Do Not Reply to This Email

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A full half of the transactional messages I recently reviewed in my inbox asked me not to reply to the email. In this age when most companies are actively trying to engage them in social media, why don't they want email replies? Here are some reasons - along with ways, if you must, to make "" more reader-friendly.

First off, I do understand why companies do this: they don't want to be responsible for reading or responding to people who might reply to their email marketing messages. Many companies are put off by the deluge of email they receive. Others don't want to incur the time and cost of having someone sift through them and, when necessary, respond. As a result, they ask or, in some cases, demand that readers not reply to their bulk email.

Filters, which are effective at pulling out soft and hard bounces and should be able to identify most out-of-office messages, have made monitoring replies easier. But many companies still aren't willing to do it. It's a position that places the corporation's interests above customer convenience. It also takes away one of the inherent benefits of the Internet: the ability to easily interact via two-way communication. It's the online equivalent of those prerecorded telemarketing calls you're supposed to just listen to, since there's no one on the other end to hear you if you speak.

I first recommend clients analyze their replies and see if there's a way to monitor that mailbox and honor that method of communication. For many companies, the response traffic is much more manageable than expected once bounces, out-of-office messages, and spam are filtered. But if you find you positively cannot handle replies, here are a few tips for alerting your readers in a friendly, rather than militant, way.

Don't Use All Caps

Using all capital letters online has always been the equivalent of shouting. Although most people have removed this from their style guides, it's still very much in use with this particular phrase. I know that in a text-only message all caps is one of the few ways you can add emphasis, but avoid the temptation. Unless you want to scold your readers into not replying to your message, don't use all caps to ask them not to.

Make It Friendly

One beauty of language is there's often more than one way to say something. All companies should have guidelines defining their corporate voice, usually in terms like "customer friendly," "professional," and "conversational." "" doesn't fit any of those definitions. Adding a "please" helps but doesn't really go far enough.

It Doesn't Have to Be Front and Center

This type of content is ancillary; it's not the email's primary message, so it shouldn't be featured prominently (as I often find it is). Check your email messages, especially those used for transactional messages. It's not uncommon to have "" positioned so high above the fold that it's visible in the preview pane. That's not the best use of your prime real estate.

Explain Why

Anyone who works with email understands why replies are discouraged, but many of your recipients may not work in email. Explaining the policy can go a long way toward encouraging compliance. If the mailbox isn't monitored, say so. If it's monitored only occasionally, tell them that.

Even better: shift the message from being about an inconvenience to being about a benefit. If there's a better way for readers to contact you, tell them about it and encourage them to use it rather than hitting reply.

Provide Another Contact Point

If you really can't accept replies to the email you've sent, at least provide readers another way to get in touch with you. I'm not talking about giving them the URL to your home page and making them search for contact information. The best way to handle this is to provide a monitored email address. Almost as good: provide a link to a "contact us" page with multiple ways to get in touch with you.

Providing another contact point is especially important for transactional messages, which aren't required to carry a U.S. Postal Service address under CAN-SPAM. Asking (or telling) recipients not to reply to this email, then not giving them any other way to easily get in touch with you is bad customer service.

Recommendations

I like to acknowledge that not being able to reply to an email is a bit of an inconvenience for readers. I tell them why it's in their best interest not to reply to that email. I then offer one or more ways to communicate with the sender, the easier the better. The tone should be apologetic rather than militant. Remember, you're trying to build a relationship with these people via email. There's no tone when you're reading online, so you must avoid anything that could be interpreted as harsh.

Some of the best examples I've seen:

Please do not reply to this message. Replies to this message are routed to an unmonitored mailbox. If you have questions please go to http://www.ourcompany.com/contactus. You may also call us at 202-555-1212..Unfortunately, this email is an automated notification, which is unable to receive replies. We're happy to help you with any questions or concerns you may have. Please contact us directly 24/7 via customerservice

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Good Morning Email Deals!

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It's the holidays, and if you're a marketer or a consumer (or likely both for ClickZ readers), shopping is at the forefront of your minds. With the rise of smartphones, mobile addiction is increasing, and the way consumers interact with email is beginning to vary. Understanding what that engagement looks like can help you find the right moment in time when your emails and offers will resonate most with your customers.

How many of you roll over in the morning, grab your phone, and check your email? I know that I am not alone in this behavior. There is a growing group of folks who are opening their email first thing in the morning, and actually converting. So let your email messages rise and shine - and wake up your consumer! How do you make this happen? It isn't actually too difficult. Here are there easy steps to letting the early email bird get the conversion worm:

Look at the last six months of email engagement data, isolating an audience who has opened and clicked on a specified number of email communications during the morning (rise and shine) hours as determined by their time zone.Examine the behavior of this audience. Is there certain content that they gravitate toward? Are there thematic subject lines that grab their attention more than others? Are they converting or spending more time on the site than others? Get to know these folks and what motivates them. It wouldn't hurt to look at the demographic/psychographic profile of this group either - do they skew more female, parents, etc.?Create content that addresses this audience specifically - and provide them with some sort of added incentive or benefit for engaging with you early in the morning. Maybe it's a 15 percent discount or free shipping for all orders placed before 9 a.m. You should test the incentive to see what best motivates your audience, but giving them a reason to pay attention to your emails in the morning is a good way to train them to expect your messages at the same time every morning.

The goal here is to create or drive an incremental behavior that would not have otherwise occurred. So be sure to maintain a control group and test the performance of the test group against it - if you are only driving conversions that would have happened anyway, it doesn't much matter. However, you may find that you are able to increase sales by reaching your customers before they get distracted by the day's activities - or offers from your competitors.

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Is Big Data the New Email Marketing Catchphrase?

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In the world of email marketing, the word "relevance" used to be the catchphrase du jour - followed closely by every email strategist's favorite, "it depends." But these both seem to be losing ground to "Big Data." According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. That data is generated through myriad places - online footprints, purchase behavior, weather beacons, take your pick. We are tracking everything these days - the challenge becomes making it actionable. The issue with big data is not the acquisition of the data elements - it's the digestion and application of them.

Typically catchphrases are just that - catchphrases. They carry very little weight or meaning to the end goal, but big data is actually a pretty meaty topic that marketers and PhDs alike are trying to digest. It's a reality that marketers, politicians, parents, and yes, email marketers need to consider.

For email marketers, where there is big data there is...relevance. There are many phases to the big data challenge, but as we turn an eye to email, there are some additional elements that should be considered and applied to your approach.

Do Your Own Analysis

Analyzing large data sets and learning anything from it is no small undertaking. It's a very labor-intensive task - but for an email marketer the challenge is oftentimes even bigger. Not because we aren't capable, or that we have more data, but because we're often at the tail end of most analytic efforts. The email team inherits personas and segments - so to rally at the front end to drive it can sometimes appear preposterous to internal counterparts. The recommendation here is to stand firm. There are elements that you can leverage from previous engagement (or lack thereof) with your email program that help to develop very effective lookalike models and predictive modeling that can drive long-term success for your email program.

Watch Out for Hyper-Targeting

Achieving a near 1:1 email communication experience has long been the Holy Grail of the email marketing vertical. With the highly dynamic tools and technical capabilities available today, the ability to communicate in that manner is relatively easy to accomplish - the challenge arises when you want to learn what the engagement means to your business overall. Many times, the success or failure of leveraging big data to drive targeting and segmentation doesn't happen because of your ability to do it - rather your ability to measure it. So if you're going to leverage big data to make your email hyper-relevant, be extra diligent on the reporting front. The takeaway here is to make sure you continue to analyze the data, leveraging the engagement metrics associated with each person you communicate with. It's no longer about a target audience but rather about an individual.

Know What to Say

Once you have found your golden child (or children) among your massive data set, you don't just stop there. It isn't about just finding the right audience; you have to message to them in an effective and efficient way. If the messaging appears too "big brother," then you're going to create a "creep factor" with the recipient. Or if you get the data wrong, you may put the customer off entirely. Regardless, it's imperative that the audience you have identified is getting messaging that actually matters to them - otherwise all the analysis of that big data was largely useless.

Whether big data is on your radar as an analytic effort for your marketing department or your email program specifically or not, you are certainly hearing the conversations about it. We all have the ability to be more prescriptive with the consumer today and oftentimes there is an expectation that you "just know" these things about them. Acting contradictorily to their expectations could be detrimental in the long run. After all, you don't want your recipients closing out your email, asking themselves, "Don't they know me at all?"

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This column was originally published on October 2, 2012.

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Email Auto-Filtering - What's a Marketer to Do?

