Adding Teaser Text to an Email

July 25, 2011 By

Adding teaser text to an email is one way to entice your subscribers to open it. The first line of text in an email template is the text that is displayed below the subject line in the email preview area, just like the below example. Instead of this text reading as, “Having trouble viewing this email? Click here to view in browser window,” place specific teaser text there to encourage the reader to open the email.

teaser text

Teaser text should be fun, witty and engaging – after all, you want the subscriber to open your email. However, it should also pertain to the information that’s in the email because you don’t want to mislead your subscribers. This could cause confusion and possibly frustration and anger, leading people to unsubscribe or worse, send you to a spam folder or the trash. In turn, this leads to poor delivery scores.

With a simple trick, it is also possible to include special teaser text  that will be used for the snippet without actually displaying the text in the email itself. This can be achieved by adding an invisible DIV-element with the teaser text as the first element of the HTML body. However, we recommend actually displaying the teaser text in the email as the best choice for delivery purposes. Here is how you can achieve placing the special teaser text so it is not displayed in the email:

<div style=”display: none; visibility: hidden; color: #ffffff; font-size: 0px;”>div>

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Product Tips Tagged With: , , ,

How to choose a winning email subject line

July 25, 2011 By

It’s a well-publicized best practice in email marketing to test and use different subject lines on your email campaigns. Load up a few subject lines, test with multivariate testing software (like WhatCounts email marketing software), and then choose the subject line that performs best. Where most email marketers stumble is at the very start – how do you know what subject lines to test?

One of the biggest mistakes we make as marketers is to get caught up in our own jargon. The more complex or technical an industry is, the more likely we are to use words, abbreviations, and subject lines that only industry insiders use. Why is this a mistake? Speaking or writing in the words of our audience (rather than our jargon) is one of the keys to getting email to perform better. The more you use language that resonates with your audience, the more they are likely to open, read, and act on your messages.

To counteract the jargon habit, try Google to see what actual terms people are using, then use those words in your email subject lines.

Here’s an example using a basic engineering term, MTBF, or mean time between failures. This is an abbreviation that is rarely used or even heard by non-engineers. If your email marketing list contained only engineers, using MTBF in a subject line would make perfect sense, but few email marketing lists (especially B2C lists) contain such narrowly-focused audiences. So what would be the start of a better subject line? Google’s related searches option shows us the way:

MTBF - Google Search

The more commonly used term related to MTBF is reliability. How much more commonly used? 15.2x more, according to a quick check in Google Trends:

Google Trends: mtbf, reliability

Google Search isn’t the only option for researching what resonates with your audience. Twitter search lets you see actual conversations happening using your chosen terms. For example, in a search for the financial aid term FAFSA, we can find a number of actual conversations about it:

(1) FAFSA -http - Twitter Search

Look for commonalities in words and phrases, and consider using exactly the words your audience or potential audience is using. In the example above, a subject line derived from it might simply be, “Still have to do your FAFSA?” or “Still have to fill out your FAFSA?”.

Finally, stop treating subject lines as an afterthought to your messaging. Think of them as newspaper headlines or magazine cover headlines. The subject line is less the outside of an envelope and more the featured words that will get you to pick up and read the magazine at the supermarket checkout or newsstand.

Magazine stand

As an interesting exercise, the next time you’re at the checkout line, quickly browse the available magazines and look at the headlines on the cover. Take careful note of the grammar and syntax used by publications to attract your attention. These headlines are language structures you can use for subject lines, such as “15 ways to X” or “5 things you didn’t know about X”. Make a careful note of which headlines were most compelling to you and then experiment using your content with those same language structures.

Take these ideas and use them in your next email marketing campaign and see how they work for you!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

What is an email address worth?

July 20, 2011 By

What is an email worth? You’ve likely seen signs at retailers offering discounts such as this one:

Email value

Is an email address worth $10 of the retailer’s revenue? How could you tell? Let’s look at a few ways to evaluate the worth of an email address. I’m going to assume that you have goals and goal values set up in Google Analytics already. If you don’t have goals and goal values set up and configured, do so before reading on.

