SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

SUBSCRIBERS RULE! Philosophy Part 1: Love Thy Subscriber

With February, the month of love (pronounced “luv”) upon us, it strikes me as the perfect time for a quick refresher on why marketers should love their subscribers.

Love Thy Subscriber!

First, a word on what I mean by “subscriber.”  You see, in this digitally fragmented age, a subscriber is anyone who gives you permission to communicate with them via specific one-to-one channels.  The most obvious and productive of these channels is email.  I don’t just say this because ExactTarget pays the bills.  I say it because the research says so.

Marketers can also acquire subscribers through channels other than email such as RSS, SMS (text messaging), Facebook (”friends”), and Twitter (”followers”).  While the nuances of each medium differ both in terms of what you can send and how you send it, they each share a common reality — subscribers, not marketers, rule.  In other words, the subscriber controls the relationship’s beginning as well as its end (the dreaded “unsubscribe”).

Thanks to the economy, the shrinking efficacy of traditional marketing channels, and the increasing cost of direct mail, subscribers are now much more than a “nice to have” — they are a core asset of every company’s marketing program.  The reasons are simple:

1. Subscribers want to hear from you.
2. Subscribers are often your best customers.
3. It is much less expensive to email. text, update & tweet to subscribers than it is to reach strangers via third-party advertising.
4. You can reach subscribers instantly.

Clearly, there’s a lot to love about subscribers.  So why do so many companies treat them like an afterthought rather than an asset?  Why do so many marketers “batch & blast” subscribers rather than build relationships with them?  What can we do to elevate subscriber to their rightful place of honor atop the marketing food chain?

At ExactTarget, we answered this question by launching the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy — three simple tenets that, if followed, can help any company build better, more profitable relationships with their subscribers.  The three tenets are:

• Serve the individual
• Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
• Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives

For those who attended our Connections User Conference last year, this is a bit of review.  Heck, you even got a music video to nail home the point.

For those who are new to the SR! Philosophy, however, I will be digging deeper into each tenet means to your email, SMS, and social media marketing efforts in the days to come.

There’s simply no time like the present, however, to show your subscribers that you love them — and there’s no better way to do that then working hard to ensure that their preferences are honored and their needs met by each and every one of your one-to-one communications.

The Super Bowl’s Email Afterthought

If you were one of the 90+ million Americans who watched the Super Bowl this past weekend, you were not only treated to a great game but also a number of great commercials from Doritos.  What you might not have known is that two of those commercials were produced by regular Joes and selected as the winner and runner-up of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest.

The contest, which ran for weeks prior to the Super Bowl, allowed people to vote on their favorite consumer-generated Doritos commercials until only five remained.  The finalists were then subjected to a final round of consumer voting, and the winning commercial, “Free Doritos!“, was shown during the 1st quarter (personal aside — the runner up, “ATM“, was created by a friend of mine, but that back story is best told over drinks at this week’s Online Marketing Summit).

The campaign generated a ton of buzz for Doritos, and both ads garnered positive comments from many Super Bowl ad reviewers.

So imagine my surprise as a Crash the Super Bowl voter when I received the following email from Doritos yesterday (Tuesday).

An opportunity missed of Super Bowl proportions.

What a missed opportunity!  The email didn’t contain any branding, any offer or any call to action to become a subscriber to Doritos future email communications.  My guess is that email was an afterthought in this campaign — a line item that had to be checked off before the books could be closed on this year’s “Crash the Super Bowl” party.

And what a shame that is.  Doritos had my post-Super Bowl attention.  They could have sent me a coupon to try a new flavor or opt-in to their continuing communications.  That way, the 30 seconds of attention they garnered around the Big Game would create value throughout the year as they grew their email subscriber base exponentially overnight.

Doritos certainly isn’t alone in treating ad campaign emails as an afterthought.  One hopes, however, that the belt-tightening of 2009 will force agencies and companies to capitalize on the power of email — and subscribers — to produce far greater ROI than any single television commercial.

The Email Append Debate

Thinking of email append? Not so fast.

