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.

Rather than trying to explain a particular reason for why she may have left, I commented to my coworkers that this individual was a builder while they were maintainers. Given that these terms were my own on-the-fly creation, this lead to a lengthy discussion about the role people play within their organizations and how a smart organization looks at people not just as long terms resources, but as fitting into an evolving puzzle.

Whether it was the Internet, social media, or the printing press, the one thing that is certain in business is that trends and tactics will change. The smart companies are the ones that adapt to these new concepts fast, ideally before they are even seen as true evolutions, while companies that conservatively wait, end up struggling to remain relevant and, oftentimes, to remain profitable. People play a major part of this cycle as well — like the marketer who I mentioned before — her role was critical in bringing a certain amount of strategy to reality; something which other types would not have been able to do so swiftly.

The evolution within a business comes through a continuous cycle comprised of four distinct, although potentially overlapping, phases. It is a company’s ability to understand, staff, and adapt at each of these stages that dictates its success in transitioning into new marketing eras.

 1- Change -

 When a new business method begins to take root, it’s difficult to embrace and understand. These ideas, from the printing press that took businesses into a mass market world, to Television replacing Radio and Print as an awareness building tool, or the most recent example of internet and social media empowering consumers to learn and engage outside of the corporate gates, it’s almost always scary times to the establishment. Change is frightening personally as it may mean a role is no longer needed, a person is no longer relevant and corporately, as it is almost always costly and significant to shift an organization.

Thus when it comes time for a significant shift there is usually conflict. The first person who introduced a direct response TV buying to the Marketing VP was probably shot down a dozen times… In hindsight it seems silly, after all, who wouldn’t want more targeted media at better rates, but at the time it was an idea that risked harming what was working.

The change agents who stir up the status quo and suggest the new idea face an uphill battle. Generally they are coming from the middle or lower ranks, younger, and newer to the organization, having seen an idea in their own lives that they wish to bring to their organization and are passionate about (although this is not a requirement as evidenced by Steve Jobs who changed apple to a music, media and portable company in his 40s).

The individual or individuals who introduce a new idea must have immense passion for it to withstand the inability of their peers and organization to change. Often this is not possible and the person who introduces a new approach or new idea finds itself moving onto an organization that’s already clued in and read to move. This is the toughest role but without a change agent it is impossible for a company to adopt a new idea early on and instead it is only when it has become beyond mainstream that the organization brings it in.

 2 – Build –

It maybe days or years from the time from which an idea transitions from introduction to acceptance, but once it has been internalized, the desire to act is usually very swift and may come with little thought or planning… This is the fire-drill reaction now that the business realizes it has something hot on its hands.

If a change agent has the patience and fortune to be able to stick around, he will get the benefit of implementing, but if not the company will go out and look for an expert, a person who can champion the idea. Of course, if the concept is new, say paid search marketing in the very late 90s, the talent pool is extremely small, if any experienced individuals exist at all, and requires the company to be very flexible in who they bring in (internally or externally) to take on the challenge… If they wait for perfection the business will miss any early advantage.

The build phase is one of constant trial, retrial and ultimately great success (or dismal failure). During this period companies are building up their new approach and running in multiple directions as they struggle to figure out a strategy rather than just using tactics. For a truly early stage, innovative company, this is the period to lead an entire industry.

 3 – Maintain –

After enough time of running around and building various programs, the winning ideas emerge over lesser thoughts and a program emerges to be pursued. This is the start of the maintenance period–an indefinite time in which the company thrives as their proven program drives continued success.

This is a period of steady growth as investments made during build pay off, marketing, production and operational triggers are optimized (rather than being invented) and small adjustments propel the company to see even better revenue. Boards, shareholders, customers remain content as everything progresses…. It’s not about excitement or headlines, but instead, it is a time of stable growth.

 While they may still exist within the organization, few change agents are seen during this time and those that are present bring forward smaller ideas, often facing strong resistance, after all, everything is going well.

 4 -  Stagnate - 

 Eventually, whether through laziness, blindness, or simply marketplace innovations which are not matched, companies start to slip. What was a steady, albeit slow, evolutionary process, turns into treading water as the company leaves maintenance and begins to stagnate. In the right conditions this transformation can be so subtle initially that revenue and other key metrics continue to grow.

