Still, at the heart of it all for marketers is the message. Never forget that these new social technologies are just new ways to communicate. And technology by itself is not persuasive. Beware not to get the media mixed up with the message.

Every status update, tweet, and inbox message is nothing more than a communication between a sender and a reader. What you say and how you say it matters. Be relevant.

E-Mail: The Original Social Media App

Plain old vanilla e-mail still rules. By the numbers, people still interact and communicate using e-mail more than any other social media app, and most companies still earn more from their e-mail campaigns than from their social media efforts.

Yet I wonder how many have put their e-mail programs on autopilot and have starting chasing shiny new objects. I recently received a disappointing e-mail from Nikon. Like most people, I typically just delete promotional e-mails, but I decided to hold on to this one, considering the headline said “My Picturetown — 20GB for just a few cents a day!”

I clicked on the call to action: “Store my photos and videos” and landed on a page offering, “Sign Up For Free” in the headline, with a form and a graphic proclaiming, “2GB FREE!” (Pictured below.) Notice how the landing page scent, or messaging connection, to the e-mail is missing.

As you can see, there’s no mention of the 20 GB at all (I wonder if it was a typo), let alone information about the e-mail’s offer of 20 GB of storage for just a few cents a day. I was wondering how few cents it actually was: 2 cents, 10 cents, or 99 cents?

Nikon clearly did not maintain scent from the e-mail to the landing page. It got my attention but didn’t maintain it on the landing page (among other things). Message matters. Nikon started with the right message but lost consistency. Someone is asleep at the wheel.

Here’s an example of an e-mail campaign from Wyndham Rewards that offers 1,000 free reward points for booking a trip:

On the landing page, I see the message about 1,000 reward points, but there’s no clear call to action. The landing page features mostly a map and some links. I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do. The call to action is weak. A simple statement of “Click Your Destination to Get Started” would have done just fine to move me through to the next step.

Bottom Line

Don’t get caught up in the flash of Web 2.0 technologies; work to understand how each works so you can use it to deliver a relevant message to your prospect. When you tear away the technology, you’re left with words and the actions they inspire — or fail to inspire. Don’t mistake the medium for the message.

A good message in any medium can be effective, and a bad message isn’t cured by Web 2.0 technologies. Remember, just because e-mail isn’t social media doesn’t mean it isn’t important and worth optimizing. Watch your message and make sure you maintain scent and clear calls to action, or even an effective message will twist in the wind.

If you have something to say, say it well and give readers clear calls to action. Give them a persuasion scenario to follow and you’ll get better results from your efforts.

Otherwise, you’ll just blend in with the noise and no one will hear you at all.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry.  Like most people, I typically just delete promotional emails, but I decided to hold on to this one, considering the headline said “My Picturetown – 20GB for just a few cents a day!”

You can see the full email by clicking the picture below.

Broken Scent Renders Landing Page All But Useless

I clicked on their call to action “Store my photos and videos” and after the jump was offered “Sign Up For Free,” by the headline, followed by a form and a graphic proclaiming: “2GB FREE!”  Notice how all “scent” or messaging connection to the email is lost on this landing page (pictured below)?

As you can see, there’s no mention of the 20GB at all (I wonder if it was a typo), let alone information about the e-mail’s offer of 20GB storage for just a few cents a day.  I was wondering how few cents it actually is: 2 cents, 10 cents or 99 cents?

Also I couldn’t help wondering what was up with the big empty box before the sign-up form’s confirm button.  What is that for?  I tried it in multiple browsers on my Mac and even tried it on a PC, but it remained empty.  Keep in mind that I only put in that extra effort because I planned on critiquing the form.  Most potential customers won’t bother checking to see if the form renders correctly in alternate browsers/platforms – that’s why it’s the marketing team’s job!

What Nikon Should Have Done

1. I hope Nikon are testing their email marketing offers before send them to their whole list. Otherwise that’s like being there for that perfect picture moment, the once in a life-time shot, snapping the photo, and realizing you left your lens cover on.  Send out your email to a small portion of your list 5-10% and watch the metrics and website analytics to see how people behave. Then tweak accordingly.

2. Nikon’s e-mail could have directed visitors to sign-up for the free service AND THEN upgrade to the paid 20GB account (they event offer a 200GB plan). It would also have been a good idea to repeat this information both on the landing page and in a follow-up e-mail after customers signed up for their free account.

Or Nikon could have offered their e-mail subscribers the choice of services directly from within their e-mail, with two separate calls to action, maybe with the second CTA looking like: “…or upgrade to a Gold 20GB account for only $2.99 a month.”  By the way, if you’re wondering where I got that price from, I had to Google “MyPicturetown,” and then really dig into Nikon’s website to – finally! – find the pricing info in their tour pages.

3. They should make sure their form works on all platforms and browsers. I can only imagine that that box has to be the terms and conditions. Sorry but my Mac with Firefox and Safari didn’t see a thing. Everything should be tested to make sure it works.

4. Their landing page design should have better visual impact. Currently, it has all of the design sensibilities of a 3 year old taking their first picture: no focus, no impact, no clear subject and leaves you wanting.  Nikon has a great brand, known for their great visuals, but what happened to this product team?

Nikon needs to work much harder than this if they want to acquire customers.  I already have a Flickr Pro account and a Picasa account. Others like me (very much in their target market) need plenty of reasons to change what we are currently doing. Maybe next time they’ll capture me at the right moment.

As I relate the following three eCommerce mishaps, be thinking about whether you can eradicate all of them from your business by the time the “Holiday Rush” hits. ALL are preventable, if you start today and take one item at a time.

Let’s start at the “precipitating event;” the spark that lit my desire to shop online…

1. An email with a promo code arrived.  w00t!  They paid attention to past purchases, and sent me a great promotion: 10% off a brand I’ve purchased before, and free shipping if the order exceeds a certain amount.

How They’re Losing Sales: Despite not mentioning an expiration date for the promo code, it was expired by the time I reached checkout.  I’m notoriously slow for opening emails from online retailers, but I bet I’m not alone.  Creating a sense of urgency with an expiration date is fine, but remember that shoppers sometimes go weeks without going through their personal email accounts to read your promo codes.

And now it’s Customer Service’s turn…

2. When the promo code came up as expired, I was understandably disappointed.  I’d just spent a fair amount of my weekend building up enough value in my shopping cart to qualify for the free shipping (Yes, I’m cheap.)  My credit card was out of my wallet.  So, I clicked the live chat in the cart to see if they’d extend the promo code, or give me an equivalent one.

