EightBlack.

Sometimes, the best intent doesn’t always work.

Take this email I received today from Boost Juice. While I applaud the founder - Janine Allis’ openness and willingness to accept feedback, this is clearly ONE email that should not have been sent.

It goes like this.

Boost have a loyalty card - called VIBE.

The crux of the email is that the 10% discount that VIBE cardholders received on juices and smoothies was going to be abolished due to the drought, the new Labour government, the recent hot weather, the outrageous rise in private school fees, the price of milk, blah blah blah. Whatever.

Here’s the message (unedited).

Dear Very Important Boost Enthusiasts,

Over the last few years we have been fortunate enough to give our VIBE club members a 10% discount on our range of juices and smoothies.

Unfortunately due to the drought in Australia, the cost of making you the freshest juices and smoothies has gone up substantially, especially in the last 12 months; so much so that we have had to make a tough decision… either put our prices up, or keep them at the existing price and remove the 10% discount for VIBE members. We have chosen to remove the 10% VIBE discount, effective 1st February 2008. You can, however, still enjoy the benefits of the Boost loyalty stamp card (buy 10 and get the 11th free)

Our VIBE club remains with great monthly specials and exclusive offers to members, such as the VIBE Challenge and your free Birthday Boost. Should the drought break and the cost of our ingredients come back down, we will review the 10% discount again.

Thanks again for your loyalty to Boost, and for any feedback you would like to make regarding this please feel free to email me at janine@boostjuicebars.com

Janine Allis

Founder

Now, here’s why it was the wrong thing to do.

First there are some things you don’t communicate via email. Removing a discount is one of them. And if you do feel the need, tell the story properly.

Customers, in this case, don’t give a rats toss about Boosts costs, the drought, or any other personal issues you might be facing. We only care about us.

These issues are always better handled by conducting an online poll which engages your customer base. Tell me the problem. If you really feel compelled to do so, tell us from the side of the franchisee. Tell me just how much the drought has caused your wholesale product to rise. And tell me face to face in store, let me read while I’m waiting, let me hear it from a team member.

I’m going to be far more compassionate when I’m there in person. Getting this sort of email from Boost (in this case Janine Allis) is sort of like being dumped by a lover via SMS. A bit impersonal really.

As a side note, I always knew when, on the lucky occasion I did manage to convince a girl to go out with me, that they no longer wanted to continue the romance when most of my personal belongings would end up on the front lawn of my parents house. It wasn’t subtle. But at least I knew where I stood.

Anyway.

Boost could have handled this better. Firstly, the email should have been personalised. Both in the subject line and in the opening. And there should have been a soft approach to this. Poll the customer base first. Then make a decision based on the feedback. The Socratic method has worked for years.

Whatever credibility Boost had with me - has now all but disappeared with the single opening of an email.

And it has nothing to do with the actual dollar amount or physical increase to me (ie from $4.50 to $5 or whatever).

The problem when email is poorly executed is that it can be passed along. It’s the downside when viral marketing works against you. My take is that this will cause more of a headache to Janine and her team than the actual profit margin they were thinking they would be clawing back.

What do you think?

(Image courtesy Wilmslow Express, London) 

Very much alive. Much to a lot of people’s amazement. And still very, very effective. But with the volume of email now, and the relentless offensive activity of corporate and personal SPAM filters, the actual job of engagement and grabbing attention is getting harder.

One of our core focuses at Eight Black is email marketing. We’ve been doing it for 4+ years now and during that time, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. On average, we’re sending out around 6 million messages a month, so we’d like to think we’ve earned the right to talk about it as a subject. Our bias is towards large, hard core e-commerce sites. Sites which transact. Which ask for a specific action.

In this post, I want to share with you some of the lessons we’ve learned, plus give you a glimpse of what we’ve been working on over in the corner of the “garage” so to speak.

I also want to disclose that while the examples I refer to are actually real, I am unable to reference the actual client. I know you always should when quoting references, but I can’t. So that’s that.

I then want to outline the top 8 mistakes companies, both big and small make, when it comes to sending email.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The first place is with your list. In many cases, clients we talk to say that they have a database but its split up into three areas and they need some guy from IT (who only works every third Tuesday) to come in and show them how to run a My SQL query, which takes all night, to then export it in a CSV file to someone in accounts, who has a PC who can read the file, to then send it to them.

Or something like that. What nonsense.

Your database is your most critical asset. The more “fields” of information you can collect, the better your email marketing efforts will be in the long run. I’ll explain why later.

We know of a company for example, whose website generates 12,000 transactions a month who does not send email of any sort. To me, that’s plain dumb. And leaving a lot of money on the table. It’s not just the “money on the table” issue either. In this case, there’s a whole section of the customer base giving you permission to talk and communicate with them.

