The L/O/C Email Campaign Diagnostic Framework

October 31, 2011 By

We’ve shared a number of frameworks and ideas with you about how to make your email marketing better. Let’s look today at the L/O/C Email Framework created by Nowspeed CEO and WhatCounts customer David Reske. We first debuted this publicly with David at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in the summer of 2011.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum

The L/O/C Framework can be described as a way to diagnose what went wrong with any given email campaign. In our shared experience, email campaigns usually fail for three reasons, in descending order of importance: wrong list (audience), wrong offer (value), wrong creative. What’s ironic is that most email marketers spend their time and efforts in the reverse order, focusing all their time on design and creative, spending less time on the offer or call to action, and very little time on building up the list.

Let’s tackle each of these areas briefly.

List

Do you have the right audience? Are you sending the right email to the right audience? If you don’t know who your audience is, you’re at best sending mass email and hoping someone in your audience is qualified and interested in what you’re offering. Make sure you know your audience first. Collect better or more information on subscription forms, use data appending from third party services, ask your customers for more information using surveys – whatever it takes to get a better idea of who your audience is and what they want.

Offer

Do you have the right offer? Even if you’ve got the right audience, the wrong appeal to them will make your campaign underperform. For example, sending a student loan offer to a graduating student makes very little sense, but sending a debt consolidation offer might make a great deal of sense. Look at similar advertisements and campaigns to your audience using publicly available comparison tools like Google Adwords or Spyfu. Look at other sites your audience visits. Look at your web analytics and see where else your audience is coming from, then craft offers that resonate with that audience.

Creative

Do you have the right creative? We’ve talked extensively about creative design here on the blog, so we won’t rehash that information except to say that you will want to test the daylights out of every creative you use. Even preferences of a theoretically stable audience can change over time, so don’t stop testing because you think you’ve gotten your audience’s tastes figured out. The only time you can safely stop testing is when you hit a 100% open rate, a 100% clickthrough rate, and a 100% conversion rate. Anything short of that means you still have room to test and improve.

Priority

What’s most important about the L/O/C Framework isn’t the individual areas, but the priorities in them. You can fine tune creative all you want, but if the offer is weak, you won’t get more than minor incremental improvements to your campaign performance. You may have the right creative and the right offer, but if it’s to the wrong audience, again, nothing will happen. You must have the right audience first before you can do anything else, so if your campaign results aren’t what you want them to be, start diagnosing with this framework.

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.

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Filed Under: Strategy

WhatCounts Annual Email Summit Recap and Videos

October 28, 2011 By

As many of you know, we recently put on our annual Email Summit in Las Vegas. During the event, our Technical Account Managers and Services Account Managers guided participants through Advanced Platform Training on Day 1. At the close of Day 1, we held a reception at Simon in Palms Place for our guests. During Day 2, many of our clients and partners spoke about email best practices and how they could be used to put together a lifecycle email marketing program. Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research challenged us to view the lifecycle framework from the consumer’s perspective during her keynote address. At the end of Day 2, we treated our guests to Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere performance.

We loved meeting with each and every one of you and got a lot of great feedback from you on our products and services. Thank you for attending the event and participating by asking great questions and being involved.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the event this year, please take a look at the videos below to view some highlights from each day. We look forward to seeing you next year!

Overview Highlight Video:

Day 1:

Day 2:

Agatha Niedzwiecki
Marketing Manager
WhatCounts

Filed Under: Latest News, WhatCounts Events Tagged With: ,

What you can learn from Hard Bounces

October 27, 2011 By

Most email programs or service providers monitor for and remove hard bounces after the first instance.  ”Why?”, you might ask. Because it’s a best practice, why else would they?  Well, for starters ISPs will usually gravestone/delete inactivate subscriber accounts after 30 – 90 days of inactivity.  Knowing that email marketers and other email senders will attempt to send email to that address (at least 1x per month) the ISP will provide them with a gentle reminder that this user’s account is inactive or the address no longer exists at this domain.  That is pretty much that in the world of email marketing, or is it?

