’t short for anything female yet the email is written entirely for women… Whoops! Now Harry & David may not have used any advanced segmentation tactics to drive this email versus but the concept is still at heart about personalizing, even if the personalization was done to their entire list. 

On the surface this makes a lot of sense and someone in their marketing team made a great suggestion that they focus an under marketed to Valentine’s Day segment [women] knowing their product is a hit with many men. But since Harry & David doesn’t know my gender there’s a serious gap. Very serious.

One could say that Harry & David may have a heavily female list, they may have even surveyed their list to confirm this.  But even if 90% of the recipients were a fit for this message the remaining 10% surely weren’t pleased and definitely weren’t likely to act on the message. Assuming most merely deleted it you’d have a definite marketing loss and in all reality there was likely a nice jump in optout rates as well; afterall, what guy wants to get an email for women. And of course only having 10% of the list be male is very, very unlikely.

The solution…

Gender targeting is a great idea especially for Valentine’s and other peak holiday seasons but it has to be done properly. While some companies try to use first name to sort out gender that’s dicey (think of the names Alex, Chris, Toni/Tony, etc…).  In all reality the only way to get close to accurate is to ask the customer. While most signups don’t have any place to gather this data, Harry & David’s does as they already require all sorts of data including name and address. Adding gender to that sign up page would be a smart idea if they want to continue segmented emails.

For those who don’t have a long form email sign up (which is not something most sites do) there are still opportunities to capture gender or other details through micro-profiling. If you aren’t familiar with it, micro-profiling is the concept of gathering data one or two pieces at a time over a customer’s lifetime. So on day one the customer signs up for email either directly or through an order and on day five you capture their gender through a poll, a short questionnaire, a profile update, a second order or any other means and add it back into the master profile. Even if you don’t want to build a robust profile, asking for some basics once can be enough to establish core segment groups.

But sometimes getting the data you want just doesn’t fit either because of technology challenges or out of fear that the customer won’t be pleased with you asking. In this case you simply have to make the wise decision to skip visibly segmenting along that line. For example, if Harry & David had realized that they didn’t have my gender (perhaps they have it for other users) and sent me a split email geared at men or women individually or a single email that just didn’t talk about gender it would have fit. Lift for the female segment may have been lower but toss outs and confusion from the male segment would go away as would the impact of optouts, brand reputation, etc… 

Not personalizing when you can’t do it right is the right call.

When things do go wrong be ready to act…

No matter how you capture data there will always be some number of people who get the wrong information. This could be a result of a database error, a user error (we don’t always check the right boxes afterall) or something else. When it does happen what matters is that you can identify and address it. If a customer calls or emails your support department to complain they just got an email about Women’s clothing and they’re a guy be sure customer support can fix their profile on the spot.  Too many companies stick their database in a vault so deep that the customer’s only response to getting the wrong message is to opt out completely and that’s a much bigger loss for you than for them,

Personalization is a great tool for any internet marketer and the results are amazing, when done right. The mistake we’re all guilty of is wanting to do more than really makes sense and the email I got is a great example of that. Nice creative, good messaging, wrong data and when the message is this visible the mistakes aren’t missed. 

As I sit in a session at the World Online Marketing conference in SF there’s been a lot of talk about using email and getting emails through even segmenting emails. For the most part I see a lot of people getting it… relevancy connects, personalization makes people happy, etc… but I’m also seeing [and getting] a lot of questions about how exactly one does this. It’s one thing to try and personalize your emails if you have a database with 500,000 client records, a statistically derived model and so forth but what if you’re just a small business? Not a problem, segmentation still works and won’t break your budget. So here’s three ways to get some basic segments you can be using in days, not months [seriously].

Step 1 – Devise customer types and build a life time value (LTV). Your customers are not all the same and even though you want to treat them all well, some deserve different recognition. This generally starts by looking at their purchase history over their lifetime (i.e. the total amount they’ve spent aka LTV). To do this you’ll need to group orders up by a common ID, ideally that’s something your system automatically does but if not an email address or phone number should get you most of the way there.

Once you have compiled your entire customer’s data use some basic excel formulas and graphs to find out what average order buckets exist (the average of the averages). Chances are you’ll have one-hit customers with yes, just one order; general-repeats with a couple of orders and depending on your length of history, a couple of good-buyer and super-buyer groups who buy frequently. If your products are renewable you may want to further segment based on how often customers purchase rather than just on how much they spend to determine if they’re “on program” and buying at or around your set intervals, if they bought on program a few times or if they just tried it once and ran off.

These are your main segments and help you with almost all other segmenting. If you have a super-customer who does something else you can always up the offer knowing they’re more likely to be good for it where as you may want to offer a one-hit customer far less under the assumption you’d just be “buying them back”.

Step 2 – Evaluate purchase history and your products. People buy different things and depending on what you sell this can be a huge opportunity to segment on. One of the most basic types of segmentation is offering a simple list of products that the customer “might like” but rather than just taking your best sellers, the segmented approach would be to use best sellers from people who bought the same item. Taken even further with 1-on-1 personalization you could talk about products they might like based on their entire account history so you aren’t recommending batteries for the camera they have when they bought them on the next order.

