Sharing email messages on social networks can increase your reach by exposing your messages to large audiences beyond your subscribers in ways forwarding to friends can't match.

That's one finding revealed in Silverpop's new study, "Emails Gone Viral: Measuring 'Share to Social' Performance," now available as a free report.

This new study analyzes key aspects of social sharing and uses a new series of benchmark metrics we created to report our findings. Leverage these benchmarks to assess the performance of your own social-sharing program or to forecast what you might expect before launching a campaign.

study report also presents a detailed set of best-practice recommendations and a comprehensive list of additional resources to help you maximize the benefit of your email social-sharing initiatives.

5 Key Study Findings

1. Share-to-Social significantly outperforms FTAF. Even though social sharing is still new to email marketing and consumers in general, it is already outperforming that old standard, forward to a friend. We found that organic social sharing rates (done without an incentive or reward) average 0.5 percent, compared to an estimated 0.1 percent or less when sharing via forward-to-a-friend links. Based on an average overall click-through-rate of approximately 5 percent, this means that 1 out of 10 clicks is on a social sharing link.

Continue reading "Silverpop Share-to-Social Study Establishes New Benchmarks" »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saying "relevance" is the key to success in email marketing is a bit like saying something is "American as motherhood and apple pie." Whether you've heard the phrase before or not, you can probably guess the general meaning, but what does it really mean?

Similarly, "relevance" in reference to email marketing success is generally understand and agreed upon. But we don't really have a single, agreed-on definition for the term, let alone the elements that go into making an email relevant to recipients.

So, on a whim recently, I polled the Twitter community, asking people how they defined email marketing "relevance." Here's a sampling of the responses:

Continue reading "Relevance: "The Right Message" at "The Right Time?"" »

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When a company finds itself struggling for sales in a tight economy, the first response is often to start competing on prices.

Although price slashing, discounts and other costly promotions can bring short-terms gains, they could end up tarnishing your email program if you simply turn it into "the discount channel."

Frequent discount offers simply train your customers to wait for a deal before pulling the sales trigger. Your best customers, though, will likely be more interested in getting better value for their money than yet another 20 percent discount that all of your subscribers receive. When every other commercial email is pushing the same promotions, your email is fighting harder to stand out in the inbox.

How to do it? Find ways to strengthen your relationship with your brand-loyal, high-value customers. These are the people who will continue to buy from you, but you must offer something more tangible than another free-shipping promotion.

Use customer data to create targeted or lifecycle messages, such as shopping-cart reminders, cross-selling, upselling and restocking reminders, which build on preference data or previous purchases.

If big-ticket items aren't moving, feature lower-cost alternatives, such as a pair of earrings that match a previous necklace purchase, or a three-day domestic cruise instead of two weeks in Italy.

Keeping email a high-value, high-return channel will help you resist the trend toward turning email into a low-value discount channel. I talk about this in more depth in my recent Email Insider column, "Strategies to Meet 5 Macro Trends Altering Email."

The other four strategies:

• Market with global sensitivity to avoid sending culturally irrelevant emails.
  
• Use a mix of channels--microblogging, social networks and email--to speed news and communications.
  
• Build engagement to break through "attention distraction" from channels that compete for your readers' eyes.
  
• Give your email messages a distinct personality through looks and "voice."

I welcome your comments about these strategies and what you're doing to help maintain your email program's value in these stressful times.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marketers who can reach their email subscribers when they're actively in their inboxes will gain a competitive advantage. Quite simply, having your message at the top of the inbox makes it much more likely to be seen and acted on.

However, finding that "magic moment" has been a major challenge for email marketers.

It's impractical, given your list demographics, time variables and mindshare, which I discuss in my recent Email Insider column. The key is being able to use recipient time-of-day open and click data.

Send Time Optimization Calculates Ideal Email Delivery Time

Silverpop recently unveiled Send Time Optimization (STO), which automatically calculates the optimal time to send to each recipient, based on a recipient's past mailing behavior. Your message is then distributed at the ideal day and time without requiring multiple segments or scheduled mailings.

Send Time Optimization (STO) analyzes when individual recipients interact with your messages over a rolling period of time and calculates the ideal email delivery time for each recipient on your list, no matter the time zone.