Something struck me the other day while researching a delivery issue for a client, I always knew there are two main types of hard bounces, Unknown and Inactive users, but I hadn’t really thought about the syntax of the bounce messages.  The two seem to count the same as far as reputation metrics are concerned; nobody’s home, stop knocking. What can you learn from the two that you can translate into better reputation?

The first of the two types is known as the “unknown user” hard bounce.  This hard bounce type (also known as Synchronous Bounces) means the account/recipient has never had an account at this domain, or it has been so long ago that this address is now completely dead.  What we can learn several lessons from this type of hard bounce especially where sign-up pages and list acquisition is concerned.  For example, it is an indication that the user doesn’t want you having their real email address or they misspelled the address on your sign up form on purpose.  There are also the coerced email addresses.  Coerced email addresses often times show up when there is a benefit to providing an email address but there is no ramification to the visitor, nor is there an extra benefit to providing a real working email address.

  • What can you learn from this type of Hard Bounce – If you provide an immediate benefit to subscribers who give you an email address, you need to verify it before proceeding any further in the marketer – recipient relationship.  You can do this by sending a welcome message through your transactional email system.  It is vital to remember that the email address has never existed with the ISP/Domain, so why are you attempting to send marketing mail and wasting valuable resources, yours and the ISPs.  Anti-Spam filters will flag your IP & From domain if your hard bounce rate exceeds their thresholds.

The second of the two types of Hard Bounces is the “Inactive User”.  Often miss-categorized as a soft bounce, this bounce type indicates that the user/recipient has abandoned this address and the ISP has recently scheduled the address to be gravestoned or deleted.  Each ISP is different in the area of gravestone timing, but for sake of argument most ISPs depending on the total account life (length of time the account has been active) will allow for an inactivity period of just inside 30-90 days.  For example, my personal Hotmail address (active for almost 12 years) can be inactive for 89 days before Hotmail will gravestone the account and set it back into the pool for anyone to grab.  If I were to attempt to claim is within the 30 day window (days 90 – 119) the account would then be back in my possession.  I might lose all my saved email but the account name would remain my own.

  • What specifically can you learn this type of Hard Bounce – This lesson is about active vs. inactive subscribers.  It tells us that this user just recently stopped interacting with their email account and therefore your company’s well-crafted, well thought out emails.  Try to keep a list of active and inactive users (- 90 days).  This way you can alter frequency schedules specifically for the inactive crowd.  The benefit of doing this is the reduced chance that your emails will trip the ISPs Hard Bounce threshold.  Your IP & Domain reputation will thank you.

You can go about setting up re-engagement campaigns and they can do wonders for recovering inactive subscribers (non-openers).  However, this technique won’t do much to assist in recovering “inactive users” of the hard bounce variety.  It is more about avoiding the negative reputation wake that these subscribers leave behind.

Filed Under: Delivery, Latest News, Strategy Tagged With: ,

25 Email Design Tips for Better Email

October 25, 2011 By

How can I make this email look killer, but killer in every different type of email client?

When designing an email creative, it can be a headache with more than 50 different email clients that your subscribers could be using, not to mention their multiple ways of viewing emails. This makes ensuring that your email renders the way you’ve intended nearly impossible.  We don’t have all of the answers, but below are several tips that are sure to help any email designer get close to perfection:

Overall design

  1. Keep email width under 650 pixels. This is a general rule as the preview pane for many email clients doesn’t get much wider than that.
  2. Design above the fold. It’s okay for an email to scroll. It’s not okay for a recipient to need to scroll.
  3. Place key elements at the top, above the fold. By top, the first 300 pixels are a good safe bet. The key aspects of the email include logo, call-to-action, navigation, primary subject matter, etc. (See Anatomy of an Email webinar for more details.)
  4. Keep it short. Don’t overload your email with content. Use the email as a tool to drive recipients to your website or landing page. Some people prefer to read large amounts of text in a web browser as opposed to their inbox. Give them a taste – a teaser – followed by a “Read More” type call-to-action. This will also give you a sense of what your readers are looking for when they follow through to your website and the content.
  5. Keep it simple. Don’t try and design a complex HTML masterpiece and expect everyone to see it the way you hope they will. The more difficult your email is to code, the more difficult it will be to see across the many email clients.

