Don't just stick to the subject

When an email open rate fails to live up to expectations, the first thing marketers often point the finger at is the subject line. Email marketing companies have been very active in promoting the ability to carry out simple A/B testing on subject lines and it’s great to see that most businesses build this into all email campaigns (note, if you don’t, you really should!).

But subject line is only one part of the influencing factors on open rate. Let’s look at a few others to consider.

“From” name

Users are more likely to open emails from people they know or recognise. Why not trial using a real name rather than your brand name? If you’ve got a famous face associated to the company or a well-know CEO, send from them. Perhaps test the difference in using women’s names versus men’s names. Even better, see if men are more receptive to male senders and vice versa.

“From” address

Don’t just stick with the old, info@companyname.com. Again, incorporate a real name. Perhaps even personalise it with the name of the recipient?

Broadcast day

I’m often asked by bosses, “What’s the best day to send emails on?” As with all these sorts of questions, my answer’s always, “I don’t know, let’s test it”. I’ve worked at companies who found Saturday to be the best, whilst at others I’ve had great success on Mondays. Trial it and find out what’s best for you.

Time of send

Same as the above really! The general rule of thumb used to be to make sure that you got your email to people when they’re on their computer. With the rise of mobile devices, I’m not sure that this is necessarily correct anymore – we’re picking up emails at all hours, but if your call to action leads to a site that isn’t mobile optimised, you’re going to have more success with the classic approach.

Of course, the above are all just influencing factors of one metric (not even a KPI) in your email reporting. The real path to email marketing success still relies on relevancy.

Social mania

I saw the first of these videos a few years ago. It was shown to me (and the rest of the department), by an excited Marketing Director who felt it was powerful enough to justify running headlong into social media. It was then shared again with me by an excited IT Director who finally felt he (and his industry) had been given the green light to leave the server cupboard and get stuck into this marketing malarkey we’d been fiddling with.

Their collective response to the video was, “We must do this now.”

I feel the correct response to the video should have been, “So what?”

These videos have surely been responsible for more empty Facebook walls, barren Twitter feeds and disappointed customers than anything else in the history of online marketing.

I have no problem with the statistics, they’re very interesting. Some are truly remarkable. But they don’t contain even the smallest justification for social media in your marketing mix. Before bringing anything new in, the two burning questions are;

“How will it benefit my business?” and “How will it benefit my customers?”

You’ll understand your audience’s use of social media and what their expectations might be. You’ll have formatted a publishing schedule to outline how you’ll be feeding this hungry social beast. You’ll have a list of clear measurable outcomes targeted and understood. You’ll be doing this because you know what you want.

You won’t be doing this because Ashton Kutcher has 6,693,643 followers.

Search Marketing Is a Bully

If it weren’t for last click attribution, search marketing today would be half the price.

That’s probably going a little to far, but over the years I think the ROI of PPC (and therefore the amount Google et al can charge for it) has been inflated dramatically by what started as a technical constraint and is now a mixture of a lack of effort and a certain inertia on the part of marketers.

In the early days, we were content to track clicks within one channel. The level of data it gave, instantly and relatively easily, blew traditional offline marketing out of the water. Person searches on Google, clicks on my ad, buys my product. Cause and effect right? Search has brought me sale.

It didn’t take long for us to realise this wasn’t what was happening and that, really, search was often just one step in a multi-channel journey. With branded searches making up the majority of traffic to a website, it’s pretty clear that something else has sowed the seed of that brand name in the consumer’s mind.

I think everyone pretty much accepts this now, so why are so few companies taking the plunge and putting together a real attribution model?

Even within Google, there’s the AdWords Search Funnel that, in the words of Google, “by showing which ads your customers clicked on before ultimately converting, Search Funnels give a more complete picture of the value of your keywords, ad groups and campaigns.”

(I’m not going to mention here that Search Funnel is pretty good at justifying spend with Google on expensive generics, that would be cynical.)

This only works within the AdWords universe, but you can do the same with numerous other third party tracking solutions. DoubleClick released their “Exposure to Conversion” report way back in 2007 which lets you see both impressions and clicks. This allows you to see the interplay between all your DC-tagged media.

From this point on, it’s simply a case of deciding how you want to work it in your business. Take your revenue figure by channel and split it out across the journey, for example.

First exposure, quite important, but only an “exposure”, no interaction. That can take 5% of the credit.

First click. That’s a biggy, right? First time you get the user onto your website. Give that 30% of the credit.

Next exposure to a display banner. Hmmm, probably came about from re-targeting, if they didn’t act on it, maybe not such a big deal, give it 2%

A few more exposures, with no click, they’ll all add up to 8%.