How They’re Losing Sales: The live chat agent, while polite and earnest, was not able to do anything to help me (be a cheapskate).  They weren’t empowered by their employer to get creative and save me from abandoning my cart.  They suggested I call the “real” Customer Service during regular M-F business hours.  So my guess is that the live chat is being outsourced, which is fine, but if they aren’t empowered to save sales, they’re probably not giving good ROI.

Now stepping up to the plate, Technology…

3. I came back the next day with the intention of calling the retailer and trying to get them to extend the promo code or give me the equivalent deal.  So, I returned to the site and clicked “My Cart” to review what I’d put in there, and have it on-screen when I called.

How They’re Losing Sales: They didn’t save my cart! So many sites are saving cart items via cookie that I assumed my items would be there the following day or week.  So now I’m definitely not going to re-build my cart AND call them to try and negotiate the promo code.  I’m going to just repress the whole memory…maybe I’ll even forget the retailer’s brand in the process!

These 3 blunders may seem unconnected from a business perspective, but from a buyer perspective, they were all part of a persuasion scenario that broke down and turned a VERY motivated shopper into a lost sale.

I do like the site, and hope they can address these issues and stay in business.  But they and others will have a very painful holiday sales season if they don’t treat the disparate parts as a unified buying experience that must be nearly flawless to be profitable.

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible.

In plain English, marketing automation uses data (like your web analytics) to do some of your marketing tasks for you. Herein lies the problem I keep running into: Your decisions and those of your marketing automation platform are only as sound as your data.

I’ve seen marketing automation software that helps your email marketing, your ppc bid management, segmentation and personalization, and others. As Jeff Sexton recently pointed out, if you have the wrong analytics it could cost you 30% of your sales. Can you afford that today?

A few weeks ago we were helping a client optimize her website and we wanted access to her historical data. All she had was the analytics from her marketing automation vendor. Now the fact that you could only access these analytics using Internet Explorer (we are mostly on Macs) was one failure, but the main failure was that it looks like the analytics was an after-thought by the vendor. Anyone can throw up some reports on a screen — but the issue is, do they tell you anything meaningful? There was virtually nothing to make you smarter as a marketer. Today’s smart marketers understand the value of data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, this vendor’s reports provided in an abstract way what happened but did not provide the vital statistics to diagnosis and prescribe any sort of optimization to the company’s efforts.

Marketing Automation Must Make You Smarter Not Lazier

I was talking to friend who is a superstar B2B marketer. He was telling me about this new enterprise PPC bid management software he was evaluating. He deals with thousands and thousands of terms so automating the bidding would be a huge help. He told me about the slick interface and the bidding rules, etc. Then I asked him the question that made him stop like a deer in the headlights.

“Have you checked out the data reporting behind the algorithm? What actionable insights does your ppc automation vendor provide you?”

Of course, vendors will shout “proprietary formula” and we marketers fall for this marketing B.S. We don’t need the complex details behind it but we do need to get a sense of what and how they look at data, keyword attribution, etc. What metrics do they value most? If you fall for the “black box” how do you and the system continue to learn? How do remove it if you are unhappy with the vendor? How do you create your internal best practices unless you have a clear picture into what is happening?

Without good data at the core, you may just end up with a mechanical turk. You need data to share in your organization and data that tells you details of what you’re doing and how to improve it. Also, beware of bad software that takes what you need done and tries to completely automate it. Just because it is automated won’t guarantee it is optimal for the way a good marketer works.

Don’t Forget Your Job Is to Make More Money, Not to Make Your Job Easier

The point of marketing automation is to free you up to do more of what you are really good at by letting the glorified calculator do what it is really good at. Good marketing automation lets you use your insights about your customers in ways you couldn’t before; bad software takes those decisions away and prays that the computer will do it for you. Keep in mind we have created a computer that has barely beaten a great human chess player, despite its intricate and complex algorithm –  and we’re still far off from a computer to beat the best human poker players. Do you really believe that some algorithm is going to be better than you at creative marketing insights?

Without solid data, scientific method and reporting, how does your marketing automation software show you it is making money? Whether or not you are using marketing automation, you still need access to great metrics. In the case of marketing personalization, how do you know if the efforts are working if there aren’t control groups to measure against? How do you control for other external factors?

The Marketing Automation Future, Now

Don’t get me wrong — I am an advocate for marketing automation. But only if there is a core focus on the insight derived from data, not the automation, first. Analytics must be at the foundation and not an afterthought. You can identify first generation automation tools by their focus in on automation first and reports second. Today’s next-generation state-of-the-art tools have to have great metrics and analysis at their core and are focused on helping you optimize your business; that is, making you more money and proving their value to you.

Please feel free to tell me more about your marketing automation love fest or worries.

P.S. Full disclosure: like my good friend and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, I work for and sit on several advisory boards of companies that use data as their foundation for marketing optimization and automation.

Never?

You mean no one has ever blocked the exit and said something like, “Hey, I saw you put that bottle of wine in your cart, why didn’t you buy it?”

It sounds funny until you realize that most online remarketing services offer to do exactly that to your website visitors.  They’ll pester them with e-mails, pop-ups, and phone calls should they have the bad fortune of visiting your site, adding something to your shopping cart, and then not buying it.

Why would otherwise sane e-tailers revert to such uncivil, gorilla-like tactics?  Really bad assumptions about both human nature and the nature of online shopping.  They simply haven’t compared what they’re doing to that kind of offline analogy.  So here are the bad assumptions, along with a few suggestions on how to correct them and what to do instead:

Assumption #1: Everyone is a late stage buyer

Related assumptions: Everyone who puts something in your shopping cart has a full-blown intent to purchase that item, and it was just chance or a shopping cart flaw that caused them to “abandon” your cart.  Cart abandonment is caused within the cart itself.

Corrections:

• Lots of people research and comparison-shop before they buy.
• Adding an item to cart is often a means of comparison shopping
• Adding an item to cart is often the only way to get important information for making the buying decision – stuff like shipping costs, whether express delivery is available, gift options etc.
• Most lost sales are caused by a lack of information and persuasion on the product page and the rest of the website – not by the cart itself.

Assumption #2: Long-term effects will parallel short-term gain

Related assumptions: sales that you recover from abusive or annoying tactics are easily tied to increased revenue and therefore are more important than the much-harder-to-measure ill will and annoyance created by those same techniques.  That the successes are as cumulative as the ill will generated.