Good email marketing starts with the right opt-in policy on your website. You need to give people a reason to opt-in. Why should I give you my email address? What’s in it for me? To help reassure people, have the privacy policy link right beside the opt-in area. And a lot of people simply think that ONE opt-in box is enough - or simply having the same opt-in text link at the top of each and every page is ample. It’s not. Visitors to your website are a lot smarter than that. Banner blindness is growing so if you have the same link at the top of each and every page, you’re not going to get very far.

You’re also assuming that people come to your website and interract with it logically and sequentially. They don’t. Your web analytics interface will prove it to you. All you need to do is look at the top 10 pages by traffic to your site. Mix it up a little. Use an opt-in box on one page, a text link on another. Move the opt-in call to action around. Test position. And above all, take advantage of the most important piece of real estate on your site - the “thank-you” page (applies to ecommerce sites). Always, always have an opt-in box on this page.

First of all, opt-in’s should be a metric on your website that you treat exactly the same way you treat “bounce-rate” or “time on site”. Or any other key web analytics metric you so choose.

Top 8 Mistakes in Email Marketing.

1. Emailing once a month is SPAM.

Frequency and relevancy is the key. Once a month is a complete waste of time, no matter what you are selling. Think about it. What relationship does a marketer have with you if you only ever hear from them once a month. None. Squat, Nada. That doesnt mean you turn the autoresponder up full bore and bombard someone with crap. It means you provide valid content, and provide a lot of it. You ask questions, you survey when you are not sure, you drive people back to your website and you do what it takes to engage with your audience.

2. Split Testing.

Not enough people are split testing effectively.

It’s all about context now. And relevance. You need to be aggressively split testing subject lines, the “from” field, opening paragraphs, link location, the PS area, the call to action. Assume nothing. And the worse thing you can do is have your ad agency write the copy. Short is better if you’re writing email that requires action - like a travel booking site. We’ve also found that too many companies are wanting to ensure that the email looks good, and so they design these magnificent looking HTML newsletter templates. Then, when it comes time to send, they wonder why their open rates and click thru rates are so low.

When we broadcast, we not only split test subject lines, but all parts of the creative. See image below.

Our advice is always push from text - especially if you’re starting out with a relatively cold or lukewarm list, one that hasn’t heard from you before. Or it’s a new promotion for something. What you’ve got to realise is that if you insist on sending out HTML from the start, then most modern email clients or SPAM settings on corporate firewalls, will strip away all the images and graphics anyway and trap the message in the Junk folder. Use plain old text at the start, until you can educate the recipient to add you to their “safe senders” list will do wonders for conversion.

3. Aborting too early.

We’ve often gone into clients and worked with them on devising a fully integrated email campaign. The HTML newsletter has passed all the legal, branding and visual standards checks and balances, the links work, the offer can be fulfilled, the call centre is ready. Everything all set to go. Then we launch. At the very first sign of a “hiccup”, the client panics and wants to stop everything. The hiccup is someone complains to the company or writes an email complaining how his identity has been stolen, that he is the victim of some Nigerian scam and why on earth have you sent him this email. He threatens to get legal on your arse, wants compensation for having no life and demands a Royal Commission.

Folks, remember this. Email marketing is a pure numbers play. Consumers are a lot braver behind their 20 inch monitor than they are on the phone and more so, face to face. You cant just say that you’ll try email marketing for a week and see what happens. You need to commit. To have a strategy. To have the right resources. And to be able to be consistent.

4. Number Overload - Click Thru Rates, Open Rates, etc.

The only metric that matters is conversion. Pure and simple. People get carried away with statistics. We’re not so worried about list sizes, we’re more concerned with actual engagement and conversion. While it is important to understand metrics at a base level, and to be committed to relentless testing, I am far more interested in the statement by the client that says, “we sent out the email and we sold X”.

5. Scrimping on costs.

If you have a database of any size, (ie above 30,000 records), why then would you consider using a $300 off the shelf product? It’s only asking for trouble. There are so many email marketing solutions out there that are cost effective and scalable. Whether you choose to use a company like ours is of no consequence. What matters more is that you invest the same amount of time in developing an email strategy as you do the rest of your marketing. Commit the right resources. Consult with specialists. Buy good advice and then act on it. And, if you do choose to outsource the function, use well respected experts with a track record in the space.

6. Not Remailing.

If you’re promoting a product or offer or competition, the biggest mistake we see is a lack of desire to communicate the message. This does not mean bombarding someone’s inbox. And it assumes that your are committed to “permission marketing” rather than what Seth Godin refers to as “interruption marketing”.

