Recently, I became a subscriber for Entertainment Weekly and as any good marketer should do, they asked for my email address when I created an online subscriber profile.
This was several weeks ago, but the other day I got the email that you see here: a simple informative piece explaining how I get the opportunity to see advance screenings as a subscriber. Great! But that’s also where things got a bit, well, classic?
If you’ll notice the movie poster used in the email seen here, it’s Rush Hour 3. In the copy, Rush Hour 3, Shrek The Third and Dreamgirls are referenced as those films that subscribers got to see before they were released to the masses.
As I write this, it’s March 2010. Rush Hour 3 came out in August 2007. Shrek The Third? May 2007. Dreamgirls was released in December 2006! I don’t know about you, but I can name a few movies that have been released since 2007.
Essentially, this is an abandoned autoresponder/trigger- something set up years ago but has been left on the side of the road like an old car.
So now I’m wondering if this program still exists. Are they even aware these are going out and if so, are they totally fine with dated references in their emails? I would assume they wouldn’t be, but I’m not sure. (I can’t wait to have the inside track on Star Trek, which came out a year or so ago.)
Think about your autoresponders and triggers. Do they have time-sensitive information in there? If so, how often do you update that information and what’s your system of checks and balances to ensure you don’t forget?
Josh Nason heads up Account Management and Support for SendLabs (@SendLabs), a New England-based email marketing software and services company with clients all over the world. Hit him up at Twitter – @joshnason.
I’m rolling my eyes once again when I think of the silliness of all those web 2.0/3.0 zealots and “gurus” who quickly discounted the email channel for the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and more.
You’d think email was the anti-christ! I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with naive social media folks who also rolled their eyes when I’d talk about email marketing’s bright future. Blasphemy, they declared. And yet here we are, a few years into the social media revolution and all the shiny examples, the great ones – Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, and more, are all being smart marketers.
No doubt, Biz Stone could have tweeted his first edition of the new Twitter Email Newsletter (launched Tuesday) 140 characters at a time, but Biz is a smart dude. He knows that even his own creation has limitations, and that his audience receives information through various channels. Remember when they started sending you email notifications of new followers? Of course you do.
And as many are now saying (and which I believe), email is and continues to be the glue that holds it all together. Companies like Nutshell Mail (Manage your Social Networks through Email) deliver a daily recap of your social media sphere to your inbox a few times a day (sign up for it…it’s really cool). My friend and colleague Brady Sadlerwrote a great post on Gowalla’s use of email marketing to create a personal bond with its users. The list goes on and on.
Google Wave? Whoa. Not sure where that stands, but my hunch is nerdy early adopters took hold but not in a way that will mean lights out for Gmail. No way. Not ever.
Email is the common thread – the baseline communication vehicle. We wake to it every day. Companies like Goodmail are innovating with video in the inbox and the future for rich presentation inside of email is something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I’d love to see companies like Brightcove get involved if possible. Most recently, Gmail announced you can now run YouTube videos inside an email sent to your Gmail. And even Outlook 2010 is going social, combining various social communications streams into one platform.
Innovations from smart college kids like Inbox 2 are addressing the fact that we have more streams of data coming at us now than ever before and this presents opportunity. I’m not sure about you, but I’m starting to crave a single platform. Exact Target just purchased CoTweet. HubSpot and its brilliant packaging of Inbound Marketing understands that email marketing is the glue. It’s the number one tactic of theirs that converts the most number of prospects into customers. Awesome! Where am I going with all of this?
Email is the current of the internet. Always has been, and as far as I can see at this point, it always will be for a long time. Just ask Mark Cuban.
Let’s not rock on, email marketers. Let’s rock on, marketers!
Brett Houle is President/CEO of SendLabs (@SendLabs), a New England-based email marketing software and services company with clients all over the world. Hit him up at Twitter – @heybrett.
A while back, we posted an article about a new addition to the SendLabs application called Advanced Triggers. These triggers allowed SendLabs to communicate to external SOAP APIs when specific events happened. This was a huge milestone and marked the beginning of our Salesforce integration.