But purchase history segmentation isn’t just about offering recommendations, it’s also about the message and layout. A popular music website found that if people visited the Guitar section of their site once and they showed them guitars the next time they returned Guitars were on the homepage conversions went up. On the other hand NFLShop.com knows I only buy products for one team yet regularly sends me emails with products from all teams that link me back all over their website causing me to do the heavy lifting, most of the time I don’t. And it makes sense of course… if you sell products in several different categories why does the customer care? Even if they do care chances are they care about the category they bought from first and the others later. So by looking at what people bought you can customize emails to include different header images, navigation items (or the order of the items), even taglines and spotlight products.

Step 3 – Evaluate their last activity. Even if a customer is a super-buyer at the very top of your list they aren’t worth much to you if their order was 3 years ago. Activity can play an awfully big role in your segmentation strategy and can help you see results too. Rather than emailing all super-buyer customers, email all the ones who have bought in the last 12 months and see how they do. Or try emailing the ones who bought more than 12 months ago with a different offer… come back and try us again. Come back and checkout these new products. Or something to that effect. Chances are you’ll see a steady decline in conversion over time until they fade out completely so your goal is to bring them back earlier. Many campaigns eventually decide to scrap sending emails to their long-forgotten segment altogether looking at it as a waste of time and resources.

If you have the technology through your email provider consider using this segment variable to setup a trigger based email filter. Once a customer hits a certain amount of time you trigger an email to them with an offer pushing them to transact, another after a few more months and so on until they’re considered dead. This way you’re always getting messages out and don’t have to build bulk blasts with people all across a series of date ranges.

Pretty simple, huh?!

Now you may be thinking to yourself, hey, I don’t have all of that data, what the heck do I do? Well if you have no data you don’t do much of anything other than build a system that can capture it but chances are you have some of it. You may not know LTV or have a single way of researching a customer over time but your shopping cart and/ or order management system should know what they spent last time. You know when they bought, if it was a promotional order, a pre-holiday sale or for something that recurs. All of these “things” are actionable and all of it can be segmented on.

Here’s a few examples of single variable segments you can try:

If a customer…

• Bought product X, promote accessory Y or complementary product Z.
• Bought last year’s model, promote this year’s.
• Bought something renewable longer ago than the item lasts promote a refill.
• Spent more than your average order, invite them to re-order.
• Hasn’t ordered since longer than X months, invite them to re-order.
• Made a holiday order, give them gift ideas for this year.
• Used a coupon, give them another discount.
• Came from a specific site (i.e. a partnership), remind them about it.
• Bought an item that had charity proceeds, show them another.
• Bought a gift item (i.e. gift wrapped it), offer them free gift wrapping this year.

As you can see there’s a near endless list you can go from with just basic order data. Ideally you really do want to talk to people based on their overall history and not a single order otherwise you risk giving great offers to lower tier customers with a single good purchase and well you get the idea about the opposite case. If you’re not in a place to have the data to do this than work with what you have but start building for the future and start building now. Seriously. Clear your IT queue off, call your webstore manager, find a new platform if you have to. Capturing basic customer data is not just essential it’s easy and if you aren’t doing it now there’s a serious issue.

Ok so now you have some ideas and are hopefully eager to go make some segmented campaigns. But wait, there’s one more step. See all this segmentation is based on your ideas and it’s going to take a fairly substantial amount of effort to get it implemented. If you’ve been sending 1 email to customers and start segmenting to 5 different customer types it’s as much as 5 times the work so it better have results. Yes, I’m going to tell you to test. Yes, you need to.

Luckily email testing is very simple. Here’s what you need to do:

1 – Build a control group. If your list is small this should be a big chunk, as high as 50% but 20% is probably ok too if you’re going from nothing to something basic.

2 – Hold out your control group from all special messaging and give them a standard [generic] message and offer.

3 – Develop tracking links for each email that are different so you can track opens, clicks and orders properly. If your analytics solution doesn’t track these metrics consider upgrading… Google Analytics supports this and is free while other solutions like omniture and webtrends support it and a lot more but come at a cost.

4 – Review the results and look at the lift versus the added cost divided by the number of people on the list. If the ROI works, you have a new champion.

5 – Keep building segments, keep refining. The battle isn’t over just because you got a segment out, it’s just getting started and the more you refine the more your tests matter.

Well there you go — 4 steps to segmenting, a few ideas and testing strategy. It’s not hard and it does work so give it a try.

This afternoon I opened up my email on my phone only to see a message from Boingo, my wireless roaming provider entitled “A Special Invitation from Boingo!” Given that I’ve used Boingo for the past 6 months and had logged on as recently as last night I figured it was some sort of refer a friend, annual subscription or affiliate company offer so it was only out of curiosity that I took a second look from my desktop. You can imagine the surprise I got when I found out that Boingo wanted me to reconsider leaving their services and that they wanted to offer me a special rate to come back – I never left!