Clients See Measurable Lift

A number of Silverpop clients who have been using Send Time Optimization have reported phenomenal results. Across a sample of just a few clients, we've seen these results:

• 20 percent to 46 percent increase in open rates
• 30 percent to 50 percent increase in click rates
• 52 percent to 75 percent increase in total revenue
• 40 percent increase in net revenue (Encyclopedia Britannica)
• 30 percent increase in total number of orders per campaign
• 35 percent to 47 percent increase in value per order

These numbers are exciting, and not just because of improved performance. Like trigger and drip campaigns, Send Time Optimization leverages the power of marketing automation. In this era of tightening budgets, reduced resources and overflowing inboxes, email marketers need all the advantages they can muster.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The title of Silverpop's most recent Webinar says it all: "Transactional Emails: Loved by Recipients, Neglected by Marketers."

In this Webinar (view below), Silverpop Product Marketing Manager Whit Lanier and I showed how transactional messages, which are highly relevant to recipients, can drive engagement when you add carefully chosen marketing content to a branded design consistent with your promotional emails and newsletters.

For many marketers, though, these are an overlooked opportunity, often because the responsibility for transactional emails belongs in another department.

In my latest Email Insider column, "Transactional Emails: Make Your First Impression Count," I review the reasons why moving transactional emails into the marketing department makes sense, not just because you can create more useful and attractive messages but also because you can more easily monitor recipient actions and deliverability, as you do with your other branded email.

The following question on using HTML in transactional emails was the most asked question during and after the Webinar:

Q: There's the perception that transactional messages are text messages, and recipients have been trained for that. If you move to a more visual approach with images and HTML, doesn't that make them more suspicious-looking? Will it increase deliverability challenges?

A: Not necessarily, if you do them correctly. If you design transactional messages with the right brand, with HTML text that renders with images blocked, and if you test the message template first with a tool such as Pivotal Veracity to check for spam-filter triggers in content or design, you should minimize any deliverability issues and avoid raising trust issues.

Four tips:

• The subject line must be crystal-clear: "Confirming your purchase from XYZ Online," for example, instead of "Order Confirmation."
• Use a friendly "from" address that names the company or department that generated the transaction: "XYZ Online" instead of a vague email address.
• Always place the details of the transaction front and center in the message to comply with CAN-SPAM requirements. Place promotional content below or to the side of the transactional content.
• Always check with your legal counsel if you have any concerns.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To answer my own question from my recent blog post "Have Social Networks Killed the Birthday Email?" I say no, they haven't. In fact, the birthday email, the anniversary reminder and similar email messages could help keep email relevant and alive as a marketing channel.

What has to change, however, is the way email marketers approach their own email programs.

Why has social networking taken off like a rocket over the last two to three years? Because people are hungry to connect and share information with each other in any way they can.

Social networks let them do that easily and in exciting new ways. They can meet up with people from their past (think Classmates.com), with people they'd like to meet (think LinkedIn or Twitter) or with friends and family in new ways (think Facebook).

Social Media Is Changing the Email Landscape

Email has been a connecting point, too, even though spam and overzealous companies started to pollute the channel. Today, more email users are savvy and sophisticated about how they manage their email. Their expectations and use of email are evolving, both from years of experience and from their involvement with social networking.

Marketers who don't understand or respond to this rapid and radical change in expectations will likely see their email programs decline in performance and engagement. In short, email needs to become even more "social" in its tone, personality, conversational style and relevance.

Work Harder to Stand Out in the Inbox

In my Email Insider column, "Will Social Media Kill the Email Star?" I urge marketers to think about how the inbox has evolved over the years, to find ways to make their messages stand out, and to get management buy-in for the resources you need to take your email program to the higher level you need to maintain your program's ROI.

This isn't a new plea. However, social-network notifications, which are triggered emails that speak directly to the recipient instead of a broadcast audience, up the ante even more.

This doesn't mean you necessarily have to throw out your entire email program and start over. However, you do need to rethink how your emails are positioned relative to this influx of social network emails and increased volume of commercial messages--and what your subscribers want and expect from you in this environment.

These changes go beyond adding share-to-social links in your emails and are really about creating an email experience for your subscribers that reflects what you know about them and when, what and how they want to be communicated to from your company.

It also isn't simply about turning your emails into 140-character Tweets. It is, however, about recognizing that many email subscribers now expect less selling and more education, less corporate speak and more personality, content and recommendations from their peers. And they likely expect all of those to be done in a manner that is short, sweet and scannable on a mobile device.

