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I published some GroupMail video tutorials recently for our customers. Sometimes, things make more sense when you see them being done. How to Configure Your GroupMail Sender Account How to Import Recipients into GroupMail How to Personalize Your Messages with GroupMail How to Create a Newsletter Opt-in Form How to Distribute Your Online Surveys with GroupMail I’ll be adding to this [...]

This should be a multipart post, but alas I wanted to get it all out together. Here is my take on what we need to think about in 2009.

Here is the current state of email marketing

Subscriber bases are expecting better email: Here is what this means. Your subscribers are now used to getting email from you and your brand. They are accustom to getting emails that are relevant, timely and well designed and formatted to render. SO you need to deliver that experience or lose some subscribers. Take a look at not only your campaigns from 2008 but look at your comp. Maybe it is time to refresh your email layouts and designs. 

Take some time to not only focus on the creative but look at how you are segmenting and targeting people. Stop the batch and blast (sorry to use that term) mentality that everyone gets the same sale or edition. It does not always work and you know it. If it is a time thing, start to plan out your campaigns and databases now to be ready for the new year. 

Relevancy growing more important every day in order to keep your lists converting and performing: This is talking you anyone that has opportunities to send emails that are different. Don’t be like Nordstrom and JCrew and continue to send gender irrelevant emails to me. I will not read and will unsubscribe. If you don’t have the data to make relevancy work for you try one of the following. Send out an email that asks for preferences to be updated. Simple enough. The other one, if you do not have a email platform with a CRM, is to just use links to ask them who they are. If you are in retail, use the simple link of male/female. If you are in business give them a simple link that will allow you to qualify them into the bucket you want to understand. Focus on one at first, but use these techniques over and over again until you have the data to execute relevant campaigns. 

Email marketing is becoming one of the best performing mediums out there. That’s right “becomes”. All these studies show that it is the best performing medium, but unless you are doing it right it might not be for you. You need to spend the time to get the performance out of your lists and campaigns. I can’t tell you how many times I see people just being lazy and sending out emails to everyone hoping that X percent take action. Think bigger and focus on driving results. And on that note have planned results to measure. If you have nothing to measure you are just swinging in the air. Easy to look good if you have nothing to prove your actions against.

Email Marketing teams being taxed with more work and more revenue generation: We hear about this all the time. The C-level just wants more emails out there as they see that it drives revenue. But you have limited time, resources and budgets. So what to do if you cannot add another FTE or find more internal resources? Well add someone like eROI to your team. Let some professionals audit your campaigns, help you segment and set you up for success. After you have yoru house in order you can manage it yourself and realize more work in less time.

ISPs battling ESPs and punishing them for the actions of one client. Not sure how to best approach this… but here goes. There is a constant battle between ISPs and ESPs. Now we have some friends at ISPs and talk to them regularly, but why can’t we all just be friends? What I mean by this is that we need to start working together on our client’s behalf and not always trying to fight and defend. We need to approach 2009 and beyond as better partners in this battle on spam and unsolicited emails. I mean all the better ESPs all feel the same way as you do about junk mail. And we thank you for protecting our own inboxes… see that we are on the same team. So let’s act like it in 2009. 

I feel that there exists a better way for all of the ESPs and ISPs to communicate proactively. I bet if we put it all aside for a weekend we could find a better way to work together. Are you in? We are.

Permissions becoming even more important in all of your actions: Did you email me? Then I assume that you have a permission based relationship with me. Right? If you feel that you have an old list that you can send emails to, then keep that old list just where it is. Don’t try to load it up and send to it. Instead act as if those emails are gone. Yep, you don’t have them just because they were in an old CRM or Excel file from a trade show in 2001. They are history. Instead be the bigger person and start new. Think of intuitive new programs to get permission based subscribers. If you can’t, then work with an agency like eROI to help you come up with ideas and make your lists perform.

Thinking bigger on how email and landing pages interface with other medias and offline brand marketing: You have the campaign… where is it going? If you are driving people to just another one of your pages, then you are missing the mark. Start getting focused about the exact location that you are driving them to. Take some time to create landing pages that speak to the link, the offer, the creative, the copy and more. Give me a reason once I click to become engaged to your campaign. If you do not, then you will people.

