SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

Addressing the problem of relevance

According to this short clip from consumer data wiz Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist for Amazon, the answer does not lie in smarter algorithms—he believes we have reached the ceiling there. Instead, Weigend believes the answer lies in smart incentives to encourage people to provide information about themselves. That by providing critical information that allows companies to help address questions the consumer has they allow those companies to serve them better. This allows companies to reward the attention of their consumers more richly and disappoint them less.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this philosophy has been baked into Amazon’s platform. For those concerned about privacy—this is only an issue when it is used inappropriately. If data collection is transparent and used in clearly relevant ways, then it becomes the basis for customer loyalty. Moreover, the loyalty is not based on rewards systems that cost the company money, it is based on the fact that customer’s are prone to transact more with the companies that serve them best!

Jaffe on Twitter “Shiny Object Syndrome”

I’ve been woefully remiss in posting to SR! lately, but the absence hasn’t been so much due to a lack of things to say as it has been a desire for time to think.

Too often in today’s social media saturated world, the multitude of outlets at our disposal — IM, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — call upon interactive marketers to talk and opine constantly rather than listen and process thoughtfully.  This is problematic because interactive marketing demands strategy, and strategy demands more than knee-jerk emotionality.  It demands experience, analysis, and time to develop great ideas into beneficial actions.

With that in mind, I was pleased to see that Joseph Jaffe focused this week’s edition of JJTV on why the collective hysteria about Twitter might not be a good thing for interactive marketers.  Twitter is, after all, but one tactic among the myriad of internet-based marketing tools that can help companies connect with customers.

Much like email, Twitter’s value depends on the relevance and attentiveness of your followers (i.e., subscribers).  However, as Joseph points out, because of the temporal nature of Twitter posts, he’d be surprised if his followers had read more than 10% of his total tweets.

If that’s the case, Joseph wonders, aren’t we all putting a disproportionate amount of emphasis on Twitter’s importance — especially when most of us have yet to fully optimize the performance of channels such as email and search?

Here are Joseph’s thoughts — feel free to share yours via the comments link above and to the right.

Cheap Advertising that beats Super Bowl Commercials

YouTube’s Ad Blitz allowed Tubers to vote on their favorite Super Bowl ads. This “Free Doritos” commercial took top place in the voting, it also happens to be the most watched 2009 Super Bowl commercial on hulu.com. The most interesting thing is that the commercial was not produced by an agency, it was the winner of Doritos’ consumer-generated ad contest. According to AdAge, the commercial only cost $2,000 to make, but Doritos will be shelling out $1 million to brothers Joe and Dave Herbert (who BTW happen to be from ExactTarget’s home state of Indiana).

At $3 millon for a 30 second spot to reach 98 million consumers, I calculate this to be about $40 CPM for ad impressions. Truthfully, they have continued to get milage out of the ad on the internet, so we can bring that down a bit… call it $30 CPM.

Looking at the cost of impressions on YouTube, this “ad” for Charlotte radio station 96.1 The BEAT takes the cake for cheap advertising. The cost, a leotard, a webcam, and a little dignity (okay, a lot of dignity–but this is a radio station intern, what did he expect?). I’ll go with the conservative estimate and throw the $150 webcam into the equation. Add $50 for the outfit and you come to less than $0.09 per 1,000 views.

Let this serve as encouragement as we think about how to grab the attention of our audiences on a mass scale. Clearly, the people at The BEAT know their audience. In this emerging landscape, anyone can give big brand marketers a run for their money!

50 People. One Question.

A fundamental element of the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy is the notion that people are individuals, and that marketers need to leverage technology to treat them as such.  Accordingly, I love it when I stumble across items that have absolutely nothing to do with email marketing but help hammer home the point that we all have different hopes, dreams, wants, and needs.

Previously in the pages of SR!, we’ve linked to videos from Microsoft, The Atlantic, and yes, even ExactTarget, that tap into the power of individuality.  Today’s video comes from Fifty People One Question, a project of creative shop Crush+Lovely, in which they ask fifty people the same question:

Where would you wish to wake up tomorrow.

As you might imagine, the answers are varied, thought-provoking, and often inspirational.  Take a look for yourself:

A big hat tip to David Mead (@DavidMead) for sharing the video.

And for the record, my wish would be to wake up with my family and a day of nothing to do but play outside.  Of course, that could be the Cleveland winter shut-in in me talking!

Feel free to share your wishes in the comments.

When It Snows in Houston…

I had the good fortune of attending MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit this week in Park City and will be sharing some observations from the event in the coming days.  At the moment, however, I have a different story to share — and bear with me, it will have a lesson for email marketers.