Corrections:

• “He who would run his business with visible figures alone will soon have neither business nor visible figures to work with.”  -    W. Edwards Deming
• Don’t mistake a lack of hate e-mail or complaints as a lack of passionate response.  Or at the least, find out a way to measure the offense or annoyance you’re causing amongst the visitors who you don’t convert through your remarketing efforts.    If more people are converted than are pissed off, and the converted become repeat buyers, then keep doing what you’re doing.  But have the discipline to find out for sure.
• Pissed off people are a lot more likely to share their experiences than a visitor converted through remarketing tactics.  And even the converted visitor will be less likely to do ANY further early stage shopping from you now that they know what to expect from putting an item in your cart or visiting your checkout page.
• Ask any remarketing service what the longer-term trends for their customers have been.  If they can’t tell you overall impact on their clients conversion rates for periods of at least 1-2 years, you should be very, very suspicious.

Assumption #3:  It never hurts to ask.

Related assumptions: that the mere form of a question /offer renders it impossible to offend visitors’ sensibilities or violate their sense of privacy and online safety.

Corrections:

• Read this Seth Godin post
• Imagine that you had only started to fill out a check-out form, had not ever hit any kind of “submit” or “enter” button before closing out, but now have that website e-mailing and calling you because they pulled the info off of their server in real-time, as you typed it into the form.  How do you feel about that?  Think this thing doesn’t happen?  It does.
• A website forces you to create an account in order to checkout.  You create one.  Then you see that they gouge their customers on shipping charges.  You close out of the process and now you’re receiving spam from that company/website.  Are you EVER likely to do business with them in this or any other lifetime?

So are all automated responses and attempts to “save the sale” a bad idea?

Absolutely not.  Just let your offline sense of what’s appropriate guide you in your applications of this online technology. Pushy sales clerks can kill brick and mortar sales just as easily as over-aggressive re-marketing techniques for the simple reason that human nature doesn’t change just because a person goes online.  In fact, I frequently recommend Why We Buy to Web optimization specialists and online copywriters for exactly this reason.

So to use that offline analogy, let’s say you are looking at a more expensive bottle of wine and that the store owner sees you put it back on the shelf to grab a few other cheaper bottles.

Would it be ok for the clerk to approach you, mention that the bottle you were looking at is one of the best buys he has in the store, guarantee you’ll love it, and offer to give you a discount to get you to try a bottle?   Or for him to show you similar bottles closer to your price range?

As long as the clerk was respectful and took “no” for an answer, there’s no problem with that at all, right?  So how could you do it online?

• You could show special offers on previously-deleted-from-the-cart merchandise during the checkout process
• You could have a button on your product page that says “alert me to any specials or discounts on this product,” and then follow-up with a special e-mail offer AFTER the visitor has given you permission to contact them.
• For completed sales – and completed sales ONLY! – you could send a follow-up e-mail with special deals on previously-deleted-from-the-cart merchandise
• And a few other techniques that I’m sure you’ll come up with yourself if you spend some time thinking about it.  I don’t want to give away all my secrets without exacting any mental work from my readers

All of these things work just as well online as their offline counterparts, which is far more than can be said for most “gorilla” (re)marketing tactics.

P.S.  Before going through all this trouble to remarket, why not make sure you’ve fully optimized your checkout process to begin with?  Bryan Eisenberg’s initial and follow-up blog posts on this are a great place to start.

As soon as Clear had a lane at the Delta Terminal at JFK, I signed up. I’ve told many people about the benefits of using the Clear card. In fact, I’ve already renewed my membership for a second time.  I am subscribed through 2013. Makes me wonder why do the keep emailing me over and over again to sign up for a trial membership? Oooooops!

Clear really needs to spring clean and segment their email lists better. Sending your pre-existing customers offers that are irrelevant is just like sending sp&m.

I do have a recommendation for them.  Why not send an email to their customers who renewed a special invitation code with a great deal they can pass along to their friends. If I had an offer like that I would gladly share it with you.

What do you think they could do better? Please share your ideas.

The problem is larger than that. In another email marketing study in 2007 by Silverpop, it was found that many people’s email marketing sucked, and that there was poor messaging follow through on the website from the email campaign. This often happens in a large organization because the team responsible for email marketing lives in a silo separate from the website team. When the organization is not in silos or when you have a smaller team though it still happens. They have not figured out how to integrate web analytics and website optimization with their email marketing; a critical piece of the marketing equation.

According to the eROI Q1 2009 Study: Trends & Use of Email Analytics:

The savvy email marketer knows that developing a truly targeted email campaign goes beyond simply segmenting by demographic and focuses on behavioral segmentation, which enables delivery of the most relevant, targeted messages to your recipients. How does one track behavior? Easy, just follow the data.

An individual who visits your site from an email campaign, but doesn’t make a purchase, can be targeted with an offer different than that sent to a person who eventually abandons their shopping cart, or another person who makes a purchase. Intelligent email marketing requires different tactics for follow up and re-engagement based on previous actions, but if you are not capturing any of these analytics all of this might sound like magic.

The 80% that measured their email marketing efforts were asked to rank the metrics they tracked by importance and ranked open rate, followed by click rate and open to click ratio as the most important measures.

Though they receive the most attention, these metrics ultimately give you the least amount of insight into the true success of your campaign. Open rate, as mentioned earlier, is not a reliable metric. Click rate is better, but unless you can tie those clicks to dollars, campaign ROI can still be a little tough to prove.

Tragically, about one-eighth of all email marketers are not tracking conversions. Of those, the majority don’t track conversions because of time or budget considerations, but, shockingly, about one-quarter aren’t tracking conversions simply because they do not know how.

Are you leveraging intelligent dynamic emails? Emails that are triggered based on the analytics and actions of your website visitors and customers? Let us know if you need help.

So start your headline optimization process with a close look at scent.  These links will help drive home the point:

Bryan Eisenberg gets interviewed on Scent and Landing Page Stickiness:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How lack of scent feels like “bait and switch” to website visitors

Broken scent between e-mails and landing pages accounts for 35% of failed campaigns

Step 2. Angle of Approach: After you understand what it will take to provide continuity of scent, you’ll need to do the research and idea generation to come up with that compelling hook, or angle of approach that will compel readers to stop and scan the article.