In today’s ClickZ, Derek Harding has a great overview of The Dangers of Email Append that highlights his problems with the practice.  According to Harding:

Many marketers want [email append] to succeed, especially those who come from a print direct marketing background. However, for many in the e-mail marketing industry, especially deliverability professionals, the problems and shortcomings of e-mail append are an open secret.

Personally, I think there are far better places to invest your time and money to grow your subscriber base.  In fact, I’ll be discussing several of them in today’s webinar with MarketingSherpa (”Building the Perfect Subscriber: Email Growth Strategies and Superior Segmentation Techniques,” Thursday, January 22 @ 2:00PM EST).

That said, I do think it is important to understand that there are different shades of email append:

1. Opt-Out Append without Notice.  Three words: bad, bad, bad.  You add subscribers without their consent or advance notice.  They just start receiving your messages, and you start receiving spam complaints.  Nothing gets our Email Deliverability Guru, Al Iverson, more incensed.
2. Opt-Out Append with Notice. A distinction without a difference from #1 in my book.  Appended subscribers receive a notice that you will now be sending them email.  In so doing, you shift the burden to them to opt-out.  Look for complaints to spike and deliverability to tank.  You know what happens when you assume…
3. Opt-In Append. The only type of append that can actually serve consumer interests.  In this model, you send only one message to the receipient informing them of their opportunity to opt-into your future email communications.  If they don’t opt-in, you stop sending.

The bottom line is that email append is fraught with issues–and it raises a ton of concerns from an SR! perspective.  If you haven’t optimized your subscriber acquisition methods, my recommendation is to start there–such a strategic, long-term approach will always result in happier, more engaged subscribers.

A Day of Email Marketing Rants

Rant All You Want, Just Please Leave the Hubcaps

There must be something in the water today because some bright email marketing folks are dabbling in some good, ol’ fashioned rants against worst-practice emailers.

First up, the cuddly curmudgeon of email marketing himself, the Honorable Ken Magill.  In his article for DIRECT Magazine today, he declares that “Opt-In Is Dead,” and then proceeds to unleash a tsunami of wisdom on those who proclaim to honor permission when they do anything but. According to Ken:

The term opt-in has become utterly meaningless. And marketers made it that way. Everyone who’s got an e-mail list says it’s opted-in no matter how their file was built. These days, the term rolls off marketers’ tongues like “best-of-breed,” “core competency” and “paradigm shift.”

But Ken doesn’t stop there:

What’s more, “opt-in e-mail list” should be redundant. A company shouldn’t have to claim its list is permission based. It simply should be.

Amen, brother!  Your SUBSCRIBERS RULE! foam hand is in the mail.

The other rant that caught my attention today came from long-time FoET (Friend of ExactTarget), Jason Baer, the CEO of Convince & Convert out in Phoenix.  In his post, “Is Email Killing Your Company,” Jason rails against marketers who view email as a short-term rather than long-term investment.

I know your boss or your client is starting to freak out, and is prodding you to hit the email list again and again in a withering attempt to generate some sort of revenue in an historically bleak period.

But email isn’t a short-term tactic. It’s a forever tactic. Like a butcher in a small town, you need to use your email program to create customers for life, not for this week. In combination with your customer experience, your email and social media programs can turn transactional customers into brand ambassadors. But too many companies are squandering years of email goodwill that they may never recapture.

Double amen!  Don’t use the current economic climate as an excuse to squander subscriber relations.  Now’s the time to become more subscriber-centric, not less.  After all, those subscribers are the ones who will likely help your company weather the storm.

For more from Ken Magill, be sure to subscribe to his Magilla Marketing column.  For more from Jason Baer, be sure to follow him on Twitter (@jaybaer) and subscribe to the Convince & Convert blog.  I’m sure there are more insightful and inspirational rants to come from both.

Ammo for Email List Rental Skeptics

Today’s ClickZ Email Marketing Experts column is a must-read (and save) for anyone considering an email list rental campaign.  In the article entitled Email List Rentals: Red Flags & Results, Jeanne Jennings shares the first-hand experience of her client who was bound and determined to test out email list rental.

To say the results were disappointing would be an understatement.  The client made few sales, and a majority of the emails sent by the list rental company were blocked as spam.

Dealing with a boss who wants to test the email list rental waters? Read the column and take to heart Jeanne’s #1 piece of advice:

• Buyer beware when it comes to third-party e-mail lists.