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There has been a lot of conversation recently around the increasing presence of auto-filtering for managing inbox clutter. With companies like OtherInbox, SaneBox, and AOL Alto, the reality of your email communication being filtered out of the inbox and into a folder may be a reality you already face. And if not, it will be one you will likely face soon as adoption of these types of tools continues - both by consumers and business users alike. While there has been a lot of conjecture around this reality, very little has been shared around the considerations we need to make as marketers, such as how it will affect our engagement rates, offer adoption, and impressions on subscribers. Let's dive into these considerations a little deeper.

You've Been Relegated to the Folder

Whether it's a folder or a "stack," your email marketing message has found itself tightly aligned with other email communications from competitors and other vertically aligned organizations. Many systems have default categorizations that look at a variety of information within the marketing message and the email envelope to tuck the message away neatly for the recipient. There are a number of challenges associated with this, but one of the biggest is that it doesn't matter when you sent that message - you aren't appearing at the top of the inbox. You may be at the top of the "travel" or "shopping" folder - right alongside the likes of your competitors, or the other four messages you sent in the last seven days. The landscape and view of how and when your subscribers see your email is changing. Does this fact impact your business? For some of you the answer is absolutely. For others, you may be less concerned.

Pre-Disposition to Engage

Let's take a more positive look at what this might mean for a marketer. Let's say you are a travel and hospitality organization and your email has been placed into the "travel" category. The act of the subscriber clicking into the "travel" folder means that she is likely already in the mindset to engage with a travel offer or communication - otherwise she would be in the "social" folder or someplace else. While the impressions may be slightly more limited, it's very possible that a recipient looking at messages with a very specific focus might just be more inclined to engage than if the message were in the inbox.

Why Can't You Be More Spontaneous?

Every "pro" has its "con." One of the advantages of sending messages that resonate with the customer, leveraging behavior and predictive opportunities, is to "remind" the customer that she wants to engage, subconsciously. By removing the message from the inbox and placing it in the "travel" folder, the consumer has to make a conscious choice to look in the travel folder. Sometimes the mere act of seeing a great deal in the inbox is enough to drive the engagement - even if the consumer didn't "know" she was looking for it. The ability to engage spontaneously is greatly minimized, if not removed completely, by email auto-filtering.

Longer Offer Periods May Be a Reality

Unless the consumer is regularly checking a specific folder (or all of her folders), the days of last-minute deals catching the eye of the customer may be gone (or greatly impacted). Imagine if a customer opens up the travel folder only to find a number of deals from you and your competitors that are all expired. This reality may frustrate consumers. A potential solution here is to use technologies and partners that optimize and render content at the moment of an open (Moveable Ink is an example). While it has historically been applied in very specific situations, the need for such an ability may increase if auto-filtering really takes hold.

Do Your Analytics Need to Change?

Delivery and inbox placement aren't going to be enough to gain proper insight into what is happening with your email. And the reality of an open action occurring days (vs. hours) after a message has been sent is a strong reality. If you're starting to see great lag times in engagement metrics or decreasing engagement, it may be time to consider the possibility that auto-filtering (or auto-foldering) is impacting your performance.

There isn't a lot of fodder out there right now about how to combat, address, or embrace the possibility of auto-filtering really taking off, but it's important to start thinking about it now. Consumers are increasingly fatigued on email clutter. This just may be their solution to it. How are you going to address it?

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Data Is Growing Up, Are You?

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As marketers progress rapidly toward the analytics 2.0 horizon brought on by the ability to collect and store more data, one phrase has echoed through my mind: "It's time to get mature about data."

The opportunities and problems brought on by "big data" are nothing new for marketers. We've always had to deal with information on who our customers are and what they do. Ever since we've realized that "half our advertising dollars are wasted," we've been driven to better understand how exactly our marketing spend influences behavior.

And for the past 20 years or so, we've done alright. We've built systems that track bounces, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints. We've connected that with on-site behavior to understand conversions. We've linked customer data back to the email to drive dynamic personalization. Well done.

But have we begun to understand statistically how our campaigns that don't drive conversions influence behavior? Do we know which factors out of that set of customer data are better to target when personalizing? And, for these two questions and hundreds more, can we justify our answers using data and analysis?

I'm guessing that for many of us, the answer is no.

Time to grow up.

As the realm of measurement moves out of the purely technical and shares importance with the marketing side of the house, are we in marketing prepared to use this awesome capability that we're about to gain?

Here are five things you can do to create a data maturity growth spurt:

1. Ditch the single channel mentality. Email affects behavior, but so do other channels. Recently, a major company's marketing department presented the revenue generated by each digital channel to their financial leaders. When they summed all the channels, they showed $200 million generated, which made the CFO laugh, since the company had only generated $120 million.

Research the methods and new tools available that make it possible to more accurately attribute revenue and understand better how channels influence behavior.

2. Get better metrics. The fundamentals remain important, but other methods of analysis will provide deeper insights into your performance.

For example, consider building cohort analysis into your reporting practice. You'll get a better idea of how customers gained through different marketing mixes perform over a certain period of time, possibly identifying key insights in lifetime value that could not be had attributing value from the most recent purchase only.

3. Understand the stats. Statistical analysis that used to be seen only in the world of insurance and finance are now being leveraged by marketing departments to better understand big data.

It's unrealistic for most marketers to reach the same level of proficiency that these Masters and Ph.D-level quants have. But that doesn't mean a marketer can't learn enough to understand what methods are being used and how to interpret the results. Learn to speak the language of the quants; be able to ask intelligent questions that a quant can work with; and be able to understand the relevance and limitations of the results she presents.

4. Look outside to find success. Research other companies that are using data and new analytical approaches to understand their successes and failures. Attend conferences, ask colleagues, and read plenty. Identify key takeaways for your business, tools you should consider, pitfalls to avoid, and results to expect.

5. Use it. This principle is as true as it ever was: all of this maturity is worth nothing if you don't use it to test new things and improve.

"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." - Mark Twain

Grow up, and join the marketers who are always striving for the next level of data maturity.

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Quantity vs. Quality: The Email Marketer's Dilemma

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In a perfect world, a brand sends the perfect number of perfectly composed emails to elicit the maximum response possible. In the real world, email marketers must balance between quantity and quality.

Total email volume per sender is up about 5 percent year-over-year, according to the Experian Q4 2012 Quarterly Benchmark Study. The same organizations that are sending more haven't hired more people to manage that increased volume. And so they must make a decision: spend time creating more emails or better emails.

If we have the same underlying offer and target, how do we decide between making our emails better vs. managing sending more emails to the same group?

Arguments for Better Emails

Something about the quality of a single email makes a difference in response rates. Thousands of tests and studies tell us this. But just how much does quality help?

Imagine a welcome email for a typical retailer with the following engagement:

Open rate: 20 percent
Click-through rate: 5 percent
Value of a click (calculated by on-site conversion rate and average order value): $1

If 1,000 people received this email, then:

200 would have opened
50 would have clicked
$50 revenue was earned

Now, what if we improved subject lines to increase open rates by 10 percent? Then:

20 more people open
Five more people click
Five more dollars earned

Not bad, especially considering the increase will likely stick. Let's say we spend more time and improve the creative, possibly investing in a responsive design for better rendering on mobile email clients. Let's say this improvement increases click-through rates by 20 percent. Out of the original 1,000 who receive the email...

200 still open
60 click
10 more dollars earned

Again, we assume this gain will be incremental - lasting throughout the subsequent sends to this campaign. (This is especially true if you invest in something like a responsive design that can be used in other mailings.)

Of course, the primary tool to drive qualitative gains is the A/B test. Making a subtle change to your email and measuring how the change affects your response rate can easily add those incremental gains that last and make the investment in the setup worthwhile.

Arguments for More Email

We know better creative can drive a better response rate. The fact remains, however, that a majority of people won't open your beautifully crafted email. Whether the recipient is on vacation, triaging her email from a mobile device, or just isn't particularly interested in your brand at the moment, the time you invested in improving quality, at least for this one email, is wasted.

We've all heard that there is a certain number of touch points required before a customer will buy (anywhere from five to 11, I've heard). The important point is that the optimum number is more than one and less than 1,000. In other words, it's possible to send too little or too much.

There's a balance, and it's tough to find, because…

Unlike quality, we can't continue to increase quantity without negative consequences.It's tough to know when too much is too much.Different recipients have different expectations, rules, and sensitivities to volume, and it can be difficult to elicit this from customer data if not explicitly requested (e.g., a preference center with volume options).