He's Mr. Snow Miser -- and he owes me six hours of my life back!

For those who follow my personal Twitter feed (@jkrohrs), you may have seen that I had quite the return trip from Utah yesterday.  After an on-time, uneventful flight from Salt Lake City to Houston, I was pleased to see that my connecting flight from Houston to Cleveland was on schedule despite the crazy fact that it was snowing in Houston.

Yup. Snow in Houston.  Last time that happened?  December 24, 2004.

With a snowfall total around an inch, I was optimistic that the impact on my connecting flight would be minimal.  When we boarded early, I was even more optimistic.  When they closed the door and the seat next to me remained empty, I was ecstatic and embraced my newfound elbow room.

As it turns out, I would need the room because I remained in that grounded plane in Houston for the next six hours.  The pilot spoke to us a total of six times during that period, each time apologizing for the delay and chalking it up to a long queue of planes waiting to get de-iced.

During those six hours, all the passengers in coach were offered was water.  That’s it, water and six announcements from the pilot.  When we finally got to the de-icing crew, they ran out of solution after only de-icing half of our plane.   When the pilot shared that factoid, I thought for sure it would trigger a full-on passenger revolt.

When I did finally arrive in snow-free Cleveland this morning — at 5:00AM — I was still on tilt about the experience and thought about what the crew could have done differently to make the experience less frustrating.

They could have offered food.  They could have offered beverage service.  They could have advocated more forcefully to the tower that we be allowed to return to the gate without losing our place in the de-icing line.

Yes, all of those things would have helped, but the number one thing they could have done was COMMUNICATE BETTER.  Hourly announcements are simply insufficient to diffuse the growing frustration when you’re stuck on the tarmac in a sardine can.

And with that realization, it hit me.  There are a lot of companies that are figuratively “stuck on the tarmac” due to our uncertain economy.  On board are customers who aren’t sure when (or if) the company is going to get back up off the ground.  Instead of treating these critical audiences like adults who can handle truth and uncertainty, the “pilots” of these companies are clamming up — and in return, the customers worries and frustrations are being heightened.

Case in point.  Two of the banks with whom I have accounts have been the subject of headline-grabbing takeovers in the past month.  Despite the fact that this is BIG NEWS, I have yet to receive so much as an email from either bank explaining to me what this situation means to me and whether my accounts are safe.

Email should be on the front lines of crisis management for any company.  Your email subscribers are like the passengers on my plane — they have opted-in to be there, and they are hungry for information.  Instead of letting their imaginations run wild and frustrations build, companies would be wise to OVER communicate in this economic climate.  Be candid, clear, and honest.  Admit that you don’t know what you don’t know — but you’ll be certain to let your email subscribers know when you do.

Email subscribers are the elite frequent flyers of your marketing ecosystem.  They are your best customers, and it’s high time that troubled companies pick up the email microphone to do more than share the latest marketing offer.  They need to use that microphone to let us know about the weather outside and their plans to get back into the air.

We frequent flyers are hearty souls, after all.  We can handle the truth.

Fab 5 Inbox Fun

A Fab High Five Executed to Perfection.

There’s a bit of fun happening over at MediaPost’s Email Insider this month thanks to Razorfish’s David Baker.  In his November 10th column, he shared a list of five emails that he looks forward to receiving in his inbox and then posed a question for readers to answer — Who’s in Your Fab 5 Inbox?

Lisa Harmon from Smith-Harmon then picked up the cause today and shared her Fab Five Inbox as well.  So, to keep the ball rolling, I dug into my personal Yahoo inbox to uncover those emails that make the top of my own list as a subscriber.  Here they are, in no specific order:

1. ITunes Tuesday: It reminds me to sync my iPod and lets you test-drive a free tune, music video, and occasionally, a TV show.
2. The Wailing List from Despair.com: Dry, biting humor from the anti-Successories folks.  Always elicts laughter and every few months, a purchase.
3. TED: If you don’t know the TED conference and it’s weath of video brainfood, do yourself a favor and visit www.ted.com now.  Their stuff is a constant source of inspiration and entertainment on long, cross-country flights.
4. Continental Airlines: Living in one of their hub cities, I’m a loyal frequent flyer who’s always on the lookout for a good deal for family travel.
5. YouTube Comments: Long story short — Two years ago, I posted a video of my son singing an impromptu version of The Turtles “Happy Together” at a local event.  155K views and growing, people still comment on it to the tune of 10+ comments a week.  He has a global fan base.  Crazy.

