February 2012 Archives

Free Leap Day Email Marketing ROI webinar

February 28, 2012 By Christopher Penn Leave a Comment

What are you doing on Leap Day to make your email marketing leap ahead?

On Leap Day, Wednesday February 29 at 1 PM Eastern, take your email marketing a giant leap forward by attending the WhatCounts Email Marketing ROI in partnership with the American Marketing Association. Join speaker, marketing professional, and bestselling author Christopher S. Penn as he guides you through how to find and grow your email marketing ROI.

You’ll walk through the steps of figuring out what your email ROI is, learning how to apply email marketing to your sales and marketing funnel for maximum impact, building a ladder of commitment, and growing the revenue you generate from email. Register for free today at www.WhatCounts.com/ama – but hurry. Spaces are extremely limited!

Click here to register now!


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: Webinars

Email for non-profits: understanding feedback loops

February 27, 2012 By Christopher Penn Leave a Comment

One of the areas in which non-profit email marketing differs from its for-profit counterparts is that increasing audience for the purposes of spreading a message (as opposed to driving sales) can be a primary goal. The more people who hear about the cause you’re promoting, the more you are succeeding in your mission. The closest analog in the for-profit world might be brand-building, where the intent is to build awareness and not necessarily direct lead generation. Today, let’s explore an interesting and powerful idea in the world of awareness building.

In a fascinating and engaging TED Talk, MIT researcher Deb Roy illustrated that in the new digital world, some fascinating social structures are manifesting themselves that previously were unseen. Using television as the common content pool and social networks as the common commentary pool, Deb shows how a piece of content can not only get people talking, but get more people to it. Fast forward to about 11 minutes, 30 seconds into the video if you don’t have time to watch it all:

Ever been to an event where someone put a microphone too close to a speaker and an ear-piercing shrill tone stopped the whole room? That’s a feedback loop. That’s what Deb Roy is demonstrating in the video – that audience and content create a feedback loop in which content is distributed to a small amount of audience, which then in turn spurs discussion and additional audience, which then in turn creates additional content.

How do you apply this very complex concept to your non-profit email marketing? Deb’s talk illustrates this key concept of the feedback loop that nearly every marketer gets wrong. If you tune in to conventional wisdom in marketing, you’ll typically hear one of two schools of thought.

The first school of thought is that it’s all about your database, and nothing else matters. List size, donor database, Twitter followers, email subscribers – build the list or go out of business. Nothing else matters. Let’s call this the speaker in the audio example above.

The second school of thought is that it’s all about content. Content, content, content – create great content and the masses will flock to your door. Build it and they will come. Nothing else matters except great content. Let’s call this the microphone in the audience example above.

Both viewpoints address independent entities – the content and the distribution network. Focusing too much on either piece to the exclusion of the other is ultimately harmful to your efforts to build awareness and audience. A microphone without a speaker will never create a feedback loop, and vice versa.

You absolutely need great content, a compelling message that will resonate with people and help them understand why they should share your passion. Few organizations have done this as well as Love 146 has, as an example. You need something to say in that microphone.

You simultaneously need a distribution network that you can activate in order to increase the likelihood that your message is shared, that your voice is heard. The larger and more powerful the speaker is, the louder the feedback loop will be.

Your job as a marketer looking to create a feedback loop is not only to have a good microphone and a big speaker (good content and a large audience), but to bring them close enough together so that you can start a feedback loop.

Most non-profits send out an overly-long, poorly focused pile of news every month as opposed to targeted, focused, messages that highlight just one thing you want everyone to pay attention to. A newsletter is fine and useful for some part of your audience, but if your goal is to create that feedback loop, then use a targeted, focused email to activate as many nodes in the audience plane as possible all at the same time, so that the moment you speak into the microphone, you create that ear-piercing sound that gets everyone’s attention.