Difficulty aside, the hunt for an appropriate email cadence is critical for email marketers. Let's discuss the example above once more:

1,000 people receive a welcome message
20 percent (200) open rate
5 percent (50) click-through rate
$1 per click earned ($50 total)

Let's say we add two more emails to the series. It's likely that average open rate will fall, as will click-through rate. But if we assume that those who are clicking through on subsequent emails either didn't make a purchase earlier on, or, if they did, are likely to make another, we can assume that the revenue-per-click remains the same. With three emails then, we see:

1,000 people receive three messages (3,000 total delivered)
18 percent average open rate for all three messages (540 total unique opens)
4 percent average click-through rate (120 clicks total)
$120 total earned (at $1 per click)

So just by sending a few more emails we see a 2.4 times increase in revenue. Nice! But don't go sending more email just yet.

Unlike quality, when quantity increases too much, negative consequences occur. If you email too much, your unsubscribe rate will increase. You may get more revenue for the email series you've just sent, but you've lost the ability to reach out to some of those people ever again, which translates to lost revenue. Also, if you email so much, people may respond now and ignore you later. The current email results look good, but you see dropped engagement down the lifecycle.

Of course, the question is what is the reality in your business? How are open rates, click-through rates, and revenue-earned affected when quantity increases? If you can get 2.4 times more revenue from a program, these may be questions worth investing time in over creating better creative.

What Is the Best Mix for You?

Only you can tell. While the two scenarios above seem to paint a clear picture that quantity should be increased over quality, beware of the long-term negative effects of emailing too often or too infrequently.

Also, gains made in quality can more easily become persistent gains than gains related to quantity, which tend to center around a certain promotion or point in the lifecycle.

To better measure the effects of quantity, investigate implementing cohort studies to test different quantity mixes and improve your understanding of how quantity affects response rates.

The next time you're working on your campaigns, take a step back and ask, "What use of my time will result in a bigger long-term gain?" The answer will depend on your products, your current mailing mix, and your ability to measure response by email and over time.

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Forget RPE, What's Your PPE: Personality-per-Email?

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Since the recession of 2008, many companies felt a winning strategy was to cut costs, cut "unnecessary" spending, and focus all marketing on lowest-price offers, trying to win a race to the bottom.

Yet, as the waters calm, and we count the companies still around, we find that some survivors chose a different strategy: staying true to their values. In their operations and their marketing, these companies stuck to the things that defined their perception in the mind of consumers.

In my recent work with clients, especially bigger companies, I've discovered a near fanatical importance placed on revenue-per-email (RPE). While revenue is important as a measure of immediate value that a company derives from its efforts, it is only one of a collection of results that define the value of an email or cross-channel marketing program. Just like the diet that focuses on the exclusion of carbohydrates and nothing else (like, say the benefit of healthy fats), overinvestment in the RPE metric can lead to an unbalanced and suboptimal marketing mix.

People buy from companies they like and trust. Where does that affection and trust come from? Certainly not promotions, specials, and clearance items. Affection and trust come from personality (what some may call brand).

Zappos has become a well-known example of a company with a well-defined personality. It delivers happiness. That simple goal, along with a few others, defines almost every step it takes as a company, including its email programs.

Every email from Zappos, from promotion to shipping confirmation, reflects the company's personality. For example, rather than the standard "Hi Justin..." greeting, Zappos greets me with "Hello Zappos Zealot!" What follows is usually some fun and quirky language letting me know my order is on the way or what's new. Plus, each email includes one of Zappos' 10 core values, such as "Be Humble," near the footer. Reading these is like peering into the journal of Zappos - I begin to know the company, and I like what I learn.

Why spend time on such personality? Why not just send a simple shipping confirmation with a tracking number, and say "Thank You For Your Order"? I imagine the RPE for a single Zappos email is on par with the RPE for many other clothing brands. But I can almost guarantee that the lifetime value (LTV) of a Zappos customer is higher. It's so much easier to like and trust Zappos.

Another example of a brand with high personality-per-email is JibJab. Unlike Zappos, JibJab inserts its personality through intelligent use of visuals in email. Since JibJab makes customizable e-cards (the one's you can put your face on), it's natural to leverage the fun and playful visuals in its emails.

But it's not merely screenshots of the e-cards that make JibJab's emails have high personality-per-email, but the selection of e-cards to promote. As the Harlem Shake became a viral video, and then an Internet cliché, JibJab sent an email highlighting all of its dancing-themed cards, subject line: "No Harlem Shake Required." Fun, witty, playful - clearly JibJab. Even emails for its new venture, StoryBots, reflect the fun videos and activities for kids in a way that is appropriately appealing to parents and representative of the StoryBots personality.

JibJab has free cards as well as a paid subscription, so perhaps it is lucky that a focus on RPE is probably not viable for its business, forcing the company to think of other metrics to measure the success of its campaigns. But even Zappos, a straight-up retailer, sees the benefit in promoting its personality along with product offers.

Overreliance on RPE comes from a combination of the following pressures:

The pressure to show short-term financial resultsThe pressure to show growth in a measurable wayThe pressure to attract customers through promotion (in other words, the pressure to make up for a lack of personality)

Not everything that is valuable, even to a company, is measurable. And, as history shows, too much focus dedicated to short-term financial results can become a cancer that slowly destroys the company, even as RPE is high.

Our customers are people, and so are we. As we pay revenue its appropriate due, let's not forget to leverage personality in our marketing to build relationships with our customers founded on affection and trust, not short-term gain.

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Are Your Emails Easy to Act On?

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Let's face it: sometimes we find our brand to be way cooler than it actually is in the mind of most customers.

Marketers who think too much about their brand - and not enough about what their brand offers - can easily find themselves caught in the trap of creating messaging that is heavy on the "aren't we great?" and light on the "here's how I can help you."

I believe the best way to build loyalty with a customer is to help her do what she wants to do in the fastest, friendliest, easiest, and least expensive way. Does your marketing do this, or does it focus on how cool the new line is, how great the most recent offer is, or how smart you as a company are?

The announcement of Gmail's inbox actions should remind us that our customers come to us to get something done - the easier, the better. Faced with a technology like Gmail's, how would you shrink your marketing message down to just a few options?

Rather than promoting a 20 percent-off coupon, the brand new product you just released, and your free shipping offer (along with your header and other frills), why not simply promote the 20 percent coupon? Subject line: 20% Off Now Through Friday. Button: Shop Now.

You can use a similar approach for an abandoned cart program. Subject line: We Noticed You Left Something in Your Cart. Button: Return to Your Cart.

With this approach, the body of these emails can still have your standard branding to make your brand recognizable, but it should keep the focus entirely on the main point of the email. No extra promotions, no site navigation. Just the main call-to-action.

You won't be able to do this with all your messaging. You'll still need to educate with some emails, offer a variety of products with other emails, and build your brand. But for those messages where you want your customers to do just one thing, make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

Step out of your marketing shoes for a moment and think about what it's like for a consumer to shop at a store. At one store, when you're ready to check out, you have to stand in line and wait for a cashier to be available. At another store, clerks walk around with mobile devices that allow you to check out wherever you are in the store. No need to wait. Product offering being similar, which store would you frequent more? We have the opportunity to provide a similar convenience and build better loyalty by making our messaging easier to take action on, just as the second store above makes it easier to check out.

Some messages you send will be ones that convince the customer to come to you. Some may be telling the customer about new things you have to offer. But a lot of marketing messages are just trying to get repeat business. A customer who sees a coupon or offer on a specific product is going to make a very quick decision whether or not to take advantage of it. Making it easier to redeem the offer is going to be more effective at driving conversion and building loyalty than wonderful creative or presenting other offers. Make it easy for your customers, and they'll reward you with loyalty.

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Email Targeting Tips for Retailers to Break Through Inbox Clutter and Connect

By guest columnist David A. Steinberg, XL Marketing

The holiday season is upon us. It's a time of celebration, family, reflection and a seemingly endless barrage of commercial emails.

If it seems like your inbox is stuffed with more "save 50 percent today" and "free shipping" messages than usual, you're right. The four most popular days for major online retailers to email their subscribers are: Cyber Monday, Free Shipping Day (December 17, the last day for free standard shipping), Green Monday (the second Monday in December), and Thanksgiving Day. And retailers have increased their use of email by 120 percent over the past 5 years.

With more than 50 percent of all messages during this time period categorized as commercial emails, the question marketers must answer is: how does my brand break through and connect with the right segment of users to drive the desired action?

To break through a cluttered inbox, the key drivers are the From line and the Subject line.

Since the power of the From line is a function of the user's connection to your brand (and since this is not something you can change with an email drop), I'll focus on the importance of the Subject line.