We do a lot of “viral” marketing work for clients. Here’s a specific example. Let’s say we’re promoting a competition for a client with the specific purpose of building their opt-in email database. The creative is solid and with a heavy emphasis on “refer a friend”. The initial broadcast goes out to the entire list and the promotion is under way. Using the technology we’ve developed within our proprietary mail application lets us then send a follow up email 4 days later to all those people who have yet to enter the competition or even open the initial launch email. Look what happens to engagement and entry/referral numbers. The lighter shade on the graph is entries into the competition and the darker shade is how many people were referred by a friend to enter.

7. ISP Reputation

Your email marketing provider - or indeed your own application, needs to be able to track and monitor ISP activity and effectiveness. Many ISP’s will throttle you back if they notice a large volume of email coming down the pipe to their users. Our application (see shot below), tracks how each ISP treats our mail and we then analyse deliverability statistics.

8. Tell A Story.

One of the best examples of good emailing marketing is where the sender, perhaps one of the best online marketers I’ve met, sent a 3 part email. Only he didn’t tell you it was a 3 part message. He just put “to be continued”. This guy by the way has a list which is probably 500,000 plus records in total and one which is highly responsive. So why don’t more of us tell a story. I don’t care if you’re selling property, travel, cars, accommodation. Too often, we’re so consumed with getting the look and feel right that we forget about the actual relevance of the content. And we don’t stop to think about splitting the message up over the course of a week or so. All we want to do is blast the message out there, so we can cross that task off our list.

SUMMARY:

I am constantly amazed at just how many large companies still don’t place much emphasis on collecting and then sorting email addresses. It’s not because they lack resource. Many large corporates I come across have invested literally millions of dollars in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions. Perhaps many think that email is not an effective medium anymore. Perhaps it’s too hard. Perhaps they simply just can’t be bothered.

It’s inexcusable to to have a customer base of 1 million people and less that 20,000 active email addresses. Everyone’s website needs to give people a reason to “opt-in”. The sales and marketing channel of a company needs to be fully committed to email marketing.

And finally, a wise word from our resident email technology expert - Ben Dyer. Ben is the key driver of TaguchiMail, our new email marketing platform that’s in Beta. He’s got some wise words about “deliverability” issues. Worth watching.

I’d be keen to hear your stories and receive your feedback on your experience with email - good or bad. Over to you.

McDonalds is getting a lot of traction around its recent “You Name It” burger competition. Probably because when they concocted the damn thing in one of their test kitchens in Collingwood, the marketing folks promptly exhaled it as quickly as they inhaled it and went running off to the dunnie to get rid of the rest. They then decided, in view of wanting to keep their jobs, that they should blame the whole fiasco on the public and make the naming of the new gut buster the public’s responsibility.

Or something like that.

Anyway, there’s plenty of back slapping and cocaine inhaling along the corridors of their ad agency because, and I quote from B&T,

“A campaign by fast food giant McDonald’s to name its new burger has received 24,100 suggestions since launching on Sunday night, and is predicted to become Australia’s most successful online engagement campaign this year.

As of 11am this morning, a name was being submitted every six seconds to the NameIT Burger promotion – based on 24,100 names divided by 36 waking hours.

The campaign was developed by Leo Burnett in Sydney and features fictitious burger naming legend Ken Thomas who has retired from the ranks of McDonald’s but wants to hand the naming baton on to a younger generation.

Todd Sampson, managing partner and head of strategy at Leo Burnett said: “We are hoping that this will be the most successful online consumer engagement campaign in the country this year”.

I might take offence to this. As would one of our clients.

You see, we’ve been running viral competitions for a while now and we, unlike McDonalds, do not use above the line media (like TV or radio) to help boost registration or enrollment. I absolutely think that they work hand in hand - if you have the budget. But we don’t, and we rely purely on the internet as our sole marketing channel.

The most recent viral competition we ran over 6 weeks - which ended over a week ago, drew the following numbers.

That’s a fair bit more than McDonalds. And it’s been repeated 8 times now - in the sense that we have pushed promotion after promotion to the same database. In all cases, the total prize was no more than $10,000.

The stats above reveal that over 144,000 people actually entered the competiton we ran and more importantly, 338,000 people were referred to the competition. On average, each and every person who actually entered, referred 2.33 people.

Our competitions are always “member get member” based, because ultimately, we want an email address. A good, permission based, opt-in email address is worth anything between $5 and $20. There’s no sane acquisition manager within a credit card company or finance company that wouldn’t pay this.

I applaud the success of the McDonalds promotion. But in perspective, you need to look deeper at conversion. What was the intent of the visitor to the site? To merely engage with the company to enter a name for their product, or to tell 3 friends about it and actually go into the store to sample one. I’m betting that McDonalds would have sold a truckload anyway, given their above the line media saturation.