HTML Do’s and Don’ts (Mostly Don’ts)

  1. Hand-coded (simple) emails are best. Many simple HTML editors often insert a ton of extra code that makes most email clients choke and cause your email to display poorly. Avoid the “Save as Webpage” feature of Microsoft Word. Dreamweaver is usually okay, but having a working knowledge of HTML allows you to check for code that shouldn’t be there.  Kompozer is a free alternative to Dreamweaver and is available for PC and Mac platforms.
  2. Use tables. In the email world, designing with tables is one of the foolproof ways to ensure your email will render correctly across all email browsers.
  3. Avoid Javascript and/or other dynamic scripts. Even if a spam filter happens to let your email through untouched, most email clients will not allow these scripts to function. No need to get fancy; just avoid them.
  4. Avoid excessive Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Many email clients strip out CSS or over-write it.  The use of CSS is acceptable in email, but there are many strict guidelines you need to follow. Simple attributes like text style, color, and sizing are usually okay and acceptable across the majority of email clients. When you start defining spacing, margin, and other positional elements with CSS you will run into problems.  Always use inline styles. Do not attach style sheets or define all of your attributes in the <head> section on your HTML. For an in-depth look at what works and what doesn’t in regards to CSS, email, and the various browsers, visit The Email Standards Project.
  5. Avoid nested tables. A lot of times they are unavoidable, but we recommend using them sparingly. Some email clients, Lotus Notes and Netscape Messenger in particular, may not render them correctly.
  6. Avoid complex colspans and rowspans. Some email clients will choke on these and they can make content revisions a nightmare for the next edition. Use them sparingly.
  7. No body attributes. Most applications strip out everything that’s not in between the body tags.  So if you want to make a background green, do it with a stretch table background.
  8. Don’t embed images. Host images on your website or let your email service provider host them for you. Then make sure your image paths point to the full URL: (i.e. http://www.yourwebsite.com/yourimage.jpg).
  9. Avoid 1×1 pixel spacers. Some spammers use them and they may get your email flagged.

Images

Don't be this guy...

  1. Don’t use images for important content such as headlines, links, or calls-to-action. Or if you do, make sure there is an HTML backup. Chances are images may be turned off making the key elements of your email useless.
  2. Use alt text for your images. Also, don’t hesitate to use the alt text to say something compelling about the subject matter like “see this motorcycle in action.”
  3. Use image widths & heights. Defining these attributes help to maintain the basic structure of your email when images are turned off.
  4. Optimize image sizes. Make sure your image file sizes are as small as you can get them without losing their visual integrity. Large images should be cut up into smaller, more downloadable sizes. This helps to reduce download times.
  5. Avoid background images. This one is pretty simple. Many email clients will not render background images at all.

Text Content

  1. Include an even balance of images and text. If an email campaign is sent as one image and the user has images turned off, they won’t see your message at all.  It also increases the risk of being marked as spam.
  2. Avoid gimmicky words. Phrases like “Act Now” or “Special Clearance” or even “Click here” sometimes trigger spam filters. If you need to use them, try putting them in a graphic.
  3. Avoid invisible text. This is another trick spammers use and is often a red flag for spam filters.
  4. Make it compelling. A no-brainer, but often overlooked. The more compelling your text is the greater the likelihood that your recipient will be less likely to hit the delete button, and more likely to click your call-to-action.
Filed Under: Creative & Design, Latest News Tagged With: , ,

How to create an email marketing metrics dashboard

October 24, 2011 By

One of the most popular questions we hear all the time about email marketing is how to prove its value. We’ve talked in the past about multichannel funnels (which is a great overview), but very often and understandably so, you just want a quick snapshot to see how email is working for you right now in concrete terms. Google Analytics and WhatCounts have come to your rescue!