In a recent study, researchers found that personalization - specifically, including the recipient's first and last name in an email subject line - was the most successful tactic for consumers to open emails. Other successful tactics include:

implying time sensitivity ("Today only") conveying exclusivity (ie.: "free shipping for our best customers") 

On the other hand, words such as "cancelled" or words associated with charity had an adverse impact. Additionally, avoid the urge to be too cute. A clever subject line may make your copywriters happy, but a clear subject line gets 541 percent more clicks than a clever one. Make sure the message is one users can understand easily.

To connect with users, the content of the email is critical.

As with the Subject line, personalization plays a key factor. Consumers are overloaded and quick to trash anything that feels canned or generic, but making them feel special will typically result in clicks.

Amazon has been known to send emails containing products you last browsed on their site and Urban Outfitters will frequently send messages reminding consumers that they left something in their cart. Even if they didn't want to buy these things, data collection allows these brands to find out what they like and spit that information back to them, making the message personal and therefore more intriguing. As with everything in the digital space, there's a fine line between knowing a user's tastes and being creepy. Test and learn your way to staying on the right side of that line.

Driving action via email has changed.

Over the past two years, there has been a seismic shift in the email ecosystem due to the rise of Mobile. Users open emails on mobile devices up to do 79 percent of the time, making the mobile conversion far more important than the desktop message. Responsive design and mobile-optimized email creative have gone from leading edge to table stakes over the course of 2013.

An email marketer's job is still not complete after a consumer has clicked. The marketer must finally consider where the click will take the user - a landing page for the advertised product or service? Or is it a better experience for users to be driven to the brand's homepage?

Mobile plays a big role here, as well.

One of the keys to a successful email campaign is making sure there are no dead ends. Consumers want the brand to do all the dirty work for them and deliver exactly what they want when they want it. Not only must the marketer deliver what was advertised with the click of a mouse, but that page must also be mobile-friendly. Nothing is more off-putting for a potential customer than making the advertised product difficult to find, especially on a site that makes it nearly impossible to navigate on a mobile device.

With the holiday season well underway, now is the time to implement targeted strategies when sending subscribers emails. Mass mailings are far too easy for consumers to ignore, so it is especially important to make sure marketing dollars are well spent by making sure your potential customers view them.

Utilize these tactics throughout the holiday season and into 2014 and you'll drastically improve your chances of keeping your marketing messages out of consumer trash bins.

About our guest columnist: Prior to founding XL Marketing, David A. Steinberg founded InPhonic, with annual revenue in excess of $400 million. Steinberg also served as chairman and CEO of Sterling Cellular, a B2B and retail wireless communications provider, and Sterling Communications, a communications telemarketing company. Mr. Steinberg was named the Greater Washington Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for communications in 2002. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of Faster Cures of the Milken Institute, the Greater Washington Sports Alliance, Cupcake Digital, and the Board of Trustees of Washington & Jefferson College and previously served on the Board of Directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Steinberg holds a B.S. from Washington & Jefferson College.

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Measure Better -- Segmentation Analysis Applied to Email

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Segmentation analysis is just a fancy way of saying "don't generalize."

Many email marketers pour over open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates daily, hoping for that subtle yet undeniable improvement, fretting over any drop in engagement or lack of improvement.

Unfortunately, these same marketers are most likely measuring everyone's engagement from a single mailing and comparing it to everyone's engagement from the previous mailing, or the previous weekly, monthly, or quarterly average.

This method, while useful for a quick glimpse of performance, gives the marketer only a vague understanding of what actually drives engagement and conversion.

Did the users who didn't click on this email not like the offer? Was it not big enough? Was the email unappealing? Was it sent at the wrong time of day?

All of these things can affect whether or not a user clicks or converts. More often than not, however, there are more impactful factors involved. Does the recipient trust the brand? Is she in market for the product? Did she purchase the item being promoted or another item that serves the same purpose recently? Each of these factors could cause a recipient to simply ignore the message, no matter how great the offer or awesome the creative.

So how can a marketer know that the increase in performance on this message is due to the offer or creative instead of the recipients' current needs?

One answer is by conducting segmentation analysis.

Segmentation Analysis -- The Basics
Imagine a crowded Peet's Coffee (way better than Starbucks, in my opinion). You're trying to sell some women's yoga pants. You have a good supply, enough for everyone in the store.

You shout, "Hey, I've got yoga pants! Who wants some? $39.99 each, normally $45. Act now!"

Let's say there are 1,000 people in the store, and 20 people decide to buy some pants. Sweet! Fifty others asked about the pants, but decided not to buy.

So, you saw a 7 percent interest rate (similar to click-through rate) and a 2 percent conversion rate. Cool beans.

But imagine what it would be if you measured differently. Imagine if you added a simple level of segmentation to your analysis.

When you look at your sales more closely, you see that 18 females and two males decided to buy. Turns out there were 500 females and 500 males in Peet's at the time (this is a mega Peet's, and a popular one at that). So now you discover that, although your conversion rate for the entire population is 2 percent, your conversion rate in the female segment is 3.6 percent (18/500) and your conversion rate in the male segment is 0.4 percent (2/500). Obviously, the female segment performed much better.

Imagine now that you look further into the female group. You're going to use a psychographic segmentation this time. You're going to ask all the women to identify themselves as sedentary, active, or extremely active. Then you're going to see who purchased based on those groups

Here's what it looks like when you're done:

 TotalBoughtConversion Rate  Sedentary120 1  0.8 percent Active300 10 3.3 percent Extremely Active80 7 8.75 percent

So it turns out that extremely active women were very responsive to your offer and your pants. Cool! Not to be forgotten are the active women. What are these two groups looking for? Is it different? Finally, is there something the sedentary women were looking for that they didn't see? What about the men?

Ultimately, the objective with segmentation analysis is to get a better understanding of who responded, and how the differences among these groups can help you better market to them in the future.

You must avoid analysis paralysis, of course. You can slice the data 100 different ways, but you only need to go as far as will help you test a treatment to drive better results. Bottom line: Conducting segmentation analysis in your email campaigns can help you understand how and where to focus your marketing efforts to achieve maximum campaign performance.

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To Send or Not to Send an Email…That Is the Question

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There is an ongoing debate among email marketers that is focused around the recipients you should either include or exclude from your mailing. There are basically two schools of thought:

Get to a 1:1 stateSend away

Oddly enough, both have some merit, and are likely the correct answer to a very specific situation within your mailing portfolio, but as a broad stroke approach either could fail on its own. Let's dig into the pros and cons of these very real scenarios.

Email marketing is a very data-driven discipline, and unlike its first cousin (direct mail), marketers are not constrained by cost if you send email to subscribers who don't necessarily meet very specific criteria. The need for targeting and segmentation in direct mail wasn't born out of marketers wanting to do the right thing by not sending offers to consumers who may not be interested; it was a cost-saving measure to generate the highest return on the investment given the skyrocketing costs of printing and postage at that time. This challenge of cost for deployment doesn't exist in email.

Regardless of the cost restraints, or lack thereof, it has been cited and reported time and time again that targeted, relevant email outperforms the shotgun approach. I firmly believe that this is true and have seen it proven thousands of times over the course of many years, but I also believe this to be a tactic that marketers apply situationally.

Pro: Sending a message that is properly targeted - getting the right message to the right person at the right time typically generates higher engagement rates.

Con: Sending a message that is highly targeted minimizes the reach of the offer, therefore potentially minimizing incremental conversion.

A common and simple approach is looking at engagement. If a customer hasn't opened or clicked a message in three months, then she is suppressed from further mailings. This shouldn't strike anyone as an odd marketing practice. But let's look at a real-life example of how this could backfire.

See these concepts in action at SES New York 2013:11 Absolutes for Email EngagementSee the full agenda.

Scenario 1

As an online provider of downloadable content (books, magazines, etc.), you send an email to your subscribers announcing the availability of a new book. The book and the fact that it is available are featured in the subject line. A recipient sees this message come through on a smartphone, which triggers her to launch your app and purchase the book. She didn't open the email, she didn't engage in anyway, yet it was the email that triggered her to take action. As she develops and repeats this behavior, the metrics would indicate that she is not email engaged. Do you suppress?

You need to ask yourself some real questions here and dig a little deeper to determine this. Look at the behavior of those who are not engaging with your email to see if a correlation exists between email deployment and conversion. If you see no conversion behavior, in addition to the lack of email engagement, then suppressing them (or better yet, trying to reengage them) may be a better way to go. It isn't as black and white as to say, just suppress them. You could be doing yourself a great disservice.

Scenario 2

Keeping in this same theme, you continually send email to your entire subscriber base that features all of the topical content available on your site. This means that you are sending content about "fishing" to those who are more interested in "fashion" and vice versa. Over the course of time, your subscribers become numb to your email because it only rarely includes content that they are interested in, ultimately resulting in list attrition. Do you segment?