Are your personal expectations with email changing? Are you making changes in your email program to reflect this new social environment? Let us know your observations in the comments section.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We all know how the Web and email have changed the way we communicate with each other and with companies, but the light bulb really went on for me when I looked at the ways friends, co-workers and peers sent me greetings before, on and after my recent birthday.

First, here's the tally of how and from whom I received happy birthday wishes:

1 - direct mail (Southwest Airlines)
1 - personal phone call from our Lexus dealer
1 - work email (a savvy co-worker who thought an email would be more special and different)
2 – emails from companies (Olympus, Pasta Pomodoro)
2 - Twitter direct message (this is a one-to-one private message)
7 - Twitter @replies (these are public messages)
7 - in person (wife, two daughters and four members of The Cheesecake Factory waitstaff)
33 - Facebook messages via Facebook's new home page feed and email notifications

The first time I viewed many of the Facebook wishes was via email notifications that let me know someone had posted a note on my Facebook wall.

They really stood out in my inbox, whereas on the marketing side, the commercial interactions were the same old thing: "Free shipping!" "XX percent off!" "Buy now!"

Only two marketers used the personal data I have willingly shared with them--in this case, my birth date--to send me unique, personal and relevant messages.

On top of this comes the Nielsen Online survey claiming that social networks and blogs have become more popular online activities than email.

I'll be exploring what this all means for email marketing in future blog posts and my Email Insider column, but for now this insight stands out:

The evolution in digital communication channels and the ways people are using them mean marketers have to work harder on building relevance, using the customer data they have to send more relevant, targeted messages.

Just mail-merging someone's name into the subject line doesn't make this happen. Nor is this another plea for segmentation. Rather, it means creating emails that are more personal, sound more like a dialogue than a TV pitch and reflect some personality other than "sell, sell, sell!"

Otherwise, they'll fade into insignificance next to the emails that speak to a subscriber's personal interests and relationships.

If you have thoughts about how social networking is intersecting with email and the implications for marketers, I'd love to see them. Post them in the comments below, and stay tuned for more on the changing use of digital communications.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple just continues to do cool stuff. The other day I was at my local Apple retail store buying a (ridiculously overpriced) case for my iPhone. Its checkout process is nifty. I was most impressed when the "genius" behind the counter hit me with a question I'd never heard before: "Would you like your receipt printed or emailed?" I was a little bit stunned, since I'd never had to consider this option before. But it didn't take me long to figure out my preference: "Emailed please." Apple already had my email address paired with my credit card (presumably through my iTunes account), so all it had to do was confirm my email address and voila–receipt sent.

Like the curious gadget-carrier that I am, I was able to check that email account on my iPhone as I was leaving the store, and sure enough ... the receipt was in my inbox. Awesome!

This transactional email offering is great in so many ways it's hard to list all of the benefits, but here are a few:

• For Me: I get a receipt, but I don't have to stuff it in my pocket, wallet or the bag. I can wait 'till I get home to my computer and organize it, ignore it forever or just search for it if I ever need it for any reason.
• For Apple: reduced paper cost, increased coolness, increased green-ness and one more way to amaze (and engage) customers with its innovativeness.
• For Mother Earth: fewer trees sacrificed for paper receipts.

Yet as cool as Apple is, there's still room to do it better. Why not take advantage of the fact that transactional messages can include some promotional content? When Apple sends the receipt for my iPhone case, it should include a coupon for some cutting-edge earbuds or a cool new application in the app store. Since transactional emails are the most likely type to be opened, why not take advantage of that captive audience and show them something else they might be interested in? A number of Silverpop clients send branded Transactional emails that entice shoppers back.

In the end, though, it's a big success for Apple. Color me impressed and thoroughly engaged thanks to Apple's cutting-edge use of transactional email.

Posted by Whit Lanier at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even though sharing email content with social networks and sites is still a new concept for most people, enlisting your subscribers to spread your message to their networks is rapidly becoming a standard email marketing practice.

My previous Engagement Marketing blog post explained why people share content with family, friends and peers and revealed the general qualities that make one email shareworthy and another one not.

This time I'll outline six design and content ideas that can help increase the shareworthiness of your emails:

1. Target the right social networks and media. The hottest social site on the Internet might not be the right fit for your subscribers or market niche.