How do you get started? That’s the role of marketing channels like email marketing and social media – to bring audience and content together. You start by setting up the pieces, acquiring the metaphorical microphone and speaker:

Create great content and a compelling message. Refine and focus frequently.
Get an email list set up and collect subscribers as boldly as possible.
Build out your social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and invite people on a regular basis to subscribe to your email list.

Once you’ve got the microphone and speaker, once you’ve got an initial infrastructure set up, bring the two together as close as possible with tight, focused messaging. Whenever you launch any kind of awareness campaign, the most important thing you can do is reach out simultaneously on every channel you’ve built and ask people to share your specific, focused message. Activate as many nodes as possible in the audience with your subscriber list, with your social networks, with a tight, compact message that helps everyone to understand what you want them to do: share your message.

As long as you’ve created the content, as long as you’ve cultivated the audience, setting off a feedback loop should generate the results you expect of a marketing campaign, that feedback loop that garners attention, awareness, and recognition of your cause.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts


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: Best Practices, NPO

What is the difference between B2B and B2C Email Marketing?

February 24, 2012 By madison 3 Comments

What is the difference between B2B and B2C Email Marketing?… is a question discussed in most seminars, white papers and blogs.

This lack of understanding stems from the fact that we are both consumers at home and work, and businesses at the same time. The fine line between work and home computing is getting blurred as we do office email at home, and look for phone or other gadget bargains at work.

It is no secret that traditional marketing in the business-to-business environment requires very different strategies from those campaigns directed towards the consumer market. The key is to have a clear objective for each campaign.

The sales cycle is often much longer and more complex in the B2B world, while consumer competition can be a lot fiercer, with customer loyalty a constant battle.

The objective for a B2B email marketing campaign is to generate interest in your products and services, to try to pre-sell or at least prop up the lead into a “prospect” first. Generate interest by offering free downloads, white papers, specifications, special reports about your products or services.

Converting your contact from a prospect to a lead to a customer is an involved process. B2B sales cycles can typically be several months, and in some cases even a year or more.

Building relationships is key in B2B sales. Because of the longer sales cycle, forming a relationship with the prospective buyer is important. Use email marketing to continuously add value to the relationship. Businesses can use email to provide a continuous stream of educational content which can ultimately influence the final purchasing decision.

Remember, B2B email primarily informs, and builds interest, not sells directly. The key use of B2B email marketing is to generate suspects into prospects into sales.

In your emails, provide content that the recipient can use to influence group decisions. Provide customer testimonials, some case studies, and some relevant trends from the industry. Make it easy to have your marketing materials reviewed by groups of people.

Use email as a way to promote all the benefits of your product or service so that buyers are well informed and comfortable with everything you have to offer.

In B2B content is king, B2C campaigns need to deliver a message that encourages the customer to be quick to click.

B2C campaigns are much shorter in duration and need to capture the customer’s interests very quickly. The path to purchase must be short and simple, no more than a couple of clicks from email receipt to order confirmation. The call to action must therefore be obvious and the offer enticing.

B2C email campaigns often highlight special deals, offer discounts or vouchers to be used online or in store. They can however also be informative, especially if the goal is to build the brand and enhance customer loyalty.

In a nutshell, the B2B buyer will make a decision based on how the service or product can increase profits and enhance productivity. Your marketing should involve activities that will help them realize the value of your products and services and how they will benefit their company.

A B2C buyer will make a decision based more on emotion, status, quality and comfort. Your marketing should focus on pricing, providing a fast, comfortable purchasing experience and building awareness about your products and services via repetition and consistency.

Of course, writing copy for either kind of email is hard work. Crafting a message suitable for your campaign is essential and half your work is done when you’re clear about the objectives.

Madison Murphy
Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts


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

How to create a welcome email campaign series

February 23, 2012 By Christopher Penn Leave a Comment

If you’re new to welcome campaigns, they’re a series of welcome emails sent to new subscribers to help introduce you and your services. Relatively few companies use welcome emails, and even fewer have a series of messages dedicated to helping new subscribers, but the results can be astonishing. A welcome email campaign series can quickly deepen the relationship between you and your customer, as well as provide multiple opportunities for a new prospect or customer to learn about your service (thus staving off buyer’s remorse) or purchase more from you (upsell/cross-sell).