Let's face it: depending on your business, not everyone is fit to receive all of your content, nor should they be. The reason companies evolve in lines of business is because the value proposition often appeals to different segments. So you should be doing some baseline segmentation, especially if you are seeing attrition rates that are concerning. The goal should be to provide a relevant experience for your customers - at every touch point, not just email.

Scenario 3

Again, in this same theme, you have done a significant amount of segmentation and cluster analysis on your database. You find that you have very distinct personas that evolved based on past purchase behavior, so you arm yourself with this data and create highly targeted messages to these groups that only feature content in the categories you have determined. Are you over-targeting?

It is possible to over-target your marketing message, which leaves an entire audience of potential conversions out in the cold. While you may see that customers are purchasing from very specific categories, it doesn't hurt to expand your reach a little to see if there is interest in complementary categories. For example, I may only purchase fashion content, but I could also be interested in cooking content as well. Be systematic and decisive about how you target; don't make the audience too small, as you may be missing out on potential customers. However, you have to use caution when casting a wide net as well, or you may turn some subscribers off.

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these scenarios, except that you actually need to consider all of these possibilities when determining who is going to get your email communications.

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SMS and Email: A Strategy to Capture Out-of-Home Subscribers

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Email is the supreme nurturing tool in the marketer's toolbox, second perhaps only to face-to-face interactions. But making a user give you her email address when she's on the move is difficult - usually involving two or three steps with a mobile browser, in-store terminal, or (heaven forbid) paper.

By adopting a cross-channel mindset, however, you can leverage SMS (an intuitive, simple, and mature technology) to capture email addresses from on-the-go prospects with just one action: a text message.

This strategy is in line with the new cross-channel mantras being chanted through the digital marketing world currently, and yet is a relatively old and proven technique. Your consumers know and use it several times a day.

(Note: I know there is severe resistance on the part of many consumers to marketing by SMS. That's not what I'm proposing here.)

Scotts Miracle-Gro ran an SMS to email campaign back in 2010 that was extremely successful. Scotts advertised lawn care products and informational guides at baseball games in partnership with MLB. The campaign advertised a lawn care guide that would be sent once you texted the short code with the keyword "baseball." Once you sent the text message, a follow-up message prompted for an email address to get a digital copy of the guide and more lawn care tips.

Scotts found that "about 40% of those people who text in to get the

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Recovering an Email Presence

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For personal reasons, I've been reflecting a lot recently on the concept of recovery.

At the core of every email program is a relationship between you (the company) and the customer. Those relationships can go astray.

To recover from an ailing email marketing presence, you must...

Diagnose and treat the problem that led the relationship astray.Invest the appropriate amount of time in the recovery, while accomplishing attainable milestones along the way.

Let's discuss just a few problems that can lead your email marketing astray, how to respond to those problems, and what milestones you'll need to cross in order to recover.

Recovery From Program Surgery

Sometimes you'll find an aspect of your email marketing that instead of helping, actually harms your relationship with your customers.

For example, you may find that an email sent three times a week causes your open and click-through rates on other emails to drop - as well as an overall increase in your unsubscribe and complaint rates.

It will be tough to remove that program, since it does bring in some revenue. It's clear to you, however, that the program must be removed to save the drop in customer lifetime value that the increased unsubscribes and complaints will cause.

So how do you recover the lost revenue when you remove the program?

First, see if you can add a more targeted and less frequent mailing to serve the same purpose. For example, if the removed program reminded all subscribers about sales three times a week, you can experiment with reminding only those who have purchased in the last three months - and only reminding them once a week.

Using this strategy, you should expect to see a full recovery (i.e., full replacement of "lost" revenue) in about three months. Maybe sooner, maybe later. Make your own milestone. If you don't meet it, reevaluate.

Second, track to make sure the problem no longer exists. You should see a drop in unsubscribe and complaint rates fairly quickly. If you don't, perhaps your original diagnosis incorrectly identified the program as the problem.

Third, search for other problems to remove. You may want to wait to make sure you can measure the effects of your original effort, but another surgery may be in order if things don't get much better, or if you identify another program causing problems.

Recovery From a Gaffe

Sometimes you send an email with #FIRSTNAME in the subject line instead of the actual first name. Or perhaps you forgot to include a critical link or piece of information. Or maybe you've sent an email to the wrong group of people (which is the same as calling your significant other by a different name).

The first step to relationship recovery after such a mistake is admitting the mistake to those affected. Depending on the scale of the mistake, you may offer some sort of special deal or consideration to make up for it, but that's not always necessary. The focus should be on repairing the long-term relationship.

The second step is to mitigate the backlash of the gaffe. Actively monitor for customer frustration and public discussion of the gaffe and respond actively, honestly, and openly. Brands don't necessarily get damaged from negative public comments...it's their response to those comments that tend to define how much damage occurs.

The final step should be to review what led to the problem in the first place, and take steps if necessary to prevent the gaffe in the future. Note that priority-wise, this is the least important step out of the three. It's still a necessary step, but it is much more important to respond to the gaffe you already made than to worry about preventing future ones.

Recovery From the Unexpected

Sometimes a black swan pops up and disrupts things for you. Your ESP's servers crash, the power goes out, or your entire office is flooded and you can't send your campaigns.

Luckily for you, we humans are pretty good at helping out others when the unexpected occurs. This tendency extends to the brand-customer relationship (if you treat it as a relationship).

To recover, first let your customers know what's going on. Again, openness and honesty buy leniency and even assistance from your customers. Treat them like a friend and they'll treat you as a friend in need.

Next, focus on returning to normal as soon as possible. Prioritize programs by considering revenue, but also the program's importance to the overall relationship. It's going to be better for you to maintain a relationship through the storm and rebuild revenue on that strong relationship than it is to focus on driving the most revenue during the storm. Reestablish enough revenue to keep the lights on, then focus on keeping those hard-won relationships with your customers.

Finally, take steps to make your email programs less fragile in the future. By definition, you can't predict the unpredictable, but you can make your infrastructure and customer relationships less susceptible to the random event. For example, a rich backup of customer data along with an alternative means of sending email can help you send to your best customers during the recovery period, maintaining that relationship.

Recovery From a Slow and Steady Decline

The last problem we'll discuss today is probably the most common for both brands and personal relationship. Nothing in particular happened to cause damage, but a lack of communication and caring over time has led to relationship atrophy.

The first step here is to call out the absence and redefine the relationship explicitly. Here's an example of an email you could send:

From: Company
To: John Doe
Subject: It's been too long, but we still like you

Hi there,

How have you been?

We realize it's been a long time since we've been in touch with you. Our bad. We still care about you though.



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Times Have Changed - and so Should Your Approach to Segmentation

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As marketers, we've aptly armed our consumer base with an unlimited amount of options when considering how each varying audience group might choose to receive our communications and related marketing information.

As we look beyond some of the most humble beginnings of direct marketing and to what's now become commonplace for other channels, the usual suspects (i.e., the strategies that have led to the marketing efforts behind them) are driven by the fact that from one recipient to the next, the desired method of receipt is more times than not - different. One might have a preference for receiving communications via email, SMS messaging, or deals that can be shared with friends and family across a wider social platform. When thinking about communicating across any of these mentioned channels to an audience, how are brands handling segmentation?

Segmentation for Email

Segmentation for email as a channel across industries still continues to grow leaps and bounds. As consumers, we have demanded and come to expect our marketers to segment and create better message experiences based on things like brand affinity and registration activity down to our account details (e.g., balance statement summaries, member level exclusivity messaging, etc.).

One great achievement with segmentation in email stems from the beauty of progressive profiling. It's not entirely a new concept, but definitely gaining traction more and more. Providing the sensibility to allow any subsequent pushes to recipients based on a previous consumer-instigated action is not only reasonable, it's logical, as well as expected by your consumers. This focus helps the next iteration of communications seem more personalized and less like an unsolicited marketing effort.

Segmentation for Mobile

Quick, easy access is undeniably hot right now. Even those of us who are historically slow to catch up with technology bank on the fact that we have access to email, financial accounts, and other information at the touch of our fingertips. It's just convenient.

Companies are no longer denying the fact that more and more users are accessing their information via their mobile devices, and in turn have begun taking steps to make the user experience more readily accessible by optimizing creative and marketing communications for mobile devices.

Much like email, in the future, as more thought is being placed into segmentation for mobile, consumers can look to communication preferences being explicitly mapped to the following areas (if not already taking place): area code, country, region, geo-location, carrier, brand, model, OS, etc.