It was a little raw to work with and the flexibility was matched by the complications of actually setting the damn thing up. For anyone who had never previously worked with a SOAP API, the process wasn’t too far off from pulling teeth with a pair of salad tongs.
But that was all it was: “the beginning”. Since that first integration, I’ve been hard at work over my proverbial stove cooking up the next step in Salesforce integration.
The next time you log into SendLabs, give the “My Account” button a click. At the top, we’ve added another tab called “Salesforce Settings”. If you populate these fields with your Salesforce credentials and check the checkbox to activate it, then any list that you have imported via Salesforce will report back to Salesforce when a subscriber interacts with the email.
For the moment, any time a subscriber in your list opens an email, clicks a link inside that email, unsubscribes or hard bounces, that information will get queued up and sent during one of the integration intervals. These queues run every 20 minutes and report information back to us the first time it runs into a problem.
Now before you go all, “Hey man…why the 20 minutes? Weren’t you pushing all this information live before?”, let me explain why we changed our procedure.
Each Salesforce account has an allotted number of API connections it’s allowed to make per day. Previously every time a subscriber did anything, one of these connections were used to instantly report them into Salesforce. So you can see how if you were to send an email campaign to one million subscribers, you might get close to hitting your limit for the day and potentially lose important information because of it – especially if you had more than one application utilizing Salesforce’s API.
Now we store all of your connections behind the scenes and send the information up in groups of up to two hundred at a time reducing the hundreds to thousands of connections to a modest seventy two connections a day.
Enjoy the new feature and as always: email on, dudes! For information about how to set everything up, hit up Josh (josh [at] sendlabs.com)
John Norton is a lead product developer for SendLabs, a hosted email marketing software and services company. Hit him up at Twitter: @jukebox42.
Every day, I get the Boston Globe’s Daily Headlines email sent to my inbox. It’s clean, well-sectioned and easily scanned for points of interest in a few seconds. (Sign up here to try it yourself to get an example of what more news organizations should be doing.)
But last week, I accidentally got the email twice. Oops.
I didn’t throw a fit or stomp my foot or unsubscribe. Instead, I simply read the content in one email and deleted both, moving on to the other 123 messages I had in my inbox.
As marketers, we tend to overthink and worry for our customers and clients a bit too much at times. “They got sent an email twice? Fire whoever did that!” In reality, I’m guessing 99.9% of the users did the same thing I did, because ultimately we have better things to do than worry about why we got an email twice.
If you repeatedly batter your recipients’ inboxes with mistakes and errors to the point they want nothing to do with you, that’s a problem. But the point is that mistakes happen and by the time you’re thinking about sending out an apology for the two emails that went out, the end user has moved on because it’s not that big of a deal.
They don’t care and if you asked them a month from now if they got two of the same emails, they’d probably couldn’t recollect what you’re talking about.
Just something to think about next time something you view as catastrophic happens. Take a step back, breathe deep and realize that in the long run, to err is human. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
Josh Nason handles Account Management and Support for SendLabs, a full-service email marketing company in Manchester, NH.
I have to assume one thing: they’re trying to drive sales? They’re short on cash? Why else would the NFL be sending me a Happy Birthday message on Tuesday when mine is on Thursday?
Maybe this works anyway.
I can hear their staff now: Ah, who cares? We’ll be close enough and heck, stats show people buy from these “apparent” misfires!
Maybe their platform fired too early or the time on their server is off two days. Ha!
What do you think?
(P.S. Don’t forget, it’s my birthday Thursday. I’m just sayin’.)
(P.S.S Dear NFL – I live close to Boston. I hate the Giants. Another misfire?)
Contests via email marketing aren’t anything new and highlighting winners with a picture is a nice touch. But take heed, marketers: sometimes it’s a bad idea.
The case in point here is Meadowbrook, a concert venue in New Hampshire who has been running contents using Facebook and smartly using email marketing as a way to promote.
In other words, they’re using a marketing mix which is fantastic.