When we suggest to clients that they build a welcome email campaign series, one of the first responses is that they have no idea what content they could put in such a campaign. Some struggle with what to say in a regular welcome email, let alone an entire series. Let’s tackle how to fix that.

One of the hidden gold mines to help you develop a welcome series is Google Analytics Site Search. If you have a search box on your web site that searches your site, you can track on-site search queries using Google Analytics. (see instructions for setup here) By itself, Site Search data is useful, especially if it tells you where there are content gaps on your website or significant navigation issues that lead to people not finding what they’re looking for.

However, let’s assume for a moment that your site’s navigation and design is working appropriately. Go into Google Analytics Site Search and select Search Terms. In the table that appears, select % Search Exits and then choose Weighted Sort so that you’re cross-referencing number of searches with % Search Exits, as shown below:

What we see here in this example are the most popular searches that people did on the website, sorted to find the searches that were most satisfying (% search exit of zero). These are people who were looking for something, found it, and enjoyed the content.

It’s not a great leap of imagination to determine that if people are interested in these topics – Follow Friday, productivity, social media, Twitter – that they’d probably appreciate a welcome email campaign series covering one or more of these topics, with links to your website content (or opportunities to buy).

What’s important about this strategy is that instead of leaving a welcome email campaign series up to speculation or opinion, we’re letting our customers, our prospects, our visitors tell us through their own actions what they’re interested in, and that’s nearly guaranteed to deliver better results than just guessing. We know from the data what people are asking to know. Delivering to them what they want, what they look for, can only make them happier.

Try these tips and let us know how they work for you and your welcome email campaign series!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts


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: Best Practices

The 220 Hour Campaign Structure

February 22, 2012 By Christopher Penn 7 Comments

Veteran marketer Dan Kennedy is famous for saying, “If debt collectors can send mail to people who have no money, offering them nothing, and still collect on debts, imagine what marketers could do if they sent mail to people who had money and offered them something valuable!”

Kennedy’s point is a valid one, and one that bears additional scrutiny from email marketers. While we preach that the core of email marketing is to send relevant, timely, targeted, valuable email to people who asked for it, let’s put aside content for just a few moments to examine email campaign structure.

The debt collector campaign structure is elegantly simple: repeated messages with limited variations on content over a period of time. You’ve seen these: first notice, second notice, third notice, final notice. Debt collectors typically stage their notices a couple of weeks apart, interspersed with phone calls, and the notices are sent on different days. The rationale for doing so is to try and catch people at different times and days.

Apply this same logic to an email marketing newsletter. Start by creating a dynamic segmentation that automatically filters out people who opened, read, or clicked on the current issue. You don’t want to annoy people who have already received your newsletter and paid attention to it.

Next, set up an auto-response campaign that will resend your newsletter to that segmentation (which should auto-update after each send) every 9 days and 4 hours until either everyone has opened/clicked/read it or you’ve reached the end of the newsletter’s useful life (typically when the next newsletter goes out).

Let’s say for purposes of example that your newsletter is monthly. If you send your first issue on a Monday at 7 AM, the next resend will go out on Wednesday 11 AM of the following week, then Friday 3 PM of the following week, then Sunday 7 PM of the following week.

You’ll cover 4 sends total, including the start of the work week, the middle of the work week, the end of the work week, and a weekend day. You’ll also cover 4 different times of day to catch people who check email at different intervals – the early riser type A folks first thing out of the gate on Mondays, the Wednesday lunch crowd, the folks looking for something different on a Friday afternoon, and folks winding up the weekend on Sunday evening.

Is this too much? Not at all. Remember, the segmentation filters out anyone who already saw our newsletter, so we’re only trying to reach the people we haven’t been in touch with yet.

