MindComet

Luck of the Irish and the BoSox

Saint Patty’s day is by far one of my favorite holidays - Im Irish and you get to drink green beer.  I also love that my favorite sports team, who else but the Boston Red Sox has apparel to match the luck of the Irish.  I received this email the other day and was instantly drawn in - why wouldn’t I want to update my Red Sox wardrobe and be festive for the upcoming holiday . 

Although this email was targeted to me in a non intended way, I don’t believe the MLB is doing anything to target based on gender or preferences.  Im pretty sure all the Red Sox fans got it as well because I haven’t received any other targeted messaging such as women’s only clothing.  I was reading The Email Wars blog the other day on gender specific emails and was frustrated for them that they were receiving the wrong gender based emails.  Luckily, the Red Sox have my support regardless if they win or loose so the non segmented emails can continue.  If it were another store/brand though, that may not be the case.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 27, 2008

Back from Miami and the MarketingSherpa Email Summit!

We are back from the MarketingSherpa 3rd Annual Email Summit.  All we can say is that those 3 days, felt like 4 weeks.  There was so much to take in, both at the Summit and just being in Miami in general.  So many things going on!!

As for the Summit itself, 800 email marketers in one place at one time, it is bound to get crazy.  But we learned a lot and are eager to implement so we can see some results on our side!  We also received confirmation that we are doing a lot right!!!  (that is always good) Now the trick is to take the stuff we got going on and move what we are doing right from good to great.  It’s a great challenge and we are looking forward to it.  We also are striving to produce the results that will gain us a chance to win one of MarketingSherpa’s awards for next year.  Yesterday at the close of the summit, they announced the 2008 winners in the 10 categories for into B-to-B and B-to-C.  They stressed that when choosing a winner, how important the documentation on measurement and results were.  MarketingSherpa made it a point to stress that many submissions lacked in documentation on these points.  This comment followed along with many points made throughout the conference: have a goal and track the results! 

Now, back to compiling everything we learned from the Summit, and yes, we will share some good points =)

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 27, 2008

MarketingSherpa - Take THIS!

After a South Florida hour long power outage (YIKES!).  The MarketingSherpa Email Summit Concluded this afternooon.  The last presentation was on
Top 5 Takeaways:

me
#1 Marketers have to be more than marketers. (be a good business person)
#2 Is 2008 the year that email marketers get religion on landing pages? (yes, as email marketers we are finally getting it)
#3 It’s all about the message. (the ratio of click to open rate is a measure of quality of content.  The benchmark is roughly 25%, Make sure your value proposition is tied thru all your marketing collateral)
#4 Marketing + IT = A Happy Family
#5 Email isn’t dead.  (reference my quote from Eric Stockton from my previous post!)

MindComet would like to Thank MarketingSherpa for such a great couple of days of amazing research and information.  We will definitely be heads down for a while trying to wrap our brains on everything we came away with.  We look forward to next year’s Email Summit and showing how we have benefited from everything. 

Readers, stay tuned, we will continue to post MANY tidbits of info we collected thru the coming weeks!! YAY EMAIL MARKETING!!!!!!!! ITS ALIVE!!!!!

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 26, 2008

Partnerships and Email

Another awesome presentation at the Email Summit this morning was, Jason Steele from Liberty Travel.  His presentation was titled: Email and Complex Partnership Marketing Campaigns.  What Liberty Travel did was they brought on partners to run a co-reg program and ran triggered emails to deliver highly relevant emails to their combined target audience. 

What Jason and his company decided to focus on was a popular vacation event and something that required a travel agent. They teamed up with two wedding themed companies, David’s Bridal and TheKnot.com.  The benefits they received from this partnership were, targeting a younger demographic with an opportunity to develop life-long customers.  They drove qualified, online leads to honeymoon specialists to close sales offline and grew their house email list. 

The basis of the campaign was to campaign around the wedding date collected by the partner contacts and based an automated email campaign that ran monthly for 1 year.

The campaign made sure to match the partner site that it came from and included a welcome message, a budget planning message, destinations for weddings, top 10 destinations (best performing), book early, importance of an agent etc. 

The fully automated process required no additional head-count which also produced two times the average profit per sale vs other programs and channels. 