Segmentation for Social

Which social networks are your active audience segments currently a part of? Does your brand have a social presence of any kind? Do you care about social marketing and what value has your organization placed on it? What vested interest has your company placed on social marketing and to what degree does that level of interest play into the overall goals across channels? OK, now that we've gotten the "first date" questions out of the way...

Do you currently capture data values from your audience segments that give any visibility into their preferred social networks? Some may not see or feel there is a need in doing this well - if at all. However, there are those who have made concerted efforts in this regard. They've gone further than simply regurgitating marketing or promotional email messages onto distinctive brand social pages. The more progressive marketers have even begun to think more intuitively. Questions about segmenting - socially - are posed among the decision-makers of the organization. Which segments have an affinity for LinkedIn? Which brand loyalists are merely communicating via Facebook or Twitter? How can we make note of our followers' "interests" or "likes," and message more appropriately to them?

Socially, it is reasonably understandable that for any audience segment, a company's social presence has to make sense. An even better strategy is to look at building a segment of a company's top influencers, making an effort to incentivize those loyalists, and giving them reason(s) to be the quintessential brand advocate. Realistically though, this might not be so wise if an overwhelming majority of a database has no social activity at all. Reiterating that first point, it has to make sense to even play in the social sandbox.

The Recap

At the very least, creating a holistic experience for any particular market requires a segmentation strategy that if done well (and deemed appropriate) would provide overarching, cross-channel direction that is explicit and tailored in nature. In our efforts to learn more about our consumers, we've gone to such great lengths to capture various data points, and yet so few are actually pausing to take a step back and look at the obvious: to see if there's a propensity for one channel over another or what the preferred format might be. The more intuitive stance to take would be to interact with our associated audiences based on data-driven activities and preferences. What harm could come from that?

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Don't Get Tabbed Out of Existence

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Since the rollout of Gmail's new inbox tabs experience around the beginning of July, email marketers have been trying to understand...

Where their emails are appearingWhat are the effects of the new tabs on campaign performanceWhat they can do to mitigate the effects

Let's discuss each of these concerns in turn.

Where Are My Emails Appearing?

First off, let me state the obvious: no one except the people at Google truly understands the algorithm that determines where a brand's emails appear in the inbox. Similar to SEO tactics, we have glimpses of what affects the categorization, but no clear definitions.

As a starting point, you should refer to the Google support article that explains in plain language how it aims to segment a user's emails.

Then it's best to experience the categorization for yourself. Go to the Gmail web client and notice which of your emails appear in Promotions, or Updates, or the Primary tab. Talk to others who use Gmail and see what their experience is.

Here's what's probably true: if you're a brand marketer sending email, that email is most likely to appear in the Promotions tab of your recipients' inbox, unless they aren't using tabs or indicate that they want to receive your emails in the Primary tab.

What Are the Effects of Gmail Tabs on Email Campaign Performance?

Reports from the industry have varied; most claiming a modest decline in open rate, but some claiming an actual increase. What's important is what's happening to your campaigns.

Identify those in your list who have a gmail.com address. (Remember, however, that not everyone who has a gmail.com address reads that email on Gmail's web app or mobile app, and therefore doesn't experience the tabs.)

For that segment, consider the following:

Open rate. Have you seen a drop in open rate for the gmail.com segment? Did it begin around July 5? Is there another factor that you can contribute to the drop?

If you have the data, you should also consider "time to open." One effect of the tabs is that recipients will not open emails in the Promotion tabs as soon as they would have before. This is important, especially if your promotions rely on timeliness.

Click-through rate. Have your clicks as a percentage of delivered emails dropped? Or have they risen? Also, look at your click-to-open rate; this will allow you to see if a drop in open rate has corresponded with a drop in engagement as well. It's possible that your open rate dropping may be merely the effect of unengaged users no longer opening your emails out of habit since your emails now appear in their promotions tab (and unengaged users are less likely to casually open those emails in the first place).

Revenue per email. While your opens or clicks may drop, make sure to check if your revenue per email or other relevant performance metrics have dropped as well before panicking.

Once you've considered the metrics, you may find that the change hasn't caused any big shifts. Continue to report on this segment for the next few months to make sure you capture long-term trends, but don't take unnecessary actions to correct a problem that isn't there.

If you're seeing a significant drop in your metrics, it's time to take action.

Mitigating the Effects of Gmail Tabs

It's true that a small set of your email list will experience the new tabs interface, and so you shouldn't freak out about small drops in engagement. That being said, I believe that the Gmail tabs move is just the latest in a general trend toward inbox foldering. Gone are the days of a single, user-filtered inbox. Approaching are the days of inboxes curated automatically by email clients based on historical engagement. Therefore, while the steps below specifically reference Gmail tabs, it's important for the email marketer to future-proof her marketing against the negative effects of inbox foldering.

Call out the change. Several brands have had success educating their subscribers who use Gmail about the new experience, and providing easy instructions on how to make sure the brand's emails are still being seen.

You can send a separate email to all of your Gmail subscribers, prompting them to move your emails to the Primary tab. Alternatively, you can dynamically populate the pre-header of your emails to Gmail subscribers with the same instructions, replacing the old "add us to your address book" approach.

Stand out in the inbox. If your emails appear in the Promotions tab, they are more likely to appear with other promotions, and even ads from Google advertisers. This means it's even more important to use attention-getting methods to stand out in the inbox.

Don't rely on email only, think cross-channel. As the trend of a more curated inbox continues, it's time to expand your approach as a brand and move beyond email as a standalone tool to reach out to current and future customers. Email should always form a part of your core strategy, but it should exist with campaigns in retargeting, SMS, mobile applications, and other channels to effectively reach your customer. Cross-channel campaigns have the added benefit of being less fragile to changes in technology like the creation of Gmail tabs.

Take the steps necessary within your organization to create cross-channel marketing experiences and don't silo email, because in doing so Gmail tabs and other similar technologies will have exaggerated effects on your marketing performance.

Finally, remember that Google has not added Gmail tabs to hurt your marketing performance (although it might feel that way) but to improve the user experience. If your recipient feels your emails are important, she will continue to engage with them. So the age-old email advice still applies: be relevant and important to your subscribers.

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Digital Footprints: Following the Data Trail

Do you know what type of data trail you're leaving behind, or what your digital footprint says about you?

Just this week, the FX network premiered the third season of American Horror Story: Coven. It's not rooted in reality, obviously, but Jessica Lange's character had one line that really resonated in this era of digital trails: "In this day and age of Facebook and Twitter, do you really think that we won't be persecuted for anything that we do--which will be recorded and uploaded for millions to see?" That question struck me.

We all know that digital footprints are made up of the data left behind by people's interactions in any kind of digital environment. This includes, but certainly isn't limited to, the internet, mobile phones, tablets, other connected devices and sensors.

These ‘digital footprints' include data about what you clicked on, searched for, Liked, where you went, your location, your IP address, what you said, what was said about you and more. The data can and is being used in behavioral and target marketing, personalization, and social media and social graphing.

What can digital footprints tell you?

They help paint the ever-changing contextual state of the consumer, which marketers can then use to identify the preferences, interests and needs of a consumer, in order to deliver relevant content that reaches the consumer at their point of need.

Whether you're a governor, mayor, military personnel or consumer, for better or worse, we live in the age of email, texting, blogging and social networking. From a customer perspective, consumers leave "breadcrumbs" that give details that surround their digital interaction data, including:

Channel EngagementDevice & OSActivityLocationTime

With social media, we can follow the imaginings, opinions, ideas and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and video they create and comment on, monitor conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists and even follow their trajectories in physical space.

Other ways that these breadcrumbs are left behind have to deal with some or any of the following profile data:

Demo-Socio-Psycho-GraphicPurchase HistoryLifecycle StageContent PreferencesPermissions

In email, digital footprints give insight into click activity, enabling marketers to infer interests. Maybe a recipient has signed up or registered for a particular promotion, or shown a level of interest by browsing a certain product or service offering.

For mobile, maybe a user is showrooming with a particular device which might make comparison shopping and/or purchasing quick and easy (for those of us always on the go). The point is this: we all have and leave a digital footprint. It's thanks to these interaction trails that marketers are able to create personalized communications for customers who have browsed their site, downloaded an application, completed surveys or abandoned shopping carts.

Will digital footprints go away? Not likely. The challenge is how to capture, visualize and take action on the data gathered from digital interactions and combine it with profile data, to create an even more accurate picture of real-time customer needs in order to deliver contextually relevant marketing communications.

As marketers, do we see this process as intuitive? As consumers, do we see it as creepy? These are the types of questions we all need to address in the day and age of Facebook and Twitter.