Of course, all of this structure assumes that you have relevant, timely, targeted, valuable email and you’re sending it to people who asked to receive it, right? That said, it’s poor practice to just send an email and hope people receive it and get around to reading it, especially when you have the tools and technical capacity to deliver email at different times to suit different needs.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts


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

How to know if your A/B Split Test really worked

February 21, 2012 By Christopher Penn 1 Comment

One of the unique features of the WhatCounts A/B testing suite is the ability to test 100% of your list. On the surface, this seems counterintuitive. After all, the point of A/B testing is to find out which combinations of content, sender, and subject work best with a sample of your list and then use the most winning combination to send to the rest of the list.

However, there are cases where taking a small sample of your audience may not prove to be helpful for drawing an effective conclusion about your data. For example, one of our Business Development Managers asked recently whether animated calls to action are less or more effective than static ones. Initially, we did a standard 10/10/80 split, with 10% of the list receiving one version of content with a static image call to action and one version of content with an animated call to action.

Let’s take a look at those results:

Sample A: 4,892 people. Response rate for non-animated image: 24 clicks.
Sample B: 4,892 people. Response rate for animated image: 16 clicks.

Now, you might be tempted to make the mistake of declaring Sample A the winner in the test. That would be a critical error. If you know anything about statistics, you are familiar with Pearson’s Chi-Squared Test. Applying this test against our A/B split above reveals an important fact: the difference between Samples A and B is statistically insignificant. That is, random noise, random variations are just as likely to be responsible for the difference in results as the actual test itself.

When we saw these statistically insignificant results in our initial A/B split test, we knew that we had to retest with a much larger sample size. This is one of the reasons why the WhatCounts platform allows you to choose a winner of an A/B test manually – there was no actual winner!

Don’t just let your email marketing software automatically “pick a winner” when there may not be a clear winner!

To retest, we used the testing suite to divide our list evenly in half to use the entire list rather than just 20% of it.

How did the much larger sample size turn out?

Sample A: 24,463 people. Response rate for non-animated image: 75 clicks.
Sample B: 24,463 people. Response rate for animated image: 87 clicks.

Ah ha! Animated images work, right?

Nope. Again, if you apply the chi-squared test, there is no statistical significance here. Animated and non-animated images behave largely the same – there’s no statistical difference that clearly declares one approach to be better than another. We can now reasonably conclude that for our list, for our audience, there is no statistical difference between animated and non-animated calls to action.

Here’s where data turns into action: by running two tests and validating that there is no statistical significance between animated and non-animated calls to action, we can now make the business and marketing decision that the time it takes to produce an animated graphic is likely not worth it. We’re better off focusing our efforts to improve our email marketing in other ways.

To do your own chi-squared test, use this handy Google Doc, based on the work of Rags Srinivasan.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts


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: Best Practices, Metrics, Strategy

5 ideas for subject line testing

February 15, 2012 By Christopher Penn 2 Comments

Five Ideas for Subject Line Testing I’ve been speaking with a lot of my clients lately about their email plans.. To my great pleasure, most of them are striving to do more A/B split testing on their emails, specifically to their subject lines, to see what resonates most with their subscribers.

For most of these clients, they know what their goal is: to see what type of subject line generates the most email opens. (Note: Some also have higher click-throughs or conversions as their goal). That much they know. I’ve found a common trend though: they don’t know what to test in their subject lines in order to reach this goal.

With this in mind, here are five great subject line tests that are worth trying.

1. Specific versus General

One of my adult education clients sends emails to prospective students about upcoming open house events. Historically, their subject line was something like “Attend our Open House on November 12”. Direct and to the point, right? One day, we decided to try a more general subject line, “A Foundation for Success”. And much to our surprise, the less-specific subject line garnered more email opens! We’ve tested it several times since then, and the general subject line always wins. Apparently these subscribers like the element of surprise in their inbox! Try this for yourself – one subject line with a specific call-to-action and another with a more general teaser line. The results may surprise you!

