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Rok Hrastnik Interview - Part 3

In this, the last part of our interview with Rok Hrastnik, we discover rules he lives by in the world of email marketing and what we can expect from his session at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit.

What is the most important thing you’ve discovered from a previous campaign you’ve managed?
Use best practices only as recommendations, not as something written in stone. Test, test and then test again, and come up with your own set of best practices that work for your industry, your marketing strategy and your audiences. I can’t stress this simple rule enough. And as you can imagine managing online for 18 countries with 18 local teams isn’t exactly stress-free, especially when you’re trying to keep a unified look & feel throughout your communications. But eventually you come to realize that having some diversity is a good thing, as you can continuously learn and improve, sometimes based on completely out-of-the-ordinary campaigns produced in countries that like to play a little too much.


What do you hope your audience will take away from your session at the Email Summit?
Hopefully a lot. Somewhere in the corner of my mind I’m even hoping that at least some of them will come back home with actionable plans or at least ideas on how to transform their existing email marketing strategies and bring them to an entirely new level.

If you’ll be attending the Email Summit next week, here’s a shortlist of what to expect from Rok’s session:
• Understand and measure the multi-channel impact of email marketing that goes far beyond the direct email sale
• Learn how email supports complex purchase processes that cross multiple channels
• See how to upgrade your standard set of email metrics with behavioral based and multi-channel measurements
• Learn how subject-lines influence recipient behavior and how to use them for user segmentation and targeting
• See why & how to go beyond brand in your email communications
• Understand how to segment your email communications using a variety of different data sources
• Upgrade your email lead generation efforts by going beyond the low-hanging fruit (prospects ready to buy now), extending your reach also to different levels of less qualified prospects and then profitably converting them to customers on the long-term using a heavily content focused email strategy 

For a recap of this interview, check out parts 1 & 2 below:
Part 1
Part 2

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Posted by MindComet on Mar. 11, 2009

Rok Hrastnik Interview - Part 2

Continuing on from yesterday’s initial installment, here’s part two of my interview with Rok:

What were the initial expectations for some of your campaigns?  Were the results surprising or unpredictable?
The entire email program development process was full of surprises. You have to keep your mind open and accept that consumers react differently than what marketers expect, and then adjust your communications accordingly.

There were a lot of things that went according to plan… follow-ups always increase total sales. In most of our campaigns the follow-ups actually generate more sales than the initial e-mail. Last-minute text-only reminders tend to work best. Being able to read the core message of the email is more important than the email looking good. It’s another simple one ... and one that many marketers still tend to ignore. It’s so simple. Just replace all of your text in graphics with standard HTML text. In 99% of our tests HTML text outperformed text in graphics.

Some of the bigger surprises I touched on earlier... First, you can’t sell mattresses by focusing your email communications primarily on sleeping related content. Only when you start going beyond your brand do things really start moving.
Secondly, email generates more sales indirectly than directly. In a multi-channel world no single channel can hold the line. Consequently your analytics also need to adapt. Men and women exhibit completely different email interaction patterns. Your email campaigns should reflect that, catering differently to different audiences.

Have you had the opportunity to apply your predictive behavior model to other interactive mediums besides email?
We’re using this approach in a variety of media, although not always the exactly same models. The insights we have on our email users are used also for direct mail and catalog campaigns, and occasionally also for mobile.
We are using the same logic (although not the same models) for our paid and organic search. We are right now working on a project to take this model and also apply it for dynamic website content targeting and also integrate it with our external display advertising.

Sounds like Rok and his team at Studio Moderna have some incredibly clever things up their collective sleeves.

Stay tuned for the concluding, part three post tomorrow!

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Posted by MindComet on Mar. 10, 2009

Rok Hrastnik Interview - Part 1

Leading up to the Email Summit taking place next week, we’ll be posting a string of interview questions from Rok Hrastnik. Rok has been involved with interactive marketing / media in one form or another for nearly a decade.  He works for Studio Moderna, which is primarily a DRTV & multi-channel retailer which operates in 19 European countries.  He’s primarily responsible for digital business development, in which he leverages multiple channels and mediums to expose his client’ brands.

Rok is probably best known for authoring “Unleash the Marketing Power of RSS”, which has garnered such praises as being “the best and more comprehensive” guide on RSS for marketers. He’s been active as a speaker at such events as DMA Annual and ACCM. His reputation for being incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to interactive marketing certainly didn’t precede him with the interview questions I emailed him last week. He’ll be speaking at the Email Summit on “ Targeting and Messaging Strategies that Effect Behavior”.  Below is the first in the interview series with Rok.