However, I didn’t like how they designed this email for several reasons:
- The pics they used are not good. In some cases, they didn’t have a profile pic and used the default image (take a look at William). Really? You’re pointing to a contest you’re running and you don’t even have pictures of everyone?
- By using profile pics, they fall at the mercy of whatever the user puts up there and in some cases, they aren’t effective. The one that stands out the most is Jessica, whose picture makes her look like she’s challenging someone to a fight. Is that fair to her? Is that the picture you want to paint of your core fans?
A little common sense here would have gone a long way. Ask the users to send in a picture to feature. If they don’t, you don’t put them in the email. It’s that simple. If you don’t have images, use text and some clever design to create something that looks good.
It’s a great idea to point out winners of contests in email, but there needs to be some caution taken in how you present them. They’ve put trust in you, so repay the favor when you tell people about them.
Josh Nason handles Account Management and Support for SendLabs, a full-service email marketing company in Manchester, NH.
There’s an app for that, but it’s email marketing that keeps me coming back.
Last summer, I switched from Verizon to AT&T because I wanted the iPhone 3GS. Since then, I find myself testing out whatever app is receiving the most buzz in an effort to understand why it’s popular and to see if it has any implications for our business or clients.
In the past six months, location-based apps have received a lot of attention. I’ve been testing out Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown, three of the most popular in this category. If you’ve tried more than one, you know they are all unique. However, the common factor is they all rely on the “check in” and recently Google, Yelp and others have joined the party.
I like to “check in” but sometimes I forget to do it. With that in mind, it’s really the personalized emails from Gowalla that makes the difference for me. Each week, I receive a “Round Up” email from Josh Williams, the Founder and CEO of Gowalla. This recaps my activity, shows what my “friends” are up to, thanks me for me for using the app and asks for my feedback.
It’s quite possible that I missed an opt-in at some point during the sign-up process for Foursquare, but I only receive emails from them when I get a friend request or earn a new badge. These emails feel automated and transactional. The emails from Josh at Gowalla feel personal, relevant and timely.
This multi-touch approach, and the interplay between the app and email, makes me more likely to use Gowalla. The emails provide interesting content that’s easy to digest. They also do a great job of presenting my activity in a way that makes me reflect back upon the week. Josh freely admits these emails are a work in progress, and we could do another post on how they could be improved. However, the fact that they are using email this way is a great start and a clear differentiator.
How do you interact with apps beyond the in-app experience? Do you receive emails from any apps you use? How does that impact your usage?
Just a few days ago, the New Orleans Saints pulled off a huge win in front of the largest watched TV event in history – a little game called the Super Bowl. As the game wrapped a few minutes before 10 pm EST, ESPN’s online store was readily prepared to cash in, deploying an email less than 30 minutes after the game ended – an example of how simple preparation and using email marketing can help fuel your business.
So here’s the deal: there were two teams playing and one was going home with the Lomabardi Trophy. ESPNShop was obviously going to have merchandise for both and smartly created emails for both scenarios.
Even if someone was celebrating in the French Quarter that night, they could have checked their email on their phone and ordered merchandise just like that.
Sports fans are passionate and by planning in advance and acting on their impulses, you can leverage the power of email marketing and cash in while the iron is hot.
Is part of your business based on a result from an outside act or event like this? Just create emails for either scenario and pounce on it. You have a timely marketing mechanism and you can control the content, time and date of when you deploy it. Put in the work that your competitors aren’t and take that money for yourself.
Some takeaways:
Plan ahead.
Be timely.
Use email.
Make money.
And as always, follow us on Twitter or be our Facebook friend – also timely and well-planned ahead.
Our agency partners who private-label our solution will be happy to know that we’ve recently rolled out even more power to rebrand the SendLabs platform as your very own. This post will focus on one of the new controls we give you: HTML/CSS editing of the app’s look and feel.
Control look-and-feel with HTML/CSS interface editing
If you log into your agency account, you will see a section called Agency Admin. Here, anyone with HTML & CSS knowledge can go in and start setting up their agency account how they like it. We’ve got some really cool ideas for the future that will give you even more controls, but we think you’ll like what you can change instantly to make the application look-and-feel just like your own.