Prerequisites

This dashboard setup is predicated on several assumptions. First, we will assume that you have goals and goal values set up and working as intended in Google Analytics. (obviously, we also assume that you’re using Google Analytics) If you don’t, you’ll want to read this post for making that determination.

Second, we will assume that your email drives visitors back to your website for the purposes of making some form of online conversion that has value. If your email serves a different purpose (such as providing coupons for offline use), then this dashboard will not be as useful to you.

Third and most important, we will assume that your email is RTTV: relevant, timely, targeted, and valuable content. If it’s not, no amount of analytics will help you realize the value of an email marketing program. Focus instead on creating awesome content first.

Fourth and finally, we will assume you are using WhatCounts SaaS or Publicaster to send your emails and have Google Analytics enabled on your account. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer, you’ll need to get your email service provider’s Google Analytics tracking information. If your email service provider doesn’t offer Google Analytics integration… well, our contact form is right over here.

Setting Up

You’ll want to make sure you’re using the newest version of Google Analytics. If you are, your left hand navigation menu should look like this on your account:

Google Analytics

Choose Dashboards, then create new Dashboard. Name it something obvious; we called ours the WC Email Dashboard and chose a blank canvas.

What To Measure: Visitors from Email

Next, let’s think about what we want to measure on a dashboard. While we can’t track subscribers directly in Google Analytics, we can see how many people came to the website from email, what they did on site, and what goals were completed, so let’s use that as the basis for our dashboard. If you have other in-tool metrics that are important to you, obviously add them as well to the list of things you want to track.

Click Add Widget. Let’s start with the basics: how many people came to the website from email? Let’s select Metric, choose Unique Visitors, and add a filter by Source that matches WhatCountsEmail, the Google Analytics source for WhatCounts customers. WhatCounts Publicaster users should put Publicaster in this field instead. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer (why not?), use the tag that your email service provider gave you for Google Analytics tracking.

Google Analytics

Name it something useful and hit save. Congratulations, you’ve got your first widget! You’ll want to do this again using the Timeline tab for the exact same setup in order to get a nice, large graph.

This shows us how many visitors came from email in a nice, compact fashion.

What To Measure: Content Visited from Email

Next, let’s start a second column of metrics. You can move widgets around by clicking and dragging them. Click Add Widget, then choose Table.

Google Analytics

Here you see we’re choosing Page as the dimension, Unique Visitors as the metric. We’re setting a filter to include our email tag, and in this case that’s unique to WhatCounts, we’re excluding our popup. If you use a popup, you’ll want to exclude it as well so that you can see just the content pages.

This shows us what pages on our site were most popular for our email audience.

What To Measure: Goals Completed from Email

Let’s start a third and final column of metrics and focus on business generated from email. Click Add Widget and create a new metric.

Google Analytics

Configure it for Goal Completions, restricted by source and your email tag. This will tell you how many goals were completed that were driven by the email.

Next, create a second metric widget using Goal Value and your email tag:

Google Analytics

In this metric, we are measuring the estimated business value generated by our email program, based on what a goal completion is worth.

Finally, create a third metric widget using the Pie Chart. Set it to show goal completions by source. Do not add a filter:

Google Analytics

This will show us the top 6 revenue generating sources of traffic. If your email program is performing well, ideally it will show up in the top 6.

The Finished Dashboard

If you’ve followed these directions and built out your widgets, your final dashboard, after dragging them around and arranging them, should look something like this:

Google Analytics-14

We can see our email program’s effectiveness in generating the results we’re after in one compact, tight screen, highlighting the most important pieces of data. If you’re looking to demonstrate your email marketing ROI to your executives or board of directors, or you just want a way to see how things are working very quickly, this dashboard should fit your needs. By constructing this sort of dashboard, you no longer need to hunt down data out of half a dozen different reports. It’s all in one location, ready for you and your team to quickly digest.

We hope this dashboard is helpful and useful to you. If you’ve got suggestions or improvements, please tell us how to make it better in the comments.

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.