Think of it this way, if scent is about matching information, keywords, and look and feel, angle of approach is about matching your copy to visitors’ emotional drives, motivations, hopes, dreams, fears, etc.  Of course, it’s also about introducing a compellingly interesting thought into the reader’s mind.  For some incredibly helpful tools and techniques on Angles of Approach,take a look at the following blog posts:

How to connect with your prospect’s dominant emotion

How to polarize an audience to speak to the prospects you most want

Roy Williams on Choosing Whom to Lose

Why writing to a specific person (or persona) Overcomes the 200 Headlines Myth

The power of Magic Words – and how to find them

Sean D’Souza on the Power of New & Knew

Sean on how specifics beat generalities when it comes to Angles of Approach

Roy Williams on Framing First Mental Images

Compelling the visitor to keep reading

Why your headline may want to refer to an unseen action

I’d recommend you come up with at least a couple of different approaches and test them.  This might cause you to rewrite your first paragraph or two of body copy for each test variant, but it’s well worth the effort.

Step 3. Wordsmithing: Once you have the angle of approach and the “Scent” requirements, then it’s time for some of the traditional wordsmithing normally associated with writing headlines.  Can you sharpen the point?  Can you increase the curiosity factor?  Should it be a statement or a question?  Can you swap out words to create different emotional associations or connotations?  Can you test fractions vs. percentages?  What kind of presuppositions can you bury in And so on.

Here’s a monster list of links containing some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Headlines:

First, go sign up for Sean’s newsletter and get his free PDF report on Why do most headlines fail.

Second, read through Jay Abraham’s list of 100 Greatest Headlines Ever written

Third, listen to Gary Bencivenga’s explanation of why you should build credibility into your headlines

Now feast on Brian Clark’s brilliant headline articles:

5 Simple Ways to Open Your Post With a Bang

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

7 More Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

Warning: Use These 5 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk

How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

And for sheer tonnage of listed techniques, it’s hard to resist Chris Bloczynski’s post:

99 Headline Techniques Revealed

Or SEO Blackhat’s 54 Headline Templates That Sell

Of course, it goes without saying that with all these choices, you’ll want to test and optimize, and the Grok’s own post on Top 10 Ideas for Testing Your Headlines is a great place to start, or you can watch the webinar on testing headlines and calls to action:

Over the past several columns, I’ve examined conversion rate basics. This week, we continue our study of the basics with an updated look at RFM.

Recency represents the number of days since the customer last completed the action you’re profiling. Frequency represents the number of times the customer has completed this action since the first time she completed it. Monetary value represents the total value (usually total sales) the customer created by completing these actions.

The classic RFM model produces scores that rank customers relative to each other for the likelihood that they will repeat the action being profiled. Any action can be profiled: visits, purchases, logins, and so on. High likelihood to repeat an action, providing this action has economic value to the company, means high future value. Low likelihood to repeat means low future value. RFM is that simple.

RFM is a commonsense way of sorting marketing and optimization decisions based on what your visitors actually do and what they spend.

What Can RFM Do for You?

Let me defer that answer to a friend, optimization junkie, and fan of RFM. According to Frank Malsbenden, VP/GM of Vision Retailing, parent company of Shoeline.com:

The use of RFM metrics can drastically improve the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. It’s no secret that your best chance at repeat business is within 30 days of the customer’s last purchase. It’s not hard to grasp that frequency of purchases are a key metric in understanding the “health” of your customer database. And if you think about what you expect for service levels at retail establishments you spend heavily with, it’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of customers who spend big bucks with you. This is RFM, and catalog empires were built on the premise that recency, frequency, and monetary metrics should be the driving force in customer retention strategies…

But sometimes in e-commerce, we outthink ourselves, get too cute by half, or just get too plain confused by all the data that flies our way on a daily basis. Instead of keeping it simple, we get too “sophisticated.” What we should be doing is mastering techniques like RFM that have been proven over time. The possibilities with RFM and e-mail are endless. At Shoeline.com, we’ve started off with the basics. We developed e-mail templates for customer’s who purchased 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days ago. The content for each template is dynamically driven based on the RFM score of the recipient as well as references to previous purchases. We’ve developed the process so that these e-mails are sent automatically every day. All we have to do is change the content for the templates on a seasonal basis to ensure thematic relevance. The results speak for themselves. In 2008 the difference in open-conversion rate (orders/opens) was 31 percent higher for RFM-driven e-mails versus our traditionally segmented e-mails. The difference in straight conversion rate (orders/recipients) is so stark I’m afraid to go public, for fear of losing credibility. These results have prompted us to increase the percentage of RFM-based e-mails in 2009, and you can be assured that someday soon, 100 percent of our e-mails will be RFM-based.

Obviously the value of RFM goes beyond e-mail and can be used to increase SEM efficiency, ad targeting, and even merchandising. Still the simplest and most profitable use of RFM scoring is to identify and resell your best customers over and over.

Getting Started With RFM

Start by reading my previous columns on the subject: “Betting the Farm on RFM, Part 1” and Betting the Farm on RFM, Part 2.

Once you grasp RFM fundamentals, you’ll be inspired. Once you sort by these criteria, you’ll quickly find new and exciting ways to use them, such as:

• Is that PPC (define) campaign really bringing in high RFM customers or just low RFM customers? Any campaigns you would kill?
• What do high-scoring customers buy more of? Are there any patterns? Can you make them an offer to sell them again?
• What other behaviors are high RFM visitors engaging in on your site? Are average number of pages higher or lower? Is time on site higher? And so on.
• Create new KPIs (define) designed to optimize higher RFM visitors retention.
• Does RFM data give you any insight on merchandising and inventory?

My one tip when using RFM: don’t waste too many resources turning low RFMs into higher ones. It’s much more efficient to keep higher RFMs engaged.

If you need a quick immersion in RFM, again I highly suggest “Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet” by good friend Jim Novo.

Have you learned anything interesting from employing RFM techniques? Let’s us know in the comments section what you’ve found.

I received an email today from Staples.com. The subject line read “Will Office Depot closings affect you?” In the body of the email they lead off that “you can always count on Staples” and show what looks like the beginning of a press release. You can see the full email below:

In these rough economic times, do you think this type of message is smart? Are they building confidence with this kind of messaging or is the painful message an overall turn-off? Your thoughts?

]]> http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/12/17/sign-of-the-times-marketing/feed/ 31 http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/20/how-to-leverage-economic-woes-and-promote-business/ http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/20/how-to-leverage-economic-woes-and-promote-business/#comments Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:45:26 +0000 Brendan Regan http://www.grokdotcom.com/?p=1552 I was firsthand witness to a clever promotion recently, so I’ll share in the hopes it inspires you to turn the Economy’s lemons into lemonade.