Here’s the simplest way to do it: judge what a trackable transaction on your website is worth and assign that as a goal value. For example, if your sales process involves someone filling out a contact form, you have your new revenue numbers from 2010, and you have the raw number of contact form submissions from 2010. Set a goal in Google Analytics to be the confirmation page after the contact form submission, and then assign it a value of (2010 new revenue)/(2010 form submissions). You’ve now got a rough raw goal as a starting point.

In your email service provider’s software, make sure Google Analytics tracking is turned on. If you’ve been leaving it on as a default, congratulations! You’ve got a ton of data already inside Google Analytics waiting for you to analyze. If your email service provider doesn’t offer Google Analytics integration, you can still do this manually with each link using the URL Builder tool. For WhatCounts customers, just ensure that Google Analytics is enabled for your realm and you’ll be all set.

Next, go into Google Analytics and look at your goals. Create a custom report that splits out goal and goal value by medium. If you’re unsure how to do this, you can download this free, pre-configured report from WhatCounts and import it into your Google Analytics. Important: if you have not set goals and goal values, this report will be useless!

Set the time parameter of the report for 6 months or whatever best matches your average customer lifespan. For example, if you operate a publication, you know how long paid subscribers remain customers on average. For retail, your POS system should be able to determine the lifespan of a customer including repeat purchases.

Now look at the summary goal value for that period of time. In this example, we see that email over the example 6 month period is responsible for a goal value of $53,824:

Custom Report - Google Analytics

We know that during that time period, our mailing list was approximately 6,000 subscribers. Thus, the roughest possible value of a subscriber’s email address to us in this case is $53,824/6,000, or $8.97 per email address.

This isn’t the entire story, though. If we dig into our analytics a bit more, we find that of 6,000 subscribers, approximately 3,000 have clicked on a link in the last 6 months. Unengaged, unresponsive subscribers are worth nothing. Engaged, active subscribers are the ones that provide value. In this case, the value of an engaged subscriber is $53,824/3,000, or $17.94.

The retailer depicted above is placing a bet that by offering a discount, they’ll be able to recruit engaged, active subscribers. If the retailer’s list worked like our example here, offering a $10 coupon for $17.94 in economic activity in a 6 month period is a great return on investment and well worth the cost of the coupon.

Use this methodology to calculate the value of active, engaged subscribers to your list and you’ll have an idea of how discounts and other incentives for subscription and engagement will work for you.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Email Marketing ROI, Metrics Tagged With: , , , , ,

Publishers Can Use Email to Diversify Revenue Streams

July 18, 2011 By

Subscriptions to newspaper e-editions were the only circulation metric that grew for U.S. newspapers during the first half of 2010. As a result, publishers should consider utilizing online publishing opportunities to diversify their revenue streams in order to offset the decline in newspaper subscriptions. Here are a few opportunities that were published in a recent whitepaper by Pontiflex:

    1. Utilize customer preferences data to send targeted emails on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers are willing to pay for an engaged community. Quarter after quarter the share of display advertising has continued to fall and the interest in performance advertising has continued to grow. In the long run, a reliance on display and impressions alone may fizzle out over time as engagement metrics become easier to receive through website analytics software and email campaign click through activity reports in the WhatCounts system.

 

    1. Create and promote an e-edition of your newspaper that can be emailed to subscribers on a regular basis. Online newspapers are similar to hard-copy newspapers as they have the same legal boundaries, including laws regarding libel, privacy and copyright. However, the e-edition layout should be formatted so online viewers can easily scroll through the edition online. Well-established newspapers with strong brand recognition and credibility usually have close relationships with advertisers; the e-edition is an opportunity to move these advertising relationships into the online space.