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Filed Under: Metrics, Tutorial

Find the Best Placement for an Email Subscription Form

October 18, 2011 By

During one of our previous webinars there seemed be a repeat of the question, “What is the best placement of an email newsletter signup on my website?“

Screenshot of SocialFresh.com – Click to Image to Enlarge

The answer, inevitably, is that it varies depending on your end goals and how important getting people to subscribe to your newsletter is in the strategy to achieve those goals.

If email marketing is a centerpiece part of your digital strategy (as we believe it should be), then your first focus should be on building a list. In which case, the placement of the email subscription form will be more important than if email isn’t a core part of your strategy.

So how do you test the best placement?

Create two pages with the form in different places on each page. For example, you could make two drafts of your website homepage, then place one sign up in the sidebar of your website and one at the top of the page in the right or left hand side of the header.

The next step is to set up an A/B Experiment testing the options in Google Website Optimizer.  Be sure to specify the conversion page so you can determine which form gets the most registrations.  In this case, it would be the Thank You page that follows after someone fills out and submits the form to subscribe.

This strategy makes an assumption that you’ve already build an audience with excellent content that meets the bar in terms of helpfulness and that they’re not already on your email list.

You will need to draft up a promotion strategy for this test.  How are you going to get the word out about your newsletter to drive registrations so you can test the placement?

After the appropriate time, check Google Website Optimizer for your test results to see which email subscription forms performed better for your website.  This should give you a snapshot of data which will help you determine the best subscription form placement to meet your goals.

Have you used a different method to test the placement of your newsletter subscription form?  Do you have some suggestions on how to improve this process?  We would love to hear other ideas for testing!

Filed Under: Latest News, Strategy Tagged With: ,

Email Open Rate Decay, Part 1

October 17, 2011 By

This week at WhatCounts, we’re investigating a phenomenon called email open rate decay – in other words, how quickly does a mailing lose its influence and stop being opened? We started with a hypothesis: mailing on a Thursday might not be the best choice for our newsletter, the GameChanger.

Why?

Anecdotally, I know that I leave mail in my inbox sometimes for a couple of days, and then go back and read lower priority stuff. However, sometimes things pile up and I just go through and clean things out. The hypothesis is that this is not an unusual behavioral pattern and that by mailing on a Thursday, by the time some people get to the lower priority reads, it’s the weekend – which means that they may not be checking their mail. When Monday finally rolls around, everything from the previous week that’s left over is headed straight for the delete bin.

How would we go about proving or disproving this hypothesis? The first thing to do is look at the data. Inside the WhatCounts control panel, we can see the open decay rate; that is, how many opens over time there are and when readership finally tails off. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer, (you should be), you can replicate a similar functionality using Google Analytics if you drive the majority of your traffic to your web site. Simply create an advanced traffic segment that uses your campaign tags or email as the medium to see inbound traffic from your email.

WhatCounts, Inc.: Campaigns
Note that the scale is logarithmic in this chart.

We see from the results above that there is indeed a drastic dropoff in opens when the weekend hits. It’s out of shape compared to a normal powerlaw curve that should show a gradual, smooth decline. For those with some background in mathematics, this should follow a normal Pareto curve. Here’s what I mean. This is a normal, uniform distribution Pareto curve, using our first two days of open rate data:

Microsoft Excel

This is the actual open rate data from our mailing:

Microsoft Excel

Do you see, in the second chart, how depressed days 3 and 4 are? These conform to Saturday and Sunday in our send schedule. It looks almost as if someone took a large bite out of our day 3 and 4 opens, which would mean fewer opens, fewer clicks, and less business generated.

Here’s an example of a mailing done on a Tuesday:

Microsoft Excel

Note how much more normal and uniformly distributed it is.

Here’s the kicker: in order to generate a sample Pareto curve that more closely reflects a uniform distribution, I had to use a data set that increased the overall opens by approximately 5%. That’s the difference between the Thursday mailing and the Tuesday mailing – same exact content, same exact subject line, just a difference in the curve indicating that we’ve not reached our list’s fullest potential solely because we run into a weekend midway through the open rate decay. 5% may not sound like a lot, but for larger mailing lists, 5% could be thousands or even millions of dollars in revenue that we never even knew we were losing.