Stagnation is, of course, an eventual path towards death and what companies and marketers fear and fight to push off.

If the organization is truly open, the early signs of stagnation can be identified quick enough to avoid the most impact as the company, seeing a marketplace challenge, jumps into conflict with both feet to embrace what is new. Even more successful businesses parallel process the entire cycle and are already conflicting while maintenance takes place allowing themselves to evolve before they even smell an issue… This level of prepared growth is something I will explore further later in this post.

However, these are the exceptions, not the rule. For most companies, and the examples are too numerous to count, stagnation is already occurring, even as a company sees itself as succeeding.

The issue of course is complacency. The best ideas can quickly become the last idea, but to those who launched it, this is often impossible to see.

Take the evolution of social media sites. While geocities and private communities had been around for over a decade, it was Friendster that started a mass network and then Myspace that, leveraging Friendster’s network issues, grew to dominate the “social” landscape in 2006. Myspace honed in on users’, especially young ones, desire to have their own profiles connected with people they knew offline and on. Enabling them with a simple, yet highly customizable solution, sign ups seemed unstoppable.

But within a few years they had stopped. We all know the reason — Facebook. But it was not that Facebook was better that doomed Myspace, it was that Myspace had already failed itself by stopping true innovation.

Myspace believed their platform was what users wanted and rather than developing better ways to connect or evaluating the implications of their open (and therefore very slow, very cluttered) system, they focused on new content. In all likelihood, this was where research led them — users wanted more music, more goodies, but behind the scenes they didn’t realize that what they were really looking for was something more connected.

Facebook came in, without any expectation of being a half billion member site 4 years later, and put better features in place that met the user’s needs. To be clear, it was not a feature war as much as an ideation one… Facebook got that people wanted a sense of exclusivity and used schools to launch. They understood that it was the actions of people’s friends over that of their own that got them to come back and they used what really amounted to less features, less control to win. And still Myspace didn’t see the writing on the wall. They remained confident in their size, their solution and direction. They didn’t return to conflict fast enough, or to a wide enough degree to regain the upper hand. And that was that.

Speaking of social networking, the evolution of digital and now social properties has vastly changed the concept of a stagnating business. 50, or even 15 years ago a business cycle just like the one I have described existed, but it took time, lots of time. Information flowed slowly to companies, which could, and in fact had to, develop slowly to allow consumers to keep up with their innovations.

But just as digital gives us new challenges in how we go to market, it also changes how we have to evolve within the market. The ability to rapidly connect to millions of users is a tool that may not have existed a week ago, but changes everything. It’s no longer about years, products, services and information that can change at an amazing rate. This requires organizations to look at their cycles differently and recognize that as quickly as they innovate, they may be out of style, especially in larger organizations where shifting still means embracing paid search, let alone the latest twitter trends.

Stagnation is what kills, but it’s also what starts the next step as companies drive to react to the new market, the new products or whatever else has changed and so we jump, fall or get pulled kicking and screaming back to conflict and restarting the cycle.

——-

While understanding these stages, it is inherently vital to addressing them, it is equally, if not more important to grasp the paradox that they reveal in business — the need to innovate and the simple desire to thrive off of what is already working and proven. More on that next week…

The iPad changed that for me in less than a day. An interesting email caught my eye and I shared it with a marketing co-worker. She looked at the creative but was pulled in by the product, handed back my iPad and went online to make a purchase.

This is revolutionary.

While the iPad has been widely talked about for its ease of use, it’s quick access to the web, apps and other interface and usability features, the real game changer that I see it bringing is in sharing content. Let’s face it, few people take the time to zoom their iPhone in to a page to hand off or unplug a laptop to pass across the room. Where the personal computer is, well, personal the iPad is an open screen. This makes it ideal for collaboration – simple items are quickly passed along and whether that’s to show a new game, results from a project, or an email with an interesting product, it works.

If the experts are right and the iPad brings in a world of tablet computing (I for one see it happening) we can expect to see the term ‘social’ take on a whole new meaning as people share content in ways we may not have considered before. For web marketers this represents a whole new school of thought, design and even offers as we move to a world where what one person gets, others will often be shown. And how do you measure that?

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.

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.