 

    1. Send local or national promotional (dedicated advertisement) email campaigns. Major publishers like DailyCandy, McClatchy, NYTimes, SF Chronicle, San Diego Union Tribune, Thrillist and many others are monetizing their user registration path with clear, transparent sign up advertising check boxes during the registration process. Some publishers will send cross-promotion email campaigns to existing subscribers to solicit an opt-in to promotional, dedicated advertisement emails.

 

    1. Carefully consider current areas of your site or email campaigns that are not monetized. Go through your website to identify pages that currently do not have ads, but are visited by a certain target market. In the same fashion, go through each email campaign you send and ask yourself what business goal this email campaign is helping you achieve? Perhaps the business goal of your campaign is to maintain subscriber relationships, but some campaigns could be opportunities for ad insertions that will enhance the look of the newsletter if planned correctly. For a good example of this, visit UrbanDaddy.com and sign up for one of their beautifully designed newsletter templates with transparent background images that match the background of the newsletter.

 

    1. Provide users with a convenient and compelling experience with self-selected ads (user selects ad topics/industry they want to see) so can charge higher eCPM. Advertisers are typically willing to pay a premium for an opportunity to leave an impression on a community of readers that have expressed in their product, service or industry. Quarter after quarter, the share of display advertising has continued to fall and the share of performance advertising has continued to grow; thus, allowing users to select their advertisement preference is a golden opportunity to get long term ad placements from advertisers.

 

    1. A case study on PlanningFamily.com (included in the whitepaper) revealed an opportunity to up-sell banner inventory, increase revenue by 50% and get the larger advertising buys by first sending an email campaign to users on behalf of the advertiser and receive a cost-per-user fee for each qualified sign-up. Nowadays, for publishers and advertisers alike, success is measured in terms of the number of users as opposed to number of site visits. As social interactions and communication increases online, it’s important for publishers to view their website as a community in which users will access their website to receive communication and even (via comments and email) communicate back to them. The closer a user feels to your community, the more comfortable a user will become with entering a progressive profiling area of your site that requests birthday, annual household income, education level and other data that advertisers are interested in knowing to make sure your users are their target market.

 

For more insight on how to diversify your revenue stream using email, regardless of whether you are in publishing or in a different industry, contact us so we can put you in touch with a strategic consultant from our team.

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Case Study, Email Marketing ROI, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Social influence metrics for email marketers

July 12, 2011 By

If you’re involved in digital marketing to any degree, you’ve likely heard of influence scoring metrics and measurements, such as Klout scores or PeerIndex scores. These are numbers assigned to social media participants by third party services based on their perceived influence.

Some marketers have been advocating the collection of social media data along with email marketing information – asking for someone’s Twitter handle or Google+ name as well as the traditional email address when building your marketing database. Does that information have value? Is it worth doing?

To investigate, I took the Share With Your Network information from 6 months of email campaigns and matched the email addresses with Twitter handles, then ran the list through Klout’s scoring mechanism. I then ran a Pearson R score regression analysis to determine the strength of correlation among Klout score, social views, and social clicks. This is drawn from a database of 9,800 subscribers to my mailing list.

Of the 94 subscribers who shared email content during the 6 month study period, let’s first check to see if there’s any sort of skewing in terms of Klout score; that is, perhaps they all have unnaturally high Klout scores, which might indicate that sharing behavior is self-selecting (i.e. influencers want to share naturally anyway):

Make Chart

What we see is a normal distribution, not strongly indicating that higher influence as measured by Klout made the group more likely to share. People with scores all across the map have shared the newsletter.

Next, let’s see if there’s a correlation between Klout score and the number of times the content was viewed by the social networks of the sharers:

Klout vs. SWYN

Two-tailed p value: < 0.001
Pearson’s R statistic: 0.488
Degrees of Freedom (df): 88
Linear Regression Details:
Slope: 1.848
Intercept: -28.779

The answer is yes, there is a correlation, a reasonably strong correlation, between Klout score and the power of the share to reach new people. This is as you might guess; the more influential someone is in social media, the more likely it is that their sharing content with their social networks would attract more outside views.