I’ll leave it to the psychiatric establishment to discern what my Fab Five mean, but I can tell you that the exercise definitely helps take you out of “marketer” mode and think like a subscriber.  Many of the emails I enjoy don’t exist to elicit an immediate purchase — but they sure go a long way toward solidifying my relationship with each company, organization or website.

So if I may echo David’s question, what’s in your Fab Five Inbox?

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’.

Email Ed - No Executive Left Behind

Bob Wants to Talk to You

I’m a firm believer that no marketing organization can maintain a subscriber-centric philosophy unless it has the full support of its C-Suite.

Too often, however, the nuances of best practice email marketing are lost on executives whose primary experience with email is their personal inbox.  Accordingly, it is the job of each email marketer to roll-up their sleeves and educate their execs on:

• The strategic, tactical & legal differences between direct mail and email
• The fact that email is a long-term, not short-term, marketing medium
• The dangers of a “batch & blast” mentality
• The need for the email team must have a seat at the CRM & data integration tables
• The fact that relevant, timely & requested email will always cut through the spam clutter

For more thoughts on this topic, check out my article in today’s DMNews: No Executive Left Behind: E-mail Education for the C-Suite.  And if you do schedule a SUBSCRIBERS RULE! briefing for your company’s leadership, be sure to cater in lunch.  Executives luvs them some free lunch!

Better Subscribers, Better Relationships - Papa John’s

Normally, when the phones aren’t ringing at a pizza place on a Friday night, it’s a bad thing.  At Papa John’s, however, it’s a sign of the times.

As one of the first pizza delivery chains to fully embrace online and text-based ordering, Papa John’s has been quick to test the power of emerging one-to-one channels both to promote its products and to enable customers to place orders.  The result?  Earlier this year, the company reported that it had eclipsed the $1B sales mark from online ordering alone.

While at Connections ‘08, we caught up with Nigel Travis, Papa John’s CEO, and Bob Ford, Interactive Marketing Manager, to learn how their efforts line-up with the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy and why they are bullish on turning over more control of email marketing messages to their franchisees.

The resulting interview may leave more than a few email marketers wishing that they had a CEO as engaged and aware of the individual subscriber’s value as Nigel Travis.

Think Again (About theAtlantic.Project)

Think Again - theAtlantic.Project

It’s not often that the redesign of a print magazine gets marketers talking, but the redesign of The Atlantic may prove to be the exception to the rule — and yes, it has a subscriber-centric angle.

For those not familiar with The Atlantic, it aspires to:

…derive[] its sensibility not from a single editorial voice or theory of how the world works, but from its regard for its readers’ intelligence and wit, for their curiosity and their hope that the world might be made a better place.

To better convey how this mission connects with the new redesign, The Atlantic has launched theAtlantic.Project (a.k.a. “Think Again”) in which regular folks are asked to answer a number of thought-provoking questions such as:

• Do We Consume Too Much?
• Can Selfishness Save the Environment?
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?
• What’s the Cost of Being a Nerd?

The resulting blog, photographs, and video interviews are extraordinarily engaging — perhaps because it’s so rare to hear regular folks respond to questions that are a bit off-the-beaten path.  Give yourself 10 minutes to dig into the site, and I think you may just agree.

When viewed in combination with Microsoft’s I’m a PC campaign, I can’t help but feel that something positive is building in the advertising zeitgeist.  Individual consumer voices are being heard, amplified, and respected — and that could only be a good thing for those who aspire to promote a subscriber-centric philosophy within their own companies.  That’s cause enough to think again.

IMterview with Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source

Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source

We’re trying something a bit different today — it’s our first-ever “IMterview,” i.e. an interview conducted entirely via IM (in this case, Facebook IM).  We do aspire one day to also branch out into “Twinterviews” (interviews conducted via Twitter) but for now, we will leave those to the professionals.

Our first test willing interview subject was the always affable Bill McCloskey, the Chairman, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Email Data Source.  The interview was conducted this past Friday while we were both multitasking, hence I was unable to delve into non-email marketing topics like his love of Jazz and the origin of his disdain for They Might Be Giants.  Be sure to press Bill for details on both should you catch him at an upcoming conference.

Now, on to the IMterview…

3:03PM JEFFREY
Bill, welcome to the first-ever SUBSCRIBERS RULE! IMterview!

3:03PM BILL
A pleasure to be here, Jeff.  By the way, you guys throw a great party.

3:04PM JEFFREY
Thanks–we try!  Could you tell us a bit of what Email Data Source offers marketers?