CSS Editor
Changing the color scheme & application font styling
We give our agency partners the ability to control just about every color: fonts, menus, tabs, link colors, section headings and more. To change them to your liking, simply click the Customize CSS link under your Agency Admin control panel. You will then see an editor window with the CSS code you need to address. Every item you can edit and control is commented appropriately. Want to change the tab color? Simply look for the following line and then change the CSS below it.
The other option we give you is the ability to add custom content blocks of information to your dashboard, the page your customers will see when logging in to their self-service accounts (if you offer this). This opens up opportunities to incorporate custom content for your customers’ eyes. Some examples we are seeing from some of our agency partners are:
Specific Help & Support Quick Links
Custom Product Feature Highlights
Custom Message Promoting Services Offered
Support & Account Management Contacts
These blocks can be customized by clicking on the Customize HTML in the Agency Admin panel. In the future, we plan on giving you even more control, allowing you to essentially organize the application and have complete design control to make it look and feel exactly like your own.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your support contact. We’re here to help!
Tony Adinolfi is the Director of Product Development for SendLabs, an email marketing solutions company based in Manchester, NH.
I get bummed out when I see how much time and effort email marketers put into their creative, but not enough time into strategy or how the technology available to them can really take their email marketing efforts to the next level. The main reason? The tools are within everyone’s reach and are so simple to implement.
So here’s my short list of things I want you to explore asap and then do…if you are not already.
Split Testing This one is a no-brainer. Can you imagine giving the newspaper or a book author the ability to test which headline would be most successful before they go to print? With email marketing technology and split testing, it’s a breeze. Which subject line will create higher open rates or clicks? Which creative will motivate more people to take action? Which offer or call-to-action will generate more conversion? With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner.We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.
Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.
List Segmenting
OK – another no brainer: stop batch and blasting. Stop uploading a hundred lists to your account. Define your data (in your CRM, etc.), map out what fields of data you want associated with each subscriber (first, last, company, contact type, etc.) and import into a single list. Then create a list segment by simply identifying a search criteria – i.e. give me a list of everyone in zip code 03102, who came to the event. Even better, do it based off of customer or prospect type and create segments based on past interactions or behavior. The options to narrowly segment and send relevant content to that segment is unlike any other marketing vehicle in the world.
Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.
Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders
You guessed it…another no-brainer. Put your outbound communications on auto-pilot. Have a web opt-in form? Set up a series of email “drips” that your email platform can deploy over a timed sequence. Maybe it’s like this: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase. Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set. You could have a two week window of every other day communications based on who subscribed, what their profile is, what their behavior has been with you, etc. And again, any good platform worth their salt will provide all of the real-time stats on your triggered mailings as well.
Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience. Multiple touches and BAM! They take action!
Personalization
This is email marketing 101, but do it in an intelligent fashion. Try something different. Get creative with the data you know about your subscribers. Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database. Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible. Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.” How clever. Now I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spun it to sound human (we made an error!). Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere? Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you. And finally, personalization should be geared around profiles. What type of actual content does a slice or segment of your audience prefer? Or are you sending one-size-fits-all content?
Benefit? Email is all about relevancy. You must know who your prospects and customers are, no? Why not demonstrate that? You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.
Social Follow & Social Sharing
At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock. You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch. If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks. Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature. It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may easily garner you some new subscribers.
Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.
So there you have it. These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the SendLabs email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily. If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.
Yes: RT @Provado: If you're going to personalize subject lines, skip names - use a detail no one will expect to see like their town/b-month tweeted on 1 day ago
Still amazed when I hear 'My clients/customers aren't on Facebook'. Really? It's 2010. Do they not have an email account too? - SLJosh tweeted on 3 days ago
On this post-#Oscar Monday, we look at Entertainment Weekly's outdated autoresponders. Rush Hour 3 anyone? http://ow.ly/1fCIf tweeted on 3 days ago
an online subscriber profile.