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Get Attention in Competitive Holiday Inbox Tabs with These Email Tips

Like it or not, the 2013 holiday season is here. Whether this is good news or bad news for your holiday email campaigns depends on your ability to deal with two trends in email marketing: increased volume and inbox foldering.

Not only has annual email volume increased year over year, but each holiday season, there is an additional increase of about 20 percent in the number of marketing emails sent. This means more and more messages are competing for recipient attention in the inbox, especially in November and December.

With the rollout of Gmail Inbox Tabs--the largest implementation of automatic inbox foldering to date--you may be competing for limited attention in a purely promotional inbox. Even if Gmail users represent a small percentage of your list, the inbox foldering trend is only going to grow, so if you're not feeling a need to adjust your strategy now, you will soon.

I laid out a framework for getting email opens in two previous articles: first, get attention; then, drive action. To get attention, you'll need to stand out among the other messages competing for your recipients' eyes and mind.

Getting Attention in a Crowded Email Inbox Tab

Attention is concentration on one item while excluding other items. In cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought processes), the brain grants concentration in one of two ways. Understanding these two different mechanisms by which the brain gives focus to things will help inform how your subject lines can stand out, especially in highly competitive environments.

While using the first mechanism, the brain is searching for a specific thing, and those items that are noticed match in some way the mental concept that is being searched for. This mechanism is known as goal-directed or top-down.In the second mechanism, called exploratory, the brain is running on automatic, searching for sets of stimuli to trigger a goal-oriented search or other information that could be important about the environment (ie.: the sudden appearance of a spider).

When looking at an inbox, most brains will be in goal-oriented mode, looking for important items that require their attention. In goal-oriented mode, the more similar other stimuli (subject lines and from names) are to the target object (your subject line), the less likely your target object is to stand out and get attention. You want to make your subject line stand out visually from the other subject lines as much as possible. This will increase the chances that it will be the subject line that captures your recipients' attention.

Tips for Stand-Out Subject Lines

How can you make your subject lines stand out? Here are a few suggestions:

Many brands highlight offers in their subject lines. Be different and tease something else in your email to get the open, and then highlight the offer inside the email.Subject lines average about 50 characters. Try going shorter. True, some studies indicate longer subject lines receive higher open rates, but several other studies show no correlation. The point here is not to be long or short, but different than everyone else so that your subject line stands out.Icons in subject lines may help. Just don't forget that once you get the email open, you need a click through to make the open valuable, so don't be ridiculous. (Also, don't do this every time. Read on to the end to find out why.)

As inbox foldering becomes more common, strategies to increase the salience of your subject line compared to others become even more important, since the context in which your subject is viewed (i.e. a tab specifically for marketing emails) means that the neighboring subject lines are more similar than they would be in a general inbox.

Standing Out to Recipients in Exploratory Mode

Now, the exploratory mechanism is a little less related to our case, but still somewhat relevant. The exploratory mechanism--literally localized in a different part of the brain than the goal-oriented mechanism--has the job of discarding a lot of stimuli and only granting attention to the stimuli it deems most important to survival and success.

In order to do it's job effectively, this part of the brain must efficiently filter out things it recognizes as being inconsequential (i.e.: the familiar).

Remember the first time you went into a new building or moved into a new place, and every little thing caught your attention? That old nail on the wall, the color of the paint, the way the door opened. At first, your brain doesn't know what's important and what's not in this new environment, so it pays attention to all of it. Once you've gained some familiarity, you don't pay attention to all those little things, unless someone calls your attention to it and you go into the goal-oriented mode.

In a similar way, recipients become habituated to your emails over time. If your from name is consistent (good) and your subject line always has the same structure (not as good), your recipient is less likely to even grant attention to your email much less engage with it. That's why using icons in your email subject lines might result in great open rates initially, but if you use icons consistently, recipients will become familiarized to this style of subject line, causing inbox attention (and thus open rates) to decline.

To stand out to recipients browsing in the exploratory mode, you need to continuously switch it up:

If you've always sent short subject lines, next time send long ones, or vice versa.If your subject lines always include a "10% off" or some other offer, try excluding that next time.If your subject lines always start with the same phrase, exclude that phrase.

The above suggestions are but a few ways in which you can go about garnering recipient attention in the competitive holiday inbox.

Remember: in order to stand out, your email subject lines need to be both visually different from your competitors and from your own previous subject lines. So this holiday season, take a chance on something different-you may find it's more effective than you expected.

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4 Traits of Today's Consumers That Make Present Tense Marketing Necessary

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The everyday life of consumers is being transformed. Thanks to the mobile devices glued to their hips, consumers are able to access information and take action online anywhere, anytime.

Understanding the behaviors that result from being constantly connected is crucial to reaching and engaging today's on-the-go consumers at their exact time and place of need. The ability to do that – to create consumer experiences that leverage a contextual understanding of the consumer's present state – is what we are calling Present Tense Marketing.

So what are the key behavior traits that define today's consumers?

Are Always Connected

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4 Cross-Channel Measurements Every Marketer Should Use

By now, you know that consumers don't interact with just one marketing channel on their path to conversion. Chances are, your company understands it can't develop and deliver marketing on only one channel if it wants to remain competitive. But are you still using old-school, one-channel metrics (CTR, impressions) to measure success?

A cross-channel marketing approach requires cross-channel metrics. Read on to learn about two specific metrics and two measurement approaches that will give you a better perspective on your cross-channel marketing effectiveness.

The Match Rate (or Identification Rate)

If you're going to engage in retargeting using display, Facebook or other channels, a key measure of success is how many people you'll be able to reliably identify on those channels.

More generally, if you're leveraging multiple channels, you need to understand exactly how many people you can identify for targeted content.

One company recently developed a technology to identify three times as many people on its site and across various digital channels. This one change tripled their identification rate, increasing the audience of people that can be nurtured.

Of course, you still need to be good at marketing to those people that you cannot identify, and you'll never be able to identify everyone. But with identity comes information, which allows a marketer to be more relevant and therefore more likely to drive action.

The View-Through Rate

The view-through rate tells us how many people who've seen or engaged with an ad go on to participate in an important interaction, such as viewing a video or visiting a site. Many of the channels in a cross-channel campaign won't lend themselves to a direct click-through, so the view-through rate allows a marketer to better understand the contribution of these channels, helping to justify spend in channels that aren't seen as generating ROI as directly as other channels, such as email.

The view-through rate has it's own complications. It's not always clear what the value of a view-through is, and it's not always clear that the ad unit itself was seen. Still, tracking this metric will move a marketer beyond rigid focus on the last interaction to build a better picture of other channels' contributions.

Adopting a Multi-channel Attribution Approach

A cross-channel customer experience should necessitate multichannel attribution of success to your different campaigns. Why should the last click on an email get all the credit for a $60 sale when it was a PPC ad that caused the subscription, site interactions that built the interest and retargeted display ads that drove the purchaser to the point just before he bought? The goal of a multichannel attribution model is to spread attribution intelligently over all of the channels that contribute to a conversion.

Thankfully, most of the top analytics platforms offer some multichannel attribution reports for you to leverage. Before you begin implementing multichannel attribution, however, you should be aware of the technical and strategic challenges this entails (Avinash Kaushik's post does a great job of explaining some of these difficulties and how to approach them). But don't let the difficulty deter you! The multichannel attribution approach allows for a much more accurate understanding of how the entire marketing mix contributes to results.

Using Cohort Analysis

One-channel metrics provide precise insight into the performance of single interaction points, such as a click on a link or time spent on a page. The problem with these metrics is the lack of visibility before and after the target interaction. What else did the person see before they clicked the link? After purchasing, does the person purchase again, and how long does it take him to do so?

Cohort analysis, in contrast, allows a long-term comparison between groups, thus negating the focus on single interactions. In cohort analysis, an objective (ie.: an increased retention rate for a subscription product) is defined and then measured for different groups of people over time.

To do this, a group with a similarity is identified (ie.: joined the list on the week of November 17th) and considered against other groups (ie.: joined the list on the week of November 24th). After a certain period of time (ie.: 2 months), the groups' performances are compared. Cohorts can also be formed around other criteria, such as previous purchase history or engagement data.

In the image below, a service with a weekly subscription model is comparing retention rates of members who joined during different weeks. Why is there such a large drop in retention for the second cohort who joined on the week of 11/24/13 when compared to the other two cohorts? Such a report allows the marketer to review the marketing mixes of that cohort specifically to see if anything obvious stands out.

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The First Mobile Holiday Season Gives Marketers New Audience Segments

Guest column by Tom Sather, Sr.