Seattle’s Chow Foods runs six restaurants, and recently sent an email blast with an inventive promotion.  The one-day promotion adjusted their menu item pricing based on…

I was firsthand witness to a clever promotion recently, so I’ll share in the hopes it inspires you to turn the Economy’s lemons into lemonade.

Seattle’s Chow Foods runs six restaurants, and recently sent an email blast with an inventive promotion.  The one-day promotion adjusted their menu item pricing based on the close of the DOW and the NASDAQ – the tumultuous DOW set the food menu pricing, and the NASDAQ set the price of house wine, draft beers, and well drinks.

The DOW closed at 8,979, which brought all menu items to a price of $8.79, and the NASDAQ closed at 1,717, which brought drink prices down to $1.71!  I walked by one of their restaurants last night at dinner time, and the line was out the door and down the block.

Here are the lessons I see in their promotion:

1. Be innovative – basing prices on market closes, which have been painful news lately, actually worked to the customer’s benefit.  I had the promotion forwarded to me, so they also came up with something Viral-worthy.
2. Put some skin in the game – the business took some risk here, and customers sensed that and respond favorably.
3. Tap in to something already on customers’ minds – I guess that’s the point of this whole story.
4. Write great copy – their copywriter obviously had some fun with this (samples below).

What other clever ways can you leverage the economy (or the political races) to promote your business or your site?  Need some support as you innovate?

Tasty copy excerpts:

Dow’d but not Out at CHOW on Oct. 16

CHOW Foods is executing a short term Main Street bailout plan far more delicious than the one the goofs in congress passed last week.

The lower the Dow closes on Thursday, the less your entrée costs–no food on the menu will be priced more than the Dow. If it closes at 8300 (gulp!) then you won’t pay any more than $8.30 for any item on our food menus.

If Chowin’ on the DOW isn’t enough to whet your appetite, keep in mind that our house red & white wine, draft beers and well drinks will be priced at the NASDAQ close for the day.  If it dips to 1250, then our depression era pricing on these libations will be just a buck twenty five!

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I have the luxury of asking these people all kinds of questions throughout the day in the office. (I’m sure they love it.) But what about the rest of you? How might we do a better job of passing this information along to those who are interested?

As the new Marketing Campaign Manager, I’m on a mission to satisfy your appetite for more relevant information. I’m starting a new email program to help answer all of your conversion questions, provide seasonal optimization tips, alert you about special events, free whitepapers, webinars, and much more.

To make our emails more relevant to you, you have the option to choose what you’d like receive. Of course, I recommend them all ( ), but do know that we’ll only send out newsworthy, relevant messages. It takes about 30 seconds to subscribe to these lists:

• FutureNow Insider – Quick, newsworthy messages (for example, free whitepaper offers, conversion tips, webinar alerts, special promotions, and more)

• FutureNow Events – Special invitations to events and training seminars, free ticket giveaway alerts, industry trade show/conference discounts and more.

• FutureNow Updates – The latest news on our products and services and how they benefit you.

Opt-in to any, all, or none of the above. Either way, your current GrokDotCom newsletter subscription won’t be affected. These lists are just icing on the cake, but if you don’t follow the blog each day and are interested in getting specific updates, please do subscribe. If at any point you wish to stop receiving these message, no worries, simply click the “unsubscribe” link at the end of any of our emails.

We hope you enjoy the new lists! As always, we’d love to see your comments about how we can make FutureNow’s emails more relevant to your needs.

. .

About the Author: Karrie Chen is the Marketing Campaign Manager at FutureNow, Inc. If you have any questions about our new email lists or problems registering, please leave a comment below or contact her at marketing [at] futurenowinc [dot] com.

ProFlowers

This is not an accident.

ProFlowers.com is committed to a culture of ongoing optimization. A recent promotional email demonstrates its commitment to go beyond the Web site, extending into other touch points, specifically its email marketing.

Look at this screen shot of a ProFlowers email as it appears in my Entourage email preview:

Contrast that with this email preview from SmartBargains.com:

The ProFlowers email shows evidence of planning and optimization, while the second shows, well, a bunch of Xs.

Notice the top of ProFlowers’s email makes the offer part of the “Can’t view this email” line. Most only say something like, “Having problems reading this email? Please click here.”

Inspired by the ProFlowers example, today I’ll share a few tips so you can optimize your own email messages.

Optimize Your Email Marketing

• Use alt tags. Never place an image in an email (or anywhere else online) without an alt tag. It’s just smart, and there’s no downside. ProFlowers uses the alt tag in the large image on the left to reinforce the overall message, and most of the major images are tagged appropriately. I can easily preview the message and act on it, without even downloading the images.

• Test your subject line. The ProFlowers’s subject line gives me enough information to determine if I’m interested in the offer. While this direct approach won’t work for every situation, your subject line should show respect for the recipient’s time and inbox. At the very least, the subject line and content should be consistent. Don’t hook recipients in with a catchy subject only to let them down in the email body by hiding the offer or by making them scroll down to see it.

• Copy matters. It matters a lot. Make sure your offer is clear and concise.

• Test your offers. What are you offering? Sometimes a seemingly lesser offer performs better. Notice how the ProFlowers offer gives me a clear choice between two decent offers.

Get Into the Inbox

These optimization tips are all well and good — provided your email actually arrives at the intended inbox. So much opt-in email ends up in the junk folder because it’s mistaken for spam. I asked my friend, Yasifur Rahman, VP of Kobemail, to share a few other tips that will help marketers optimize deliverability:

• Images and text. It’s a good idea to work toward a 60:40 image-to-text ratio. Image-only creative is a big no-no. Always have both images and text in creative. Most spam creative is just center-aligned images, so this layout is a spam indicator for various filters. If you have a top header (usually a logo), keep it under 100 pixels and simple, if possible. And always linked to the sender’s landing page.

• Overuse of spam-flagged words. Symbols and words, such as “$,” “FREE,” “$100″ (or any other amount), “cash,” “!,” “Prize,” “!!!,” “click,” and “complimentary” increase your spam score exponentially when used excessively. A few of them used here and there won’t affect the email as much. But when they’re used consistently throughout the message, the email is open season for spam blockers.

• Backgrounds and alignment. Colorful backgrounds raise a spam score greatly. A white background is the lowest scoring color within an email. Also, most spam messages are centered. Left-align your creative to make it look legitimate. The combination of these changes will have a positive effect on your deliverability.