Budgets for email growing, all while expecting more from it every step of the way: And you should if you are doing it right. You should be placing more in your email marketing budget. It is no longer a secondary line item in your list for digital marketing. It should be a major driver of your online communications, community, marketing, and traffic drivers. Look how you are going to use your budget wisely and properly to drive more performance from your campaigns. If you can do this you will have a measurable result to take to your boss and show why you need to place more into this medium.

Pots of Gold and Unicorns for All.

How many “NEW” email clients are going to be released? And do they matter? 

We have seen so many email clients launched this past year all with features that we wish were in some of the larger ISPs and standards. But will these bells and whistles really make people switch and really make an impact on email marketing? I don’t think so. 

Although I love some of these ideas, I think that none of them will get enough groundswell or uptake to make an impact on our testing and our email marketing efforts. Now I don’t want to discount the hard work and innovation that has gone into these new apps, but in the end they are not going to make a dent in our radars. 

So take this new one with a grain of salt and chalk it up to just another one to know about, but not worry about testing. Unless Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, MSN, or Thunderbird make some massive changes, your life should go on as normal. Focus on the big picture in email clients. Use your energies to start understanding mobile clients like Blackberry, iPhone and MS Mobile. That is where your efforts in NEW clients should lie.

 

I’ve often written about “NASCAR Blindness” -- the strongly held belief that if no one in your little bubble of upscale artsy BoBo friends is into something, then clearly no one else could be either-- and how it afflicts the advertising community. But there’s an equally insidious syndrome affecting the tech community: Scoble Blindness.

Scoble Blindness is the strongly held belief that everyone using social media is supremely interested in what Robert Scoble and others like him have to say.

But nothing could be farther from the truth.

Now Mr. Scoble is a very bright man who legitimately has many interesting things to say. But the topics he discusses are mainly of interest to people working in the greater technology field. And hard as it is for those afflicted with Scoble Blindness to accept, most people using social media are not in the greater technology field. And that percentage is growing rapidly, as more and more non-tech users discover things like Facebook and Twitter.

It’s why I roll my eyes in amazement at the endless discussions (and subsequent hand-wringing) about the power of/desirability of/definition of “influencers.” As if said “influencers” were universal or (and this is key) people outside of the Silicon Valley bubble had any interest at all in Scoble-type “influencers” of any stripe or for that matter, in using Twitter as a “tool.”

Think of how your friends and relations outside the Silicon Valley bubble use MySpace or Facebook. Are they putting up blog posts about how to increase site traffic? Commenting on Zappos’ brilliant use of Twitter? Or are they commenting on their friends pictures from their trip to Jamaica last month and posting mildly funny clips they found on YouTube?

So what makes you all think they’re going to act any differently on Twitter?

Rather than a “tool” that “provides value” most non-tech users are going to use Twitter as an asynchronous IM device to (a) keep up with their real-life friends (b) follow the ramblings of a celebrity tweeter like Shaquille O’Neal or Britney Spears-- people with whom they have zero expectations of reciprocity and (c) get updates from broadcast-only news feeds like the New York Times or the BBC.

The notion of the “citizen-expert” -- someone like Robert Scoble, who is well-known in his field, but makes time and effort to reach out to unknowns-- is unique to Silicon Valley culture where the difference between “known” and “unknown” can change overnight.

This paradigm does not exist in other fields. Silicon Valley is still building up an infrastructure around social media and social media itself is evolving daily, so blogs and tweets have become their primary information sources.

But if I’m a golfer, there’s already a world of information out there: books, magazines, DVDs-- all from established media sources. So it’s pretty easy for me to find it all myself, both online and off-- I don’t need a Twitter “golf guru” to point me to interesting golf articles or to opine on Tiger Woods’ putting game.

The closest golfers might get to a “Twitter guru” is a well-known golf journalist whose comments about the PGA tour provoke discussion among golf fans. But that’s a discussion, not a learning experience and the golf journalist is not influencing anyone, at least not in the sense that many in Silicon Valley see their gurus influencing the masses. (To wit: many Silicon Valley “gurus” also have a sizable following in the investment community, since investors are hoping they’ll alert them to the next Google or YouTube.)

Twitter offers the option of keeping one’s feed “closed” and that’s an option I’m seeing most of my non-tech world friends choosing. And while they’re an admittedly non-scientific sampling, they are, to a one, baffled by the notion of following/being followed by strangers and the fact that there are people who actively seek out strangers to follow them. They view it both in terms of security and social normalcy: why would you want all these complete strangers to know you like raisins in your oatmeal (and vice versa)?