2. Personalization

We’ve all seen the “Joanna, get 10% off today!” type subject lines. The first name personalized subject lines have been around forever, and they seem to have lost their impact. But why not try other personalization tactics? Try adding the subscriber’s location or other demo/geographic information to the subject line. Seeing something personal about themselves might make your subscribers want to open your email and read more. Here’s a great example: on a recent gloomy day in Charlotte, North Carolina, my colleague received an email from Qdoba offering a rainy day special. The subject line was “Rainy Day Special from Qdoba Mexican Grill”. You can’t get much more personalized than that! Take a look at your subscriber database. What information do you have on your subscribers that you could use in your subject lines?

3. Company/Branding

Another great test to try is adding your company or brand name to the subject line. Of course, your company or brand name will show in the From Name, but will adding it to the subject line as well increase your open rate? In many instances it will, as subscribers will recognize the email more as coming from a trusted source. One of my online retailer clients (let’s call them Acme) recently sent an email with the subject line “Save 15% on spooky Halloween cards & invites!” Could adding the company name to the subject line, like “Save 15% on spooky Acme Halloween cards & invites!” or “Save 15% on spooky Halloween cards & invites from Acme!”, have increased their response rates? You never know until you try!

4. Negative versus Positive

Have you noticed that many subject lines are so negative? For example, consider this subject line I just received, “Enterprise Marketers: Social Media Management Woes?” While it’s direct and intriguing, it is assuming that we all have woes at work, which is depressing. While this type of subject line may work for some, why not try a more positive spin? For example, “Enterprise Marketers: Improve your Social Media Management”. Again, it’s direct and intriguing, but is uplifting and promises good things! See what works for your subscribers by testing a positive subject line against a negative one. It might give you some good insight regarding the general moods of your subscribers too! (Side note: I wonder if a negative subject line would work better on a Monday morning when we’re all grumpy and want to commiserate versus a Friday afternoon when we are in a more positive, happy mood … something to test!)

5. Urgency

This one is my favorite. Will adding a due date or expiration date to your subject line make your subscribers open your email more? This is a great one to test during the holidays, since we are all on tight present-buying deadlines. Try adding the ship-by date to your subject line, like “Only 5 more days to get guaranteed shipping by Christmas!” and compare it against a date-less one, like “Get guaranteed shipping by Christmas!”. Or try testing a sale announcement with and without a date limit, like “5 days only – Get 15% off!” versus “Get 15% off!”. Don’t have an expiration or due date to use? Make one up to create urgency! (Just don’t do this too often or you’ll become the boy who cried wolf.) Brainstorm with your team to come up with ways to make your subscribers feel like they need to open and take action on your email today, or else they’ll miss out!

Final Thoughts Before You’re Set Loose

Remember, the key to email subject line testing is having a control group. It’s imperative to have this so you can get accurate results on the winning subject line. So, for example, if you want to test branding within the subject line, make sure you have an exact replica without the branding, like this:

Control: Enjoy 10% off your next purchase
Experimental: Enjoy 10% off your next Acme purchase

You can also test more than two subject lines at once, but remember to only change one variable at a time. This will help you to understand what caused the winning subject line to perform the best. Note: you can do this type of more advanced testing using Publicaster’s A/B split tool.

For example, if you want to test branding and urgency at the same time, try this format:

Control: Enjoy 10% off your next purchase
Experimental 1 (branding): Enjoy 10% off your next Acme purchase
Experimental 2 (urgency): Only 3 days left to enjoy 10% off your next purchase
Experimental 3 (branding & urgency): Only 3 days left to enjoy 10% off your next Acme purchase

And finally, before you start testing (and this goes for testing anything in your email program), decide what your goals are and what will determine the “winner”. Most often with subject line testing, your winning version will be the one that generated the highest open rate. But if you’re testing a different offer, your winner could be the offer that garnered the highest click-through or conversion rate. Be sure you’ve decided this beforehand as well as what margin of error you will allow before deciding on a winner.

