Thursday, February 6, 2014

Use E-mail Segmentation to Multiply Your Results

If targeted segmentation of e-mail can deliver up to nine times higher results, as reported recently by Jupiter Research, e-mail marketers should be feverishly slicing and dicing their databases. For those who aren't sure where to begin, Target Marketing magazine has provided a quick primer on key ways to segment your e-mail campaigns. Start with e-mail recipients' stated preferences, which hopefully have been gathered from permission and sign-up forms. The article provides some obvious examples: IKEA asking new email sign-ups what rooms they are most interested in receiving information about; e-tailers letting subscribers decide whether they want to get messages about sales offers or new product offerings; and e-newsletter publishers asking for content preferences. Next, consider the best way to segment based on demographics, geography and behavioral/lifestyle data. If your consumer e-mail sign-ups didn't provide information about age, gender, home ownership, etc., you can use a data company to overlay that information. You can even append personal information such as lifestyle interests and buying behavior. The same applies to business-to-business marketers, but their segmentation could use data such as industry, company size and job function. Your e-mail customers' past shopping behavior is another good indication of how to divide and target. Look at who regularly opens and clicks on your e-mails and what product categories or promotions they select. For example, Barnes & Noble regularly promotes a range of bestselling books, but if some recipients consistently click on mysteries, Barnes & Noble creates a mystery buff segment for targeting. Past purchase history with the tried-and-true RFM measure (recency, frequency, money) is another segmentation tool. If someone has already purchased from you, they are much more likely to purchase again, so promote other products in the same category or complementary products to them. Website browse time and patterns are also indications of targetable interest. Target Marketing provides the example of SmartPak, a retailer of vitamins and supplements for horses. The company integrated e-mail tracking with website tracking to send complementary-product promotions when an e-mail recipient clicked and browsed a particular on-site category. A company spokesperson reported that resulting opens were 37.6% and clicks 7.35%. Want some more segmentation ideas? Go to http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/5-ways-segment-email-marketing-success/1#

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Save Your E-Mail Campaigns From Spam Traps

An e-mail marketer's nightmare is to watch a campaign disappear into junk folders or, worse, trigger ISP or blacklist blocking. This can happen when an e-mail list includes "spam traps." Spam traps are e-mail addresses that don’t belong to real recipients, and they are used by ISPs and blacklists to track and block e-mail spammers. Spam traps can be recycled defunct e-mail addresses or e-mail addresses that never existed (honeypots). So, how can you stop these traps from sneaking into your system and sending your e-mail promotion into a black hole? Basically, you need to be careful about the way e-mail addresses are collected and how long they stay in your database. A recent blog post by Silverpop, a digital marketing platform provider, gives some tips. First of all, never use purchased (as opposed to rented) e-mail lists. Next, you can reduce incoming traps, even maliciously added addresses, by sending a double opt-in mailing during sign-up that includes a link that says "this is not me." Be cautious about contest data and appended addresses. And regularly hygiene your e-mail database. Go beyond cleaning up opt-outs and bounces, and segment data into active and inactive addresses. Recipients who don’t click or open an e-mail after six months generally don’t become active again, and they file more abuse complaints and potentially become spam traps in future. Focus on sending to active addresses and put older, inactive addresses on a special reactivation messaging track to try to re-engage, Silverpop advises. For the full article, see http://www.silverpop.com/blog/-Spam-Traps-Here-There-Everywhere