So what comes next? Testing! Beginning next week, October 26, we’ll be moving the GameChanger to Tuesdays to see if our hypothesis about the Pareto curve is correct or not. We’ll post a followup entry on the blog letting you know about our findings.

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.

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Filed Under: Latest News

Email Marketing Tip: Clear Call-to-Action

October 13, 2011 By

After you get your readers to engage by opening the email with a non-misleading subject line, your next step is to include a clear call-to-action in your email.

Make sure it stands out and will catch the recipient’s eye. Include a link to a landing page, contact form, phone number, or another way for them to follow through with the action.

Two great examples come from Amazon and Google’s local deal/offers daily emails.

With Amazon’s email you get a clear headline of what the deal is with a huge orange button to call your attention to view more and buy.

With the Google Offers email, you get a more detailed description and the call to action could be a better, bolder color but it’s there with a view deal and buy button in blue.

Remember when putting together your company’s newsletter, you want to be sure to direct your readers to what you want them to do. Decide what action you want them to take and point them in the direction as boldly and clearly as you can (e.g., Download our free whitepaper now, Click here for 50% off, etc.). Contrasting colors, bold links, and other design techniques will help you call attention in the right places.

Bonus tip: Make sure your call to action landing page URL has a referrer tag attached so you can track the results in Google Analytics (or whatever analytics package you may be using). For instance, to track the results of this post being shared on Twitter, I’d take the URL and change it to:

http://www.whatcounts.com/2011/10/email-marketing-tip-clear-call-to-action/?referrer=Clear+Call+To+Action+post+tw

before shortening the URL through Argyle Social.

Filed Under: Creative & Design, Product Tips Tagged With: ,

Do Creative Email Subject Lines Work?

October 11, 2011 By

White House Emails$1,115
8
625
41
1

Those are the subject lines of 5 White House emails we’ve seen. Above is what they actually looked like in Gmail.

Do Creative Email Subject Lines Work? (Yes! If…)

The answer is always “it depends”, but let me break it down for you.

  • Yes! If you want your email to stand out in the often-cluttered inbox.
  • Yes! If those types of subject lines appeal to your subscriber base.
  • Yes! If your goal is to get an open (read: not necessarily a click-through or conversion).
  • Yes! If you are okay with some subscribers choosing to not open based on the subject line alone.
  • Yes! If you’ve tested and tested and tested until your data proves that it works.

Open vs. Click-Through vs. Convert

Let’s expand on the 3rd bullet above. If your only goal of email marketing is to get people to open, then you don’t need to read any further. If you are interested in clicks and conversion, continue on. Here’s the issue with using subject lines like The White House example above.

  1. They subject line should be consistent with the main call-to-action in the email copy/creative. In the case of The White House example, they nail this part. Politics aside, when you open the email it discusses the significance of that particular number. There is a large image of the number as well as some copy describing how it ties to health care reform.
  2. The copy/creative should be consistent with the landing page. Again, with White House example, they also get this part right. Their landing page reinforces the campaign, Health Reform by the Numbers.
  3. The other aspects of your email should be in order. The White House still misses on this often. The “miss” that jumps out at me most is their from name.  Leading with “The White House” would be a better option than the cut off, so we only see “Nancy-Ann DeParle, The W.”, which is not instantly recognizable.
  4. We also recommend using some Share With Your Network (SWYN) options. At a minimum, they could include a few social components. If they want to create buzz, make it easy to share, right? Learn more about how email and social play together.
  5. Monitor your unsubscribe rate. This way you can see if being creative is causing you to alienate a greater than average number of subscribers.
  6. Finally, as we say often, yet cannot be stressed enough: Test. Test. Test. What works for others may not work for you. What was successful on the last campaign may flop on the next. What is considered best practice for most, may bomb out for you. Let the data – your metrics - dictate your next steps.

So now it’s your turn. Test away and let us know what you learn.