We learned a lot from Jason and are so glad he presented this at the MarketingSherpa Summit!!

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 26, 2008

Beginning of the End at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit

After a long day yesterday of gaining some great knowledge on various aspects of email marketing as well as a networking gala, we are diving right back into it this morning!  We just attended the first presentation of the morning here at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit, from Pam McHugh from Mintel.  Her presentation was on a New Proprietary Study: How Consumers Interact with Email.  She had some great stats and info to share. 

As mentioned various times throughout each day, she began discussing the daily challenges we see as email marketers.  Two main topics she discussed was Subject Lines and Frequency. 

“Subject lines transcends familiarity,” is something that sort of echoed in the room when Pam made the statement.  Her role is to study email marketing and they have found that subject lines can get you past the reader not knowing who the sender is.  A reader is more likely to open the email if the subject line is relevant and catching. 

When she touched on frequency, which is a very touchy subject around email, there were some interesting points she mentioned.  Consumers reported a high tolerance for multiple communications if their perceived relationship with the company was high.  They were more than likely to tolerate up to 9 emails a month.  This did not necessarily mean the emails would be opened, but they would not get annoyed that they were receiving them.  If the perceived relationship with the company was lower, the tolerance or receiving emails was significantly lower.

On to more breakout sessions here at the Summit, more to come!!!

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 26, 2008

Correct is Not Always the Most Effective…

During the introduction of the 3rd Annual MarketingSherpa Email Summit by Stefan Tornquist this morning, he concluded with TO DOs for 2008!

1. Conduct an email audit
2. Obsess on content
3. Reputation (monitor your delivery on multiple ISPs)
4. Subject lines (get to the point, don’t waste time re-stating who the email is coming from, that is what the “From” line is for)
5. Vary your email templates
6. Optimize

This list was revisited during various other presentations throughout the day. 

Other great statements to note from the various presenters:

- “Relevance drives campaign performance.” - Kimberley Talbot, Adobe Systems Inc.

- Utilize your “Thank You” email when people subscribe for your Newsletter, don’t waste the communication with a one line message.  Add white papers, good, relative content to ride off the initial interest of the customer. - Stefan Tornquist, MarketingSherpa

- “The first email communication your subscribers receive is the one they spend the most time on.” - Randall Huff, Intuit Inc.

- Use Salesperson photos in your Service (not sales) emails you send out.  Creates a better connection to the consumer. -Dave Wieneke, Thomson Compumark

Are you executing doing your email campaigns correctly?  Maybe!  BUT, are you making sure it is executed to the extent in order to make sure it is the MOST Effective?

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 25, 2008

Day Two - Email Marketing Summit

Although we are in Miami, the heat isn’t on…Yesterday we attended an all day email certification course put on by Marketing Experiments which was great and so was the temperature of the room.  Today, its like Im back in the office and its 67 degrees.  I guess going from 400 people yesterday to over 800 today, they felt the need to accommodate or perhaps the fact that it’s in the 80’s and only February.  Coming from Orlando, we didnt think the temp. would change as much as it has.  Don’t get me wrong, I love 80 degree whether but the Summit isn’t being held out on the beach but I’m going to leave that in my feedback that next year it should .  Anyway, just so I don’t confuse you and make you think we changed our blog from an email marketing blog to a weather blog we’ll get on to the good stuff.

Today was the official start to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Summit which started off with a Research Keynote from Stefan Tornquist, the Research Director of MarketingSherpa.  Stefan provided the group with key takeaways on some tactics to follow this year as it relates to email marketing.  One that I found was interesting was shortening the subject line.  I completely agree that the subject line should try to stay under the 45 character limit which has been the previous standard however getting shorter than that, gets tough.  However, I do agree that subject lines need to be short so it will only encourage our team to work harder at keeping the sub. lines short and to the point. 

Later in the day I sat in on a thirty minute session put on by Cori Mozilo, the Interactive Marketing Manager of Cold Stone Creamery.  We didn’t get any ice cream however she did enlighten the group on how she uses a different vendor for each of her interactive needs.  Her internal team only consists of three resources so it makes sense in her case.  The main takeaway I received from Cori was that regardless of your situation or how big your team is, if you have the right experts, internal or external you can execute campaigns to be over the top successful.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 25, 2008