And while there are those who’d respond that the solution is to only tweet things “of value” (rather than one’s breakfast menu) that’s sort of beside the point. Part of the charm of Twitter is the ability to share our friends’ breakfast menus, which creates something the writer Clive Thompson calls “ambient intimacy.” And outside the Silicon Valley bubble, the twin notions of “tool” and “value” are lost on users for whom those terms have a complete different meaning.

The solution to Scoble Blindness is an easy one: acknowledging that the rules and norms of the Silicon Valley social media scene begin and end with that scene. So that when a Guy Kawasaki asserts that everyone on Twitter really wants to have thousands of followers, he needs to frame his statement in terms of the Twitterers he’s actually talking about: those people working in the space who wish to use Twitter as a business tool to market themselves, a group which includes both the tech community and (funny enough) the “multi-level marketer” community (who have also discovered the business possibilities of Twitter, but that’s a whole different post.)

For marketers, the proposition is different: we’ve got to stop listening to the chatter coming out of Silicon Valley. To remember that the people we’re marketing to have a very different view of social media, it’s values and uses. And that we’ve got to advise our clients accordingly. We also need to remember that the rules for promoting one’s own personal brand are not the same as the rules for promoting our clients brands. In other words, we need to avoid coming down with Scoble Blindness.

Here's one of my worries as we continue to trudge through the murky waters of the recession. Business owners have always been an impatient lot, when it comes to marketing efforts.

They plant the seed and then two days later, when nothing has sprouted, they dig up the seeds before they've had a chance to take root. Tactics that would have worked, given enough time, are aborted before they've had a chance. Lots of wasted time. Lots of wasted money.

But with the pressures of tougher times, I worry that the impatience factor will get even worse. And there are a lot of businesses who can't afford too many missteps.

So before you invest in a marketing effort, be sure you are willing to hang in there and take into account these factors:

How often do people need/want it? If you run a restaurant or sell ice cream – you’re in luck. Mail a coupon on Tuesday and you might see the family, coupon in hand, by Saturday. But on average, someone buys a car every 3-5 years. Own a car dealership and you might wait 18+ months after your first ad to see that person in your door.

Who the heck are you? Does the prospect recognize your brand? Do they know what you are all about? What makes you different from your competitors?

Who else is talking? Just like at a party, if you are the only voice talking, it’s a lot easier to be heard. But, if you are one of many and others are talking louder and faster – you can easily get lost in the din.

Where are you talking? What would happen if you stood up right in the middle of a church service and started talking? You’d get noticed, wouldn’t you? That’s because you are doing something unexpected in an unexpected place.

What are you saying? The most important factor of all. Are you talking about what the consumer cares about or are you talking about you?

If you're on the agency side, how do you help clients have the patience to let a campaign take root? If you're a business owner/marketer -- how do manage expectations within your organization so that your efforts are given enough time to have impact?

Happy New Year! It's resolution season. How do you avoid the let-down of resolutions earnestly created in January that may not last until February? Instead of setting resolutions, I recommend a simple life philosophy that will stick. Comp Yourself.

That's it. That's the entire philosophy.

Did I do better this year than I did last year?

For example, at work to measure my own comp performance, I would ask myself...

• Did I contribute more?
  
• Did I do a better job?
  
• Did I take on more projects?
  
• Did I add more value?
  
• Did I learn more?
  
• Did I get a promotion?
  
• Did I get a pay increase?
  
• Did I receive more praise?
  
• Did I get better feedback from peers?
  
• Did I feel better about my skills?

This isn't the official company performance appraisal, it is your own gauge. There were years, despite receiving excellent performance feedback from my boss (using the company review process), when using my own comp performance measures, I felt stagnant. What you consider "better" is entirely up to you.

When you feel you haven't grown enough, put a plan together that will challenge you and push you where you want to be... Just like you would for an underperforming store location.

Hopefully this doesn't feel too daunting. Improvement doesn't necessarily require huge change. Alan Weiss, in his book Million Dollar Consulting, suggests the 1% Solution:

"Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you're twice as good."

Now, that's an interesting and manageable approach.

"Comping yourself" is an idea a few of us came up with some years ago while working as marketers at Starbucks. We used comp performance to measure our stores, why not for ourselves?