• Subscription date. Add a subscription date to your message, such as: “Thank you for signing up on 07/13/06.” This builds email credibility. The more information about the subscription you put in your email, the easier it is for ISPs to determine that the mailing was a legitimate, subscribed mailing.

• Broken image and text. A smooth transition between image and text makes your creative look professional. Plus, when images are disabled, the HTML won’t break. Combined with the earlier recommendations, it will be easier for email recipients to believe your email isn’t spam. And if reported, it’s easier for the sender to convince the ISPs that the newsletter was legit and not intended as spam.

You can get more of Rahman’s tips on his blog.

Email and the Big Picture

Email’s only one piece of the conversion rate puzzle.

Double-digit conversion rates don’t happen overnight. They take work and relentless testing, collecting insight after insight into why customers behave the way they do, making the changes, then doing it all over again.

What are you optimizing in your email marketing and landing page experience?

. .

Also seen on ClickZ.

Looking to improve email and landing page conversion? FutureNow can help.

“Yeah, right. Save the April Fools‘ pranks for Google.”

But it’s true! Spirit Airlines wants to have a threesome with me.

They told me so via email:

What kind of persona do they think I am?

Seriously…

Do you think they got their message across?

It all started when I checked my email and found an email from Apple with a subject line that said, “The new Mac Pro. Now with 8 cores standard.”

Like many email users, I don’t automatically enable HTML images. So, I have to click to allow the images to be shown. The result: The Apple email looks like a fancy design of gray and black with absolutely nothing there.

The subject line (”The new Mac Pro. Now with 8 cores standard.”) means nothing to me. How is that a benefit? It certainly doesn’t excite me enough to explore further, but since I’m an Apple fan, let’s say I decide to keep going.

When I did finally enable the image, I see the computer tower…

The call to action above the fold is “Configure now.” Wow, that’s really exciting!

I’m a Humanistic type (as opposed to Spontaneous, Competitive, or Methodical), so the word “configure” holds no scent for me — it sounds like something really technical you do with a graphing calculator. No thanks.

But for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m curious enough to continue and see this landing page:

Could they possibly use more techno-speak? There isn’t a word here of that wonderful, personal, easy-to-understand Apple language.

If this were designed for Methodical types, I’d give it high marks. Even if she didn’t have her images enabled, the Methodical customer might scroll down and see there was indeed some text in the email. She would probably like the word “configure” and appreciate all those wonderful technical specs, and a subject line like, “Now with 8 cores standard.”

But for the other types, this scenario bombs.

Spontaneous customers who don’t have images enabled on their email will likely not even open it with that subject line, and if they see nothing but a black and gray design with nothing in it, they’re gone.

Humanistics won’t often get past that subject line, either. Where’s the wonderful everyday language and engaging images? I’d like to see that nice guy from the TV commercials telling me why this new Mac Pro would be great for me. I bet he could do a good job of putting it into plain English and making me feel good about the product.

Competitives might like the subject line, but they want benefits, not features. How will this help them do more, be better, have a superior computer to what they have today? They also will bail if they don’t have images enabled. They are almost as impatient as the Spontaneous folks. Here’s the sad thing: There’s actually great copy for Competitives like, “Once reserved for the top of the line, 8-core processing power is now at the heart of the Mac Pro.” Same feature, but delivered in a benefit-oriented fashion Competitives would love — yet it’s below the fold where, unlike the Methodical customer, they may not scroll to see it (they’re much too fast-paced).

Bottom line: The whole scenario feels like it was designed by that “PC guy.” I want my Mac guy back.

[Editor's Note: Do your landing pages speak to customers in their own language? If you'd like to optimize your landing pages and improve customer focus, we can help.]

…seams are important.

Try throwing a baseball or a football without seams.

Wear clothes without seams and you look like you’re on Star Trek.

Seams make it possible to get a grip.

The goal, it seems to me, is not to create things that are seamless. It’s to put the seams in places where they are actually useful.

That’s exactly what Threadless.com does for its customers. If you’ve done business with them before and have selected an item that’s running low in their inventory, and you abandon the checkout process before buying, they’ll send you a follow-up email like this:

Their shirts come with seams, as does their marketing. The copy is spot-on without being pushy. They seem to be doing us a favor. Threadless knows that their customers know that the t-shirt designs they print sell out fast. They don’t shout “buy now!” when we’re just browsing the products. Nope. This message is tailored for people who’ve shown genuine interest. And despite the exclamation points, it reads something like this: “Sorry to bother you, but here’s what you should know about our inventory. If you really do want to buy this item, you should probably do it soon-ish.”

(Hat tip to Rishi at the Better Retail blog for the subtle link to this via comment. Great seam!)

I’m a sucker for good, experience-based marketing; the kind that draws you into an experience with a product or service. So, what’s even more impressive to me than the magazine is that they have some of the best email marketing around.

In addition to their typical, retail product-based emails, there’s one thing I love more than anything about this company: Christopher Kimball’s newsletter. Kimball is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief and, in addition to being head of the company, he runs a family farm in a small town in Vermont. For as long as I’ve been a subscriber, Kimball’s newsletter has always had a welcoming, familiar tone, describing every detail about “what’s going down on the farm.” He talks about the harvest, funny happenings around his small town, updates on things the family has cooked, links to photos, and so on. Here’s an except from a summer update:

“Two weeks ago, our family and neighbors turned out to help get Jean’s hay in [links to photos], and our strawberry crop has been terrific. Adrienne will turn out at least a couple dozen jars of strawberry jam and probably a similar number of raspberry. The 23 rows of corn were better than “knee-high by the fourth of July,” and all the potatoes are doing well and are free of potato bugs, at least so far. I hope to start digging new potatoes out of the ground by early August, steaming them, and serving them with nothing more than salt, butter, and chives. Click here to see recent photos of the farm [links to photos]”

It’s a whole email of this rich commentary, interspersed with links for recipes on the Cook’s Illustrated site and updates on the filming of their weekly show on PBS. But here’s the thing: I’m absolutely compelled to read them. What’s more is that I completely look forward to taking a 15-minute break from city life to be transported to an environment that seems so alien to me, yet I’m allowed to experience it as a resident. I pour over each link and look at every photo, but more importantly — for them, anyway — I’m driven to read the recipes. Why? I’m curious and excited to learn what made the cobbler he and his wife served at the latest community event so amazing. And that’s the point. His words draw me into the experience and persuade me to interact with the brand and its products.

Knowing when it’s more effective for your copy to have personality and create an experience, versus cutting straight to the point, is crucial. It’s about showing your audience that you know them by anticipating their interests and needs. That’s what Kimball does so well, and it works.