Fearing that my access might be on the way out, my first reaction was to pull up my credit card invoice incase I had slipped through the cracks and was no longer paying but sure enough, there was a charge there. So I took things to the phone and called about the offer hoping to see if I could get my $21.95 monthly bill slashed down a bit. The CSR who answered had me switched out to the promotional rate in literally under a minute without so much as a question. Put another way, I went from happily paying their normal fee to paying half of it because they sent me the wrong email.

On the plus side [for Boingo], they handled the call extremely well. Many companies would have denied me the chance to get the offer which would have meant canceling and calling back in 30 seconds later to fulfill a silly policy; or just canceling outright had I stopped using the service. So kudos to Boingo for empowering their customer service team to take care of things but shame on their marketing team for giving me the wrong email in the first place. They may have also helped to impact my long term retention… who knows, maybe this email was designed with that in mind, although it seems unlikely.

Boingo’s mistake cost them a little over $12 a month from me ($120 in the next year) and I can’t imagine I was the only one to have this sort of “glitch”. And of course I’m blogging about this which means others probably are two… having current customers get in on a reactivation deal is probably not something Boingo had in mind when they sent out the email.

We’ve all made mistakes sending out campaigns but as the subject line of this post says, good data (and the proper logic to execute it) really is everything.

This morning an article found its way over to my inbox about the ways in which consumers like to hear from companies. This immediately got me thinking about all the brands, stores and social sites I use and which ones I tend to find myself visiting again and again. With very few exceptions, the sites I return to when I’m not thinking about visiting them are the ones that have either just sent me an email or do so frequently. This is even true of sites that I don’t shop with like social networking sites, forums, news sites, etc… The places sending out alerts and updates that match my needs get me back and the ones that do it well get me back often.

Despite all the talk about spam and message blindness, consumers continue to overwhelmingly use and request email as a means of communication. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Most of us spend our days in front of a computer using email to accomplish business goals, arrange evening plans and as an article in from today’s USA Today mentioned, we now even receive wedding invitations via email (but that’s another topic for another post).

Now it’s also worth mentioning (and the survey in the article supports) that email is by no means the only way to communicate and certainly not the only way I would expect to receive information. IM, RSS / Feeds, text messages and dozens of other communication methods exist – even posting a Facebook update can be a great way to remain top of mind. However, rather than using the method that you or your developers best like (i.e. the new fancy tools), shouldn’t you be using the one your customers prefer and actually follow (i.e. the one that they’ll use)? Getting a text from a FaceBook application that lets me respond is wonderful, texting my mother in the middle of my day with a 10% discount at Amazon wouldn’t make nearly as much sense when she can barely use her phone and likely is in front of her computer at that very minute. And when you really step back and think about where people spend their time, email almost always comes up at the top – so ignoring it without throughout testing in place of something else makes little sense.

What baffles me however isn’t that companies adopt the wrong messaging methods for their customers as much as it is that they fail to talk to themat all! Unfortunately this is even truer with content and social sites many of which seem to simply assume you’ll return to visit them. I belong to dozens of forums, possibly hundreds, and out of that entire world the only emails I receive only a handful of proactive emails (aside from post updates and internal message notifications of course). This means I have no chance to be reminded of the site and in many cases, I’ve probably – no – I’ve certainly forgotten they existed or that I was a member. Sending me a basic newsletter, a special, or just a periodic announcement would do wonders to get me and likely many other people back to the site.

For the more sophisticated organizations and sites that already cover the basic promotional email, digging in to segmentation is also a major step and something we need to see much, much more of. Again, it surprises me how many sites treat me in a way that doesn’t describe me at all, when they could fairly easily do this. By giving customers the opportunity to self describe, even if it’s in very small ways, companies gain the opportunity to send the a message that resonates, gets read and will get acted on far more often than not. It doesn’t take having advanced analysis to segment and stand out- today Circuit City sent me an email with the subject line “How to get your birthday gift from Circuit City.” My first reaction – wow – I <b>need</b> to read this; after all, I have to find out how to get my birthday gift (not that my birthday is coming up any time remotely soon). When I opened the email it was an attempt at data capture but the real goal was clear – Circuit City wants to know exactly when they can hit me with a strong sales offer and by using something that appears to give me / the consumer value, they should easily get a response (they got one from me so there’s at least one).

Regardless of where you sit in the communication mix and whether your site is about selling the latest gizmos or connecting people who share a common interest, ask yourself this – am I reminding my users / customers I exist often enough? If so, am I using the right tool and at the end of the day, am I delivering a meaningful message that they want to act on?

Check out the original article at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006353&src=dp1_home

p.s. As a final thought for those of you with some longevity to your site; when was the last time you reached into your database and sent an email to the inactive crowd to encourage their participation? Again, very basic and something many, many companies are doing but still something that often seems to get overlooked.