Originally posted by DJ Waldow
Revised and Updated by Michelle Wolverton for WhatCounts.com

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: Creative & Design, Latest News, Strategy Tagged With: ,

Winning the Zero Moment of Truth with Email

October 10, 2011 By

Google published a landmark paper called the Zero Moment of Truth, by Jim Lecinski, which posits that since the advent of the digital age, there’s an additional stage to consumer behavior. Back in 2005, Proctor & Gamble coined the term “First Moment of Truth” when the consumer is standing at the point of purchase.

Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley put it this way:

The best brands consistently win two moments of truth. The first moment occurs at the store shelf, when a consumer decides whether to buy one brand or another. The second occurs at home, when she uses the brand — and is delighted, or isn’t.

Google now posits a third moment of truth, the Zero Moment of Truth:

It’s a new decision-making moment that takes place a hundred million times a day on mobile phones, laptops and wired devices of all kinds. It’s a moment where marketing happens, where information happens, and where consumers make choices that affect the success and failure of nearly every brand in the world… ZMOT is that moment when you grab your laptop, mobile phone or some other wired device and start learning about a product or service…  you’re thinking about trying or buying.

Winning the Zero Moment of Truth means that when the consumer goes to find information about your product, your service, or your company, they find you, find positive information about you, and ultimately choose you to do business with.

So how does email marketing play into the Zero Moment of Truth?

Let’s first take a look at some of the data Google created with Shopper Science, indicating the amount of influence needed for a consumer making a decision. In this example, let’s look at technology product purchase.

google-zmot.pdf (page 62 of 75)
Source: ZeroMomentofTruth.com

Here we see that consumers start thinking about a new technology purchase 4-6 months out, begin their research in earnest 2-3 months out, and then 3-4 weeks out, they do a great deal of decision-influencing research. They then sleep on it for a little while and a week before their purchase decision, they return to do more research and assuage any buyer’s remorse up front.

As a search marketer, you can assess what consumers are searching for and hope that your content is ideally placed for each of the queries that consumers are making. As an email marketer, however, once someone subscribes to your list, you can do something search marketers can’t: you can be there before the zero moment of truth.

Chris Brogan is often quoted as saying this amounts to being there before the sale, whether by social media, community, or email list, you’re present before the consumer begins their investigation and reaches the zero moment of truth. If you were the email marketer in charge of communications to these tech consumers, you could send email before each major cluster of research done by the consumer.

Let’s look at how this might play out.

google-zmot.pdf (page 62 of 75)

Let’s say that you have a subscription form on your technology products site and one of the questions is where in the buying process your subscriber is. If they answer with “just looking”, then start them in on a campaign series.

Your first email might be about the different needs you address, and using behavioral segmentation, you could ascertain which need was most urgent for the consumer. Following that, you would use the timing shown in the Shopper Science data to send reinforcing messages and the 2-3 months before mark to encourage shoppers to investigate possible alternatives in your product line.

3-4 weeks before, when consumers are doing their heaviest comparisons, you might want to link them to favorable reviews of your product on third party sites or aggregated social commentary on your own site, to better guide them into sources of data that will influence their decision in your favor.

At the 1 week mark, send an email with additional social proof, helping them to assuage their fears about making a wrong decision. This is where you can use your social media community to its strongest benefit. If you have lists of evangelists in your stable, consider directing your email subscribers to a discussion forum or group where the evangelists gather so that anyone with doubts can ask around.

After this key point, send an email prompting the consumer to make their purchase; ideally, they will be fully informed about your product, proven to themselves that their decision is the correct one, and assuaged any worries or anxiety about the purchase. Give them a gentle nudge, perhaps with an incentive, to buy just as they exit the last major research stage, and you’ll be there before the first moment of truth to win the sale.

Winning the zero moment of truth isn’t just about showing up in search results. With proper use of email marketing and shopper data, you can influence the formation of opinion and the zero moment of truth far better than a marketer simply hoping that their prospects stumble upon the right content to influence them.

How will you use your email marketing to win your zero moment of truth?

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

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