Crossover Learnings Between Email And Social Media

by Chad White

What Email Can Learn from Social Networks

Expressing personality. Most brands can no longer afford to be faceless entities. The interactivity and transparency of the Internet has elevated the need for personality. Luckily, there are several ways to do this: You can use an executive as TigerDirect does, staff members like Crutchfield, or your customers like REI. The most poignant expression of personality I’ve seen recently is Backcountry’s memorial message for skier Shane McConkey.

Expressing a sense of community. People want discounts and helpful information, but many also want to be part of a community. Including product testimonials from product reviews on your site is one way to do this. Backcountry goes a step further and highlights its top contributors in its monthly newsletter.

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently suggested another way to build a community feel: adding social proof to your email sign-up process, such as a running count of how many subscribers you have. Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, subscriber counts are a well-established and highly promoted measurement of legitimacy and influence. I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but the idea is intriguing.

What Social Networks Can Learn from Email

Providing exclusivity. Email subscribers appreciate it when they get exclusive deals and information not available to your Web site visitors. It helps justify them sharing their email address with you. With social networks, there’s a similar dynamic. Some people will ask themselves, “Why should I bother to be a fan if the announcements and other content are available on your Web site or to email subscribers?”

There’s value to making information available via different channels — being channel-agnostic is great m– but if you want to get people to engage with you via multiple channels, then the experience has to be different. Indeed, people expect to have a different experience with your brand via Facebook vs. Twitter vs. email, for instance.

Explaining the benefits of joining. Just as email sign-ups suffer when you don’t explain the benefits of receiving your emails, your “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” call-to-action put the burden on your customers to explore the benefits themselves. Quickly listing the key benefits can be effective in getting people motivated to take action. In a recent email, Fingerhut did a good job of selling the benefits for engaging with the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Driving subscribers to other channels. Providing customers with many avenues to take advantage of offers and exposing them to different channels has well-established benefits. Just as email programs aren’t maximizing their opportunity when they drive traffic solely to the Web, self-contained social networks are destined to underperform. Look for occasions to expose customers to multiple channels. Sephora did that recently by asking email subscribers to share a digital gift (a tote bag) with their Facebook friends; if they did that, they could get a real Sephora tote from their local store. But the most impressive utilization of a brand’s channels that I’ve seen recently was Buy.com and its Tweet n Seek contest, which had participants following them on Twitter, searching Buy.com, visiting their Facebook page, and reading products pages.

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Email Open Rates in Q4 2009

Email open rates increased 5.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 versus the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Q4 2009 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks report published by marketing services firm Epsilon.

The quarterly analysis is compiled from more than 7 billion emails sent by Epsilon in October, November and December 2009, across multiple industries and approximately 170 participating clients. The analysis combines data from Epsilon’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail. Additional highlights from the study include the following:

• average click rate was 5.9 percent, up slightly from the same time last year (5.8 percent);

• during the high-volume holiday season, the average volume per client increased 25.8 percent from last quarter and 9.8 percent from last year;

• Epsilon’s client base had a 94.1 percent inbox deliverability rate for Q4 across a sample of U.S. and Canada commercial email; and

• nine of the 13 industries tracked saw increases in open rates over Q4 2008, and two of the 13, consumer products goods and consumer services telecommunications, reported increases in all three metrics — opens, clicks and nonbounce rate — compared to last year.

Delivered Does Not Mean In The Inbox

It’s rather amazing how much confusion there is between the bounce rate and the inbox deliverability rate. I’ve been on the road much of May and June speaking at online marketing conferences — and while every marketer understands that if they don’t reach the inbox, they don’t earn a response, there is a sense of complacency around inbox deliverability that is not grounded in the right data. Marketers think they know their inbox deliverability rate, but in fact are either misinformed or just do not have access to that information.

Perhaps I should not be so surprised at the level of confusion. Most marketers are just going with the reports they are being given.Most email broadcast systems report something called “delivered.” It’s usually a pretty high number — like 95% or 98.8%. That’s because it’s probably only telling you how many messages bounced, and nothing about how likely messages are to actually reach the inbox. Bounces are the number of records on your file that either no longer exist (a hard bounce) or are having temporary delivery failure (a soft bounce), perhaps due to an out-of-office reply or a full mailbox or some glitch in the ISP server.

Most marketers who keep their lists clean and have good permission practices have a bounce rate of 1% to 5%. So that “delivered” metric is high, and often stays high consistently. Since it’s the only number most ESPs provide, this lulls marketers into thinking they also have inbox deliverability under control. Those deliverability challenges they keep reading about? That must happen to other people.

What’s the number marketers really need to know? Inbox deliverability: How many messages actually reached the inbox so you can try to earn a response? Let’s be honest. Very few subscribers will search for your message in their junk folder or contact you if they didn’t receive it at all.

You know about spam filters and probably know that some of your email gets lost. However, many marketers don’t know the full extent of the problem. In fact, about 20% of email marketing messages globally never reach the inbox (source: Return Path client and ISP data). And if marketers think it couldn’t possibly happen to them, they are fooling themselves.

Twenty percent is a big number. Most marketers would be very pleased with the instant revenue boost that would result if all the response metrics — opens, clicks, purchases, downloads, page views — went up by 20% this week.

The fact is irrefutable: Email must reach the inbox if it has any hope of earning a response.

The good news for marketers is that the factors that go into whether your messages reach the inbox are under their control. They can improve inbox deliverability rates by following best practices around complaints, permission, list hygiene, blacklists, frequency, relevancy and yes, bounce processing. Marketers need to pay attention to what their reports actually say. And then they must be sure that they know the inbox deliverability, and know it by campaign and by domain (e.g.: Gmail vs. Yahoo). This data should be considered an addition to whatever your ESP or MTA reports as “delivered.”

Knowing that your bounce rate is low is a good thing. But it won’t guide you on optimizing response. If you don’t see inbox deliverability data, then ask for it.

By: Stephanie Miller
Source: Email Insider