Last click on a branded product search. Your user now associates you with the product – success! You’ve being considered. 25% credit I think.

And here it comes, the last click. I’m feeling generous so let’s give it 30%.

That’s a pretty throw-away response to how to build an attribution model, but my point is you should try. Maybe then we’ll break the tyranny of PPC.

What's in it for me?

As marketers, most of our campaigns are focused on eliciting a response from a customer – a sale, a download, completing a form, posting a comment etc... Most of the time, you’ll get a better response if the outcome is mutually beneficial to both parties. A sale, for example, means the customer gets something they want, whilst the business brings in a nice bit of revenue.

All too often, however, businesses focus on pushing a customer into completing an action which is really only intended to meet business goals. There are two areas which I think are particularly guilty of this.

Sign up forms

They’re on all sites across the web, but how often do they actually promise something in return to the customer? With these actions, the value exchange is of paramount importance. “Sign up for updates” just doesn’t cut it so don’t be surprised if your plaintive call for names fails.

Give them something in exchange. A discount, a white paper (particularly appropriate in B2B), some information that only the privileged few gain access or even promise a donation to charity. Be aware that the bigger the incentive, the less engaged your prospect will be so it’s important to find the right balance.

Social media involvement

I find it a little perplexing when companies encourage users to send in a video/picture of them using their product.

Why should I? As a customer, what’s in it for me?

If you’re going to ask your “friends” to start participating in your brand, at least make it worth your while because, outside the committed few advocates, no one cares (a fact it’s often hard to lose sight of when your working day is filled with the products you sell).

Well done to Rowse Honey who at least gave some money to charity for each vote and seen to have bought over 10,000 social interactions (I hope they did the sums and this represents some VFM for them?).

Not so well done to Kingsmill whose “Confessions” campaign on national TV seems to have brought in fewer than 200 responses (some of which seems distinctly copy-written).

Analytics? Excellent!

A quick post to draw your attention to a nifty little Excel add-on called Excellent Analytics.

It’s a free program that lets you pull your Google Analytics data straight into Excel. The beauty of this is when it comes to reports which you frequently re-run (weekly dashboards, yearly sales views etc...). If you build a front sheet which takes Excellent Analytics data and displays it attractively, you can quickly bang out reports without endlessly starting from scratch.

It also allows you to execute several queries that you can’t normally carry out within the Google Analytics U.I., segment at some really deep levels and pull out up to 10,000 rows of data.

Outcomes, not output

In busy marketing departments, there’s often a tendency to rush headlong from one deadline to the next. This email campaign needs to be out by Thursday, there’s a DM we need to design for Tuesday, the new PPC campaign goes live on Wednesday and so on. Deadlines are hit, the campaign goes out the door and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before leaping up to start the next project.

Why does this happen?

It’s because too many teams driven by a marketing plans which deal with outputs, not outcomes. And this can happen when there’s no clear objective established.

If you want to sell 2000 widgets, forecast exactly what activity  you need to reach that goal and how much it will cost. End up with a nice healthy ROI (note, it may not have to, ROI isn’t always the end point of a piece of marketing activity, but it really should be for the end of the campaign).

If you reach that target with half the activity planned, then that’s great – STOP NOW!

You’re been presented with the rare opportunity to review the other parts of the plan and decide if you can switch resources/spend/effort to these instead. You can free up time to start chasing the best results for what you’re doing. True, you may work out that there’s benefit in continuing with your original plan but you’ve made this decision based on outcomes, not outputs.

The content chesnut.

The old adage "content is king" is so oft-repeated it's beginning to become a cliche. I've been working on kicking off a social project recently and I've really started to believe the old chestnut applies just as well to this medium as any other.

Why should anyone want to socialise with your brand? Well, for some lucky brands, there appears to be a level of love and devotion among consumers that simply draws them in. I'm thinking about Apple here which, despite not pursuing an obvious social media strategy, has a huge fan base online (see eConsultancy's recent post for more on this). But we're not all as luck as that. Some of us have got to really work for a social gathering.

And it's here that content comes into play. Give people something valuable, something they want, and they'll come to you. Good content can form the nucleus around which your customers can socialise. Without it, you're not giving them much to hang on to.

I've taken this further, an even applied a bit of an SEO-methodology to it. We all know that good content can drive SEO but what happens if you adapt more of this strategy to social?

Get good content.
Let people know about your content.
Give them the means to share your content.
Let them collaborate with you/fellow fans on creating and driving that content.

I've labelled these steps as below.

Whilst I admit that this isn't the end point of social media (there's limitless possibilities from customer service, UGC etc), it's a worthy first step to ensure that your social skyscraper has sound foundations.