Just as we all predicted, the first-ever mobile email holiday season is finally here. Thanksgiving weekend and the unofficial holiday shopping kickoff saw nearly 60 percent of marketing messages opened on mobile devices. This is great news for email marketers whose campaigns are poised to become even more effective, but it introduces a new complexity: Mobile devices aren't just different screens to design for - they're the equivalent of distinct audience segments.

As people are increasingly free to open their mail from wherever they are, whenever they choose, their choices become important to marketers. For example, when they saw your Black Friday offers this year, were your customers on the couch, half-watching the Lions game? At the mall, nursing an Orange Julius? One important clue is the device they used to open your message.

Return Path compared the volume of mail opened on iPhones to iPads during the holiday weekend to explore the differences between phone and tablet engagement. The first pattern we found was that the share of iPad opens dipped more than 10 percent on Friday as total mobile opens spiked.

Then, although mobile email engagement remained high throughout the weekend, the percentage of iPad opens jumped back up by more than 20 percent on Sunday. Essentially, people left their tablets at home when they headed to the mall on Black Friday, then relaxed on Sunday, iPads in hand. The same pattern applied to individual days: Email got opened on iPads in the evenings and on iPhones during the day.

This is important because those off-hours email sessions on tablets find your customers only a click away from a purchase, and on Thanksgiving weekend lots of couch-bound consumers had their credit cards out. Your tablet openers are far more likely to be actively shopping than your phone openers, who will probably at least switch devices to place an order. That means your messages to tablet openers can be different because their device allows them to easily "buy now." That's a distinct behavior-and a distinct audience segment.

Your messages to smartphone openers can be distinct, too, because these customers are a step or two - perhaps literally - away from being able to act. They may be out shopping a few blocks or miles from your nearest store, which a huge number of iPhone openers certainly were on Black Friday, actively combing their inboxes for deals. Or they may have been conducting email triage, saving the best offers for later when they had their iPads, or for Cyber Monday when they got back to their desks. (Mobile opens dipped back below 50 percent on Monday, when 33 percent of messages were opened on desktops.)

Ironically you might tell this segment not to buy now...to hold off until they get home, or at least pass by your competitor to get the goods at your retail location. Whatever your message to smartphone openers is, their response patterns - their behavior - is different from tablet openers. Another distinct segment.

Although Thanksgiving weekend officially ushered out the simpler days of worrying only about whether your messages render the same way across a proliferating set of screens, the era of mobile email and device-based segmentation creates an opportunity to make campaigns far more effective. Happy holidays, marketers!

About the columnist:

Email data and deliverability expert Tom Sather has worked with top-tier brands to diagnose and solve inbox placement and sender reputation issues as a strategic consultant with Return Path. As the company's senior director of research, Tom is a frequent speaker and writer on email marketing trends and technology. His most recent analysis of new inbox applications' effects on consumer behavior was widely cited across leading business media outlets including the Financial Times, Ad Age, and Media Post.

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Use Email to Amplify Content, Search & Social

Touch Edition News Marketing StrategiesData-Driven MarketingMarketing AutomationMarketing to LatinosConference CallLocalRetailSports & EntertainmentPolitics & AdvocacyAutomotiveCPGFinancial ServicesHealthcare & PharmaAgency Spotlight Email B2C Email MarketingEmail Marketing OptimizationAdvanced Email MarketingEmail Marketing Best PracticesEmail Marketing Analytics Actionable AnalysisAnalyzing Customer DataConversion & ROIROI MarketingVerifying Business ValueConvergence Analytics Media Media PlanningMedia BuyingPublishingDisplay AdvertisingVideoMobile Social Social MediaCommunity ManagementSocial CommerceSocial IntegrationSocial Media Smarts Search SEOPaid SearchSearch Marketing Asia ChinaHong KongIndiaJapanSingaporeSouth East Asia More Categories Tags Tools CPM CalculatorCPA CalculatorWebsite Optimization ROI Calculator Ad Industry Metrics Ad Spend Audience/Traffic

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First Truly Mobile Christmas Prompts Rise in Email Mobile-Friendliness

By guest columnist Chad White, ExactTarget

2013 is officially the first mobile holiday season for email marketers, since the majority of emails are now opened on mobile devices, according to Litmus. As we pass this latest mobile milestone, retailers seem to be responding with a newfound urgency.

In early October, ExactTarget looked at emails from nearly 110 major online retailers and found that only 23 percent were using mobile-friendly design techniques, while the remaining 77 percent were using largely desktop-centric design. The mobile-friendly group was comprised of 13 percent using responsive design, where the email's design and content varies based on the device it's read on, and 10 percent using mobile-aware design techniques, such as employing a single-column layout, large images and text, and tap-friendly calls-to-action.

Thanksgiving Week presented a few great opportunities for retailers to improve the performance of their emails by being mobile-friendly on some high-value, high-mobility days when consumers are very likely to be away from their desktops. Thanksgiving Eve, which is the busiest travel day of the year, offered a great chance to reach the increasing number of airline passengers on Wi-Fi-enabled planes and car passengers with 4G-connected tablets. Thanksgiving is on its way to rivaling Black Friday because of "couchbuster" deals and the rise of mobile commerce. And, of course, Black Friday is a huge test for mobile emails because many folks are out shopping at stores.

Mobile Optimization Has Increased Substantially 

Looking again at the mobile-friendliness of retailers' emails during this critical Nov. 27-29 time period, our research found that 32 percent were using mobile-friendly design techniques, while 68 percent were not. That means that over the course of less than two months, the percentage of retailers using mobile-friendly email design increased by more than 40 percent, from 23 percent to 32 percent. That's a substantial increase and bodes well for gains to come in the first half of 2014.

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Google’s Latest Email Marketing Game Changer: Gmail to Auto-Show Images

By guest columnist Kirsten Schlau

Attention email marketers: if you haven't heard the latest, Gmail will soon be showing images in your messages by default. That means no more prompts asking you to show images in your emails!

Just yesterday, Gmail for desktop started to automatically show images in user's messages. According to the Gmail blog, the change is already being seen by webmail users and will be rolling out to Android and iOS app users in ‘early 2014.' This is especially significant as Gmail has over 425 million users. This comes hot on the heels of their recent unannounced update, in which Gmail began to cache images.

Like many of its internet service provider brethren, Google restricted images from automatically showing to protect its users from senders who might try to use images to compromise their computer and mobile device security. Moving forward, Google has made changes so that Gmail will serve all images through Google's own secure proxy servers. Images are normally served directly from their original external host servers, but this tweak means Google can be responsible for the security of images received in emails on its service.

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Achieving Right Time, Right Message in Email Marketing and Beyond

By guest columnist Ida Barrie

Right time, right message. We all agree it's the best way to resonate with our potential customers, but that doesn't mean it's easy to accomplish.

This year at document software company Nitro, we've made a concerted effort to look at our marketing program in order to evaluate how we can continue to shift away from the old school "batch and blast" method and move toward the "right time, right message" method we know drives sales.

As I reflect on 2013 (and review the numbers, of course!), I notice there were three major initiatives that brought us closer to our messaging goal:

predictive lead scoring, starting conversations with our customers, and ad retargeting.

A New Way to Hit Your Numbers: Predictive Lead Scoring

At Nitro, we speak to individual users, plus small to enterprise size businesses. Trying to determine which messaging a contact should receive was a perpetual challenge for us, and it wasn't an ideal user experience to include the "business or personal" question on all of our forms.

We decided to look into predictive lead scoring to solve this issue. By studying and building a model around our historic enterprise deals, our lead scoring engine is now able to assign a predicted lead score to each of our contacts. The higher the score, the more that contact resembles an enterprise customer of ours.

We've integrated the scoring process with our web forms, so now a contact is assigned a score as soon as they enter our database. The predicted lead score, along with other information such as marketing lead score and website interactions, helps us decide what type of messaging a contact should receive (e.g. hard sell or soft sell), how frequently we should reach out, or if the contact should be sent directly to our sales team for follow-up.

It's only been a few months, and already our sales team has shared positive results about being able to get in touch with the right people more quickly.

How to Start Conversations with Your Customers

A while back, we launched a moderately successful educational email series to help users get acquainted with our software. While we were proud of the original idea, we noticed that customers weren't getting the best possible service, because the campaign didn't include a "reply to" email address that allowed users to ask questions or start a conversation.

When we revamped the series, we decided to take a more personal approach. Now, our product education emails come directly from our employees. For example, our Director of Product and Support discusses our customer support team; our Head of Security explains how we secure our software, etc.

The best part? Customers can reply to those emails and engage with a live person! Instead of noreply

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