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First a disclosure: I love Target with a passion. I will drive past the local Super Walmart and go 10 miles out of my way to go to Target. As a result, I signed up for Target’s email program approximately four years ago. At the time, I filled out a profile with demographic data and provided my zip code when I signed up. I began to receive specials and personalized content based on my location for my local Target.

Fast-forward four years: I no longer live in that city or near the local Target. However, I am still receiving special email offers for my (old) local Target (see below):

While I applaud Target for sending geo-targeted content to subscribers to increase relevancy, they have never once, in four years, asked me if my profile data is still accurate. Boat, missed. As I’m still committed to my long-term relationship with Target, I decided to scroll to the very bottom of the email.

If I were the average subscriber, would I know that behind the “My Account” link I could also update my profile data? Tip for marketers: Have a loved one or friend not affiliated with your brand “secret shop” your emails and site to ensure the average user understands your terminology.

I clicked through and was taken to a page to sign in.

Another opportunity missed to reduce the barriers for subscribers to update their profiles. Listen: Your subscribers are constantly evolving and making lifestyle changes (more on that in a moment), so you have to be sure you are still providing targeted, relevant, valuable content that hits them at the right time. For now, I’m either going to continue to receive no longer relevant content based on profile data from four years ago, or I’m going to unsubscribe.

On a side note, in addition to localized emails, Target has begun sending me messages targeted to new parents.

Now, when I signed up, I believe I provided my birth date and maybe Target decided now is the time in my life when I should/would be having a baby. However, this is not the case. Granted, I am going in with the assumption that they only send targeted and segmented emails. An email entirely focused on babies, again with no option to tell Target that these emails are not relevant, may cause many subscribers to hit the “spam” button (because remember, spam could also mean “not relevant”), unsubscribe or disengage from their emails. Don’t miss the boat on ensuring you’re hitting the right audience with the right, most valuable and relevant message, at the right time.

Target, I love you, but let's take this baby thing one step at a time, okay? Give your preference center a little TLC and your subscribers will love you that much more.

Kelly Lorenz
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto Software
@KNLorenz

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Email marketing, like any career, is likely to include working and collaborating with people who are not in the same physical office.   If you are the remote person, you probably have concerns about keeping in touch with others on the marketing team or in your department, and if you are managing people who are remote, you have to pay special attention to keeping them in touch with the rest of the group.

In an eec Member Initiatives Advisory Committee meeting on the Career Paths project last month, we discussed the impact of this dispersed workforce, and how it affects an email marketing team.

Angela Baldonero, VP, People of Return Path, reviewed four broad trends for career development among the diaspora:

1. Technology keeps us connected, and enables a broad dispersion of the workforce.  However, it also causes some practical issues. For example, we have an employee in Berlin reporting to a manager in California. It raises the question:  Is Skype enough?
2. Social interaction is good for the business.  Bringing on people in new geographies can be challenging for on-boarding as well as collaboration.  It’s harder for new people to be remote.  However, people who have already built relationships in a core office and then move away can be successful in a remote environment.
3. Dispersion affects the talent development lifecycle.  For example, the key needs of top talent are relationships and recognition and it’s hard for people to build relationships if they are not there.  Lots of good work happens when you are in the same room – including discussing the creative for the email campaign while you look over my shoulder, or brainstorming subject lines by the coffee machine.   Plus, it’s hard to “make your mark” if you do not have access to casual interaction, and the only time you “see” colleagues is in formal business meeting situations.
4. It is easy to confuse connections with relationships.  It’s easy to have connections. It’s harder to build relationships.  However, it’s relationships that drive recruitment as well as career advancement. Geography supports or inhibits relationship depth and meaning.

As the group discussed these ideas, we realized that these are challenges for workforce, but also for proving the value of email marketing within the organization.  We can’t earn the respect we need for resources and a seat at the table just from the numbers; the relationships matter, too.

Other impact areas:

• Geographic dispersion and even business unit silos within the same geography also affect the collaboration and governance of different brand/business unit email programs.
• Participation in eec meetings is a way for geographically or functionally isolated professionals to network and be educated. It’s also always helpful to hear that other marketers have the same challenges!
• Remote employees don’t have access to impromptu conversations which can help your career and move your projects forward.  Baldonero quoted, “A lot of work gets done when you talk about nothing.”  Relationships are not built just talking about business and trust is built when you know the whole person.  If you just talk business, you may actually have less trust, because you only know one aspect of that person.
• Sometimes there is a perception that if you are working at home you are not working as hard.  Jennifer Carmichael of Tenet Healthcare noted, “Some remote employees work harder or longer hours because they're ‘always on.’”
• Relationships drive loyalty and the extra effort needed to get something done.  If I need help with a project or getting something run up the flagpole, it’s a lot more successful to stand in that person’s office, than to IM them.