The McDonalds and their ad agency folks are all up in arms about this campaign being “the most successful online engagement campaign in Australia”. Is it too cynical to say “so what?”. Maybe. But really, so what and who cares.

I’m more concerned with what a client can do from the data they collect from the competition, what can they (or we) learn about our market and how can we leverage this going forward. And more importantly, can we repeat the success. Again and again.

I hope I can keep this up. I always thought it would be a good idea to post to the blog actual video interviews, rather than just the link to the phone interview and transcript.

So, after much debate amongst the geeks at the office about which type of camera to buy and how we should produce it, I made an executive decision and basically ignored everyone and went out and did my own thing. As I always do (apparently).

I rarely wheel out the super geeks I work with - because many of them are somewhat socially challenged and to be honest, there’s always a sort of gamble when they talk publicly - you never know what will end up coming out of their mouths.

Anyway, Ben is an exception. He’s one smart dude. And I’m lucky to have him on the team. Ben and one his colleagues have been buried on Taguchi Mail for the past 9 months now. It’s shaping up nicely.

Here’s the video interview. Tell me what you think. I’d appreciate the feedback. (More to come, including James Masini, Founder, Hippo Jobs, Richard Noon, CEO,Webjet, Cameron Riley, Founder, The Podcast Network, James Farmer, Founder of Edublogs and Incsub (James is Australia’s Wordpress Guru) and many more.

Hopefully, by the time I leave next week to go to Web 2.0 Summit, I’ll have figured out how this whole video upload and editing thing works out without having to yell across the office for a nerd to help me.

I was talking to some Franchise Association Members this morning at an industry sponsored breakfast. Actually, my good friends at Australia Post picked up the tab.

Anyway, I’m glad for once that about half the audience were older than me. Guaranteed, all were better looking.

We were at the Marriott Hotel. I’ve learnt long ago that when you have to present and it involves a laptop, a projector and the internet, then you better get to the venue well ahead because when the wheels fall off the proverbial chariot, you had better be prepared. Which I was.

Bloody Mary in hand, I picked up the phone in the conference room and dialed the front desk. It was 7.36am.

“Hello, I’m in the conference room and I need a working internet connection and a projector..”

“A what…”

Speaking slowly now, I repeated “An internet connection and a projector you silly man..”

“Oh, the internet doesnt work in that room. You’ll have to move…” “We tried the internet once and we didn’t like it, so we shut it off”. Or something like that.

For the life of me, I just cant figure out why in gods name, hotels cant get on top of the internet. I’ve stayed in 6 separate Hiltons in the past month and some had wireless, some didnt, some charged for it, some didnt and some didnt even have it at all and pretended it was the work of the devil.

The Marriott finally got it worked out, but it took several phone calls, a lot of arm waving, and 3 guys, 2 of whom didnt speak a word of english, all hanging onto to a blue lan cable arguing whose wife was better in bed. Or something like this.

Right then. Lets move on.

So, this room full of franchise folks. All nice people. A chasm of difference between their combined online knowledge.

Most of them were looking for the next best thing. Indeed, whenever I talk at these gigs, some people come up to me afterwards and say, “yeah, yeah, I got all that stuff about SEO, email, Google and the rest of it but what I really want to know is that I expect my parents to die soon and I want to know what to do with the money…”

Ok, maybe not that bad but you get the idea.

It was clear to me that a lot of people knew about SEO and there were a few SEO companies who wont be inviting me to their Xmas party this year because of the comments I might have made about their work. But thats another story.

In all cases though, this crowd were a little “over” email. Most thought it was passe.

I beg to differ. Here’s why.

We have a client. Lets pretend that they’re in the online travel space. Lets also pretend that they email their customer base. A lot.

In the last 6 weeks, we’ve added 165,000 net new email addresses to their list. From 3 separate viral campaigns. And dare I say it, (and I hate using the word), but probably triple this number have been exposed to a “branding” message.

If your message is on target, if you have developed a “relationship” with your email base, they like you and trust the brand, then you owe it to yourself to commit to email marketing.

When we started with this client, their email database was around the 140,000 mark. Now, its just cracked the big million. The biggest shot in the arm has clearly been the viral work we’ve been doing. It wont win us any BAFTA awards from a creativity perspective, but we have the evidence to not give a rats toss. It works. And works like gang busters.

Trust me on this. Email, used properly, is hands down, the most effective direct response mechanism you can get. When you combine it with solid offline solutions (like personalised direct response mail), results can soar.

If you have a good (or bad) email marketing story, I’d love to hear it.