Author and blogger John Moore documents how we practiced this philosophy in a chapter of his book "Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed from the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture" In fact, he provides the entire chapter, Always Measure Your Comparable Job Performance on his blog for free.

Happy New Year!

For most businesses, customer segmentation -- the act of dividing customers into similar groups for the purpose of targeting -- is something that you did as a marketing exercise many years ago or at best, at the beginning of last year. In a challenging economy, a different and very powerful kind of segmentation called price segmentation can help you to make the most of each sale you get and stop leaving money on the table with each sale.

Price segmentation is the practice of offering different prices to different customer segments with an eye on maximizing the profitability of each segment. For most businesses, it is highly lucrative, though it can take some effort and planning to get started. Price segmentation works better when you have real customer need-based segments that you can effectively isolate from one another, but those are not prerequisites to success.

Pricing is a powerful marketing tool. Use it wisely. Let’s say that you have a product that sells for $5, but some customers will pay up to $8 for it, while others value it at $3. Through effective price segmentation, you can create opportunities for each customer to purchase your product at the price that is most relevant to them and most profitable for you.

Price segmentation happens every day, perhaps you’ve experienced some of these examples:

• Time based, as in hotels or attractions that are more or less expensive on weekdays or weekends.


• Location based, where you find or consume the product will affect its pricing, such as buying at a supermarket vs. a gas station.


• Control brands, such as private label products vs. national brands


• Solution sales, when a company packages a solution to a problem instead of a single product.


• Customer segments, such as member vs. non-member prices for products and services.

Getting started with segmented pricing is doable for most organizations by working through the most important aspects of price segmentation.

• Define your customer segments by benefit. What benefits do they derive from doing business with you? You can price differently based on convenience, level of service, time of service and loyalty.


• Look at your distribution channels. This is an easy way that many companies use to segment their pricing


• Use price segmentation as an opportunity to innovate or bundle products and services to create completely new offerings that offer more value that you price accordingly.


• Consider offering programs for your customers that allow them to pay upfront from pricing discounts later. Starbucks Gold Card program costs $25 upfront, but offers 10% off on all drinks. This helps them retain their most loyal customers who often spend upwards of $100 per month. They have the added benefit of customers self-segmenting into a category that Starbucks can market to for even greater return.

Price segmentation isn’t a marketing tactic for every business, but if you can work through the process above and align your customer segments with specific pricing, you’ll no longer be leaving money on the table.

While 2008 was an eventful year in email marketing, we’ve had a busy year here at Blue Sky Factory as well. With a strategic acquisition, additions to the team, and recognition as one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies by Inc. Magazine, we had a lot of exciting events and announcements. Here’s a look back at just some of our highlights in 2008.

nTarget acquisition: In June we announced our acquisition of nTarget. Focusing on the travel and tourism industry, nTarget brought high profile clients to BSF like Cracker Barrel, Harris Teeter, Picture Me! / Portrait Studios and Columbia Hospitality among many others. Along with John Kirk and Michelle Oglesby joining the team and sharing their expertise, the nTarget acquisition allows Blue Sky Factory to build our service offerings for various industry leaders and provide our new client base with the latest in ESP technology.

New offices and team members: In addition to our new Charlotte, NC office as a result of the nTarget acquisition, Blue Sky Factory also opened up a West Coast presence this year! With Joanna Lawson-Matthew managing the San Francisco-based office, we now have a more national presence with an ability to be more proactive to our West Coast-based clients and extend our support hours.

The BSF team is also growing. Doug Broujos came aboard as the company’s COO in September. An online marketing veteran, Doug is working hard to help take our company to the next level, bringing with him a focus on proactive account management, customer retention and new revenue growth. Other new additions to the team are Jeff Finlay, Technology; Amy Garland, Marketing; Elena Hekimian, Client Services; and Jessica Lowe, Client Services.

Ranked on Inc. 5000’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies List: We are proud to be ranked by Inc. Magazine as #1,861 on its list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.

As we wrap up the end of 2008, I would like to say a heart felt thanks to all of our clients, partners, team members, and other Blue Sky Factory friends for your support in 2008! Here’s to a prosperous New Year to us all! And, on a final note, if you haven’t seen our 2008 holiday card “Fruitcake” yet, be sure to check it out here. Happy New Year!

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