In all this, we discussed that building relationships is a shared responsibility.  If you work remotely, you need to make time for making these connections since they don’t happen organically. This is both the responsibility of the individual and the organization.  If a business hires people remotely for email marketing or any task, there needs to be a commitment to support this relationship building.

Some ways to build your own long distance relationships or help make it easier for remote employees to engage:

1. Stay an extra day when you do visit the office. Make time for coffee and hello’s.
2. Corporate social networks can help facilitate information across offices.
3. Seek out similarities – find the connections outside the office with your colleagues. This might mean taking a bit of extra time on the phone or in an email to get to know the person.
4. Managers can facilitate team building prior to the business meetings. Build time into the weekly phone calls or hold quarterly in-person meetings that have time for socializing.   “This is a great idea that I can implement tomorrow,” Carmichael said.
5. Conferences like the Email Evolution Conference are a good way to meet new people.   However, we are all busy; we have to make time for establishing these connections.  Nancy Atwood of Anchor Computer said, “In some ways, we are victims of technology – we can work all the time and we are always connected. So the “doing the work” is taking priority over “building a network.”  We invest our time in replying electronically rather than establishing a personal connection.”
6. Corporate HR or someone needs to accept some level of administrative support and education, as well as the remote employees themselves.  Be proactive. If no one is reaching out to you, reach out to your manager or the HR team, Baldonero recommends.
7. Working long distance is a reality for most email vendor/marketer relationships. Many of these same principles apply to good account management and client service. “Think of your colleagues as clients, and that might change the way you relate to them,” Atwood said.

Lastly, we discussed some things that the DMA/eec can be doing to help facilitate career growth and help us all build these relationships internally and around the industry:

1. A member directory of names, company, industry, geography. Restricted access and “no sales calls.”
2. Local events for members to meet and network and learn from each other. Perhaps in cooperation with local DMA groups.
3. Ensure there are strong networking opportunities prior to and during the main DMA conferences.

What are you doing to build relationships with remote colleagues, clients and employees?  What else would you like the DMA/eec to do to help the industry? Please leave your comments below or email Stephanie Miller at the Member Initiatives Advisory Committee.

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Research done by the eec's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable shows that ESPs use several different methods of measurement for the Click-Through Rate (CTR) metric.  During our discussions we identified several methodologies for calculating the CTR.  Two methods, delivered-based and open-based, emerged as the most common based on an online poll conducted by the Roundtable.  Here are the poll results:



The majority of respondents calculated the CTR using clicks divided by delivered, similar to how direct mail calculates its response rates.  Clicks divided by open was the second most common method and is similar to other online advertising methods that are impression-based such as banner ads and search sponsor links.  Companies often use more than one tool and therefore choose the methodology that makes the most sense for their media mix.  Having to normalize their data may create additional work for IT or marketing departments when they want to report and analyze results of their email program overall or roll up information into higher level reporting and analytics dashboards.

What can email marketers in the field take away from this survey?

• First, it reminds us to check with our ESP to determine how they calculate metrics in their reporting to help maintain comparability and consistency while comparing results across or within email campaigns.
• Second, we should also check how metrics are being calculated in other systems that email impacts, such as web analytics, to determine any necessary adjustments to normalize our reporting for cross-media analysis.  
• Third, it demonstrates the need for email marketers and ESPs to come together to standardize metrics.

For the past two years, the Measurement Accuracy Roundtable has been working to standardize email metrics to improve the quality of reporting for the email industry and provide more uniformity in reporting for email marketers and email service providers alike.  You can learn more on this blog or show your support for the program on the Roundtable’s online petition.

Special thanks to Peter Roebuck of AllWebEmail for contributing to this post and to all the Roundtable members for their participation.

Luke Glasner
Co-Chair
eec Measurement Accuracy Roundtable

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Building programs to re-engage dormant leads is a necessity for many email marketers, particularly those that have not had buttoned-up strategy for segmentation and targeted communications in the past.  List re-engagement and “win-back” program strategy was the open forum discussion topic at the February meeting of the Email Experience Council’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable.

“If you need to do re-engagement after a long period of subscriber inactivity, that is a failure of strategy,” suggested Stephanie Miller, VP, Return Path and Vice Chair of the eec.  “Marketers who are trying to catch up have a steep road.  Rather, win-backs should be a consistent part of your segmentation strategy.”

Bottom line, Stephanie pointed out, effective email marketers reach out early in the cycle and “shouldn’t have a situation in which someone hasn’t responded in a long time.”

Ultimately, the question of glass half-empty or half-full regarding re-engagement may boil down to the buyer. In BtoB, noted Bulldog Solutions’ Amy Bills, list re-engagement can be an effective way to generate more ROI from an existing database. “A lot of time and money has probably been spent putting together that list.  Marketers are looking at making the most of it.”