So there you have it, you no longer have an excuse as to why you aren’t doing subject line testing! Start with these five simple tests, and you’ll be well on your way to finding the best subject line for your subscribers. If you’re a WhatCounts client and need help with some more A/B split test ideas, contact your client services manager today. Not a WhatCounts client yet? Get more info today, we’d love to have you!

This post was originally written by Joanna Roberts.


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: Best Practices

Use autoresponders to convert browsers into buyers

February 14, 2012 By Christopher Penn Leave a Comment

Examine any bad sales experience with an otherwise good product or service (such as working with the average car salesman) and what has usually caused a bad buying experience is the lack of relationship construction or thoroughly ham-handed attempts at forcing rapport that doesn’t exist. This stems principally from a salesperson asking for value before providing it – asking for a sale or pressuring for a sale before a buyer even knows what it is they’re buying. Very few prospective buyers in any industry are immediately ready to buy, though those few that are should be allowed to do so with minimal interference.

Ask any prospective buyer that is not cash-in-hand-ready where they are in the buying process and almost all will give you the same answer, from the shopper in aisle 17 to the chief procurement officer of a Fortune 50: “just looking”. Just looking and its millions of variations are a polite way of prospects indicating that they haven’t learned enough about your products or services and thus are not ready to commit.

What’s the antidote to the non-committal prospect? It’s not pressure, not trying to extract value faster out of someone who has not received value. It’s education, and email marketing is the ideal vehicle for delivering the education. Here’s a recipe for constructing a value-delivery email campaign to bring prospects closer to a close.

1. Develop education-based content.

Start by determining what things your prospects are actually looking for. Look in your analytics for your web properties to see what people are searching for, what questions people are asking on your site’s internal search, what questions you see over and over in your inbox and voice mail. Compile these questions and rank them by frequency of occurrence from 1 to 7.

2. Create an auto-response campaign.

Set up each of the 7 questions with your answers in a series of 7 emails that someone receives, one per day, over a 7 day period. Obviously, if you have better information from data and experience about the length of your buying cycle, adjust the frequency accordingly, but if someone is doing research, keeping the topic – and you – in mind over a week probably isn’t a bad idea in the absence of other data.

The questions should each have clear answers that are valuable enough that a subscriber would want to forward them to a colleague, friend, or family member. Remember, the cardinal sin of most salespeople is asking for value first instead of providing it first, so be sure your email content is more than just a pitch or a close – make it valuable.

For example, if an email for, let’s say real estate, answers the question “what credit do I need to buy a house”, make sure you provide a list of resources for people to check their own credit for free and understand what credit is. That level of educational depth provides value and makes prospects more comfortable that you know what you’re doing and are worth building a relationship with.

3. Invite people to participate.

Nearly every salesperson has had this conversation or a variation of it:

“Can I help you?”
“No, I’m just looking.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure yet, I’m just looking.”

At this point, there’s usually an awkward transition where the salesperson encourages the prospect to come to them with questions, and the prospect walks away without ever asking questions.

Here’s where you make your email offer as the alternate sale:

“Great. What I’d like to do is help answer some of the questions you’ll probably have after you’ve learned what you’re looking for. We’ve been in business long enough to hear the same questions and concerns come up, so we put together a little email miniseries that can help answer those questions as you have them with one short email a day for just the next week. Would you like me to send that to your work email address or your home email address?”

If you deal with trade shows or walk-ins, take the time to put this offer on a business card-sized piece and let people take it with them if you’re not speaking to them face to face.

4. Track your data carefully.

If you’re legitimately answering questions about your product or service in a valuable way, make sure you track prospect responses throughout the cycle. You may find that prospects always reply or call back after message #3 in the series or always make a purchase after message #6 in the series. Pay attention to the data as you test, because you may find that data can help you improve the speed of your regular sales process as well.