2. Explain how to use your social-sharing feature in your welcome email and in regular program emails. Include instructions in both the welcome email and the first few email messages you send that include a sharing function. Then, either link to an explanation page on your Web site, or put instructions in your email footer and link to it using inline navigation.

3. Test the share function design, location and copy. Use text links and the social networks' logos to be sure people see them with or without images enabled. Also, test which locations of the share links within your emails deliver the most clicks and shares.

4. Highlight shareworthy content. Make your content actionable and easy to read. A European airline saw strong sharing results with a compelling and simple free-travel offer: "100% Discount for Your Beloved One."

5. Track how readers use your social-sharing features, and then use that information to refine your content. Over time, consider segmenting out your high-value or frequent sharers from the rest of the pack, and send them special offers or content.

6. Test, refine and test again. Like everything in email marketing, what works for one company might fall flat at yours; so, test everything.

I go into more detail about these tactics in my latest Email Insider column, "More On Making Your Emails Shareworthy."

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently returned from the second annual Email Evolution Conference (EEC), where presentations, panel discussions and personal conversations showed that marketers are beginning to understand how email and social networking can work together to better engage with customers and prospects.

Many sessions touched on the growing importance of social media—going where your customers are—and integrating email into a company's social marketing efforts. To underscore this, many attendees were posting live Tweets (updates on Twitter) under their employers’ Twitter brands.

Social media is clearly exploding like nothing the marketing world has seen in years, probably since the Internet explosion itself. Email will not disappear anytime soon, but the growth in social media adoption does provide both challenges and opportunities for email marketers.

Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?

So, what does it all mean for you? To start with, you should look at the emails you send in a new light: Are they "shareworthy”?

In other words, does your email content encourage your subscribers to share your emails with their tribes (friends, family or peers) on their social networks?

Ever since Silverpop went live in 2008 with its "Share-to-Social" function, which lets email subscribers post email content on their social networks, I've been thinking about what actually motivates someone to share content.

My latest Email Insider column, "Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?" outlines six reasons that people share:

• They want to contribute to the conversation.
• Sharing serves their self-interest.
• They want to help others.
• Sharing validates their self-worth.
• Sharing with likeminded people makes them feel part of a community.
• Sharing prurient or shocking material makes them feel less guilt at gawking.

Once you understand why people share, you can tailor your content around the attributes you think would prompt people to post your emails to their networks.

Factors That Contribute to 'Shareworthiness'

However, you can't just count on appealing to your subscribers' altruistic or ego-feeding natures to have your emails shared. Your emails must also address these key factors:

• Trustworthiness that makes a subscriber willing to attach his or her personal brand to your content
• Tribal interests, e.g. what "tribes," or interest groups, comprise your list and what motivates them
• Simplicity of message
• Ease of sharing
• Social adoption and acumen of your subscribers
• Obvious value for the sharer and shares
• Rewards or incentives that tap into reasons why people share
• Well-written, timely and relevant content

I go into more detail in my current Email Insider column, "Are Your Emails 'Shareworthy'?" Watch for a follow-up post with advice on creating emails that your subscribers will want to forward, post and tweet. In the meantime, feel free to post your comments below or mention emails that had truly "shareworthy" content.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last month, we rolled out a shiny new feature we dubbed “Share-to-Social,” which enables email recipients to click a button in an email to share their favorite messages with their contacts/friends in their social networks. Not only that, but we made sure the marketers using this feature could track the results. (You can check out my blog post about it here.)

Well, we didn’t stop there. This month we added the same capabilities to our Landing Pages application, which enables marketers to easily create landing pages coordinated with their emails.

Also, we’ve added a few new social networks to the mix. We’re up to five and counting: Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

After email, landing pages are a natural next step for sharing marketing content into social networks. Think about it. MarketingSherpa estimates that up to 50 percent of visitors to a landing page will abandon it in the first eight seconds. So, for people who stick around, we’re talking about either: the most highly engaged visitors and/or the very best landing pages, able to grab attention and keep it. Either way, these are pages with a high propensity for going viral. They yielded the first click. They can yield the next. And the next.

If you’re taking the time to create fantastic, thoughtful landing pages that recipients are most likely to share, then this is one capability you definitely want to consider adding to your email toolkit.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of email marketing, particularly in an environment of growing customer control, emerging communication channels and the current global economic environment. I come to only one conclusion: Marketers' "batch-and-blast" approach and mentality must evolve to one that endeavors to speak as directly as possible to each recipient in a voice that resonates with each individual on their lists.