Want to know how Kimball does it? If you’d like to craft authentic, engaging prose that turns visitors into customers, customers into fans, and fans into advocates, join us for our upcoming Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Orlando. (Sorry, kids, no coyotes and freshly-picked apples, but you might find a cartoon mouse or two.) If you can’t make it to Florida, perhaps you’d like to buy the Persuasive Online Copywriting e-book or simply subscribe to Future Now’s free newsletter instead.

[Editor's Note: This is the first post from the latest addition to Future Now, our first-ever VP of Marketing, Bond... Brian Bond. It takes a brave soul to market the marketers, so if you've enjoyed the email soufflé, feel free to wave 'hello' in the comments. Welcome to the team, Brian!]

In February, Jeffrey asked “Does Ziff Davis’s Spam Damage its Brand?” Both Jeffrey and I could not get off of Ziff Davis’s email list, no matter how many times we tried to remove ourselves. Thankfully, a reader (James) left a comment on June 10th about how he solved this problem:

Hi all,

I found a solution to Ziff Davis SPAM. I spent an hour searching every Ziff Davis email on google and come up with the following list.

info@ziffdavis.com, phil_kramer@ziffdavis.com, kelli_turtz@ziffdavis.com, sandra_gibson@ziffdavis.com, Sloan_Seymour@ziffdavis.com, Martha_Schwartz@ziffdavis.com, Stephen_Veith@ziffdavis.com, Phil_Kramer@ziffdavis.com, angelo_mandarano@ziffdavis.com, lfreeman@ziffdavis.com, chris_maginn@ziffdavis.com, baseline@ziffdavis.com, appscout@ziffdavis.com, larryseltzer@ziffdavis.com, matthew_graven@ziffdavis.com, randy_zane@ziffdavis.com, events@ziffdavis.com, chris_primesberger@ziffdavis.com, opportunities@ziffdavis.com, eWEEK@ziffdavis.com, Debra_Olchick@ziffdavis.com, jeffrey_burt@ziffdavis.com, dennis_barker@ziffdavis.com, mary_hart@ziffdavis.com, gearlog@ziffdavis.com, Sheena_Mohan@ziffdavis.com, askloyd@ziffdavis.com, kristin_holmes@ziffdavis.com, ppereira@ziffdavis.com, debra_donston@ziffdavis.com, Matthew_rothenberg@ziffdavis.com, Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com, elda_vale@ziffdavis.com, eric_lundquist@ziffdavis.com, jason_freidenfelds@ziffdavis.com, Mary_behr@ziffdavis.com, john_mccormick@ziffdavis.com, aimee_levine@ziffdavis.com, stan_gibson@ziffdavis.com, Nicholas_mokhoff@ziffdavis.com, dennis_fisher@ziffdavis.com, garcia@ziffdavis.com, darryl_taft@ziffdavis.com, caton@ziffdavis.com, Karl_Elken@ziffdavis.com, barry_ harrigan@ziffdavis.com, andrew_garcia@ziffdavis.com, cameron_sturdevant@ziffdavis.com, chris_maginn@ziffdavis.com, joe_wilcox@ziffdavis.com, peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com, kristin_holmes@ziffdavis.com

This list includes CEO’s, GM’s Managers, Executives and staff thoughout thier SPAM empire.

Send an email to all these people with an email subject similer to:

Violation of Federal CAN-SPAM act of 2003: Request to stop receiving unsolicited emails from ALL Ziff Davis related publications, subsidiaries and websites.

However, don’t be rude or abusive just politily tell them that thier “unsubscribe” links have not stopped thier spam and that they are in voilation of the above Federal Legislation.

I sent off this email with a read receipt, and received no reponsce from anyone apart from:

Sloan Seymour
President, Enterprise Group
Ziff Davis Media
Office: 212.503.4850
Mobile: 917.273.2774
Sloan_Seymour@ziffdavis.com

She apologised, and advisde me I would be removed from all mailing lists. I have happily never received SPAM since

I’m sure you could just email Sloan and help would help you, but the extra emails in the CC feild might add a bit more weight.

Hope this helps other people out there stop the madness.

I followed this advice and was personally contacted by Sloan Seymour.

An Open Letter To Sloan Seymour

Sloan,

Thank you for keeping me off your email list, till now.

How bad are things at Ziff Davis? Desperate enough that you have to insist on sending emails to people who have so angrily opted out?

I suggest you invest a few bucks and buy a few copies of this book for your staff. Make it a requirement to actually read it and practice permission marketing.

By the way, if things are so bad at Ziff Davis, let me know — I’ll happily purchase a handful of copies and send it to you, as long as you never email me again.

You can see from the comments on our post that this is a common complaint. I’m sure you are aware. Please let us know what you plan to do?

Pissed off in the blogosphere,

Bryan

P.S. Below is the previous email thread to remind you of our correspondence.

If you’re an avid skier who lives in North America, like me, you’ve probably seen a Warren Miller film. He was one of the first to harness ski culture enthusiasm for commercial purposes — way before the Internet.

For years, I’ve been a big fan. I hadn’t seen any advertising for this year’s Warren Miller film, but — knowing that it just wouldn’t be a ski season without one — I was proactive about not missing a second year in a row. I don’t watch much television and I rarely listen to the radio, so unless I’m lucky enough to see an ad for the film, it’s easy to forget. Luckily, I went online to see when and where his film would be featured and was able to buy my tickets directly from his site.

Warren Miller’s loyal fans are passionate about skiing and snowboarding. His crowd acts differently than most moviegoers. It’s a bonding experience between strangers who are all there for the same purpose; they’re looking for an adrenaline hit from powdery, snow-covered mountains. Everyone is very vocal and outwardly excited, sharing the experience that gets them stoked for the upcoming season.

Still, I’m left scratching my head. Why didn’t they collect my email address when I purchased my ticket online? Had they specifically told me that they’re collecting my information in order to inform me when next year’s film will be released, I would’ve been perfectly happy to cough up my email address. After all, I would rather not have to think about when the Warren Miller flick is playing next year. They would be doing me a favor by telling me when and where it’s playing in my area, and just letting me click to purchase directly from an email.

Something I found interesting at this year’s film was that the majority of attendees had pre-purchased their tickets. In fact, there was hardly anyone purchasing tickets at the box office. Each year, and at every screening, the audience receives a free (or discount) ski pass to the local resort. But this year, the tickets weren’t handed out at the event. Instead, the audience was given a piece of paper with a ticket number where they were asked to go online to redeem their free pass.

