Managing the Evolution of Your Email Marketing Program

Okay, enough about blogs. Let's get back to my favorite topic. Email.

This past Wednesday, the AiMA had its monthly educational event. This one on email, which attracted over 170 people. Last year, we barely hit 100, so I consider this further proof that email has proven to be a key tactic in the marketing tool belt.

Elaine O'Gorman from Silverpop moderated a panel of leading email specialists - Gareth Morgan from InterContinental Hotels, Brad Bacon from The Weather Channel, and Karna Crawford from the Coca-Cola Company.

Elaine provided some great retail email marketing study statistics:

To avoid churn, email a minimum of every 90 days. Based on other statistics I have shared in this blog, I feel this is even too long. Of course everyone is different so just test what works best for you.

Another interesting although obvious fact, you have 1.5 to 3 seconds to get someone to recognize your email. Which makes your from and subject line both equally important. Some personal experience with this - test putting your brand in both the from and subject lines. Many companies have seen an definite increase in opens. Certainly worth testing.

Elaine also mentioned SpamAssassin to test your content.

Other tidbits shared by the panelists. Gareth (who has a fondness for hykus) shared InterContinental hotels' recent shift in focus to transactionsl emails such as cart abandonment, pre-stay/welcome, and thank you/opt-in emails. This type of targeting has seen much greater results compared to their broadcast emails.

The Weather Channel is also using transactional emails especially when it comes to renewing subscriptions. Unfortunately, with a one-year subscription credit cards tend to expire and change, so some auto-renewals fail. To contact the "failed rebills" Brad tested several different areas: HTML vs. text, increasingly urgent messages, and graphic buttons vs. text links. In a nutshell, the more transactional feeling email saw the best conversion rate - text not HTML, text link not graphic button. Let this be a lesson to everyone - it does not matter what the "experts" say, you need to test, test, test and determine what works best for your audience and your goals.

Finally, Karna Crawford took the stage and taught the audience about testing emails. She encouraged email'ers to ask themselves: What do I know about my subscriber base? Am I delivering to them what they want? Am I optimizing my email campaigns to produce the highest metrics possible? What are my baseline metrics?

Basic testing everyone should be performing: from line, subject line, creative, day of the week, time of day. More advanced ideas include personalization testing (interest/behavior vs. general content), frequency, and offers.

My favorite part of her presentation was the test between an Olympics newsletter and an Olympics postcard. The postcard was all graphics. You would think with all the graphic issues the media has been talking about, the postcard would fail. Actually it beat the newsletter by 30%.

Once again, repeat after me, "Don't believe what you read. Test, test, test."