This means replacing, or at least supplementing, the usual deal-of-the-week email with messages that recognize the relationships and interactions you have with your customers, moving beyond the usual selling mentality to incorporate a healthy focus on communications and retention.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels that companies are falling short in their communications. A recent Opinion Research Corp. poll found 46 percent of bank customers and 42 percent of mutual-fund investors don't believe their financial services companies are communicating enough with them in these turbulent days.

We are in a period where customers are more sensitive to price and value for their dollar and more likely to shop around and compare features and benefits, looking for the best deal. So, it becomes critical that marketers communicate trust and value with every message.

One way to increase relevance and loyalty is to create messages that provide additional value, including emails that:

• Update
• Remind
• Educate
• Simplify
• Listen

Have you recast your email program to align with your customers' needs, or do you have other functions that email can provide aside from the ones I listed here? I would love to hear about them.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of us at one time or another been forwarded a great email campaign, or have passed one along ourselves. But as email marketers, we know that creating a successful viral campaign is actually pretty tough to do. Email forward rates are low; recipients find forwarding to large groups time-consuming, or they worry that you’ll spam their friends if they use your form. For marketers, forwarding can break your HTML, and it can be difficult to track actions on the forwarded message.

But what if it suddenly got a whole lot easier for your campaigns to spread? If your recipients could quickly and easily share their favorite email messages, so that your message could reach not only your customers, but their friends, and their friends, too? And what if you could identify which recipients shared your content, and how many views and clicks each piece of shared content generated? Imagine what you could do with that kind of information.

By integrating social networking and email marketing, you can do exactly that. We at Silverpop have developed an exciting new “share-to-social” feature that allows email marketers to quickly turn emails into social-enabled viral messages. By clicking a button in their email message, recipients can quickly post the email to the profile page on their social network page—Facebook and MySpace for now, with more to come.

Branching out into social networks is a natural evolution for email. After all, social marketing is first and foremost about relationships, and successful email marketers have learned to engage customers in timely and relevant relationships. Social email marketing’s success rests on the ability to reach the right people with the right message—one they’ll want to share with others.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently opened a promotional email from my favorite business publication (I subscribe to the offline version). This email was promoting one of the publication's sister brands. Since I've been subscribing for years, I don't recall specifically that I agreed to receive promotional emails from this company, but I presume I did.

Okay, so far. But this major brand failed on some of the most basic email administrative tactics. Let me show you how:

Below is the unsubscribe and contact information located at the bottom of the email (I've removed the company name):

If you would prefer not to receive further commercial messages about "Sister Publication,"
please click here and confirm your request.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This message is being sent to you by Parent Business Publication.

If you would prefer not to receive further messages from Big Business Publication, please click on the following Internet link and confirm your request.

I clicked the "click here" link to unsubscribe, but the page didn't load despite several attempts. Either it was a bad link, they were having server issues, or some other technical issue had arisen.

Then, I clicked the second hyperlinked "global" unsubscribe link. This link worked but took me to an "email privacy preferences" form. The form pre-populated my account number but asked for my email address and first and last name. It included two pre-checked boxes: one asking if I wanted to renew my subscription and another asking if I wanted to receive promotional emails from the parent company.

I replied to the email telling the company that its unsubscribe page did not load. I got an automated response: "… emails are normally answered within one business day."

Here's how this household name failed four email administrative basics:

• The unsubscribe link didn't work. It happens, but testing the unsubscribe link and process frequently can uncover and prevent it most of the time. It is working now, but took several days before the unsubscribe process was operating.
• No phone number or email address was provided in the email to let me send questions or comments or to request a manual unsubscribe.
• The reply-to address worked and had a reasonably well-written auto-response message, but after one week and counting, still no response. I assume that this company has not staffed appropriately for email-related issues. My guess is my email went to a general Web site or customer-support department, rather than a specific email address that someone on the marketing or production team was monitoring and could have answered quickly.
• The two links—one to unsubscribe from the parent company list and one from the sister publication—were well intended, but the copy and format was poorly executed, and neither process actually worked. The second unsubscribe/preferences page did not appear to enable either process. This company did not comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

The mistakes this company has made are simply unacceptable and, frankly, easily avoided.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)