Yael Penn of i360 Marketing reframed the concept of re-engagement as an ongoing effort. “In BtoB we’re always thinking about reengagement strategies. We’re planning re-engagement from the start.  BtoB purchases are more complex and the sales cycle is much longer. Sometimes a company is only doing the research now and they are not ready to make the purchase decision for six months.  In BtoC,  the reason to buy is impulse; in BtoB, because the sales cycle is different, re-engagement can be more effective."

On the BtoC side, ExactTarget’s Nate Romance said, “There is risk to carrying a lot of dead weight. We’re hearing re-engagement as a drumbeat in reputation management and deliverability. If you’re beating on 60% of your list that is not responding, it’s costing you something.” (Some more on low engagement concerns here.)
A discussion of specific re-engagement strategies included:

• Ideas for engagement tactics including changing the subject line format, adding interactive elements like polls or surveys, featuring a high-value offer and highlighting exclusive information.  Sometimes just asking straight out can work, too.  “We hate spam, too.  Let us know if you want to stay on the file,” can be an effective approach, Stephanie noted.
• Nate described test findings regarding language used to confirm a prospect’s interest and willingness to stay on a list. “We did some testing and found that inclusion of the 'No' option caused more 'Yes' responses,” he said.
• The preference center tactic—asking people to “update their information” had not been found by the group to be a compelling re-engagement tool. “With a true re-engagement we typically encourage a strong call to action,” Nate said. “Not enough people do a good job of explaining what’s in it for the recipient to fill out preferences. It’s perceived by subscribers as the marketer’s tool, having little value to them, he said.   

We hear a lot about engagement being effective and necessary – but the pressing need for re-engagement  is a reminder that engagement must be earned with every message sent, Stephanie suggested.   Nate agreed, “If you want to optimize the value of your email marketing asset, you must keep the file engaged and fresh.  That is more than a one-time win back campaign, but an imperative for your content strategy.”

Place your comments below to tell us what you are doing to engage – and re-engage; we’d love to feature your efforts in a future blog post or as part of the Roundtable's discussions.   Also, check out the List Growth & Engagement Roundtable’s 2010 Benchmark Guide to see how your list growth efforts stack up.

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When you work in the email space, you take a different perspective on your inbox. I receive email for very different reasons than others in my life. I subscribe to just about any email I can, because I like to see what people are doing. More specifically,  how marketers are targeting their customers, leveraging data, addressing rendering challenges and motivating recipients to open, among many other things.

But “normal” people just don’t do that. They subscribe to a specific email because they want it – at least they thought they did. So I thought I would ask the real email subscriber in my life, my husband, what he likes and doesn’t like about email – this is what he said (ok, I’ve paraphrased some, but this is almost what he said):

The Bait and Switch
So, apparently people actually subscribe to email because they expect or want something – go figure, huh? But once they get “it” do marketers continue to deliver value? So my hubby tells me that often times he subscribes for something specific, but if the subsequent emails don’t grab him right away then he unsubscribes. Yes, you heard me right, he actually does click the unsubscribe link.

The Fine Print
But he can’t click the unsubscribe link if he can’t find it – and he actually does look for it. This leads us to the second thing that annoys him about email – ok, it’s a life in general thing, but it’s prolific in email – the fine print. Now that we have kids, the closest he’s getting to Vegas are the emails he gets in his inbox – and nothing drives him more crazy than a great subject line and headline about getting free nights at a great hotel – only to open the message to find that there isn’t a snowball’s chance he can go. It would just take too long to filter through the legalese.

No Real Point
My better-half tells me that we email marketers have seconds to get to the point otherwise he closes the email. Which in and of itself isn’t news – but what surprised me was that he’s actually pretty fickle. If we don’t make our point quickly in this email – he isn’t opening the next one either – or the one after that, or the one after that. He’s stubborn…

No Images (Not our fault, but he doesn’t know that)
So this was the very first thing he said – and as long as we’ve been together and all the time I’ve been working in the space – I was sure he knew this, but he did not. AOL, take note, my husband does not like that you suppress his images by default. The funnier thing for me was that he couldn’t figure out why images rendered for Zappos,  but not for Mandalay Bay. He has no recollection of adding Zappos to a safe-sender list, but clearly he did. So in his mind, the issue was with Mandalay Bay, not AOL.

But rest assured, he doesn’t dislike everything about us. There is one thing he loves about email and that is Zappos. He's an uber-fan of everything Zappos, but here’s a lesson to integrating your customer service calls with your email programs. After an issue he had with shoes he ordered for our son, he called and spoke with someone who was very friendly and helpful and took care of correcting the order issue. He was happy with the customer service he received, and he moved on to other things. A short hour later, he received a coupon for a discount off his next purchase – as a way to say “we’re sorry for the recent issue with your order.”

So learn from his man-crush on Zappos – sometimes doing something nice goes a long way.

 
- Kara Trivunovic
Senior Director of Strategic Services
StrongMail

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