What was it like for you when you first started dabbling in email marketing, specifically targeted messaging? 
For me personally the story starts way back in 2001 when I first started doing email marketing for a financial consulting company. That first experience was a real eye-opener in terms of the real marketing capabilities of email when it’s done right. Even back then we realized that relevant prospect and customer communications aren’t about sending out a new sales message every second day (as we still see many US online retailers doing today), but rather about educating/entertaining your audience, gradually building their trust and preparing them for their first purchase. Sure, we could get a higher short-term purchase response if we focused only on the immediate sale, but that would alienate all the readers who aren’t in their “shopping” mode just yet, eventually destroying the long-term potential of our email lists and lead generation efforts.

This simple point became even clearer when I started managing online for a business daily newspaper a couple of years later, where targeted and timely messaging were the absolute norm. Sure, you still have thousands of email subscribers that only want your overall daily business news recap message. But you only start providing real value when you let your subscribers decide exactly what business news they’re interested in and exactly when they want to receive it. Some only want to be notified of their ticker changes. Others only care about the latest business news in their specific industry. Yet again others only care about news involving their company or their competitors. Giving your audiences this sort of choice in the online media world is crucial.

What were some of the most beneficial things you learned early on?
When I joined Studio Moderna back in 2004 we were focused on one thing when it came to email , and that was sales, sales, sales ... and more sales, immediately. I followed suit, but all of that time my previous email experience kept nagging at me at the back of my head, reasoning that in its essence online retail really isn’t that much different from selling business services or from the online media world. People are still people. And people want real value. The thing is, different things are valuable to different people. There is no real cookie-cutter model for “value” that works for everyone.

Having that in mind, we started transforming our email program step-by-step, ultimately going through 5 distinct development phases, shifting from a total focus on direct immediate sales to putting readership & engagement before everything else. Studio Moderna owns several brands, but let’s focus the discovery process on Dormeo, which is our mattress & sleeping brand.

The first step, as you can imagine, was total focus on sales campaigns. The metrics used to measure results were your standard mix of open-rates, clickthrough rates and conversions, as well as basic business data, such as revenue per email address and similar. Early results were certainly encouraging, but not enough.

The next logical step was starting an email newsletter on… yes, you guessed it, sleeping. Newsletter after newsletter with tips on improving the quality of your sleep, selecting the right mattress, mattress materials, subscribers’ dream interpretations, the consequences of poor sleeping and so on. The logic was simple: support the purchase process for those already in the consideration phase and educate all others that they need to get into that consideration phase right now. As we started focusing more on content we also added churn as one of the regular metrics we looked at.

But then a funny thing happened. After a couple of issues readership started going down and churn started increasing dramatically. We found out the hard way that for some reason people just aren’t interested in reading about sleeping every week. Figure that.

That brought us to our third development phase, changing our newsletter from being strictly sleeping oriented into a more general lifestyle newsletter. We still kept some of the sleeping oriented content, but started focusing more on general interest high-readership articles such as diets, sexuality, relationships, home decoration, personal growth and more. That’s when things really started moving. And yes, you really can sell mattress with articles on diets and sex.

We updated our email database with gender information, which turned out to be another big eye-opener. As we quickly saw, men and women care about completely different topics. What’s more, they also show different email interaction patterns.

This new information brought us to our next email development stage: gender based lifestyle newsletters and email campaigns. From that point on we started segmenting all email communications based on gender. Not only the content selection, but even implementing structural template changes to the campaigns based on gender interaction patters. One of the many differences, for example, is that female newsletters are made for reading and men newsletters are made for browsing. While the table of contents in the female newsletter would focus on “selling” the article and getting the clickthrough, the men version would already give the meat of the article up front.

So what other targets do you now focus on?
Targeting based on different lead generation models. An email address that entered our program via a viral sweepstakes game will, for example, be treated completely differently than an email address acquired through a catalog subscription campaign or a sleeping tips whitepaper campaign.

Targeting based on user engagement. We look at a variety of metrics that tell us what an individual is interested in at a specific time, using that data to determine the right messaging strategy based on that person’s interests and stage in the purchase cycle. If you spend 10 minutes browsing our mattresses that’s a clear sign you’re in the market to buy a mattress now. Our email communications to you will usually reflect that, as well as other behavior patterns that we look for and detect.

How do you get a better feel for your customers through email?
Using subscriber surveys to get an even better idea of the content and products individual groups of users are interested in. We also use transactional data for follow-up sales. Analyzing responses to different subject-lines to see what matters most to individual user groups and then focusing our communications based on this data. For example, someone that responds to a subject line on allergies will be treated differently that someone who responds to a subject line on neck pain.

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Posted by MindComet on Mar. 09, 2009