Wouldn’t this be the ideal opportunity for the Warren Miller team to collect email addresses with the sole purpose of nurturing their loyal customers?

By the way, the film rocked! It wasn’t the best year ever, but it definitely pumped me up for what’s ahead this winter. After seeing the flick last week, I purchased my season pass at my local ski resort. I may even want to purchase the DVD when it comes out. Too bad they didn’t collect my information. I’ll probably forget about the DVD and I probably won’t be proactive enough to buy it later on when I’m skiing (read: not just daydreaming about skiing). If I received an email about it when it comes out, chances are they would make another sale. This is why it’s often a good idea to ask for an email address after you’ve made the sale.

Oh well. Maybe they’ll catch on next year.

It’s a great example of how to spice up your PR without making it seem like you’re only after the cash booty. Pirates base their careers on the element of surprise. Likewise, marketers — the lily-livered bilge rats they be — need to make Broca walk the plank.

Have fun with you email campaigns. Talk like a pirate, even. Just don’t get too carried away…

I’m sure this wasn’t Proflower’s intention. It was, however, a poor job of personalization. What ProFlowers did was take a professional relationship and turn it into personal familiarity. They do a fabulous job of personalizing around birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays–but those are set events on a calendar. This is much tougher in a “just because” email for the simple fact that relationships–like the one between Andy and ProFlowers–doesn’t exist on a calendar.

I hope my friends from ProFlowers go ahead and forward the following couple of posts to the email marketers:

Your Email Marketing Sucks!* Study Says So…

Why “Personalization” of the Web Scares Me

I do want to thank ProFlowers, though, for reminding me that I haven’t touched based with Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa in a while–she’s the last person I sent flowers to from ProFlowers. (Apologies to my lovely wife. It’s not what it seems.)

Be proud, Andy. Spread the word!

35% of landing pages studied didn’t have the same look or tone of the email that generated the click. For consumer campaigns, this figure was 29%, but increased to 41% for B2B companies.

Unfortunately, this happens when email marketing is silo’d within the organization and the folks sending out emails don’t have the ability to control landing pages, etc.

45% of landing pages didn’t repeat the promotional copy found in the email. Landing pages with images and messaging matching the emails that generated initial interest are better able to reinforce the brand and move email recipients from clicking to converting.

In other words they did not plan for their customer to follow the scent.

17% of the email marketing campaigns studied actually sent recipients to the marketer’s home page rather than a unique landing page. “Home pages are most often created to appeal to the broadest spectrum of prospects possible, while truly successful email marketing campaigns are focused on segmented groups based on their relationship to the company or product,” said Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy, Silverpop.

Email marketing is still one of the most powerful online marketing tactics. Hopefully, if you have been a GrokDotCom reader for a while, you aren’t making any of these mistakes. However, thinking about email marketing in isolation without paying attention to the details of the online sales and marketing blueprint is just a noise making, customer irritating tactic that sucks the success away from you.

*P.S. “Sucks” is a Brooklyn technical term.

P.P.S. Don’t forget to plan for the preview pane.

Will Turner at Dancing Elephants talks about two more cardinal mistakes in e-mail marketing:

• Applying pressure
• Making Assumptions

Read more about how follow-up e-mails can kill a sale…

We’d like to share a story that illustrates a job well done, and a potential pitfall avoided. Flat out, the guys at CBS are sharp, and they know how to avoid a roadblock.

We wrote about our efforts to clean our GrokDotCom email list. CBS Sportsline just did something similar. I blogged about this past week and their story was written up in greater detail on ClickZ News. I was concerned with this first attempt because they only were sending only one email out to notify subscribers. They now will use a three-email campaign. Phew. Great move. Potential crisis avoided.

My concern is with the following statement made in the article:

Marketers and media companies that want to clean their lists need not e-mail the whole database, according to Jared Blank, VP of client solutions at direct marketing agency Epsilon. Blank recommends list owners target their re-subscribe requests to users who haven’t opened the last several messages sent. ‘It wouldn’t be your whole list,’ he said, adding he doesn’t believe such aggressive purging practices have become widespread.

Ask yourself: What would have happened had they simply sent a single email? Which customers would they have missed? Exactly the people they were trying to reach, perhaps?

Here’s the problem with what Jared Blank says. For technical clarification I asked CC Chaman from Kobemail, our email service provider, to explain the flaw in his logic. The people who haven’t opened your email, may not open them if you email them in the same manner. Analyze that the deliverability path is trusted (i.e., white-listed, authentication, SPF, DKIM, etc.); then, with that established, the marketer needs to reestablish the value of the publication to the reader before asking them to resubscribe.

Additionally, opens are not an indication of engagement. Engagement is! Try emailing subscribers who open said emails (who, if you’re lucky, at least passively scan your content) with an email that highlights the value of the publication and the benefits of resubscribing. You want to let the reader know that their lack of engagement will get them removed from the list. This reinforces the value of interaction.

If Jared advised to email those who clicked, and not those who opened, I might not have objected. Plus, while you may choose not to email the readers who actively respond by clicking inside your emails, they are usually the first people to recognize the value. These people already are your biggest advocates and will appreciate that you care about the publication quality. In fact, in our case, readers spread the story. In fact CC told me that after we did this for GrokDotCom, a handful of other people contacted him to do the same for them. They told him that they shared a our story with others. That’s a viral opportunity.

Do you really want to miss your most loyal readers by not sending them an resubscribe email?

This is what their email said:

Dear CBS SportsLine.com Member, We would like to confirm that you still wish to receive THIS WEEK ON CBS SPORTSLINE.COM. This email newsletter is delivered to your inbox every week – bringing you updates and previews on the week’s expert analysis, video, Fantasy Sports advice and the hottest sports topics from CBS SportsLine.com writers. Please confirm your CBS SportsLine.com enrollment status by clicking on the confirmation button below. If we do not hear from you by April 30, 2007, we will remove you from this email list.

In today’s email environment, you shouldn’t care about the absolute number of subscribers you have. Instead, reader engagement, the quality of the relationship readers have with you, is what’s important.

Nobody expects subscribers to read every issue, but if they haven’t read a newsletter even once in three months, then assume they’re not interested or don’t have the time to invest in reading it. Make any other assumption and you risk the quality of your subscriber interaction. The last thing we want is for the newsletter to degrade into a perception of opt-in sp*m.

CBS Interactive is a client, so we’ll follow up with them to let you know more about their results from this email list cleanup.