Finally, let’s see if we can get at What Counts: activity by the viewers, or social clicks. Does Klout score correlate with social clicks?

Klout vs. SWYN

Two-tailed p value: 0.359 1
Pearson’s R statistic: 0.098
Degrees of Freedom (df): 88
Linear Regression Details: 2
Slope: 0.257
Intercept: 0.572

The answer is no. Perhaps the content wasn’t compelling enough to convince social media viewers to click through. Perhaps the influence of the sharer wasn’t strong enough to encourage clickthrough and eventual conversion behavior. Perhaps the followers of the sharer simply aren’t the correct target audience or interested in the material. One thing is certain: all of the social sharing didn’t amount to much action on the part of the social networks of the sharers over a 6 month campaign series.

What conclusions can we draw from this study? First, Klout score and other social media influence metrics do not appear to strongly influence the likelihood that someone is going to share your email. Among those who shared, Klout scores followed a normal distribution, and the percentage of the audience who shared was under 1%.

Second, Klout score does strongly correlate with new audience views. This makes voluntary collection of social network information like Twitter handles or other publicly accessible profile information a good idea. If you can convince those with higher scores to share (perhaps offering them incentives or segmenting them out and targeting them), you may get lots of additional viewers.

Third, you’ll need to extensively test your content, offer, and audience in order to get conversion results that matter. Klout score alone is a poor predictor of whether or not a sharer’s audience will take the desired action you want.

Finally, it’s important for you to do this sort of data analysis on your own audience, on your own campaigns. Every subscriber base is going to be different, and drawing broad conclusions from one study is a poor practice. Test extensively, collect data meticulously, and carefully examine your information to extract what counts – the insights that matter to you.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

If you’d like to download the dataset used in this study, you can do so here for free. Personally identifying information has been removed.

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Metrics, Social media, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Marketers Expect More Email Effectiveness

July 6, 2011 By

Forrester’s recent report on how US marketers are using email provided some insight about email usage for the rest of 2011 and into 2012. While many of the findings were expected, there were some definite surprises that should be noted.

Email is used more in the B2C world (88% of companies) than in the B2B market (71% of companies). This isn’t a huge difference and might be explained by different sales cycles, type of products or services, and email address availability.

Not surprising is that email budgets will stay flat in 2011—with many companies still reeling from the economy, additional expenditures are not expected.

List hygiene best practices are not being widely used. The majority of marketers are not cleaning bounced and inactive email addresses from their lists. This is a big no-no in the email marketing world as mailing to bounced and inactive email addresses not only wastes resources, it can also lead to deliverability problems with many major ISP’s.

43% of marketers believe that email marketing will become more effective over the next few years, but with a lack of budget and list hygiene, that will be a tough feat to accomplish!

Not surprisingly, 55% of marketers think that social media will become more effective over the next few years. Does that mean social media is replacing email? Absolutely  not. The most powerful marketing initiatives will be the ones that combine social media and email marketing.

So what does Forrester recommend?

Invest in analytics for email just as you would for direct mail and paid search. The payback will come in improved message relevance and better forecasting.

Clean your data! Remove bounced addresses regularly and monitor the inactive addresses. If someone has not opened your message in 6 months, it might be time to employ a different strategy for that person, or remove them from the list.

Don’t get caught up in the bells and whistles. Rich media can be effective, but make sure that using it actually leads to a better user experience. If it doesn’t, don’t waste your money.

Get mobile friendly. With more and more smart phone users in the U.S., make sure that your emails are rendering properly on mobile devices. If not, you are missing good opportunities to connect with your customer.

The findings from this report should be very helpful as you continue your email strategy through 2011. As always, reach out to your WhatCounts’ Account Manager or our Strategic Services team to get the most out of your email marketing program.

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,