Try out an auto-response campaign as your alternate sale antidote to “just looking” and see how well you can transform “just looking” into “just buying”.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts


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: Best Practices, Sales

Be there at the sale!

February 13, 2012 By Christopher Penn Leave a Comment

One of the mantras at WhatCounts is to be there before the sale, be a valuable member of the community. Support the members of the community and be an active participant so that when the time comes for a prospect to make a purchase, you have top of mind presence. However, one of the rarely discussed parts of sales and marketing strategy with email is to be there at the sale. What do we mean?

Simply put, use email to advance the sale. Please keep in mind that “sale” is a generic term for getting someone to make a substantial commitment. Substitute in volunteer, donate, join, download, activate, or whatever action is most appropriate for your audience in place of buy if you’re not selling something.

Let’s look at one way email can be there at the sale: sales abandonment reduction. Everyone who has an online process for making a sale (volunteer/donation/etc.) has lost people along the way from the first click to the completion of the purchase. If you set up Google Analytics correctly, you can even make a chart of how many people abandon your sales process online and at what points, by setting up goals and a funnel.

So how do you reduce the number of people who bail out on your purchasing process? How do you recover some of that lost business?

In order to make email a vital part of sales abandonment recovery, you’ll first need to change the order of items and sequence on your web forms. Put simple contact information such as name and email first, so that you capture that information as quickly as possible and gain the right to follow up.

Instead of having one lengthy form, consider having a form broken up into two or more stages with just a few questions each. On each page of the form, create a hidden form field that indicates what part of the process was just completed, and make sure that’s recorded in your database. Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Assuming you know what’s on each page of your purchasing form, you can create special emails for people who abandon at each page. Let’s say in the example above that page 1 is basic contact information. Everyone gets through that, which is excellent. Page 2 contains the stuff in the cart, page 3 contains credit card information and the buy button, and the purchase page is the thank you page at the end of the process.

You’d want to create a set of emails for people who reached page 2 but didn’t finish it, like Jane Smith in the example above. In that email you’d want to say something to the effect of, “Jane, we noticed that you didn’t buy the stuff in your cart. Were you unhappy with the items you’d selected? Write back to us and let us know where we went wrong.” Obviously, you’ll want to have a customer service employee reading these replies to help customers who do respond.

You’d want to create a set of emails for people who reached page 3, the place where you press the buy button, and send a similar message that’s contextually appropriate, such as, “John, we noticed that you had selected some of our fine items but didn’t finish the process of owning them. Is there something we can help you with, some questions we can answer to better suit your needs?” Again, make sure someone’s actually going to answer any replies.

Inside your email program, set up autoresponse campaigns based on the purchasing fields. It might be custom-written code or something built in. WhatCounts customers, ask your Support manager about setting up a time-based autoresponse campaign based on a data segmentation. Here’s the logic of how that might look:

If page1 == 1 and page2 == 0 and page3 == 0 and purchase == 0 then send Sales Abandonment Reply #1.
If page1 == 1 and page2 == 1 and page3 == 0 and purchase == 0 then send Sales Abandonment Reply #2.
If page1 == 1 and page2 == 1 and page3 == 1 and purchase == 0 then send Sales Abandonment Reply #3.
If page1 == 1 and page2 == 1 and page3 == 1 and purchase == 1 then send Sales Thank You For Your Purchase.

No matter where someone stops in the sales process once they start, you’re reaching out to them to see what the sticking point is. Pay careful attention to the replies; perhaps some people abandon because the price in the cart is different than the price on the web site. Perhaps some people abandon because they have to ask a significant other, in which case you’ll want to change the content of your web site to fit this scenario. Whatever the feedback is, you’ll be able to act on it and recover more sales than simply ignoring people who abandon your sales process.

Use email to be there at the sale, every step of the way, and watch your sales grow as your prospective customers tell you exactly why they’re not buying – and how to fix it.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts


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