3:07PM BILL
We are the largest repository and archive of email marketing messages in the world. We monitor the world of email marketing and archive the email marketing efforts of over 25,000 brands and publishers. We have a database of over 11 million marketing campaigns that our clients can access for competitive intelligence, idea generation, affiliate monitoring, brand monitoring, new business pitches, and sales leads. We add nearly a million new campaigns to our database each month.

3:07PM JEFFREY
So that begs the question, how many emails do you personally read each day?

3:09PM BILL
Well, we track nearly 35,000 emails a day. I’d like to say I look at each one, but I do have a business to run. However, when I sit down to write an article, or to comment on the state of the email marketing industry, I have a wealth of information at my finger tips that really gives me a unique insight into what is going on in email marketing today: who is doing it well, and who…well not so well.

3:10PM JEFFREY
If you had to name the top 3 things that folks are doing wrong, what would they be?

3:10PM BILL
1. Ignoring the power of their Welcome Letters.
2. Not making the email marketing channel unique.
3. And finally — and this is hard to believe — not actually sending out a campaign once someone has signed up.

3:12PM JEFFREY
Let’s start on point #1. What opportunities are companies missing in their Welcome Emails after opt-in?

3:14PM BILL
The folks that are doing it right really leverage the power of the Welcome Letter. It is the one email that you are pretty much guaranteed will get opened. And yet, so many people don’t take advantage of that fact.

The good ones use it to begin to establish the brand in the clients mind. They provide special codes for free shipping and special offers. They provide links so that they can begin to segment their list post-sign up. What you don’t to do is to just say “Thanks.”  You want to start the engagement from the very first email they receive from you.

3:17PM JEFFREY
What do you think that failure is due to? Is it a failure to understand the email channel? A lack of email marketing education? Cross-team responsibility issues?

3:20PM BILL
You can’t blame it on a lack of marketing education. I’ve seen bad welcome letters from some of the countries most savvy marketers. But I’ve also seen some brilliant examples which I outlined in a recent article I wrote for the DMA.
One of the things I always rail against is that email is often ignored in favor of the latest, unproven, marketing channel. It is fun to talk about the newest whizbang marketing effort your company is leveraging. It gets press and it is something to brag about in the board room. But email just works in its unexciting way. It works. And perhaps, with today’s economic conditions, we are going to get back to being excited by things that just work again.

3:23PM JEFFREY
Let’s dig in on that point a bit. One of the things that works is increasing personalization & relevance by leveraging segmentation – actually personalizing content based on things you know about your subscriber. What percentage of email marketers would you guesstimate are actually segmenting & personalizing their messages?

3:29PM BILL
Well, it is a question that needs some explaining.

Personalization, per se, in the way most people use it - i.e. the inclusion of the person’s name in the email - is okay - a nice touch. But really not all that effective in my mind. You need to do more than just merge a database with an email and put someone’s name at the top to get people to care about your product.

Segmenting by interest, and past behavior, is where the real gold lies, but I don’t think many are taking advantage of that. Way too few anyway. One reason is that many ESP’s don’t provide the proper infrastructure to make it easy (something that ExactTarget on the other hand does make easy - hope you don’t mind the plug). We see some, but not a lot. We should see a lot more, because all the data, especially the data that has been collected by David Daniels of Forrester Research, clearly shows a dramatic increase in ROI when you do spend the time and money to do it right.

3:34PM JEFFREY
So what’s your take on the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy? Is subscriber-centricity the right focus moving forward with email and other one-to-one media like SMS?

3:38PM BILL
What I’ve been preaching, and I think it fits into the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy is the importance of making people desire to receive your marketing message and you do that by making it exclusive: an insiders club that provides something to the subscribers that they can’t receive any place else.
One of the examples I noted in my recent article was a Harley-Davidson campaign that invited people to sign up for a six-part email series. A mini-series delivered to the inbox that walked you through the various models and financing options. What a great idea to limit the campaign to six emails in order to gain attention! One of the things I’ve been saying is that too much focus has been placed on deliverability, and not enough attention is focused on what you are actually delivering.

3:43PM JEFFREY
So would you say that companies should be invest in better, more personal content to weather this economic storm?

3:45PM BILL
I think you have to be insane not to start investing heavily in one of the least expensive, highest ROI marketing channels on the planet. And that channel is EMAIL.  I think you will start to see companies begin to resist unproven channel and start talking a look at the little engine that could — email.

3:46PM JEFFREY
Boy, you know how to stick the landing! With that, I think we’ll wrap things up. Thanks for your time & insight!

3:46PM  BILL
Always fun hanging with you big guy! Thanks it was a pleasure.

For more information about Email Data Source and it’s competitive email marketing research tool, Email Analyst, please visit www.emaildatasource.com.