10 Email Marketing Lessons from Coldplay

Viva La Vida from Coldplay

Back in May, I wrote a post over on the ExactTarget blog about Coldplay’s email strategy for their new album Viva La Vida.

Now comes a great blog post from Nick Crocker, a digital music marketer down in Australia, who offers up his analysis of the Ten Things We Can Learn From Coldplay’s Email Marketing.

While it is hard to argue with Coldplay’s sales success, Nick does a great job of offering some very valid and constructive criticism of certain elements of Coldplay’s efforts — such as the delay in sending a follow-up email upon registration and the inclusion of ridiculously large links.  He also hit on the biggest miss of the program — Coldplay’s failure to offer a pre-order link in their initial email to subscribers.

My favorite of his “Top Ten,” however, has to be #6:

Remember, it’s about them, not you. Since the download, 70% of the calls to action within Coldplay’s emails outlined what fans could do for the band.  Only 30% related to Coldplay doing something for fans.  Email marketing, like a friendship, works best when the exchange is 50/50.  When you give people more value, you increase the chances they will talk positively about you to others.

Apparently, SUBSCRIBERS RULE! even down under.

Attention Kmart Subscribers…

While I’m usually more of a Tarjay guy when it comes to big box shopping, I found myself dropping into my local Kmart this past week to pick up a few items and peruse their vast assortment of post-Halloween discount candies.  Normally, this experience wouldn’t be blog worthy; however, this visit was different.  THIS visit, upon reaching the cashier with my items, I was hit with the following wall of sound:

HelloandwelcometoKmartwouldyouliketoreceive$10incouponstodayallyou
havetodoissignuptoreceiveouremailupdatesmayIsignyouuprightnow?

Kmart's email opt-in C.T.A. at P.O.P., FYI.

Unable to decipher what I had just been asked (but clearly aware that it was a question), I stood dumbfounded for a moment until my eye caught the bright red sign next to me.  Ah-ha!  She was asking if I wanted to opt-in to their email program in exchange for $10 in coupons.

“No, thank you,” I replied, and the cashier immediately when to task two on her mental checklist — scanning my items for purchase.

Of course, a normal person would have gone on their merry way, forgetting all about this exchange.  Not me.  I’ve been mulling that transaction over and over again because it highlights one of the most critical components of any point-of-sale email acquisition program — YOUR PEOPLE.

You see, Kmart did most everything right here:

1. They posted a sign at check-out touting the benefits of email opt-in.
2. They included a strong incentive ($10 in coupons) for the opt-in.
3. They added the email opt-in call-to-action to the cashier’s checkout script.

Ultimately, what Kmart could not control was the delivery of that script.  Instead of a warm, engaging, “Wow, you really should sign up for this — it’s a great deal” conversation, I received a monotone, run-on question that left me struggling to understand what I was even being asked to do.  The net impression is that this question was clearly something that the cashier was required to ask but not something that she cared about or even remotely understood.

As previously discussed, had this been one of Gary Vaynerchuk’s employees, they would have likely found themselves on the unemployment line.  Each employee at Wine Library is trained not only on how to ask for the customer’s email address but also on WHY THAT EMAIL ADDRESS IS IMPORTANT TO THE COMPANY.  Forget to ask once or twice with the right enthusiasm, Gary may give you call — but that third time, you’ll be looking for a new gig.

Could Kmart do this?  Should they do this?  Feel free to share your thoughts.

One thing is for sure.  Kmart’s investment in point-of-sale signage and opt-in incentives indicates that they place at least a $10 value on each subscribers email address.  If my cashier generated fewer opt-ins because of her poor delivery, she could be costing the company hundreds of dollars each and every shift.

Yes, Kmart may have 1,500 stores while Wine Library has one.  That fact is exactly why it is even more imperative that Kmart and other big box retailers verify that their opt-in message is getting delivered effectively at point-of-sale — they stand to gain (or lose) far more due to the volume of their business.

Think of it this way, if Kmart would fire an employee for outright theft, shouldn’t they at least consider doing the same for an employee who consistently underperforms his or her peers at capturing opt-ins?

I’m just sayin’.